three persons, and allows them
all their room; they spread themselves at large. The statesman looks at
many, and compares the few habitually with others, and these look less.
Yet are they not entitled to this generosity of reception? and is not
munificence the means of insight? For though gamesters say that the
cards beat all the players, though they were never so skilful, yet in
the contest we are now considering, the players are also the game, and
share the power of the cards. If you criticise a fine genius, the odds
are that you are out of your reckoning, and instead of the poet, are
censuring your own caricature of him. For there is somewhat spheral and
infinite in every man, especially in every genius, which, if you can
come very near him, sports with all your limitations. For rightly every
man is a channel through which heaven floweth, and whilst I fancied I
was criticising him, I was censuring or rather terminating my own soul.
After taxing Goethe as a courtier, artificial, unbelieving, worldly,--I
took up this book of Helena, and found him an Indian of the wilderness,
a piece of pure nature like an apple or an oak, large as morning or
night, and virtuous as a brier-rose.

But care is taken that the whole tune shall be played. If we were not
kept among surfaces, every thing would be large and universal; now the
excluded attributes burst in on us with the more brightness that they
have been excluded. "Your turn now, my turn next," is the rule of the
game. The universality being hindered in its primary form, comes in
the secondary form of all sides; the points come in succession to the
meridian, and by the speed of rotation a new whole is formed. Nature
keeps herself whole and her representation complete in the experience
of each mind. She suffers no seat to be vacant in her college. It is
the secret of the world that all things subsist and do not die but only
retire a little from sight and afterwards return again. Whatever does
not concern us is concealed from us. As soon as a person is no longer
related to our present well-being, he is concealed, or dies, as we say.
Really, all things and persons are related to us, but according to our
nature they act on us not at once but in succession, and we are made
aware of their presence one at a time. All persons, all things which we
have known, are here present, and many more than we see; the world is
full. As the ancient said, the world is a plenum or solid; and if we sa