So the Greeks represented thought in their winged god, Hermes, as the father of speech and messenger of intelligence; they conceiving the visible world as a globe of forms, whereby objects of thought were pictured to sense, and held forth to fancy,—a geometry of ideas, a rhetoric of images.
Sallying forth into nature, the mind clothes its ideas in fitting images, and thus reflects itself upon the understanding. Things are symbols of thoughts, and nature the mind's dictionary.
Mind omnipresent is,
All round about us lies,
To fashion forth itself
In thought and ecstacy,
In fancy and surprise,
Things with ideas fraught,
And nature our dissolving thought.