and the plant eats him again; fire, water, and frost, in their old quarrel, destroy whatever they build; the night eats the day, summer the snow, and winter the green.  Change is a revolving wheel, in which so many spokes rise, so many fall, a motion returning into itself.  Nature is a circle, but man a spiral.  No wonder he is dissatisfied, with his longing to get on.  Eating and hunger, labor and rest, gathering and spending, there is no gain.  Life is consumed in getting a living.  After laborious years our money is ready in bank, but the man who was to enjoy it is gone from enjoyment, shrivelled with care, every appetite dried up.  So learning devastates the scholar, is another plague of wealth, and our goodness turns out to be a hasty mistake.  Is order disorder, then?  Are we fools of fate?  Is there only power enough to prop up this rickety old system, to keep it running and hold our noses to the grindstone?  No man believes it:  the madness of Time has method only half concealed.

See what eagerness is in the eyes of men, curious, hopeful, dimly aware of beneficence under all these knocks and denials.  There are whispers of a great destiny for man,—­that he is dear to the Cause.  We suspect integrity in Nature.  Can this canebrake, in which we are tangled with care, fear, and sin, be after all single and sincere, a piece of intelligent kindness?  Genius is the opening of this suspicion to certainty.  We are like children who recognize the love which gives them sugar-plums, but not that which shuts the bag and forbids.  Insight goes deep enough to prize all severity and detect the good of evil.

Trade seems contemptible to Wilhelm Meister, but, in its larger aspect, sublime to Werner, who sees it as an exploration and possession of Nature with friendly interchange between man and man.  Trade is democracy.  Authority is hateful to democrats; but Carlyle can justify loyalty, and show how obedience to the hero may be fidelity to myself.  Every experience needs its interpreter, one who can show its derivation from an absolute centre.  The mob of the French Revolution is a crowd of devils till their poet arrives and restores these maniacs to manhood.  They are misguided brothers, doing what we should do in their place.  Genius in every situation takes hold on reality, a tap-root going down to the source.  Equilibrium appears in a staggering as well as a standing figure, and is perfectly restored in every fall.  The landscape seen in detail is broken and ragged,—­here a raw sand-bank, there a crooked butternut-tree, yonder a stiff black cedar:  but look with a larger eye; the straight is complement to the crooked tree, color balances color, form corrects form, and the entire effect of every scene is completeness.  The artist restores this harmony broken by our microscopic view.  Music is a shattering and suspension of chords till we ache for their resolution; and the music of life is desire, a diminished seventh that melts the past and ruins the present to prepare a future in another key.