abode with
the old one and scorn it.

As soon as he met Love he was attracted towards her, and she ardently
accepted his suit; yet the first embrace chilled her, and her fervour
startled and repelled him. So, each fearing the other's tenderness,
they shunned each other, though an invincible charm constantly drew them
together.

Love continued to yearn for him even after she had sundered the bond;
but he often yielded to the longing for his higher home, of whose
splendours he retained a memory, and soared upward. Yet whenever he drew
near he was driven back to the other.

There he directed sometimes with Love, sometimes alone, the life of
everything in the universe, or in unison with her animated men with his
breath.

He did this sometimes willingly, sometimes reluctantly, with greater or
less strength, according to the nearness he had attained to his heavenly
home; but when he had succeeded in reaching its circle of light, he
returned wonderfully invigorated. Then whoever Love and he joined in
animating with their breath became an artist.

There was also a thoroughly comic figure and one with many humorous
touches. Intellect's page, Instinct, who had risen from the lily with
him, was a comical fellow. When he tried to follow his master's flight
he fell after the first few strokes of his wings, and usually among
nettles. Only when some base advantage was to be gained on earth did
this servant succeed better than his master. The mother, Matter, whom
for the sake of the verse I called by her Greek name Hyle, was
also invested with a shade of comedy as a dissatisfied wife and the
mother-in-law of Intellect.

In regard to the whole Poem of the World I will observe that, up to the
time I finished the last line, I had never studied the kindred systems
of the Neo-Platonics or the Gnostics.

The verses which described the moment when Matter drew her fiery
children to her heart and thus warmed it, another passage in which men
who were destitute of intellect sought to destroy themselves and
Love resolved to sacrifice her own life, and, lastly, the song where
Intellect rises from the lily, besides many others, were worthy, in my
opinion, of being preserved.

What first diverted my attention from the work was, as has been
mentioned, the study of Feuerbach, to which I had been induced by a
letter from the geographer Karl Andree. I eagerly seized his books,
first choosing his "Axioms of the Philosophy of the Future," and
a