With what joy I begin to read a poem which I
confide in as an inspiration! And now my chains
are to be broken; I shall mount above these
clouds and opaque airs in which I live,-opaque,
though they seem transparent, and from the
heaven of truth I shall see and comprehend
my relations. That will reconcile me to life and
renovate nature, to see trifles animated by a
tendency, and to know what I am doing. Life
will no more be a noise; now I shall see men
and women, and know the signs by which they
may be discerned from fools and satans. This
day shall be better than my birthday: then I
became an animal; now I am invited into the
science of the real. Such is the hope, but the
fruition is postponed. Oftener it falls that this
winged man, who will carry me into the heaven,
whirls me into mists, then leaps and frisks about
with me as it were from cloud to cloud, still
affirming that he is bound heavenward; and I,
being myself a novice, am slow in perceiving
that he does not know the way into the heavens,
and is merely bent that I should admire his
skill to rise like a fowl or a flying fish, a little
way from the ground or the water; but the all-
piercing, all-feeding and ocular air of heaven
that man shall never inhabit. I tumble down

if

again soon into my old nooks, and lead the life of exaggerations as before, and have lost my faith in the possibility of any guide who can lead me thither where I would be.

But, leaving these victims of vanity, let us, with new hope, observe how nature, by worthier impulses, has insured the poet's fidelity to his office of announcement and affirming, namely by the beauty of things, which becomes a new and higher beauty when expressed. Nature offers all her creatures to him as a picture-language. Being used as a type, a second wonderful value appears in the object, far better than its old value; as the carpenter's stretched cord, you hold your ear close enough, is musical in the breeze. "Things more excellent than every image," says Jamblichus," "are expressed through images." Things admit of being used as symbols because nature is a symbol, in the whole, and in every part. Every line we can draw in the sand has expression; and there is no body without its spirit or genius. All form is an effect of character; all condition, of the quality of the life; all harmony, of health; and for this reason a perception of beauty should be sympathetic, or proper only to the good. The beautiful rests on the foundations of the necessary.

The soul makes the body, as the wise Spenser teaches:

"So every spirit, as it is more pure,

And hath in it the more of heavenly light,
So it the fairer body doth procure

To habit in, and it more fairly dight,
With cheerful grace and amiable sight.

For, of the soul, the body form doth take,

For soul is form, and doth the body make.'

Here we find ourselves suddenly not in a critical speculation but in a holy place, and should go very warily and reverently. We stand before the secret of the world, there where Being passes into Appearance and Unity into Variety.

The Universe is the externization of the soul. Wherever the life is, that bursts into appearance around it. Our science is sensual, and therefore superficial. The earth and the heavenly bodies, physics and chemistry, we sensually treat, as if they were self-existent; but these are the retinue of that Being we have. "The mighty heaven," said Proclus," "exhibits, in its transfigurations, clear images of the splendor of intellectual perceptions; being moved in conjunction with the unapparent periods of intellectual natures." Therefore science always goes abreast with the just elevation of the man, keeping step with

religion and metaphysics; or the state of science is an index of our self-knowledge. Since every thing in nature answers to a moral power, if any phenomenon remains brute and dark it is because the corresponding faculty in the observer is not yet active.

if

No wonder then, if these waters be so deep, that we hover over them with a religious regard. The beauty of the fable proves the importance of the sense; to the poet, and to all others; or, you please, every man is so far a poet as to be susceptible of these enchantments of nature; for all men have the thoughts whereof the universe is the celebration. I find that the fascination resides in the symbol. Who loves nature? Who does not? Is it only poets, and men of leisure and cultivation, who live with her? No; but also hunters, farmers, grooms and butchers, though they express their affection in their choice of life and not in their choice of words. The writer wonders what the coachman or the hunter values in riding, in horses and dogs. It is not superficial qualities. When you talk with him he holds these at as slight a rate as you. His worship is sympathetic; he has no definitions, but he is commanded in nature by the. living power which he feels to be there present.

A

No imitation or playing of these things would content him; he loves the earnest of the north wind, of rain, of stone and wood and iron.' beauty not explicable is dearer than a beauty which we can see to the end of. It is nature the symbol, nature certifying the supernatural, body overflowed by life which he worships with coarse but sincere rites.

The inwardness and mystery of this attachment drive men of every class to the use of emblems. The schools of poets and philosophers are not more intoxicated with their symbols than the populace with theirs. In our political parties, compute the power of badges and emblems. See the great ball which they roll from Baltimore to Bunker Hill! In the political processions, Lowell goes in a loom, and Lynn in a shoe, and Salem in a ship. Witness the cider-barrel, the log-cabin, the hickory-stick, the palmetto, and all the cognizances of party. See the power of national emblems. Some stars, lilies, leopards, a crescent, a lion, an eagle, or other figure which came into credit God knows how, on an old rag of bunting, blowing in the wind on a fort at the ends of the earth, shall make the blood tingle under the rudest or the most conventional exterior. The people fancy