Shelley, and opposite that of the Olympian Goethe, illumines the current of my thoughts and charms the tapestry of my unwearying dreams.
Literal folk who consider great men as external and independent beings will reproach me for sacrilege, and express surprise at this adaptation of a genius to the spiritual needs of one obscure soul. They may protest as loudly as they will: they have failed to understand that the great men of the past are in reality instruments of the present, themes on which we may build personality, fragments of olden time through which we may learn to analyze ourselves, dead bodies to which we may give new life. If we content ourselves with knowing the external vicissitudes of the great, the scenes in which they moved, the lists of their works, their characteristic traits of style, we are simply gathering erudition, we are approaching the temple without prayer, we are entering the orchard without tasting its fruit. But if we seek to know the heroes of the past truly and profoundly, we shall make them members of ourselves, our own instruments of joy—we shall save their treasure by enabling them to live again in us. A great man may be known either through dead words and documents or through present and individual consciousness.
