Boston and New York, with fashion and covetousness, and wilt stimulate
thy jaded senses with wine and French coffee, thou shalt find no
radiance of wisdom in the lonely waste of the pinewoods.

If the imagination intoxicates the poet, it is not inactive in other
men. The metamorphosis excites in the beholder an emotion of joy. The
use of symbols has a certain power of emancipation and exhilaration for
all men. We seem to be touched by a wand which makes us dance and run
about happily, like children. We are like persons who come out of a cave
or cellar into the open air. This is the effect on us of tropes, fables,
oracles, and all poetic forms. Poets are thus liberating gods. Men have
really got a new sense, and found within their world another world, or
nest of worlds; for, the metamorphosis once seen, we divine that it
does not stop. I will not now consider how much this makes the charm
of algebra and the mathematics, which also have their tropes, but it
is felt in every definition; as when Aristotle defines space to be an
immovable vessel in which things are contained;--or when Plato defines
a line to be a flowing point; or figure to be a bound of solid; and
many the like. What a joyful sense of freedom we have when Vitruvius
announces the old opinion of artists that no architect can build any
house well who does not know something of anatomy. When Socrates, in
Charmides, tells us that the soul is cured of its maladies by certain
incantations, and that these incantations are beautiful reasons, from
which temperance is generated in souls; when Plato calls the world an
animal; and Timaeus affirms that the plants also are animals; or affirms
a man to be a heavenly tree, growing with his root, which is his head,
upward; and, as George Chapman, following him, writes,--

"So in our tree of man, whose nervie root
Springs in his top;"--

when Orpheus speaks of hoariness as "that white flower which marks
extreme old age;" when Proclus calls the universe the statue of the
intellect; when Chaucer, in his praise of 'Gentilesse,' compares good
blood in mean condition to fire, which, though carried to the darkest
house betwixt this and the mount of Caucasus, will yet hold its natural
office and burn as bright as if twenty thousand men did it behold; when
John saw, in the Apocalypse, the ruin of the world through evil, and the
stars fall from heaven as the figtree casteth her untimely fruit; when
Aesop reports the whole