many-coloured glass
Stains the white radiance of Eternity";--

and when Swinburne sings of Time and change that:

"Songs they can stop that earth found meet,
But the Stars keep their ageless rhyme;
Flowers they can slay that Spring thought sweet,
But the Stars keep their Spring sublime,
Actions and agonies control,
And life and death, but not the Soul."

In a poetic age--in the time of Aeschylus, for example--Plato
would have been a poet; and then perhaps we should have had to
invent another class of poets, one above the present highest;
and reserve it solely for the splendor of Plato. Because
Platonism is the very Theosophic Soul of Poetry. But he came,
living when he did, to loathe the very name of poetry: as who
should say: "God pity you! I give you the Way, the Truth, and the
Life, and you make answer, 'Charming Plato, how exquisitely
poetic is your prose!'" So his bitterness against poetry is
very natural. Poetry is the inevitable vehicle of the highest
truth; spiritual truth is poetry. But the world in general does
not know this. Like Bacon, it looks on poetry as a kind of
pleasurable lying. Plato went through the skies Mercury to the
Sun of Truth, its nearest attendant planet; and therefore was,
and could not help being, Very-Poet of very-poets. But Homer and
others had lied loudly about the Gods; and, thought Plato, the
Gods forbid that the truth he had to declare--a vital matter--
should be classed with their loud lying.

He masked the batteries of his Theosophy; camouflaged his great
Theosophical guns; but fired them off no less effectively,
landing his splendid shells at every ganglionic point in the
history of European thought since. Let a man soak his soul in
Plato; and it shall go hard but the fair flower Theosophy shall
spring up there presently and bloom. He prepares the soil:
suggesting the way to, rather than precisely formulating, the
high teachings. The advantage of the grand Platonic camouflage
has been twofold: on the one hand you could hardly dwarf your
soul with dogmatic acceptation of Platonism, because he gave all
his teachings--even Reincarnation--as hypotheses,--and men do not
as a rule crucify their mental freedom on an hypothesis. On the
other hand, how was any Church eager to burn out heresy and
heretics to deal with him? He was not to be stamped out;
because his influence depended on no continuity of discipleship,