ly descended; from whom it, and its Father the Reason before
it, parted themselves when they dared to think and act, and assert their
own free will.

'And in the meanwhile, alas! Hector, the father, fights around, while
his children sleep and feed; and he is away in the wars, and they know
him not-know not that they the individuals are but parts of him the
universal. And yet at moments--oh! thrice blessed they whose celestial
parentage has made such moments part of their appointed destiny--at
moments flashes on the human child the intuition of the unutterable
secret. In the spangled glory of the summer night--in the roar of the
Nile-flood, sweeping down fertility in every wave--in the awful depths
of the temple-shrine--in the wild melodies of old Orphic singers, or
before the images of those gods of whose perfect beauty the divine
theosophists of Greece caught a fleeting shadow, and with the sudden
might of artistic ecstasy smote it, as by an enchanter's wand, into an
eternal sleep of snowy stone--in these there flashes on the inner eye a
vision beautiful and terrible, of a force, an energy, a soul, an idea,
one and yet million-fold, rushing through all created things, like the
wind across a lyre, thrilling the strings into celestial harmony--one
life-blood through the million veins of the universe, from one great
unseen heart, whose thunderous pulses the mind hears far away, beating
for ever in the abysmal solitude, beyond the heavens and the galaxies,
beyond the spaces and the times, themselves but veins and runnels from
its all-teeming sea.

'Happy, thrice happy! they who once have dared, even though breathless,
blinded with tears of awful joy, struck down upon their knees in utter
helplessness, as they feel themselves but dead leaves in the wind which
sweeps the universe--happy they who have dared to gaze, if but for an
instant, on the terror of that glorious pageant; who have not, like the
young Astyanax, clung shrieking to the breast of mother Nature, scared
by the heaven-wide flash of Hector's arms, and the glitter of his
rainbow crest! Happy, thrice happy,! even though their eyeballs, blasted
by excess of light, wither to ashes in their sockets!--Were it not a
noble end to have seen Zeus, and die like Semele, burnt up by his
glory? Happy, thrice happy! though their mind reel from the divine
intoxication, and the hogs of Circe call them henceforth madmen and
enthusiasts. Enthusiasts they are; for Deity is in t