44 
WILD SCENES AND SONG-BIEDS. 
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 breath of ether to the small 
Breath of new buds 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 im- 
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. 
