Pater's _Marius the Epicurean_, and
Browning's _Dramatis Personae_. As I reflected, however, I came to the
conclusion that such omission was but justice to his own individuality,
for none of these books had created an _initiative_ in Narcissus'
thought, but rather come, as, after all, I suppose they come to most of
us, as great confirming expressions of states of mind at which he had
already arrived, though, as it were, but by moonlight. In them was the
sunrise bringing all into clear sight and sure knowledge.
It would seem, indeed, that the growth of the soul in the higher spirits
of our race is analogous to the growth of a child in the womb, in this
respect: that in each case the whole gamut of earlier types is run
through, before the ultimate form is attained in which it is decreed
that the particular vital energy shall culminate. And, as in the
physical world the various 'halts,' so to say, of the progress are
illustrated by the co-existence and continual succession of those
earlier types; so in the world of mind, at every point of spiritual
evolution, a man may meet with an historical individuality who is a
concrete embodiment of the particular state to which he has just
attained. This, of course, was what Goethe meant when he referred to
mysticism as being a frame of mind which one could experience all round
and then leave behind. To quote Whitman, in another connection:--
'We but level that lift
To pass and continue beyond.
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