and will.

The climax of one vision of attainment when reached proves only the steppingstone to new ranges beyond.

There is perfection for other orders in nature, but for man, infinite reach and potency. This truth is one of the dynamic forces in the poems of Robert Browning; it is equally an all-pervading atmosphere in Whitman.

I launch all men and women forward with me into the Unknown.

Each must travel for himself into this unknown. His hand points to "landscapes of continents' and to them leads "a plain country road.' "There is no stoppage and never

can be stoppage.

There is a thrill inexpressible in the bugle call he gives for this journey on into unmeasured accomplishment.

He lets go the past and proceeds to "fill the next fold of the future." All the past of the universe and of men is absorbed into the life of each, and in each is the promise of all to come.

This day, before dawn, I ascended a hill and looked at the crowded heaven, and I said to my spirit, When we become the enfolders of those orbs, and the pleasure and knowledge of everything in them, shall we be filled and satisfied then?

And my spirit said No, we level that lift, to pass and continue beyond.

Could anything more graphically and awesomely picture the challenge which evolution throws to humanity? Grow, enlarge, it says, be and become in unresting, purposeful progress, or you go the way of the extinct species. The future—immortality-belongs to him who can triumph in new attempts unendingly.

O, I see that life is not short, but immeasurably long, I henceforth tread the world, chaste, temperate, an early riser, a gymnast, a steady grower,

Every hour the semen of centuries and still of cen

turies.

The Cosmic Self

III. The Cosmic Self

For I believed the poets. It is they
Who utter wisdom from the central deep,
And, listening to the inner flow of things,
Speak to the Ages out of Eternity.

The

Lowell in this voices a striking fact. poets have been the prophets. They have, by diving deep into inmost principles, been able to see the essential meanings and purport before the fact-searching scientists could ascertain the truths coming into view, and generations before the popular mind could take hold upon their value.

Goethe, though his specific scientific work was almost worthless, outlined the general theory of evolution with a master's perspective. The mastery was, however, that of the poet, not of the scientist. Browning, in "Paracelsus," published in 1831, drew with a true artist's stroke the vast picture of evolutionary progress with a symmetry and completeness that only our own decade has verified in definite, classified fact.

The readjustment of conceptions of man and religion to new knowledge of the universe has