renovate nature, to see trifles animated by a tendency, and to know what I am doing. Life will no longer be a noise; now I shall see men and women, and know the signs by which they may be discerned from fools and satans. This day shall be better than my birthday; then I became an animal; now I am invited into the science of the real.
"Such is the hope, but the fruition is postponed. Oftener it falls, that this winged man, who will carry me into the heaven, whirls me into mists, then leaps and frisks about with me as it were from cloud to cloud, still affirming that he is bound heavenward; and I, being myself a novice, am slow in perceiving that he does not know the way into the heavens, and is merely bent that I should admire his skill to rise, like a fowl or a flying-fish, a little way from the ground or the water; but the all-piercing, all-feeding, and ocular air of heaven, that man shall never inhabit. I tumble down again soon into my old nooks, and lead the life of exaggerations as before, and have lost my faith in the possibility of any guide who can lead me thither where I would be."
And yet—"the melodies of the poet ascend, and leap, and pierce into the deeps of infinite time. So far the bard taught me, using his freer speech. But Nature has a higher end, in the production of new individuals, than security; namely, ascension, or the passage of the soul into higher forms."
"The poet," says Emerson, "knows that he speaks adequately, only when he speaks somewhat wildly, or 'with the flower of the mind';
