members we have known longer, and more intimately, and more profitably than we have known any one of you; for all the great men of letters have infinitely more power to-day than they had in their bodily life-time; and they retain all the essential and interesting attributes of life. We know their habits and opinions; we hear their voices; we feel their influences; we change our relations to them; we hate and love them; we are intellectually and emotionally begotten and reared and governed by them."
Literature, then, is formidable because it emancipates a man from bondage to the present and makes him a citizen of this state which is as wide as humanity and as old as the world. He may conform outwardly to the government of the men in the street, but his true inward' allegiance is to a state which transcends national society, which transcends the international society of the present; and which has no sovereign but God. I have called it a republic; it is more strictly speaking a natural and entirely free aristocracy where no man has any power whatever but the power of his own spirit upon other spirits.
Living habitually in the company of a true spiritual aristocracy has certain decisive effects
