inward related soul, whose human feelings and life are expressed by poetry. Men's relations to Nature are closed by their coming between the realities of soul and Nature; their life is erected into a sense, and is not diffused around, like the ocean with its great proportionate surface. Human nature, if left to itself, will be full of life, like the great western forests and standing water, and Poetry is the physical inworld of the spiritual nature, with its life developed in forms; forms are not mere forms continent of life, but forms which are formed life. Dolon's living relation to things answered at school for activity and readiness in the usual course of systematic learning; for life is ready and willing to meet all that comes before it, and his teacher saw he learned in this spirit of life, by the natural way of the correspondence of means to ends, and that if lessons were given him he so earnestly, singly, and simply, and unconsciously made his own use of them, that he allowed him to learn after his own natural manner, and felt towards him as what he was and not as what, canonjudged, he outwardly did; and his mother liked to have him free, and sent him to school only half of the day, so that he had all the rest for the air and fields and woods. His father wanted him to learn more decidedly, but always saw that Dolon had better be left to himself, at least for the present, and he had a quiet unconscious pride in his son, and felt he did not know how to manage such a being, who was so positive by being himself, though so gentle, and whose only resistance to formal elementary study was an indifference, an unrealizing, as of objects by a blind man, as one placed in a relation by a master of ceremonies, but for what depended upon something to be developed or completed, like children who are being collected in a room and position by the elder sisters of their child-host, who smile in their silent designs which are not to be told till all is ready to begin, as if in the humor of mystery. Life is life's teacher, and children deal only with life; all that they make is an imitation of life, and knowledge, as imparted by the present old method, is the only positive thing to them in all nature; all things are to them by being towards them; they do not know and use means, but go along enjoying all, like one on a beautiful road on his way to a place which he does not keep in mind; na

ture carries them and leaves them free to look and feel as they please, like an infant unconsciously borne in the nurse's arms to a family friend.

At school, Dolon loved to hear about the classic Mythology, (of which the teacher talked and read to him,) as before he had about the fairies. The sky and earth were full of undefined God-Beings, at the same time that there was a history in the theogony, and much which gave local significances and associations, and humanized natural objects, the stars, the pine trees, the reeds, the laurel, and so forth; and the Gods being more human and heroic, and more spiritually expressive, answered his advance in life. There is less intellectualness in the relations of youth than of men to the imaginary, for it is more as to the real, and they experience as if from the real; the beautiful is not music and sympathy to them, but has its natural, physicallike effect; the thing which is beautiful acts as a thing upon the child, and Being answers Being rather than looks at each other, and each feels the other as what they internally are. Genius is matured youth living with life within it, which before was out of it or with it. It is as if nature was continented within it, and lived through its own life, as before it lived in the general life. All forms are facts to youth, and recognised by them as beings, not as persons; the sunshine reflects itself in their eyes, and all things are true to them by the realizing of their natures; the cause is known and believed through its effect.

Dolon loved to go and sit on a large rock within a wood which bordered on an old potatoe moss-hilled field, separated from the house by a large hay-field. The woods sloped down from the rock toward the western and southern sky, and Dolon came and sat here, almost regularly, every pleasant late afternoon and early evening. Underneath a part of the rock which was separated from the part on which he sat by an imperfect ravine, was a small cave within a cleft.

Dolon had often heard sounds like footsteps on the dry leaves among the bushes around the rock, as of a person moving stationarily about, but he never saw any one, and thought the sound was of some animal. One afternoon, sitting in the sunset upon the rock, he rose and raised his eyes up to a pine tree which overhung one end of the

rock; seated on branches near the top, in an opening of branches which had been broken off, or interlashed aside, was a man earnestly and inwardly, as if in contemplation, looking down on Dolon. It was as if Dolon had been moved to rise by something, which was himself' without any thought or consciousness of his; their souls faced by their faces; each involuntarily started at first, but the man continued to look as unconsciously as if he thought he was invisible, and Dolon's combined surprise and wonder was lost in the innocence and simplicity of the reality. The man was dressed in a crimson tunic over a white dress, with a fillet on his head, and the golden light of the setting sun shone on a strong profile, and heightened the effect of his dress in the dark tree, and the pale shade of the other half of his face gave a mysterious effect to his whole form. Just at this time, Dolon's attention was diverted by the voices of his father and mother approaching the rock with some company, and on immediately looking up to the man again, he saw he was hastily descending and in an instant disappeared behind the edge of the rock; Dolon hastened to the edge to see him, but it was sloping and slippery with dead pine-leaves, and when he got there, the man was with self-possessed eagerness hastening into the bushes. The people had reached the rock, and Dolon asked if they had seen the man, and when they inquired about him, told them what he had seen. The women affrightedly exclaimed, "oh that must be the man"; and proposed to instantly return home. Dolon, gently amazed, asked if they knew who he was, and his mother said, there was a crazy man about, who believed in all the Greek and Roman Gods and Goddesses, and that it was thought he carried out the whole worship and made sacrifices, for sheep and calves had been found killed, bedecked with flowers before stone-piled altars; and said, that she was afraid to have Dolon go about so alone in the woods. 'Oh how beautiful,' said Dolon, 'I wish I could see him and talk with him.' One of the company said, that he had been a great scholar, and living so in the old Greek literature had turned his head, and that he was of a most re-' spectable family, and had been a remarkably pure and earnest character, and did not seem crazy, except in this belief of his, yet was decidedly so, and all his family

thought so, he was so sincere and earnest in his belief, but they never thought he would so carry it out, or they would have confined him before he left home.

Dolon was in a retired state, as if thinking or lost, but a youth's reflection is the person in a passive relation to his nature, as if the personality had aerially vanished, unseen, like the raising of an eyelid, and the Being had incarnated itself in human form, like the soul of man in Jesus, and had become the person. Men in absence of mind are somewhat youthlike, though their Being-Nature is less free and full and formed than in youth, and they are as if their personality were folded aside, and they were quietly getting at their Being, while a youth is freshly individual, and his Being comes out as if his nature, and personality disappears, as a soul from the body at death. The youth instinctively, unconsciously, waits before his Being for his nature to act through it, and the Being not merely assists him, but comes beside him and spiritually over him, like one who answers the call or want of a child by going to it and doing all for it.

Dolon went home with the others, and was serious all the evening. Youth's seriousness is a state of himself, and not as a man's, himself in a state; his nature is affected as is the temperature of water by the condition of the sky, but its form remains a form, and its relations continue in all its parts, though all are modified yet in equal proportion, and it recedes together and in order, like a highly disciplined army. The youth neither introverts or extraverts, but is as he is affected.

Dolon continued in this state, and was all the three next days in Nature, and toward the sunset, sat as usual upon the rock, and they were the nights of the new moon. Something had met him which required the conformation of his nature to meet, and which in men would have given need of a high consciousness, as the sleeper in the dark, awaked by something which has touched him, or is near him, cannot sleep again till he ascertains it, and he looks about in the dark with eyes which, though open, cannot see till they are used to the darkness. The crazy man as a fact, combined with Dolon's condition from the general experience of his humanity, of which this event was crisis-like, had made this impression on him as if his nature was relat

ed to them as to things which, as inner principles, acted upon it; and this was the first intellectual development of a youth who had lived in Nature, and been a Being of Nature, but whose relations also comprehended men as they are, as, his parents, the school, and this crazy man, and whose nature partook of this modified humanity, though it so naturalized it by being a form of it, such as it was, as if a primitive condition, like air and water, which remain elements, though their essences are in different proportions from those of the optimum, and a lake enclosing hills, rocks, and cataracts; whereas men are. forms of the original humanity which has become incomplete and disharmonized by the disproportionate development of parts, like a full-formed tree whose sap ceases to equally circulate. It was a relation of his nature, not of his intellect, which looks out of one's nature as from an observatory; its consciousness was in the relation of his Being to the Nature which thus was around him, as a blind man's sense is in his feelings. As a person, Dolon had a kind of instinctive quiet consciousness, as if God had put into his soul a celestial flower-plant on which were heavenly little fairies, and the consciousness was a feeling of an experience, like natural effects, going on within him; the life lives within him, and he neither sees, orders, or interferes with it. He did not think, though it was as if thoughts were taking forms within him, and taking their place as forms in the fresh spiritual inworld of his humanity. He was quiet and passive, and himself, as though there was an opening in the state of his humanity, and the forms there were shone upon by the sky, but the opening was of his own nature, like the cleft in a rock, and though the forms rose near the surface, did not rise beyond a level with himself, like stars brightly appearing in heaven. He was in Nature, and at unity with it, though he was as if there was something instinctively engaging him, like a child keeping by its mother's side, with its hand in hers, while it has a certain care of doing or seeing something, it has not defined to itself what.

The experience going on within him was as if Poetry which he heard, and was quietly and really related to, as to a tale which a child realizes, (so far as it does realize, the effect upon him taking care of itself;) and what in men would