Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made

The tender person'd Lamia melt into a shade."

Mere utilitarian aims and ends rob everything of beauty.

"O sweet Fancy! Let her loose;

Everything is spoiled by use."

"The principle of beauty in all things" is his self-avowed passion. We can easily see how he failed to reach the fulness of vision in the fact of the avoidance of the ethical note in life. Rare, indeed, are the places in the entire range of his works when he touches upon the austere in nature or the moral in life and when he does he recalls himself with rebukes in most characteristic fashion.

""T was a quiet eve,

The rocks were silent, the wide sea did weave

An untumultuous fringe of silver foam

Along the flat brown sand; I was at home

And should have been most happy;-but I saw

Too far into the sea, where every maw

The greater or the less feeds ever more.

But I saw too distinct into the core

Of an eternal fierce destruction,

And so from happiness I was far gone.

Still am I sick of it, and tho' to-day

I've gathered young spring leaves and flowers gay

Of periwinkle and wild strawberry,

Still do I that most fierce destruction see,—

The shark at savage prey-the hawk at pounce

The gentle robin like a pard or ounce,

Ravening a worm."

It lasts but a moment. revulsion.

His soul recoils upon itself in strong

Moods of one's mind.

"Away ye horrid moods!

Ye know I hate them well."

In Sleep and Poetry he in a similar way but not as clearly expresses himself. After characterizing the hard spirit of the age he continues,

"How much toil!

How many days! What desperate turmoil!
Ere I could have explored its wilderness.

Ah, what a task! upon my bended knees,

I could unsay those-no, impossible!

Impossible.

For sweet relief I'll dwell

On humbler thoughts, and let this strange assay
Begun in gentleness die so away."

His "horrid moods are those characterized by some of the typical expressions of the period, such as, "introspective analysis,' ""the disease of thought," "inquisitorial metaphysics," "riddle of life," "the maladie du siecle." His artistic sense avoided these with a sort of nausea but he in so doing also avoided the real problem of the soul which they reflected. Who knows but that had Keats lived fifty years instead of twenty-five his songs would have had their minor keys. His Platonic vision of beauty would not only have proclaimed the truth but also its righteousness and goodness. Alongside of his characteristic expression, "The principle of beauty in all things," we feel the necessity of placing that of F. W. Robertson who struggled through the same gloom, namely, "The soul of goodness in things evil." The reactionist poets to his mind were sick with the maladie du siecle,

and

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forgetting the great end

Of poesy, that it should be a friend

To soothe the cares and lift the thoughts of man,"

"Simply tell the most heart-easing things."

On this ground many of the liberal writers roundly abused Keats as being sentimental and lacking in real virility. His avoidance of the ethical must be studied, however, from another standpoint.

His was not a sickly sentimentality. Now and then we catch the note of pagan melancholy but this too has its root in his point of view. The principle of beauty is vital in life and in its relation to truth, but it is not all. The melancholy is that of the classical period at its best in the sense of

"Beauty that must die;

And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu."

His

Would that he had lived longer to cure his melancholia. Platonic vision would have been completed; for he truly was on the way of most rapid development. Let us follow him as far as he went and then complete his vision in the larger light of Emerson.

The archetypal idea of beauty was for him the great reality. "What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth," he said in a letter; in the Ode on a Grecian Urn he says it in poetic form.

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,-that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

Not only is beauty truth but also joy.

"A thing of beauty is a joy forever."

Beauty, truth, joy-surely these lead to the heart of things; but he was wrong in saying, "that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." Keats himself was not fully satisfied. His pagan melancholy, even as in the Greek classic period the same sadness crowned philosophy, at times filled him to overflowing. Beauty alone in mortal life must of necessity be evanescent. It is associated too much with form. As truth it reaches deeper into life. As joy it reaches the mountain heights. But how much more is wanting to the earnest soul! With the true and the beautiful must be the right and the good. Emerson in his remarkable address to the senior class of the Cambridge Divinity School closes with the following full-orbed vision: "I look for the new Teacher that shall follow so far these shining laws that he shall see them come full circle; shall see their rounding complete grace; shall see the world to be the mirror of the soul; shall see the identity of the law of gravitation with purity of heart; and shall show that the Ought, that Duty, is one thing with Science, with Beauty, and with Joy." Browning, coming by another path, reached the same crowning view:

"There where law, life, joy, impulse are one thing."

And was it not Milton who believed in that higher life,

"Where love is an unerring light

And joy its own security."

John Keats, though his allotted days were so few, lived long enough to start the springs of poetry anew in spontaneity and new vision. He emphasized the necessity of the "seeing eye," the contribution of the "subject" to the sense of reality of knowledge. Hugh Clough held fast with all the purity of his moral life to the necessity of the "object," i. e., that all knowledge is rooted in perception. To-day we feel both the strength and weakness of both these poets, the extremes of realism and idealism. As poets their value for the student of theology lies in the fact that the point of view of neither was satisfactory, even to themselves. Life is from below upward, but more from above down, using a simple phraseology. Raphael, in his painting, The School of Athens, makes Plato stand with raised hand, the index finger pointing to the sky, and uplifted face all radiant with a light from above. Aristotle looks down upon the earth, holding in his hand a copy of his Ethics and Politics. They both live to-day. Professor Ladd, in his Introduction to Philosophy, says: "The tendency of modern thought toward a form of speculative thinking that (if the compound may be pardoned) a 'realidealism' or an 'ideal-realism,' is unmistakable." How well Goethe has given us a sense of the same movement in the verse, "Seek within yourself,

And you will find everything;

And rejoice that, without, there
Lies a nature that says, Yea and Amen,

To all you have discovered in yourself."

Toward this goal our nineteenth century poets worked as truly as did the philosophers and theologians. Matthew Arnold, the subject of our next study, marks the transition; Robert Browning the full entrance into this new-world glory. GREENSBURG, Pa.

XII.

ERNST HAECKEL AND FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE.

FIRST PART.

BY PROF. R. C. SCHIEDT, PH.D.

An odd combination of names, of tendencies, of systems of thought and yet only apparently so. For they both have a common aim; they both earnestly desire to improve humanity, to fill the heart of man with finer and nobler ideals than either the Christian church or Christian philosophy have ever dreamt of. Haeckel, the preeminent scientist, and Nietzsche, the brilliant literary artist and metaphysician, belong to that galaxy of great minds who have given the second half of the past century a characteristic impress and who demand a hearing at the forum of a magazine which claims to interpret the thought of the age. Haeckel, a Brandenburgian from Potsdam, born in the middle of the fourth decade of the nineteenth century is the very embodiment of the precise, matterof-fact Prussian spirit which so rapidly became the dominant force of central Europe; Nietzsche, a Thuringian from Naumburg, born ten years later is also Prussian in his ultimate standards of judgment, but his poetic trend for form and expression betrays the romantic flavor of his native heath. The former, a physician by choice, became the most lucid and withal the most radical exponent of Darwinian evolution, occupying at the early age of twenty-eight the professorship of zoology at the university of Jena; the latter, a student of classic philology in the university of Leipzig, was called to the chair of his chosen science at the University of Basel at the age of twenty-four without ever having passed an examination, an unparalleled acknowledgment of his genius.