in the finite."

"As we degenerate, the contrast between us and our house is more
evident. We are as much strangers in nature as we are aliens from
God. We do not understand the notes of birds. The fox and the deer
run away from us; the bear and the tiger rend us."

All this has an Old Testament sound as of a lost Paradise. In the next
chapter he dreams of Paradise regained.

This next and last chapter is entitled _Prospects_. He begins with
a bold claim for the province of intuition as against induction,
undervaluing the "half sight of science" as against the "untaught
sallies of the spirit," the surmises and vaticinations of the mind,--the
"imperfect theories, and sentences which contain glimpses of truth." In
a word, he would have us leave the laboratory and its crucibles for
the sibyl's cave and its tripod. We can all--or most of us,
certainly--recognize something of truth, much of imagination, and more
of danger in speculations of this sort. They belong to visionaries and
to poets. Emerson feels distinctly enough that he is getting into the
realm of poetry. He quotes five beautiful verses from George Herbert's
"Poem on Man." Presently he is himself taken off his feet into the air
of song, and finishes his Essay with "some traditions of man and nature
which a certain poet sang to me."--"A man is a god in ruins."--"Man is
the dwarf of himself. Once he was permeated and dissolved by spirit. He
filled nature with his overflowing currents. Out from him sprang the
sun and moon; from man the sun, from woman the moon."--But he no longer
fills the mere shell he had made for himself; "he is shrunk to a drop."
Still something of elemental power remains to him. "It is instinct."
Such teachings he got from his "poet." It is a kind of New England
Genesis in place of the Old Testament one. We read in the Sermon on the
Mount: "Be ye therefore perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect."
The discourse which comes to us from the Trimount oracle commands us,
"Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to
the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions." The
seer of Patmos foretells a heavenly Jerusalem, of which he says, "There
shall in no wise enter into it anything which defileth." The sage of
Concord foresees a new heaven on earth. "A correspondent revolution in
things will attend the influx of the spirit. So fast will disagreeable
appearances, swine, spiders, snakes, p