imprisoned by the
logician's spell, like Ariel in the cloven pine-tree, he became suddenly
enamoured of Bishop Berkeley's fairy-world,[136] and used in all companies
to build the universe, like a brave poetical fiction, of fine words--and
he was deep-read in Malebranche, and in Cudworth's Intellectual System (a
huge pile of learning, unwieldy, enormous) and in Lord Brook's
hieroglyphic theories, and in Bishop Butler's Sermons, and in the Duchess
of Newcastle's fantastic folios, and in Clarke and South and Tillotson,
and all the fine thinkers and masculine reasoners of that age--and
Leibnitz's _Pre-established Harmony_ reared its arch above his head, like
the rainbow in the cloud, covenanting with the hopes of man--and then he
fell plump, ten thousand fathoms down (but his wings saved him harmless)
into the _hortus siccus_ of Dissent, where he pared religion down to the
standard of reason, and stripped faith of mystery, and preached Christ
crucified and the Unity of the Godhead, and so dwelt for a while in the
spirit of John Huss and Jerome of Prague and Socinus and old John Zisca,
and ran through Neal's History of the Puritans, and Calamy's
Non-Conformists' Memorial, having like thoughts and passions with
them--but then Spinoza became his God, and he took up the vast chain of
being in his hand, and the round world became the centre and the soul of
all things in some shadowy sense, forlorn of meaning, and around him he
beheld the living traces and the sky-pointing proportions of the mighty
Pan--but poetry redeemed him from this spectral philosophy, and he bathed
his heart in beauty, and gazed at the golden light of heaven, and drank of
the spirit of the universe, and wandered at eve by fairy-stream or
fountain,

----"When he saw nought but beauty,
When he heard the voice of that Almighty One
In every breeze that blew, or wave that murmured"--

and wedded with truth in Plato's shade, and in the writings of Proclus and
Plotinus saw the ideas of things in the eternal mind, and unfolded all
mysteries with the Schoolmen and fathomed the depths of Duns Scotus and
Thomas Aquinas, and entered the third heaven with Jacob Behmen, and walked
hand in hand with Swedenborg through the pavilions of the New Jerusalem,
and sung his faith in the promise and in the word in his _Religious
Musings_--and lowering himself from that dizzy height, poised himself on
Milton's wings, and spread out his thoughts in charity with the glad