44: WILD SCENES AND SONG-BIRDS. 



Time, and delved and soared in every secret place where 

 they might bear it, searching for knowledge of that will so 

 shall its wages be. 



" Has she not shown us all 

 From the clear hreath of ether to the small 

 Breath of new huds unfolding ! From the meaning 

 Of Jove's large eyebrow to the tender greening 

 Of April meadows ?" 



Everything that we may know of our relations to the 

 eternal cause duties as citizens of the star-lit extended uni- 

 verse we must be taught by this imagination, which has 

 been "since mind at first in characters was done," the 

 chiefest theme of poets. In many a guise and strange in> 

 personation, they have sung of it. The Hebrew first named 

 it Job, and in that noble allegory showed how the prone 

 "Reason strove to drag it earthward, with tortures and wiles 

 beset in vain its pure allegiance to the Lord of Hosts. Then 

 through a long line of Prophet, Priest and King, these an- 

 cient chronicles have traced it down to the day of the Cae- 

 sars ; and here they showed how the Prince of Spiritual Life 

 might blend himself with matter, and become incarnate 

 through a Virgin ! that the lowlier essence of himself im- 

 prisoned here might learn to love, to hope, and to endure ! 



The less favored nation symboled its lower and fanciful at- 

 tributes as Dryad, Fawn and Nymph : 



A beautiful, though erring faith, is't not? 

 Which populates the brute insensate earth 

 "With beamy shapes, the ministers of love 

 And quaintest humors ! 



Or, in the sublime myth of the Greek Prometheus, who 

 wrestled defiant with the Gods, and defied them, through tor- 

 ments without name, to quell that spark of their own life he 

 won from heaven for his race. 



