e shall live with us as really as the present itself, are
ever vivid within us, and are two of the great vital arteries of all
true art. This burning human thirst for the fulness of eternity in
opposition to our fragmentary time manifests itself in our agonizing
efforts to bring back the past, to which sad efforts we have given the
melancholy name of memory; shows itself in our restless longing for the
future, which we call hope; and frequently reveals itself in an insane
seizing upon something in the imperfect and fleeting present, which it
insists upon worshipping, in regarding as divine. Upon this last phase
is dependent all that excited, exaggerated, but frequently beautiful
passion of language which marks our poems of love. Ah! it is the
merciful will of the Creator that we should worship only the divine, and
so the human passion ends in sobs and wails of anguish, for the finite
idol can never fill the shrine of the Absolute, the infinite God!

As the intuition of eternal love in the past, we find this longing for
the infinite breathing through poetry in the form of elegy; in sad
recollections of a faded world of demigods and heroes; and in the
plaints for the loss of man's native home in Paradise, in the faint and
dying echoes of the happy innocence of creation before the first
outbreak of evil, and the consequent misery of nature. Poetry is indeed
so full of haunting, melancholy memories, that it might almost be called
the 'mind's supersensuous recollection of the eternal.' And what else
can be said of music? Is it not an art eminently addressed to this
intuition of eternal love, this constant longing for the infinite? Do
not its giddy flights and dying falls at once arouse this mystic
yearning, seeking, feeling, which may appropriately be termed the
passion of the soul? That music holds some deep relation to the soul not
yet clearly developed, may be inferred, not only from the magic power it
sways over our spirits, but from the fact that the inspired writers
picture it among the joys of heaven. It is now the language of our
'divine despair;' it is yet to be the speech of our eternal beatitude!

'God is love:' through all the hidden veins of ever-germing life beats
this divine pulse of universal being. Hope, faith, and charity spring
from the revelation and answering intuitions of this blissful love: from
the hope, faith, and love of men sprang all the really noble works of
art. All this is full of consolation,