His words are an inexplicable rhapsody, a speech in an unknown tongue. Whether there is meaning in it to the speaker himself, and how much or how true, we shall never ascertain; for it is not in the language of men, but of one man who had not learned the language of men; and, with himself, the key to its full interpretation was lost from amongst us. These are mystics; men who either know not clearly their own meaning, or at least cannot put it forth in formulas of thought, whereby others, with whatever difficulty, may apprehend it. Was their meaning clear to themselves, gleams of it will yet shine through, how ignorantly and unconsciously soever it may have been delivered; was it still wavering and obscure, no science could have delivered it wisely. In either case, much more in the last, they merit and obtain the name of mystics. To scoffers they are a ready and cheap prey; but sober persons understand that pure evil is as unknown in this lower Universe as pure good; and that even in mystics, of an honest and deepfeeling heart, there may be much to reverence, and of the rest more to pity than to mock.

Miscellanies, vol. i., p. 68, 71.

THIS MIRACULOUS WORLD!

You remember that fancy of Aristotle's, of a man who had grown to maturity in some dark distance, and was brought, on a sudden, into the upper air to see the sun rise. What would his wonder be, says the Philosopher, his rapt astonishment, at the sight we daily witness with indifference! With the free open sense of a child, yet with the ripe faculty of a man, his whole heart would be kindled by that sight-he would discern it well to be Godlike-his soul would fall down in worship before it. Now, just such a childlike greatness was the primitive nations. The first Pagan Thinker among rude men, the first man that began to think, was precisely the childman of Aristotle. Simple, open as a child, yet with the depth and strength of a man. Nature had, as yet, no name to him ;

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he had not yet united under a name the infinite variety of sights, sounds, shapes, and motions, which we now collectively name Universe, Nature, or the like,-and so with a name dismiss it from us. To the wild, deep-hearted man all was as yet new, unveiled under names or formulas; it stood naked, flashing in on him there, beautiful, awful, unspeakable! Nature was to this man what to the Thinker and Prophet it for ever is-preternatural. This green, flowery, rock-built earth, the trees, the mountains, rivers, many-sounding seas; that great deep sea of azure that swims overhead; the winds sweeping through it; the black cloud fashioning itself together, now pouring out fire, now hail and rain: what is it? Ay, what? At bottom we do not yet know; we can never know at all. It is not by our superior insight that we escape the difficulty; it is by our superior levity, our inattention, our want of insight. It is by not thinking that we cease to wonder at it. Hardened round us, encasing wholly every notion we form, is a wrappage of traditions, hearsays-mere words. We call that fire of the black thunder-cloud electricity,' and lecture learnedly about it, and grind the like of it out of glass and silk; but what is it? What made it? Whence comes? whither goes it Science has done much for us; but it is a poor science that would hide from us the great, deep, sacred infinitude of Nescience, whither we can never penetrate, on which all science swims as a mere superficial film. This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle-wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more-to whosoever will think of it. Lectures on Heroes, p. 11.

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WHAT IS MADNESS.

Witchcraft, and all manner of Spectre-work, and Demonology, we have now named Madness, and Diseases of the Nerves. Seldom reflecting that still the new question comes upon us : What is Madness, what are Nerves? Ever, as before, does Madness remain a mysterious-terrific, altogether infernal boiling up of the Nether Chaotic Deep, through this fair

painted Vision of Creation, which swims thereon, which we name the Real. Was Luther's Picture of the Devil less a Reality, whether it were formed within the bodily eye, or without it? In every the wisest soul lies a whole world of internal Madness, an authentic Demon-Empire; out of which, indeed, his world of Wisdom has been creatively built together, and now rests there, as on its dark foundations does a habitable flowery Earth-rind.

Sartor Resartus, p. 281.

THE APES OF THE DEAD SEA.

Perhaps few narratives in History or Mythology are more significant than that Moslem one, of Moses and the Dwellers by the Dead Sea. A tribe of men dwelt on the shores of that same Asphaltic Lake; and having forgotten, as we are all prone to do, the inner facts of Nature, and taken up with the falsities and outer semblances of it, were fallen into sad conditions,-verging indeed towards a certain far deeper Lake. Whereupon it pleased kind Heaven to send them the Prophet Moses, with an instructive word of warning, out of which might have sprung 'remedial measures' not a few. But no: the men of the Dead Sea discovered, as the valet-species always does in heroes or prophets, no comeliness in Moses; listened with real tedium to Moses, with light grinning, or with splenetic sniffs and sneers, affecting even to yawn; signified, in short, that they found him a humbug, and even a bore. Such was the candid theory these men of the Asphalt Lake formed to themselves of Moses, That probably he was a humbug, that certainly he was a bore. Moses withdrew; but Nature and her rigorous veracities did not withdraw. The Men of the Dead Sea, when we next went to visit them, were all changed into Apes;' sitting on the trees there, grinning now in the most unaffected manner; gibbering and chattering complete nonsense; finding the whole Universe now a most undisputable Humbug! The Universe has become a Humbug

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to these Apes who thought it one! There they sit and chatter, to this hour; only I think, every Sabbath there returns to them a bewildered half-consciousness, half-reminiscence; and they sit, with their wizzened smoke-dried visages, and such an air of supreme tragicality as Apes may; looking out, through those blinking smoke-bleared eyes of theirs, into the wonderfulest universal smoky Twilight and undecipherable disordered Dusk of Things; wholly an Uncertainty, Unintelligibility, they and it; and for commentary thereon, here and there an unmusical chatter or mew :-truest, tragicalest Humbug conceivable by the mind of man or ape! They made no use of their souls; and so have lost them. Their worship on the Sabbath now is to roost there, with unmusical screeches, and half-remember that they had souls. Didst thou never, O Traveller, fall in with parties of this tribe ? Meseems they are grown somewhat numerous in our day. Past and Present, p. 205.

THE ONLY EPOCH IN SCOTTISH HISTORY.

In the history of Scotland I can find properly but one epoch: we may say, it contains nothing of world-interest at all, but this Reformation by Knox. A poor, barren country, full of continual broils, dissensions, massacrings; a people in the last state of rudeness and destitution, little better, perhaps, than Ireland at this day. Hungry, fierce barons, not so much as able to form any arrangement with each other how to divide what they fleeced from these poor drudges; but obliged, as the Columbian Republics are at this day, to make of every alteration a revolution; no way of changing a ministry but by hanging the old ministers on gibbets: this is an historical spectacle of no very singular significance! "Bravery" enough, I doubt not; fierce fighting in abundance; but not braver or fiercer than that of their old Scandinavian Sea-king ancestors, whose exploits we have not found worth dwelling on! It is a

country as yet without a soul; nothing developed in it but what is rude, external, semi-animal: and now at the Reformation, the internal life is kindled, as it were, under the ribs of this outward material death. A cause, the noblest of causes, kindles itself, like a beacon set on high; high as Heaven, yet attainable from Earth; whereby the meanest man becomes not a Citizen only, but a Member of Christ's visible Church— a veritable Hero, if he prove a true man!

Lectures on Heroes, p. 234.

WHAT SCOTLAND OWES TO JOHN KNOX.

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A country, where the entire people is, or even once has been, laid hold of, filled to the heart with an infinite religious idea, has made a step from which it cannot retrogade.' Thought, conscience, the sense that man is denizen of a Universe, creature of an Eternity, has penetrated to the remotest cottage, to the simplest heart. Beautiful and awful, the feeling of a Heavenly Behest, of Duty God-commanded, over-canopies all life. There is an inspiration in such a people: one may say, a more special sense, the inspiration of the Almighty giveth them understanding.' Honour to all the brave and true; everlasting honour to brave old Knox, one of the truest of the true! That, in the moment while he and his cause, amid civil broils, in convulsion and confusion, were still but struggling for life, he sent the schoolmaster forth to all comers, and said, "Let the people be taught: " this is but one, and, indeed, an inevitable and comparatively inconsiderable item in his great message to men. His "Let in its true compass, was, message, men know that they are men; created by God, responsible to God; who work in any meanest moment of time what will last through eternity." It is verily a great message. Not plough ing and hammering machines, not patent digesters (never so ornamental) to digest the produce of these: no, in no wise; born slaves neither of their fellow men, nor of their own appetites; but men! This great message Knox did deliver, with a