stretch onward, constructing their own plates, charts, compasses, scopes, being born pilots, and finding no end to the universe of fact but in the limits of their own lives and labors; sometimes too safely denying more land than they can discover. Still others, by the light of superior genius shining within them and reflected in the world without them, industriously, perseveringly, and fainting not, hold still onward, believing yet with such as Bacon, or Columbus, that "they are but ill discoverers who think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea";—until they run against Fate: "Othello. Who can control his fate? —.. Here is my journey's end, here is my butt, And very sea-mark of my utmost sail."- Act V. Sc. 2. Bacon understood how "knowledge is a double of that which is," and that "the truth of being and the truth of knowing is all one." He considered that "the sovereignty of man lieth hid in knowledge," as it is beautifully prefigured in the Prospero of the "Tempest," and he recognized "the happy match between the mind of man and the nature of things, and the science or providence comprehending all things"; as Hamlet saw, that there was 66 a special providence in the fall of a sparrow." He looked upon the universe as the book of God's works, and he frequently quotes Solomon as saying, "That it is the glory of God to conceal a thing, but the glory of a king to find it out, as if, according to the innocent play of children, the Divine Majesty took delight to hide his works, to the end to have them found out";1 and he says, again, “The spirit of man is the lamp of God, wherewith he searcheth the inwardness of all secrets."" And so says the Soothsayer in the play: "In Nature's infinite book of secrecy, A little I can read." - Ant. and Cleo., Act I. Sc. 2. Nor did he think it was, in Nature, : to be secretly open."- Tro. and Cr., Act V. Sc. 2 2 Works (Mont.), XVI. Note 66. It is no wonder that Goethe, finding that his own 66 open secret," as well as many other things, for the means of comprehending which, he was, as he in some degree acknowledges, much indebted to the philosophies of Plato, Spinoza, and Kant, had been known to Shakespeare as well, should pronounce this wonderful Bard of Avon the greatest of modern poets. Modern transcendental moralists and poets have discovered many new wonders in Shakespeare. They have much to say about man being a microcosm," though not always particular to mention that the doctrine is as old as Plato, or the fable of Pan, nor that Bacon fully comprehended the meaning of that wise saw, as any one may see in his interpretation of that fable; but he frequently speaks of the "ancient opinion that man was microcosmus," and of "the spirit of man, whom they call the microcosm"; and we have it in the play thus: 66 "Men. If you see this in the map of my microcosm, follows it, that I am known well enough, too?"— Cor., Act II. Sc. 1. In the style of poetry, but not less according to the truth of philosophy, Goethe images forth the visible universe as the "garment" of God: 66 'Spirit. Thus, at the roaring loom of Time I ply, And weave the garment which thou see'st him by." Bacon, in like manner, interpreting the Fable of Cupid, as being intended to shadow forth some conception of the Divine Person under the image of Cupid born of the egg, hatched beneath the brooding wing of Night, and coeval with Chaos, speaks of the primary visible matter as being "the vest of Cupid"; and a like philosophy seems to underlie this passage from the Othello: : "Cas. Most fortunately: he hath achiev'd a maid That paragons description and wild fame; One that excels the quirks of blazoning pens, And in th' essential vesture of creation Does bear all excellency." Act II. Sc. 1. and this, again, from the "Merchant of Venice": "Such harmony is in immortal souls; But, whilst this muddy vesture of decay Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it."- Act V. Sc. 1. And the same idea appears in plain prose thus : — "For though we Christians do continually aspire and pant after the land of promise, yet it will be a token of God's favour towards us in our journeyings through this world's wilderness, to have our shoes and garments (I mean those of our frail bodies) little worn or impaired." I And surely the author of the "Cymbeline" was not far from the same conception, when he wrote concerning Jupiter's tablet, delivered down out of his radiant roof," thus: "[Ghosts vanish. POSTHUMUS wakes, and finds the Tablet.] Posth. What fairies haunt this ground? A book? O, rare one! Be not, as is our fangled world, a garment Again, Prospero says to Miranda in the "Tempest" :"Lend thy hand, And pluck my magic garment from me.— - So: Materialistic science, on the one hand, and unphilosophical theology, on the other, have, in all times, come equally short of comprehending the great truth here indicated. One thinks there is nothing but the garment, or, at least, that the garment covers nothing: the other thinks likewise that the garment covers nothing nobler than itself; but that the Maker of it, when it was finished and pronounced good, plucked it from him and hung it in the heavens, and that he has ever since sat apart on a throne above his "radiant roof," contemplating and judging his 1 Dedication to the Hist. of Life and Death. handiwork, only occasionally delivering down a miraculous tablet; but that his art lasted six days, and ceased altogether some six thousand years ago. As that book, that 1 "C rare one," has been more worshipped, in our newfangled mansions," than what of truth it contains and reveals, so, on the other hand, has the physical garment been held nobler than that it covers. The ancients knew better than this; for they held with Bacon, Shakespeare's plays, Berkeley, Goethe, Jean Paul, and many more modern disciples of the Higher Philosophy, that the visible world was but the vest of Cupid, the visible manifestation of the Invisible Essence, which is eternally weaving the web of His physical garment, in the Roaring Loom of Time and Space. Indeed, the hieroglyphic Sacred Books of the ancient Egyptians seem to read much to the same effect, as deciphered by Seyffarth :— "I am that I am. I weave the garments (bodies) of men. I am the shining garment of the sky. I have fashioned the verdure of the earthly pasture. I have woven the hosts of worlds, the High and Holy God. Songs and anthems of praise to the Master Architect, who made the world, who made it for the habitation of man, the Creator's image.” 2 As the highest ancient, so the highest modern voice, still exclaims:-"() thou unfathomable mystic All, garment and dwelling-place of the Unnamed; and thou articulate-speaking Spirit of Man, who mouldest and modellest that Unfathomable Unnameable even as we see, is not there a miracle! "3 Time and Space, as necessary laws of thought, divine or human, as fundamental principles or conditions of ideas. or things, and those complex keys which alone unlock the door of the inner sanctuaries, have tasked the brains of the deepest thinkers from Plato and his cave down to Kant, or Cousin; and this author, too, seems to have understood 1 Bacon's Theory of the Firmament. something of their nature. He knew that Time carried a wallet at his back wherein he put alms for oblivion; and Imogen, at the departure of Posthumus, watched him, "till the diminution Of space had pointed him sharp as my needle; The smallness of a gnat to air." Cymb., Act I. Sc. 4. And Belarius, leaving his companions at the cave, to ascend the mountains, says to them: "Consider When you above perceive me like a crow, He understood, too, how things appear great or small to The sharded beetle in a safer hold Than is the full-winged eagle." — Ib., Act III. Sc. 3. Which may remind the reader of Jean Paul in search of happiness, now soaring above the clouds of life, and again sinking down under a leaf in a furrow of his garden, or rather, again, alternating between the two; or of Emerson, who says: -- "There is no great and no small To the soul that maketh all." But unto "poor unfledged" boys of the forest, that have 66 never wing'd from view o' the nest," it is "A cell of ignorance, travelling abed, A prison for a debtor, that dares not To stride a limit.” — Ib., Act III. Sc. 3. "The common people," says Bacon, "understand not many excellent virtues; the lowest virtues draw praise from them; the middle virtues work in them astonishment or admiration; but of the highest virtues they have no |