d recount their greetings and mine
in that sweet language of the spirits.'--But the glorious Wonder drew
back majestic with a frown, saying, 'Not so, presumptuous child of man;
the things I have shown thee, and the greetings thou hast heard, and the
songs wherewith I filled thee, cannot worthily be told in other than the
language of spirits: and where is the alphabet of men that can fix that
unearthly tongue,--or how shouldst thou from henceforth, or thy fellows
upon earth, attain to its delicate conceptions? behold, all these thine
intimates are wroth with thee; they discern evil upon thy soul: the
place of their sojourn is too pure for thee.'

"Then was there a peal of thunder, like the bursting of a world,
whereupon all that restless sea of shadows, and their bright abode,
vanished suddenly; and there ensued a flood of darkness, peopled with
shoaling fears, and I heard the approach of hurrying sounds, with
demoniac laughter, and shouts coming as for me, nearer and louder,
saying, 'Cast out! Cast out!' and it rushed up to me like an unseen
army, and I fled for life before it, until I came to the extreme edge of
that spiritual world, where, as I ran looking backwards for terror at
those viewless hunters, I leaped horribly over the unguarded cliff, and
fell whirling, whirling, whirling, until my senses failed me--

"When I came to myself, I was by the sun-dial in my garden, leaning upon
the pedestal, and the thin shadow still pointed to twelve.

"In astonishment, I ran hastily to my chamber, and strove to remember
the strains I had heard. But, alas! they had all passed away: scarcely
one disjointed note of that rare music lingered in my memory: I was
awakened from a vivid dream, whereof the morning remembered nothing.
Nevertheless, I toiled on, a rebel against that fearful Power, and
deprived of her wonted aid: my songs, invita Minerva, are but bald
translations of those heavenly welcomings: my humble pyramid, far from
being the visioned apotheosis of that of a Cephren, bears an unambitious
likeness to the meaner Asychian, the characteristic of which, barring
its presumptuous motto, must be veiled in one word from Herodotus
(2-136),--alas! for the bathos of translation, the cabalistic--[Greek:
phelikos], 'built up of mud.'

"Was not Rome lutea as well as marmorea? and is not beautiful Paris
anciently Lutetia, with its tile-sheds for Tuileries, and a Bourbe-bonne
for its Sovereign?"

All these sonnets, with others,