spiritual influence, without which this poetry would have no matter to work upon. "Il fallait nous faire sentir l'entourage, l'habillement, le milieu respirable de cette âme nuageuse, de cet esprit fatigué." After the full effusion of spirit in his one great utterance, Empedocles has little to bring forth but fragments and relics of the soul, shadows of thin suggestion and floating complaint. The manliness and depth, the clearness and sufficiency of thought have passed from him; he is vague and weak, dissatisfied much as the commonest thinker is dissatisfied with whom all things have not gone well, to whom all things are visibly imperfect and sensibly obscure. Now the prophet of nature who spoke to us and to Pausanias in the solemn modulation of his lyric speech was more than that, There needs no ghost come from the grave—there needs no philosopher scale the summit of Etna—to tell us this that we find here: that a man had better die than live who can neither live with other men as they do nor wholly suffice to himself; that power and cunning and folly are fellows, that they are lords of life in ages of men with minds vulgar and feeble, and overcome the great and simple servants of justice and the right; that the lord of our spirit and our song, the god of all singers and all seers, is an intolerable and severe god, dividing and secluding his elect from full enjoyment of what others enjoy, in the stress and severity of solitude—sacrificing the weaker and sequestering the strong; that men on whom all these things beat and bear more heavily than they need can find no fullness of comfort or communion in the eternal elements made of like matter with us, but better made, nor in any beauty nor in any life of the