studies the cemetery, the chapel, the school, the gallery, the burial-service, the estate,—­whatever is nearest.  He finds astonishing values in labor, trade, production, art, science, war.  In his boyhood he built an altar with his playthings and burned incense to Deity on a pile of shells and stones.  That act of worship foreshadowed his whole career; he took every creature and thing from God’s hand with reverent expectation, and never rested till he had opened to some intent of the Maker therein.  Things, therefore, in his view are no longer empty and hollow like old cast-off shoes, but pieces of sublime design.  A beetle is sustained by earth, air, fire, and water, needs the sun and the sea, winter and summer, earth’s orbit and parallax, needs whatever has been made, to set him on his legs.  He carries the world in little, and is a creeping black body of the best.

Much more man is microcosmic and macrocosmic.  Natural and supernatural meet concealedly in the out-world, but openly in him, and his early desires grow into a future surpassing all desire.  The poet sees his destiny in our wishes,—­sees right and wrong, kindness and greediness, deepening into incalculable grandeurs of heaven and hell.  He sees the man never yet arrived, but now arriving, to inhabit each breast.  “Far off his coming” shines.  We have many little gleams of generosity; we have conviction, and can strike for the right.  Nature is a fixed quantity, a solid; but life is reinforced by life.  Truth begets truth, love kindles love, every end is a new beginning.

Therefore the perception of genius is prophetic,—­an anticipation of manhood for this boy, who is the King’s son, child of Eternity, and only changeling of Time.  Wherever any magnanimity is revealed, I lay claim to it.  The courage of heroes, the purity of angels, the generosity of God, is no more than I need.  Only show virtue unmixed at the heart of this system, and you open my destiny in that.  If there be but the least spark of pure benignity, it is a fire will spread through all and fill the breast; for Good makes good, and what it is I must become.  Man is heir not to any possession or commodity, though it were a homestead in all heavens, but to the moral power which we ache to exercise.  To-day I am a poor starveling of Nature, sucking many a dry straw, but so sure as God I shall stream like the sun.  The meanest creature is a promise of such power, for in each is some radiation as well as suction.  Man grows, indeed, faster than he can be filled, and so is forever empty; but if power is never a plenum, it is never drawn dry, and at least the mantling foam of it fills the cup.  Our expectation is that bead on the draught of being, and boils over the brim.