of
the arch of heaven and the unsustained architecture of the stars.
These out-reach his mortal grasp, outwearying his scrutiny, blinding
his intelligence; but, master of the image, his soul knows again by
reflection the felicity which it knew when one with the Shaper of the
worlds.

And thus the soul mounts, steep above steep, from the rudely hewn
granite to the breathing marbles of the Parthenon, to the hues of
Titian, to the forests in stone, the domes and minarets, and the gemmed
splendour of later races, to the drifted snows of the Taj-Mahal,
iridescent with diamond and pearl.

Yea, from those first imaginings, caught from the brooding rocks, and
moulded in the substance of the rocks, still it climbs, instructed by
the winds, the ocean's tidal rhythm, and the tumultuous transports of
the human voice, its raptures, sorrows, or despairs, to the newer
wonder, the numbered cadences of poetry, the verse of Homer, Sophocles,
and Shakespeare.

And at the last, lessoned by those ancient instructors, winds and
tides, and the ever-moving spheres of heaven, how does the soul attain
its glory, and in Music, the art of arts, the form of forms, poise on
the starry battlements of God's dread sanctuary, tranced in prayer, in
wonder ineffable, at the long pilgrimage accomplished at last--in the
_adagio_ of the great Concerto, in the _Requiem_, or those later
strains of transhuman sadness and serenity trans-human, in which the
soul hears again the song sung by the first star that ever left the
shaping hands of God and took its way alone through the lonely spaces,
pursuing an untried path across the dark, the silent abysses--how dark,
how silent!--a moving harmony, foreboding even then in its first
separate delight and sorrow of estrangement all the anguish and all the
ecstasy that the unborn universes of which it is the herald and
precursor yet shall know!

Aristotle indeed affirms that in the universe there are many things
more excellent than man, the planets, for instance. He is thinking of
the mighty yet perfect curve which they describe, though with all the
keenness of his analytic perception, he is in this judgment not
unaffected by the fancy, current in his time, that those planets are
living things each with its attendant soul, which shapes its orbit and
that fixed path athwart the night. How much higher a will that
steadfast motion argues than the wavering purposes, the unstable
desires of human life. But we know th