ce enthroned, cast chains upon the intellect which had
elevated them to power. Man, because he could not but acknowledge the
majesty of Nature, fell into childish exultation at his acquired and
still-increasing dominion over her elements. Even while he stalked a
God in his own fancy, an infantine imbecility came over him. As might be
supposed from the origin of his disorder, he grew infected with system,
and with abstraction. He enwrapped himself in generalities. Among other
odd ideas, that of universal equality gained ground; and in the face of
analogy and of God--in despite of the loud warning voice of the laws
of gradation so visibly pervading all things in Earth an Heaven--wild
attempts at an omni-prevalent Democracy were made. Yet this evil sprang
necessarily from the leading evil, Knowledge. Man could not both know
and succumb. Meantime huge smoking cities arose, innumerable. Green
leaves shrank before the hot breath of furnaces. The fair face of
Nature was deformed as with the ravages of some loathsome disease. And
methinks, sweet Una, even our slumbering sense of the forced and of the
far-fetched might have arrested us here. But now it appears that we had
worked out our own destruction in the perversion of our taste, or rather
in the blind neglect of its culture in the schools. For, in truth,
it was at this crisis that taste alone--that faculty which, holding a
middle position between the pure intellect and the moral sense, could
never safely have been disregarded--it was now that taste alone could
have led us gently back to Beauty, to Nature, and to Life. But alas for
the pure contemplative spirit and majestic intuition of Plato! Alas
for the which he justly regarded as an all-sufficient education for the
soul! Alas for him and for it!--since both were most desperately needed
when both were most entirely forgotten or despised. {*1}

Pascal, a philosopher whom we both love, has said, how truly!--"que
tout notre raisonnement se reduit a ceder au sentiment;" and it is not
impossible that the sentiment of the natural, had time permitted it,
would have regained its old ascendancy over the harsh mathematical
reason of the schools. But this thing was not to be. Prematurely induced
by intemperance of knowledge the old age of the world drew on. This the
mass of mankind saw not, or, living lustily although unhappily, affected
not to see. But, for myself, the Earth's records had taught me to look
for widest ruin as the pri