s. Yet let us enjoy the cloven flame whilst
it glows on our walls. When each new speaker strikes a new light,
emancipates us from the oppression of the last speaker to oppress us
with the greatness and exclusiveness of his own thought, then yields
us to another redeemer, we seem to recover our rights, to become men.
O, what truths profound and executable only in ages and orbs, are
supposed in the announcement of every truth! In common hours, society
sits cold and statuesque. We all stand waiting, empty,--knowing,
possibly, that we can be full, surrounded by mighty symbols which are
not symbols to us, but prose and trivial toys. Then cometh the god and
converts the statues into fiery men, and by a flash of his eye burns
up the veil which shrouded all things, and the meaning of the very
furniture, of cup and saucer, of chair and clock and tester, is
manifest. The facts which loomed so large in the fogs of
yesterday,--property, climate, breeding, personal beauty and the like,
have strangely changed their proportions. All that we reckoned settled
shakes and rattles; and literatures, cities, climates, religions,
leave their foundations and dance before our eyes. And yet here again
see the swift circumscription! Good as is discourse, silence is
better, and shames it. The length of the discourse indicates the
distance of thought betwixt the speaker and the hearer. If they were
at a perfect understanding in any part, no words would be necessary
thereon. If at one in all parts, no words would be suffered.

Literature is a point outside of our hodiernal[705] circle through
which a new one may be described. The use of literature is to afford
us a platform whence we may command a view of our present life, a
purchase by which we may move it. We fill ourselves with ancient
learning, install ourselves the best we can in Greek, in Punic,[706]
in Roman houses, only that we may wiselier see French, English and
American houses and modes of living. In like manner[707] we see
literature best from the midst of wild nature, or from the din of
affairs, or from a high religion. The field cannot be well seen from
within the field. The astronomer must have his diameter of the earth's
orbit as a base to find the parallax of any star.

Therefore we value the poet. All the argument and all the wisdom is
not in the encyclopaedia, or the treatise on metaphysics, or the Body
of Divinity, but in the sonnet or the play. In my daily work I incline
to re