about it. Has he not the solid earth and the realm of sense?
Why should he seek what is beyond it? _O caecas hominum mentes_! Man
cannot help himself. Well does the ethic master say, "What is the use
of affecting indifference towards that about which the mind of man
never can be indifferent?" And why not? Because man came thence?
There is that in us "which drew from out the boundless deep". In some
incomprehensible way the infinite is in us, and we are therefore
restless, dissatisfied ultimately with all that is not it. "The eye is
not filled with sight nor the ear with hearing," for in us there is the
capacity, and therefore, in our best moments, the yearning to see and
hear something which sense can never give. Greater than all that is
here, in silent moments, when the senses are tired and disappointment
steals over us, the truth of the insignificance of things bursts upon
us. "Man is but a reed, the feeblest thing in nature," says Pascal in
the _Pensees_, "but he is a thinking reed. The universe need not mass
its forces to accomplish his destruction. A breath, a drop of water
may destroy him. But even though the world should fall and crush him
he would still be more noble than his destroyer because he knows that
he dies, but the advantage which the world possesses over him--of that
the world knows nothing." And, therefore, the universe is nothing to
him who is conscious that there is that in man which made all worlds
and shall unmake them--the eternal Mind, one and identical throughout
the realm of intelligence.

This is no dreaming, but an interpretation of man and nature
necessitated by the undeniable facts of life. The finite does not
exhaust man's capacities, it cannot even satisfy them. He was made for
something vaster. He is ever seeking the boundless, the infinite.
Hence the most positive, the most scientific of philosophers, Mr.
Herbert Spencer, believes that there is one supreme emotion in man,
utterly indestructible, the emotion of religion; and what is religion
but the yearning I have described for communion, not with the world,
vast and entrancing as it is; not with humanity, admirable, even
worshipful in its highest estate; but with that which transcends them
and all things, the enduring reality which men call Divine? Spencer
and Emerson are at one. Nothing but the Infinite will ultimately
satisfy man.

Such are the thoughts awakened by the music of this poet's song, which
haunts on