own. 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 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 ensured 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, if 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