to understand,

   this yearning after perfection by Knowledge was one of the fruits of the Renaissance. The other was the yearning to gain perfection by means of

    feeling

   , by the ecstatic contemplation

   of and communion with perfect Beauty—'to love infinitely and be loved,' as Aprile says in Browning's

    Paracelsus

   . These two impulses, the one toward Knowledge and the other toward Love, were doubtless awakened by the study of Aristotle, that 'master of those who know,' and of Plato's doctrine of the soul's love-inspired yearnings for Truth and Beauty and for communion with the Perfect and the Eternal.

   I have called them

    two

   impulses, and to the mind they must ever appear distinct, nay sometimes contrary; but I need not remind you how Christianity teaches us to reconcile the ancient feud between the mind and the heart—between Knowledge and Love. You may perhaps remember how Dante, to intimate to us that there can be no true knowledge without love and no true love without knowledge, speaks of the Cherubim and the Seraphim as ideally the same, and tells us that the Seraphs, who love most, also know most.

   Both these impulses are noble and awaken our sympathy.

   Now, in order that

    tragic

   art may have its effect it must possess what Aristotle calls

    πάθοσ

   , so that we may be able to sympathize

   with the sufferer. Thus, for instance, Milton enlists our sympathies even with his Satan, and it is perhaps because we cannot sympathize in any way with Dante's Lucifer that many feel repelled by the terrible creation. But even in the oldest of the Faust-legends, and far more of course in Goethe's

    Faust

   , we are attracted by a 'pathetic' element, viz., the unsatisfied and insatiable longing of a human soul for Knowledge—for Truth—and its 

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