and uses it as his exponent. Every verse or sentence
possessing this virtue will take care of its own
immortality. The religions of the world are the
ejaculations of a few imaginative men.

But the quality of the imagination is to flow,
and not to freeze. The poet did not stop at the
color or the form, but read their meaning; neither
may he rest in this meaning, but he makes the same
objects exponents of his new thought. Here is the
difference betwixt the poet and the mystic, that
the last nails a symbol to one sense, which was a
true sense for a moment, but soon becomes old and
false. For all symbols are fluxional; all language
is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries
and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and
houses are, for homestead. Mysticism consists in
the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol
for an universal one. The morning-redness happens
to be the favorite meteor to the eyes of Jacob Behmen,
and comes to stand to him for truth and faith; and,
he believes, should stand for the same realities to
every reader. But the first reader prefers as
naturally the symbol of a mother and child, or a
gardener and his bulb, or a jeweller polishing a
gem. Either of these, or of a myriad more, are equally
good to the person to whom they are significant. Only
they must be held lightly, and be very willingly
translated into the equivalent terms which others use.
And the mystic must be steadily told,--All that you