And
this concludes the poem.
What is the central point from which this poem can be regarded? It does
not seem to be very hard to find. Novalis has said: "Die Philosophie ist
eigentlich Heimweh, ein Trieb ueberall zu Hause zu sein." (Philosophy is
really home-sickness, an impulse to be at home everywhere.) The life of
a man here, if life it be, and not the vain image of what might be a
life, is a continual attempt to find his place, his centre of
recipiency, and active agency. He wants to know where he is, and where
he ought to be and can be; for, rightly considered, the position a man
ought to occupy is the only one he truly _can_ occupy. It is a climbing
and striving to reach that point of vision where the multiplex crossings
and apparent intertwistings of the lines of fact and feeling and duty
shall manifest themselves as a regular and symmetrical design. A
contradiction, or a thing unrelated, is foreign and painful to him, even
as the rocky particle in the gelatinous substance of the oyster; and,
like the latter, he can only rid himself of it by encasing it in the
pearl-like enclosure of faith; believing that hidden there lies the
necessity for a higher theory of the universe than has yet been
generated in his soul.
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