oom of Heaven; whereby he is revealed to his like,
and dwells with them in UNION and DIVISION; and sees and fashions for
himself a Universe, with azure Starry Spaces, and long Thousands of
Years. Deep-hidden is he under that strange Garment; amid Sounds and
Colours and Forms, as it were, swathed-in, and inextricably
over-shrouded: yet it is sky-woven, and worthy of a God. Stands he not
thereby in the centre of Immensities, in the conflux of Eternities? He
feels; power has been given him to know, to believe; nay does not the
spirit of Love, free in its celestial primeval brightness, even here,
though but for moments, look through? Well said Saint Chrysostom, with
his lips of gold, "the true SHEKINAH is Man": where else is the
GOD'S-PRESENCE manifested not to our eyes only, but to our hearts, as
in our fellow-man?'

In such passages, unhappily too rare, the high Platonic Mysticism of
our Author, which is perhaps the fundamental element of his nature,
bursts forth, as it were, in full flood: and, through all the vapour
and tarnish of what is often so perverse, so mean in his exterior and
environment, we seem to look into a whole inward Sea of Light and
Love;--though, alas, the grim coppery clouds soon roll together again,
and hide it from view.

Such tendency to Mysticism is everywhere traceable in this man; and
indeed, to attentive readers, must have been long ago apparent. Nothing
that he sees but has more than a common meaning, but has two meanings:
thus, if in the highest Imperial Sceptre and Charlemagne-Mantle, as
well as in the poorest Ox-goad and Gipsy-Blanket, he finds Prose,
Decay, Contemptibility; there is in each sort Poetry also, and a
reverend Worth. For Matter, were it never so despicable, is Spirit,
the manifestation of Spirit: were it never so honourable, can it be
more? The thing Visible, nay the thing Imagined, the thing in any way
conceived as Visible, what is it but a Garment, a Clothing of the
higher, celestial Invisible, 'unimaginable, formless, dark with excess
of bright'? Under which point of view the following passage, so
strange in purport, so strange in phrase, seems characteristic enough:

'The beginning of all Wisdom is to look fixedly on Clothes, or even
with armed eyesight, till they become _transparent_. "The
Philosopher," says the wisest of this age, "must station himself in
the middle": how true! The Philosopher is he to whom the Highest has
descended, and the Lowest has mounted up; who