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A man's heart aye, and a woman's, too should be light in the spring. The spirit of resurrection is abroad, calling the life of the world out of its wintry grave, knocking with radiant fingers at the gates of its tomb. It stirs in human hearts, and makes them glad with the old primal gladness they felt in childhood.
His red eyes and the black hair, matted about his lips and shadowing the backs of his hands, gave him a wild, fierce look; and it was as if the primal blood-lust and hatred that seared him had literally swept him back into the forgotten centuries, the first, savage human hunter at the edge of the retreating glaciers.
Nevertheless, give its parts what names you will, its whole is yet the wind of the living God to the bodies of men, his spirit to their spirits, his breath to their hearts. When I learn that there is no primal intent only chance in the unspeakable joy that it gives, I shall cease to believe in poetry, in music, in woman, in God.
Freedom is to be conceived, in the Kantian sense, as equally far removed from chance or caprice and from compulsion: Man chooses his own non-temporal, intelligible nature; he predestinates himself in the first creation, i.e., from eternity, and is responsible for his actions in the sense-world, which are the necessary results of that free primal act.
No, in the sense that there cannot be perfect soundness in the brain and heart of one who violates a primal instinct of human nature. Each case has its own peculiar features, and must be left to the all-seeing and all-pitying Father. Suicide, where it is not the greatest of crimes, is the greatest of misfortunes. The righteous Judge will classify its victims.
In his previous writings he had insisted upon the sacredness and infinite value of the human soul, upon the wonder and mystery of life, and its dread surroundings, upon the divine significance of the universe, with its star pomp, and overhanging immensities, and upon the primal necessity for each man to stand with awe and reverence in this august and solemn presence, if he would hope to receive any glimpses of its meaning, or live a true and divine life in the world; and in the "Sartor" he has embodied and illustrated this in the person and actions of his hero.
Romantic poetry, on the other hand, is the expression of the secret attraction to a chaos which lies concealed in the very bosom of the ordered universe, and is perpetually striving after new and marvellous births; the life-giving spirit of primal love broods here anew on the face of the waters.
Only from a mind of this peculiar training, marked by a concentrative energy that nothing can distract from its course, every thing beyond the circle of its own nationality remaining alien to it, can we hope to obtain an exact picture of the past; for it alone, like a faithful mirror, reflects it in its primal coloring, preserves its proper lights and shades, and gives it with its varied and picturesque accompaniments.
After thus laying solemn injunctions upon all men to render supreme allegiance to this personal God, for we can find no better word, although Matthew Arnold calls it "the Power which maketh for righteousness," Moses presents the duties of men to each other, chiefly those which pertain to the abstaining from injuries they are most tempted to commit, extending to the innermost feelings of the heart, for "thou shalt not covet anything which is thy neighbor's;" thus covering, in a few sentences, the primal obligations of mankind to God and to society, afterward expanded by a greater teacher into the more comprehensive law of Love, which is to bind together mortals on earth, as it binds together immortals in heaven.
There was no pretence that it was an incorporation, that the people had laid down a constitution, an organic law. The people were never consulted, did not exist, had not for political purposes been invented. It was the great primal defect of their institutions, but the Netherlanders would have been centuries before their age had they been able to remedy that defect.
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