of God, is considered a trivial, inert, commonplace
matter,--as if, says the Satirist, it were a dead thing, which some
upholsterer had put together! It could do no good, at present, to
_speak_ much about this; but it is a pity for every one of us if we do
not know it, live ever in the knowledge of it. Really a most mournful
pity;--a failure to live at all, if we live otherwise!

But now, I say, whoever may forget this divine mystery, the _Vates_,
whether Prophet or Poet, has penetrated into it; is a man sent hither
to make it more impressively known to us. That always is his message;
he is to reveal that to us,--that sacred mystery which he more than
others lives ever present with. While others forget it, he knows
it;--I might say, he has been driven to know it; without consent asked
of _him_, he finds himself living in it, bound to live in it. Once
more, here is no Hearsay, but a direct Insight and Belief; this man
too could not help being a sincere man! Whosoever may live in the
shows of things, it is for him a necessity of nature to live in the
very fact of things. A man, once more, in earnest with the Universe,
though all others were but toying with it. He is a _Vates_, first of
all, in virtue of being sincere. So far Poet and Prophet,
participators in the 'open secret,' are one.

With respect to their distinction again: The _Vates_ Prophet, we might
say, has seized that sacred mystery rather on the moral side, as Good
and Evil, Duty and Prohibition; the _Vates_ Poet on what the Germans
call the aesthetic side, as Beautiful, and the like. The one we may
call a revealer of what we are to do, the other of what we are to
love. But indeed these two provinces run into one another, and cannot
be disjoined. The Prophet too has his eye on what we are to love: how
else shall he know what it is we are to do? The highest Voice ever
heard on this Earth said withal, 'Consider the lilies of the field;
they toil not, neither do they spin: yet Solomon in all his glory was
not arrayed like one of these.' A glance, that, into the deepest deep
of Beauty. 'The lilies of the field,'--dressed finer than earthly
princes, springing up there in the humble furrow-field; a beautiful
_eye_ looking out on you, from the great inner Sea of Beauty! How
could the rude Earth make these, if her Essence, rugged as she looks
and is, were not inwardly Beauty?--In this point of view, too, a
saying of Goethe's, which has staggered several, may have mea