be alle fal, and could achlere the let and vein to muster intellectually the stars and react the same height or the same degradedom that our fellow, our proxy tøs done

All inquiry into antiquity, a crisy specting the Pyramids, the excited dres

the Chio Circles, Mexica Mem

pitis,—is the desire to do away this wild, savage, and preposterous There or Then, and introduce in its place the Here and the Now. Belzoni digs and measures in the mummy-pits and pyramids of Thebes until he can see the end of the difference between the monstrous work and himself. When he has satisted himself, in general and in detail, that it was made by such a person as he, so armed and so motived, and to ends to which he himself should also have worked, the problem is solved; his thought lives along the whole line of temples and sphinxes and catacombs, passes through them all with satisfaction, and they live again to the mind, or are now.

that it was done Surely it was by

A Gothic cathedral affirms by us and not done by us. man, but we find it not in our man. But we apply ourselves to the history of its production. We put ourselves into the place and state of

the builder. We remember the forest-dwellers, the first temples, the adherence to the first type, and the decoration of it as the wealth of the nation increased; the value which is given to 'wood by carving led to the carving over the whole mountain of stone of a cathedral. When we have gone through this process, and added thereto the Catholic Church, its cross, its music, its processions, its Saints' days and image-worship, we have as it were been the man that made the minster; we have seen how it could and must be. We have the sufficient reason.1

The difference between men is in their principle of association. Some men classify objects. by color and size and other accidents of appearance; others by intrinsic likeness, or by the relation of cause and effect. The progress of the intellect is to the clearer vision of causes, which neglects surface differences. To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine. For the eye is fastened on the life, and slights the circumstance. Every chemical substance, every plant, every animal in its growth, teaches the unity of cause, the variety of appearance.

Upborne and surrounded as we are by this

all-creating nature, soft and fluid as a cloud or
the air, why should we be such hard pedants,
and magnify a few forms? Why should we make !
account of time, or of magnitude, or of figure?
The soul knows them not, and genius, obeying
its law, knows how to play with them as a young
child plays with gray beards and in churches.
Genius studies the causal thought, and far back
in the womb of things sees the rays parting from
one orb, that diverge, ere they fall, by infinite
diameters. Genius watches the monad through
all his masks as he performs the metempsychosis -
of nature. Genius detects through the fly, through
the caterpillar, through the grub, through the
egg, the constant individual; through count-
less individuals the fixed species; through many
species the genus; through all genera the stead-
fast type; through all the kingdoms of organ-
ized life the eternal unity. Nature is a mutable
cloud which is always and never the same. She
casts the same thought into troops of forms, as
a poet makes twenty fables with one moral.
Through the bruteness and toughness of mat-
ter, a subtle spirit bends all things to its own.
will. The adamant streams into soft but precise
form before it, and whilst I look at it its outline
and texture are changed again. Nothing is so

\ fleeting as form; yet never does it quite deny itself. In man we still trace the remains or hints of all that we esteem badges of servitude in the lower races; yet in him they enhance his nobleness and grace; as Io, in Æschylus, transformed to a cow, offends the imagination; but how changed when as Isis in Egypt she meets Osiris-Jove, a beautiful woman with nothing of the metamorphosis left but the lunar horns as the splendid ornament of her brows!

The identity of history is equally intrinsic, the diversity equally obvious. There is, at the surface, infinite variety of things; at the centre there is simplicity of cause. How many are the acts of one man in which we recognize the same character! Observe the sources of our information in respect to the Greek genius. We have the civil history of that people, as Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Plutarch have given it; a very sufficient account of what manner of persons they were and what they did. We have the same national mind expressed for us again in their literature, in epic and lyric poems, drama, and philosophy; a very complete form. Then we have it once more in their architecture, a beauty as of temperance itself, limited to the straight line and the square,—a

builded geometry. Then we have it once again in sculpture, the "tongue on the balance of expression," a multitude of forms in the utmost freedom of action and never transgressing the ideal serenity; like votaries performing some religious dance before the gods, and, though in convulsive pain or mortal combat, never daring to break the figure and decorum of their dance. Thus of the genius of one remarkable people we have a fourfold representation: and to the senses what more unlike than an ode of Pindar, a marble centaur, the peristyle of the Parthenon, and the last actions of Phocion?

I

Every one must have observed faces and forms which, without any resembling feature, make a like impression on the beholder. A particular picture or copy of verses, if it do not awaken the same train of images, will yet superinduce the same sentiment as some wild mountain walk, although the resemblance is nowise obvious to the senses, but is occult and out of the reach of the understanding. Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. She hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations.2

Nature is full of a sublime family likeness. throughout her works, and delights in startling