ing that they were mere symbols, ideas of the mind; perhaps
nonentities and Letters of the Alphabet! She is the noisiest,
inarticulately babbling, hissing, screaming, foolishest, unmusicalest
of fowls that fly; and needs no 'trumpet,' I think, but her own
enormous goose-throat,--measuring several degrees of celestial
latitude, so to speak. Her 'wings,' in these days, have grown far
swifter than ever; but her goose-throat hitherto seems only larger,
louder and foolisher than ever. _She_ is transitory, futile, a
goose-goddess:--if she were not transitory, what would become of us!
It is a chief comfort that she forgets us all; all, even to the very
Wodans; and grows to consider us, at last, as probably nonentities and
Letters of the Alphabet.

Yes, a noble Abbot Samson resigns himself to Oblivion too; feels _it_
no hardship, but a comfort; counts it as a still resting-place, from
much sick fret and fever and stupidity, which in the night-watches
often made his strong heart sigh. Your most sweet voices, making one
enormous goose-voice, O Bobus and Company, how can they be a guidance
for any Son of Adam? In _silence_ of you and the like of you, the
'small still voices' will speak to him better; in which does lie
guidance.

My friend, all speech and rumour is short-lived, foolish, untrue.
Genuine Work alone, what thou workest faithfully, that is eternal, as
the Almighty Founder and World-Builder himself. Stand thou by that;
and let 'Fame' and the rest of it go prating.

'Heard are the Voices,
Heard are the Sages,
The Worlds and the Ages:
"Choose well; your choice is
Brief and yet endless.

Here eyes do regard you,
In Eternity's stillness;
Here is all fulness,
Ye brave, to reward you;
Work, and despair not."'

_Goethe._

BOOK III.

THE MODERN WORKER.

CHAPTER I.

PHENOMENA.

But, it is said, our religion is gone: we no longer believe in St.
Edmund, no longer see the figure of him 'on the rim of the sky,'
minatory or confirmatory! God's absolute Laws, sanctioned by an
eternal Heaven and an eternal Hell, have become Moral Philosophies,
sanctioned by able computations of Profit and Loss, by weak
considerations of Pleasures of Virtue and the Moral Sublime.

It is even so. To speak in the ancient dialect, we 'have forgotten
God;'--in the most modern dialect and very truth of the matter, we
have taken up the Fact of this Universe as it _is not_. We have