“I will give thee a rich recompense.  Truth in the created—­truth in God!”

And through the stagnant lake, where before the misty spectral figures rose, whilst the bells sounded from the sunken castle, the light fell down on a swaying vegetable world.  One drop of the marsh water, raised against the rays of light, became a living world, with creatures in strange forms, fighting and revelling—­a world in a drop of water.  And the sharp sword of Knowledge cleft the deep vault, and shone therein, where the basilisk killed, and the animal’s body was dissolved in a death-bringing vapour:  its claw extended from the fermenting wine-cask; its eyes were air, that burnt when the fresh wind touched it.

And there resided a powerful force in the sword; so powerful, that the grain of gold was beaten to a flat surface, thin as the covering of mist that we breathe on the glass-pane; and it shone at the sword’s point, so that the thin threads of the cobweb seemed to swell to cables, for one saw the strong twistings of numberless small threads.  And the voice of Knowledge seemed over the whole world, so that the age of miracles appeared to have returned.  Thin iron ties were laid over the earth, and along these the heavily-laden waggons flew on the wings of steam, with the swallow’s flight; mountains were compelled to open themselves to the inquiring spirit of the age; the plains were obliged to raise themselves; and then thought was borne in words, through metal wires, with the lightning’s speed, to distant towns.  “Life! life!” it sounded through the whole of nature.  “It is our time!  Poet, thou dost possess it!  Sing of it in spirit and in truth!”

And the genius of Knowledge raised the shining sword; he raised it far out into space, and then—­what a sight!  It was as when the sunbeams shine through a crevice in the wall in a dark space, and appear to us a revolving column of myriads of grains of dust; but every grain of dust here was a world!  The sight he saw was our starry firmament!

Thy earth is a grain of dust here, but a speck whose wonders astonish thee; only a grain of dust, and yet a star under stars.  That long column of worlds thou callest thy starry firmament, revolves like the myriads of grains of dust, visibly hovering in the sunbeam’s revolving column, from the crevice in the wall into that dark space.  But still more distant stands the milky way’s whitish mist, a new starry heaven, each column but a radius in the wheel!  But how great is this itself! how many radii thus go out from the central point—­God!

So far does thine eye reach, so clear is thine age’s horizon!  Son of time, choose, who shall be thy companion?  Here is thy new career! with the greatest of thy time, fly thou before thy time’s generation!  Like twinkling Lucifer, shine thou in time’s roseate morn.

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