and attuned
voice,' may come to move him 'more with the voice than with the words
sung.' Yet how graciously he speaks of music, allowing 'that the several
affections of our spirit, by a sweet variety, have their own proper
measures in the voice and singing, by some hidden correspondence
wherewith they are stirred up.' It is precisely because he feels so
intimately the beauty of all things human, though it were but 'a dog
coursing in the field, a lizard catching flies,' that he desires to pass
through these to that passionate contemplation which is the desire of
all seekers after the absolute, and which for him is God. He asks of all
the powers of the earth: 'My questioning them, was my thoughts on them;
and their form of beauty gave the answer.' And by how concrete a series
of images does he strive to express the inexpressible, in that passage
of pure poetry on the love of God! 'But what do I love, when I love
thee? not beauty of bodies, nor the fair harmony of time, nor the
brightness of the light, so gladsome to our eyes, nor sweet melodies of
varied songs, nor the fragrant smell of flowers, and ointments, and
spices, not manna and honey, not limbs acceptable to embracements of
flesh. None of these I love, when I love my God; and yet I love a kind
of light, and melody, and fragrance, and meat, and embracement, when I
love my God, the light, melody, fragrance, meat, embracement of my
inner man: where there shineth unto my soul what space cannot contain,
and there soundeth what time beareth not away, and there smelleth what
breathing disperseth not, and there tasteth what eating diminisheth not,
and there clingeth what satiety divorceth not. This is it which I love
when I love my God.'

Mentioning in his confessions only such things as he conceives to be of
import to God, it happens, naturally, that St. Augustine leaves unsaid
many things that would have interested most men, perhaps more. 'What,
then, have I to do with men, that they should hear my confessions--as if
they could heal my infirmities,--a race curious to know the lives of
others, slothful to amend their own?' Finding, indeed, many significant
mentions of things and books and persons, Faustus the Manichee, the
'Hortensius' of Cicero, the theatre, we shall find little pasture here
for our antiquarian, our purely curious, researches. We shall not even
find all that we might care to know, in St. Augustine himself, of the
surface of the mind's action, which we