he myth. Do you fancy that in it Homer meant to hand down to
the admiration of ages such earthly commonplaces as a mother's brute
affection, and the terrors of an infant? Surely the deeper insight of
the philosopher may be allowed without the reproach of fancifulness, to
see in it the adumbration of some deeper mystery!

'The elect soul, for instance--is not its name Astyanax, king of the
city; by the fact of its ethereal parentage, the leader and lord of
all around it, though it knows it not? A child as yet, it lies upon
the fragrant bosom of its mother Nature, the nurse and yet the enemy
of man--Andromache, as the poet well names her, because she fights with
that being, when grown to man's estate, whom as a child she nourished.
Fair is she, yet unwise; pampering us, after the fashion of mothers,
with weak indulgences; fearing to send us forth into the great realities
of speculation, there to forget her in the pursuit of glory, she would
have us while away our prime within the harem, and play for ever round
her knees. And has not the elect soul a father, too, whom it knows not?
Hector, he who is without--unconfined, unconditioned by Nature, yet its
husband?--the all-pervading, plastic Soul, informing, organising, whom
men call Zeus the lawgiver, Aether the fire, Osiris the lifegiver; whom
here the poet has set forth as the defender of the mystic city, the
defender of harmony, and order, and beauty throughout the universe?
Apart sits his great father--Priam, the first of existences, father
of many sons, the Absolute Reason; unseen, tremendous, immovable, in
distant glory; yet himself amenable to that abysmal unity which Homer
calls Fate, the source of all which is, yet in Itself Nothing, without
predicate, unnameable.

'From It and for It the universal Soul thrills through the whole
Creation, doing the behests of that Reason from which it overflowed,
unwillingly, into the storm and crowd of material appearances; warring
with the brute forces of gross matter, crushing all which is foul and
dissonant to itself, and clasping to its bosom the beautiful, and all
wherein it discovers its own reflex; impressing on it its signature,
reproducing from it its own likeness, whether star, or daemon, or soul
of the elect:--and yet, as the poet hints in anthropomorphic language,
haunted all the while by a sadness--weighed down amid all its labours by
the sense of a fate--by the thought of that First One from whom the Soul
is original