can easily believe it;
they had done things a little harder than these! Burns, a gifted
song-writer, might have made a still better Mirabeau. Shakspeare,--one
knows not what _he_ could not have made, in the supreme degree.

True, there are aptitudes of Nature too. Nature does not make all
great men, more than all other men, in the self-same mould. Varieties
of aptitude doubtless; but infinitely more of circumstance; and far
oftenest it is the _latter_ only that are looked to. But it is as with
common men in the learning of trades. You take any man, as yet a vague
capability of a man, who could be any kind of craftsman; and make him
into a smith, a carpenter, a mason: he is then and thenceforth that
and nothing else. And if, as Addison complains, you sometimes see a
street-porter staggering under his load on spindle-shanks, and near at
hand a tailor with the frame of a Samson handling a bit of cloth and
small Whitechapel needle,--it cannot be considered that aptitude of
Nature alone has been consulted here either!--The Great Man also, to
what shall he be bound apprentice? Given your Hero, is he to become
Conqueror, King, Philosopher, Poet? It is an inexplicably complex
controversial-calculation between the world and him! He will read the
world and its laws; the world with its laws will be there to be read.
What the world, on _this_ matter, shall permit and bid is, as we said,
the most important fact about the world.--

* * * * *

Poet and Prophet differ greatly in our loose modern notions of them.
In some old languages, again, the titles are synonymous; _Vates_ means
both Prophet and Poet: and indeed at all times, Prophet and Poet, well
understood, have much kindred of meaning. Fundamentally indeed they
are still the same; in this most important respect especially, That
they have penetrated both of them into the sacred mystery of the
Universe; what Goethe calls 'the open secret.' "Which is the great
secret?" asks one.--"The _open_ secret,"--open to all, seen by almost
none! That divine mystery, which lies everywhere in all Beings, 'the
Divine Idea of the World, that which lies at the bottom of
Appearance,' as Fichte styles it; of which all Appearance, from the
starry sky to the grass of the field, but especially the Appearance of
Man and his work, is but the _vesture_, the embodiment that renders it
visible. This divine mystery _is_ in all times and in all places;
veritably is. In most times and places it is greatly