by he is revealed to his like,
and dwells with them in UNION and DIVISION; and sees and fashions for
himself a Universe, with azure Starry Spaces, and long Thousands of
Years. Deep-hidden is he under that strange Garment; amid Sounds
and Colors and Forms, as it were, swathed in, and inextricably
over-shrouded: yet it is sky-woven, and worthy of a God. Stands he not
thereby in the centre of Immensities, in the conflux of Eternities? He
feels; power has been given him to know, to believe; nay does not the
spirit of Love, free in its celestial primeval brightness, even here,
though but for moments, look through? Well said Saint Chrysostom,
with his lips of gold, 'the true SHEKINAH is Man:' where else is the
GOD'S-PRESENCE manifested not to our eyes only, but to our hearts, as in
our fellow-man?"

In such passages, unhappily too rare, the high Platonic Mysticism of our
Author, which is perhaps the fundamental element of his nature, bursts
forth, as it were, in full flood: and, through all the vapor and tarnish
of what is often so perverse, so mean in his exterior and environment,
we seem to look into a whole inward Sea of Light and Love;--though,
alas, the grim coppery clouds soon roll together again, and hide it from
view.

Such tendency to Mysticism is everywhere traceable in this man; and
indeed, to attentive readers, must have been long ago apparent. Nothing
that he sees but has more than a common meaning, but has two meanings:
thus, if in the highest Imperial Sceptre and Charlemagne-Mantle, as
well as in the poorest Ox-goad and Gypsy-Blanket, he finds Prose, Decay,
Contemptibility; there is in each sort Poetry also, and a reverend
Worth. For Matter, were it never so despicable, is Spirit, the
manifestation of Spirit: were it never so honorable, can it be more? The
thing Visible, nay the thing Imagined, the thing in any way conceived as
Visible, what is it but a Garment, a Clothing of the higher, celestial
Invisible, "unimaginable formless, dark with excess of bright"? Under
which point of view the following passage, so strange in purport, so
strange in phrase, seems characteristic enough:--

"The beginning of all Wisdom is to look fixedly on Clothes, or even with
armed eyesight, till they become _transparent_. 'The Philosopher,' says
the wisest of this age, 'must station himself in the middle:' how true!
The Philosopher is he to whom the Highest has descended, and the Lowest
has mounted up; who is the equal and kind