o the _hortus siccus_ of Dissent, where he pared religion down to the
standard of reason and stripped faith of mystery, and preached Christ
crucified and the Unity of the Godhead, and so dwelt for a while in the
spirit with John Huss and Jerome of Prague and Socinus and old John
Zisca, and ran through Neal's History of the Puritans, and Calamy's
Non-Conformists' Memorial, having like thoughts and passions with
them--but then Spinoza became his God, and he took up the vast chain of
being in his hand, and the round world became the centre and the soul of
all things in some shadowy sense, forlorn of meaning, and around him he
beheld the living traces and the sky-pointing proportions of the mighty
Pan--but poetry redeemed him from this spectral philosophy, and he
bathed his heart in beauty, and gazed at the golden light of heaven, and
drank of the spirit of the universe, and wandered at eve by fairy-stream
or fountain,

"------When he saw nought but beauty,
When he heard the voice of that Almighty One
In every breeze that blew, or wave that murmured"--

and wedded with truth in Plato's shade, and in the writings of Proclus
and Plotinus saw the ideas of things in the eternal mind, and unfolded
all mysteries with the Schoolmen and fathomed the depths of Duns Scotus
and Thomas Aquinas, and entered the third heaven with Jacob Behmen, and
walked hand in hand with Swedenborg through the pavilions of the New
Jerusalem, and sung his faith in the promise and in the word in his
_Religious Musings_--and lowering himself from that dizzy height, poised
himself on Milton's wings, and spread out his thoughts in charity with
the glad prose of Jeremy Taylor, and wept over Bowles's Sonnets, and
studied Cowper's blankverse, and betook himself to Thomson's Castle of
Indolence, and sported with the wits of Charles the Second's days and
of Queen Anne, and relished Swift's style and that of the John Bull
(Arbuthnot's we mean, not Mr. Croker's) and dallied with the British
Essayists and Novelists, and knew all qualities of more modern writers
with a learned spirit, Johnson, and Goldsmith, and Junius, and Burke,
and Godwin, and the Sorrows of Werter, and Jean Jacques Rousseau, and
Voltaire, and Marivaux, and Crebillon, and thousands more--now "laughed
with Rabelais in his easy chair" or pointed to Hogarth, or afterwards
dwelt on Claude's classic scenes or spoke with rapture of Raphael,
and compared the women at Rome to figures that had walke