true relation, as much as one can, these higher and lower dual
values--and that the doing so is a part, if not the whole of our old
problem of paralleling or approving in art the highest attributes,
moral and spiritual, one sees in life--if you will grant all this, let
us offer a practical suggestion--a thing that one who has imposed the
foregoing should try to do just out of common decency, though it be but
an attempt, perhaps, to make his speculations less speculative, and to
beat off metaphysics.

All, men-bards with a divine spark, and bards without, feel the need at
times of an inspiration from without, "the breath of another soul to
stir our inner flame," especially when we are in pursuit of a part of
that "utmost musical beauty," that we are capable of
understanding--when we are breathlessly running to catch a glimpse of
that unforeseen grandeur of Mr. Lanier's dream. In this beauty and
grandeur perhaps marionettes and their souls have a part--though how
great their part is, we hear, is still undetermined; but it is morally
certain that, at times, a part with itself must be some of those
greater contemplations that have been caught in the "World's Soul," as
it were, and nourished for us there in the soil of its literature.

If an interest in, and a sympathy for, the thought-visions of men like
Charles Kingsley, Marcus Aurelius, Whit tier, Montaigne, Paul of
Tarsus, Robert Browning, Pythagoras, Channing, Milton, Sophocles,
Swedenborg, Thoreau, Francis of Assisi, Wordsworth, Voltaire, Garrison,
Plutarch, Ruskin, Ariosto, and all kindred spirits and souls of great
measure, from David down to Rupert Brooke,--if a study of the thought
of such men creates a sympathy, even a love for them and their
ideal-part, it is certain that this, however inadequately expressed, is
nearer to what music was given man for, than a devotion to "Tristan's
sensual love of Isolde," to the "Tragic Murder of a Drunken Duke," or
to the sad thoughts of a bathtub when the water is being let out. It
matters little here whether a man who paints a picture of a useless
beautiful landscape imperfectly is a greater genius than the man who
paints a useful bad smell perfectly.

It is not intended in this suggestion that inspirations coming from the
higher planes should be limited to any particular thought or work, as
the mind receives it. The plan rather embraces all that should go with
an expression of the composite-value. It is of the underlying