“I have listened to you patiently and without interruption.  Now listen to me.  You complain of the skepticism of the age.  This is one form in which the philosophic spirit of the age presents itself.  Let me tell you, that another form, whichit assumes, is that of poetic reverie.  Plato of old had dreams like these; and the Mystics of the Middle Ages; and still their disciples walk in the cloud-land and dream-land of this poetic philosophy.  Pleasant and cool upon their souls lie the shadows of the trees under which Plato taught.  From their whispering leaves comes wafted across the noise of populous centuries a solemn and mysterious sound, which to them is the voice of the Soul of the World.  All nature has become spiritualized and transfigured; and, wrapt in beautiful, vague dreams of the real and the ideal, they live in this green world, like the little child in the German tale, who sits by the margin of a woodland lake, and hears the blue heaven and the branches overhead dispute with their reflection in the water, which is the reality and which the image.  I willingly confess, that such day-dreams as these appeal strongly to my imagination.  Visitants and attendants are they of those lofty souls, which, soaring ever higher and higher, build themselves nests under the very eaves of the stars, forgetful that theycannot live on air, but must descend to earth for food.  Yet I recognise them as day-dreams only; as shadows, not substantial things.  What I mainly dislike in the New Philosophy, is the cool impertinence with which an old idea, folded in a new garment, looks you in the face and pretends not to know you, though you have been familiar friends from childhood.  I remember an English author who, in speaking of your German Philosophies, says very wisely; `Often a proposition of inscrutable and dread aspect, when resolutely grappled with, and torn from its shady den, and its bristling entrenchments of uncouth terminology,—­and dragged forth into the open light of day, to be seen by the natural eye and tried by merely human understanding, proves to be a very harmless truth, familiar to us from old, sometimes so familiar as to be a truism.  Too frequently the anxious novice is reminded of Dryden in the Battle of the Books; there is a helmet of rusty iron, dark, grim, gigantic; and within it, at the farthest corner, is a head no bigger than a walnut.’—­Can you believe, thatthese words ever came from the lips of Carlyle!  He has himself taken up the uncouth terminology of late; and many pure, simple minds are much offended at it.  They seem to take it as a personal insult.  They are angry; and deny the just meed of praise.  It is, however, hardly worth while to lose our presence of mind.  Let us rather profit as we may, even from this spectacle, and recognise the monarch in his masquerade.  For, hooded and wrapped about with that strange and antique garb, there walks a kingly, a most royal soul, even as the Emperor Charles walked amid solemn cloisters under