in all
her specific natural forms in which they see the eternal essence, the
specific substantial perpetuator of the eternal generation and mutation
of things, which are called after their founders and builders and above
them all presides the form of forms,[Q] the fountain of light, very
truth of very truth, God of gods, through whom all is full of divinity,
truth, entity, goodness. This truth is sought as a thing inaccessible,
as an object not to be objectized, incomprehensible. But yet, to no one
does it seem possible to see the sun, the universal Apollo, the absolute
light through supreme and most excellent species; but only its shadow,
its Diana, the world, the universe, nature, which is in things, light
which is in the opacity of matter, that is to say, so far as it shines
in darkness.

[Q] A discerning of the Infinite in the Finite.--("Sartor
Resartus.")

Many then wander amongst the aforesaid paths of this deserted wood, very
few are those who find the fountain of Diana. Many are content to hunt
for wild beasts and things less elevated, and the greater number do not
understand why, having spread their nets to the wind, they find their
hands full of flies. Rare, I say, are the Actaeons to whom fate has
granted the power of contemplating the nude Diana and who, entranced
with the beautiful disposition of the body of nature, and led by those
two lights, the twin splendour of Divine goodness and beauty become
transformed into stags; for they are no longer hunters, but that which
is hunted. For the ultimate and final end of this sport, is to arrive at
the acquisition of that fugitive and wild body, so that the thief
becomes the thing stolen, the hunter becomes the thing hunted; in all
other kinds of sport, for special things, the hunter possesses himself
of those things, absorbing them with the mouth of his own intelligence;
but in that Divine and universal one, he comes to understand to such an
extent, that he becomes of necessity included, absorbed, united. Whence,
from common, ordinary, civil, and popular, he becomes wild, like a stag,
an inhabitant of the woods; he lives god-like under that grandeur of the
forest; he lives in the simple chambers of the cavernous mountains,
whence he beholds the great rivers; he vegetates intact and pure from
ordinary greed, where the speech of the Divine converses more freely, to
which so many men have aspired who longed to taste the Divine life while
upon earth, and who