and proudly entered the lecture-hall, and
ascended the tribune like a goddess, amid the shouts of her audience....
What did she care for them? Would they do what she told them? She was
half through her lecture before she could recollect herself, and banish
from her mind the thought of Raphael. And at that point we will take the
lecture up. ...............

'Truth? Where is truth but in the soul itself? Facts, objects, are but
phantoms matter-woven--ghosts of this earthly night, at which the soul,
sleeping here in the mire and clay of matter, shudders and names its own
vague tremors sense and perception. Yet, even as our nightly dreams stir
in us the suspicion of mysterious and immaterial presences, unfettered
by the bonds of time and space, so do these waking dreams which we call
sight and sound. They are divine messengers, whom Zeus, pitying
his children, even when he pent them in this prison-house of flesh,
appointed to arouse in them dim recollections of that real world of
souls whence they came. Awakened once to them; seeing, through the
veil of sense and fact, the spiritual truth of which they are but the
accidental garment, concealing the very thing which they make palpable,
the philosopher may neglect the fact for the doctrine, the shell for
the kernel, the body for the soul, of which it is but the symbol and the
vehicle. What matter, then, to the philosopher whether these names of
men, Hector or Priam, Helen or Achilles, were ever visible as phantoms
of flesh and blood before the eyes of men? What matter whether they
spoke or thought as he of Scios says they did? What matter, even,
whether he himself ever had earthly life? The book is here--the word
which men call his. Let the thoughts thereof have been at first whose
they may, now they are mine. I have taken them to myself, and thought
them to myself, and made them parts of my own soul. Nay, they were and
ever will be parts of me; for they, even as the poet was, even as I am,
are but a part of the universal soul. What matter, then, what myths
grew up around those mighty thoughts of ancient seers? Let others try
to reconcile the Cyclic fragments, or vindicate the Catalogue of ships.
What has the philosopher lost, though the former were proved to be
contradictory, and the latter interpolated? The thoughts are there, and
ours, Let us open our hearts lovingly to receive them, from whencesoever
they may have come. As in men, so in books, the soul is all with which