If there be great wrongs, we cannot distrust the Maker, and postpone the security of the soul.  Impatience is a wrong as great as any.  Love and trust are remedies for wrong.  Music is our cure for insanity, and I remember that incantation of fair reasons which Plato prescribed.  What gain is in scolding and knitting the brows?  The blue sky, the bright cloud, the star of night, the star of day, every creature is in its smiling place a protest of the universe against our hasty method of counter-working wrong with wrong.  Let loose the Right.  Go forward with martial music; never await or seek, but carry victory and win every battle in the organization of your band.  Hear Beethoven:—­“Nor do I fear for my works.  No evil can befall them, and whosoever shall understand them shall be free from all such misery as burdens mankind.”

From this security in the lap of Nature, this nest in the grass, we rise easily to every height.  Gladness becomes uncontainable, a pain of fulness, for which, after all effort, there is no complete relief; for language breaks under it in delivery, and Art falls to the ground.  The psalm of David, the statue of Angelo, the chorus of Handel, are inarticulate cries.  These men have not justified to us their confidence.  It will be shared, not justified.  They have divined what they cannot orderly publish, and their meaning will be by the same greatness divined again.  The work of such men remains a haunting, commanding enigma to following ages.  They do but repeat the promise and obscurity of Nature, for she herself has the same largeness, is such another raptus, proceeding to no end, but to a circle or complexity of ends.  Men are again and again divided over the images of Paul, of Plato, of Dante, unable to escape from their authority, more unable to give them final interpretation.  They leave Nature, to puzzle over the inexhaustible book.  What does it mean?  What does it not mean?  The poet will never wait till he can demonstrate and explain.  He must hasten to convey a blessing greater than explanation, to publish, if it were only by broken hints, by signs and dumb pointing, his sense of a presence not to be comprehended or named.

For, if the seer is sustained, he is also commanded by what he sees.  Genius is not religious, but religion, an opening to the conscience of the universe no less than to the joy.  From this original the moral, intellectual, and aesthetic sense will each derive a conscience, and rule with equal sovereignty the man.  Through an ant or an angel the first influx of reality is entertained in an attitude of worship, and the poet, in his vision, cries with Virgil to Dante:—­

  “Down, down, bend low
  Thy knees! behold God’s angel! fold thy hands! 
  Henceforward shalt thou see true ministers!”