believe what they have said; as long as they are with us, they are
voices crying in the wilderness.

Now, these great ideas, these harmonies of the world of mind, first
strike upon the ear of the poet. They seem to break into the
consciousness of man by the way of emotion. They possess the seer; he is
divinely mad, and he utters words whose meaning passes his own calmer
comprehension. What we find in Goethe, we find also in a manner in
Browning: an insight which is also foresight, a dim and partial
consciousness of the truth about to be, sending its light before it, and
anticipating all systematic reflection. It is an insight which appears
to be independent of all method; but it is in nature, though not in
sweep and expanse, akin to the intuitive leap by which the scientific
explorer lights upon his new hypothesis. We can find no other law for
it, than that sensitiveness to the beauty and truth hidden in facts,
which much reflection on them generates for genius. For these great
minds the "muddy vesture" is worn thin by thought, and they hear the
immortal music.

The poet soon passes his glowing torch into the hands of the
philosopher. After Aeschylus and Sophocles, come Plato and Aristotle.
The intuitive flash grows into a fixed light, which rules the day. The
great idea, when reflected upon, becomes a system. When the light of
such an idea is steadily held on human affairs, it breaks into endless
forms of beauty and truth. The content of the idea is gradually evolved;
hypotheses spring out of it, which are accepted as principles, rule the
mind of an age, and give it its work and its character. In this way,
Hobbes and Locke laid down, or at least defined, the boundaries within
which moved the thought of the eighteenth century; and no one acquainted
with the poetic and philosophic thought of Germany, from Lessing to