JESCULAPIUS. 487 



which the perfection and splendor of nature were revealed 

 and the beauty of the world exhausted, he has, in all his 

 creations, made the ideal real, by an eternal production of 

 himself, "his body absolutely expressing his soul." 



In his highest efforts, forever captivated by truth and beauty, 

 he became the prophet, priest, and king of nature, making his 

 artistic or reproduced world bright with the immortal stars of 

 thought, redolent of Olympian airs, aromatic shades, haunts 

 and bowers of the gods. The muses, the heavenly nine, hover 

 around his path of progress, and the glory of an unde- 

 bauched, unfallen world is shadowed forth in "shapes whose 

 beauty is truest and rarest, in visions, in soul, the grandest 

 that crowd on the tear-dimmed eye," in the prophetic oracles 

 of Delphi, in the whispering of the groves of Dodona. In 

 all his intellectual manifestations true ; true in the symbol- 

 ism of the world embodied in his poetical mythology ; true 

 in the instincts of his mind in the path of science ; perfect 

 in the world of the senses and understanding, his genesis 

 of the healing art is the embodiment of wisdom. What but 

 a Grecian hand could chisel an Apollo of Belvidere, the 

 ideal physical ? and what but a Grecian head could create 

 the magical romance of the son of Zeus and Leto, the ideal 

 spiritual? both worlds united in the form of the God of 

 Medicine, Divination, and Poetry. 



"Mine is the invention of the charming lyre; 

 Sweet notes and heavenly numbers I inspire. 

 Medicine is mine ; what herbs and simples grow 

 In fields, in forests, all their powers I know, 

 And, am the great physician called below." 



Thus muses the charmer of high Olympus, and thus the 

 ethereal god of the gods announces the duties of his trans- 

 cendent sphere, and prefers the sympathies of heaven to 

 sufferers in the gloomy realms of pain, uniting, in his blessed 

 form, the spirituality of thought and intellect, with the bene- 

 ficence and grandeur of love and mercy. 



" Whatever we may think of the modes of explaining the 



