occasionally
rewarded with ecstasy and a vision of the infinite.
For fourteen centuries the ideal of this life was the
anchorite or monk. If you would estimate the power of
such a conception and the grandeur of the transformation
it imposes on human faculties and habits, read, in turn,
the great Christian poem and the great pagan poem, one
the 'Divine Comedy' and the other the 'Odyssey' and the
'Iliad.' Dante has a vision and is transported out of our
little ephemeral sphere into eternal regions; he beholds
its tortures, its expiations and its felicities; he is
affected by superhuman anguish and horror; all that the
infuriate and subtle imagination of the lover of justice
and the executioner can conceive of he sees, suffers and
sinks under. He then ascends into light; his body loses
its gravity; he floats involuntarily, led by the smile
of a radiant woman; he listens to souls in the shape of
voices and to passing melodies; he sees choirs of angels,
a vast rose of living brightness representing the virtues
and the celestial powers; sacred utterances and the
dogmas of truth reverberate in ethereal space. At this
fervid height, where reason melts like wax, both symbol
and apparition, one effacing the other, merge into mystic
bewilderment, the entire poem, infernal or divine, being
a dream which begins with horrors and ends in ravishment.
How much more natural and healthy is the spectacle which
Homer presents! We have the Troad, the isle of Ithica and
the coasts of Greece; still at the present day we follow
in his track; we recognize the forms of mountains, the
color of the sea; the jutting fountains, the cypress and
the alders in which the sea-birds perched; he copied a
steadfast and persistent nature: with him throughout we
plant our feet on the firm ground of truth. His book is
a historical document; the manners and customs of his
contemporaries were such as he describes; his Olympus
itself is a Greek family."

The manifest inferiority of our mixed languages to their one
simple language is stated in the following paragraph, with which
we must leave Taine for the present:

"Almost the whole of our philosophic and scientific
vocabulary is foreign; we are obliged to know Greek and
Latin to make use of it properly, and, most frequently,
employ it badly. Innumerable