usness of their opinions on this subject, may be fairly
presumed to be himself equally an object of pity and contempt.

8 "Let us depart," etc., _vide_ Hom., _Iliad,_ lib. ii., 140, et lib. ix.,
27.

9 Porphyry informs us in his excellent treatise, _De Antro Nymph,_
that it was the opinion of Numenius, the Pythagorean (to which he
also assents), that the person of Ulysses in the _Odyssey,_
represents to us a man, who passes in a regular manner, over the
dark and stormy sea of generation; and thus, at length, arrives at that
region where tempests and seas are unknown, and finds a nation
who

"Ne'er knew salt, or heard the billows roar."

Indeed, he who is conscious of the delusions of the present life and
the enchantments of this material house, in which his soul is
detained like Ulysses in the irriguous cavern of Calypso, will like
him continually bewail his captivity, and inly pine for a return to his
native country. Of such a one it may be said as of Ulysses (in the
excellent and pathetic translation of Mr Pope):

"But sad Ulysses by himself apart
Pour'd the big sorrows of his swelling heart,
All on the lonely shore he sate to weep
And roll'd his eyes around the restless deep
Tow'rd the lov'd coast he roll'd his eyes in vain
Till, dimmed with rising grief, they stream'd again."
_Odyssey,_ book v., 103.

Such a one too, like Ulysses, will not always wish in vain for a
passage over the dark ocean of a corporeal life, but by the assistance
of Mercury, who may be considered as the emblem of reason, he
will at length be enabled to quit the magic embraces of Calypso, the
Goddess of Imagination, and to return again into the arms of
Penelope, or Philosophy, the long lost and proper object of his love.

10 See Pope's Homer's _Odyssey,_ book v., 182.

11 "We must stir up and assume a purer eye within." This inward
eye is no other than intellect, which contains in its most inward
recesses a certain ray of light, participated from the sun of Beauty
and Good, by which the soul is enabled to behold and become united
with her divinely solitary original. This divine ray, or, as Proclus
calls it, mark or impression, is thus beautifully described by that
philosopher _(Theol. Plat,_ p. 105): "The Author of the Universe,"
says he, "has planted in all beings impressions of his own perfect
excellence, and through these he has placed all beings about himself,
and is present with t