This cheerful laborer, with no external popularity or provocation,
drawing his motive and his plan from his own breast, tasked himself
with stints for a giant, and, without relaxation or rest, except by
alternating his pursuits, worked on for eighty years with the steadiness
of his first zeal.
It is the last lesson of modern science, that the highest simplicity
of structure is produced, not by few elements, but by the highest
complexity. Man is the most composite of all creatures: the
wheel-insect, volvox globator, is at the other extreme. We shall learn
to draw rents and revenues from the immense patrimony of the old and
recent ages. Goethe teaches courage, and the equivalence of all times:
that the disadvantages of any epoch exist only to the faint-hearted.
Genius hovers with his sunshine and music close by the darkest and
deafest eras. No mortgage, no attainder, will hold on men or hours.
The world is young; the former great men call to us affectionately.
We too must write Bibles, to unite again the heavens and the earthly
world. The secret of genius is to suffer no fiction to exist for us;
to realize all that we know; in the high refinement of modern life,
in arts, in sciences, in books, in men, to exact good faith, reality,
and a purpose; and first, last, midst, and without end, to honor every
truth by use.
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