places it is greatly overlooked; and the Universe, definable always in
one or the other dialect, as the realized Thought of God, is considered
a trivial, inert, commonplace matter,--as if, says the Satirist, it were
a dead thing, which some upholsterer had put together! It could do no
good, at present, to _speak_ much about this; but it is a pity for every
one of us if we do not know it, live ever in the knowledge of it. Really
a most mournful pity;--a failure to live at all, if we live otherwise!

But now, I say, whoever may forget this divine mystery, the _Vates_,
whether Prophet or Poet, has penetrated into it; is a man sent hither to
make it more impressively known to us. That always is his message; he
is to reveal that to us,--that sacred mystery which he more than others
lives ever present with. While others forget it, he knows it;--I might
say, he has been driven to know it; without consent asked of him, he
finds himself living in it, bound to live in it. Once more, here is no
Hearsay, but a direct Insight and Belief; this man too could not help
being a sincere man! Whosoever may live in the shows of things, it is
for him a necessity of nature to live in the very fact of things. A
man once more, in earnest with the Universe, though all others were
but toying with it. He is a _Vates_, first of all, in virtue of being
sincere. So far Poet and Prophet, participators in the "open secret,"
are one.

With respect to their distinction again: The _Vates_ Prophet, we might
say, has seized that sacred mystery rather on the moral side, as Good
and Evil, Duty and Prohibition; the _Vates_ Poet on what the Germans
call the aesthetic side, as Beautiful, and the like. The one we may call
a revealer of what we are to do, the other of what we are to love.
But indeed these two provinces run into one another, and cannot be
disjoined. The Prophet too has his eye on what we are to love: how else
shall he know what it is we are to do? The highest Voice ever heard on
this earth said withal, "Consider the lilies of the field; they toil
not, neither do they spin: yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed
like one of these." A glance, that, into the deepest deep of Beauty.
"The lilies of the field,"--dressed finer than earthly princes,
springing up there in the humble furrow-field; a beautiful _eye_ looking
out on you, from the great inner Sea of Beauty! How could the rude
Earth make these, if her Essence, rugged as she looks and is,