When a man authentic speaks, our interest goes through every statement to himself.  The root of that word is not in the market or the street, but in humanity, and through that in the deep.  We study Goethe, not any opinion of Goethe:  he represents for us in his measure the nature, need, and resource of the race, because what he publishes he knows, lives, and is.  We open the mind largely to take the sense of such a gospel:  it will not appear in details of perception.  Plato and Goethe see the same sun, and seem to the vulgar to follow each other; they have more in common than any man can have in privacy; yet if you enter to the entire habit of each, you will justify the making of these two.  They are like and unlike, as apples on one and another tree.  The great in any time hold in common the growing truth of their time, and refer to it in intercourse as understood, an atmosphere which he must breathe who now lives and thinks; yet no two will be identically related to the same.  We are radiated as spokes from a centre; we enter to it and work for it from every side.

There is no danger of repetition, if the thought be deep.  Superior insight will always sufficiently astonish, will always be novel in its place.  The more simple the method, the more wonderful every result.  Men are shut, as if by a wall of adamant, from all that is yet beyond their sympathy.  My neighbor is immersed in planting, building, and the new road.  Beside him, companion only in air and sunshine, walks one who has no ocular adjustment for these atoms; his thought overleaps them in starting, and is wholly beyond.  The end of vision for a practical eye is beginning of clairvoyance.  To the road-maker, man is a maker of roads; he cracks his nuts and his jokes unconscious, while the ground opens and the world heaves with revolutions of thought.  Ask him in vain what Webster means by “Concord, Lexington, and Bunker Hill”; what Channing sees in the Dignity of Man, or Edwards in the Sweetness of Divine Love; ask him in vain what is the “Fate” of Aeschylus, the “Compensation” of Emerson, Carlyle’s “Conflux of Eternities,” the “Conjunction” of Swedenborg, the “Newness” of Fox, the “Morning Red” of Behmen, the “Renunciation” of Goethe, the “Comforter” of Jesus, the “Justification” of Paul.

For the dull, this mystery of existence is not even a mystery; they are shut below the firmament of wonder.  When the vulgar come with their definite gain and good, their circle of immediate ends, we feel the house contract, the sky descend,—­we shrivel, our pores close, the skull hardens on the brain.  The positive, who exactly knows, is a skeleton at the feast; that exactness is numbness, and chills every expansive guest.  Dogma is a stoppage quite short of the nearest beginning; the liberal habit a beginning of all that has no end.  Sense is a wall very near the eye, and when that is penetrated all lies open beyond; we see only paths, seas, and vistas.  Wisdom explores and never concludes.  The explanations