"The babe by its mother
Lies bathed in joy,
Glide its hours uncounted."
And Wordsworth says of "the little child,—"
"On whom those truths do rest,
That we are toiling all our lives to find;"
"By the vision splendid
The youth is still attended;"
and
"Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing boy,
Yet he beholds the light and whence it flows;
He sees it in his joy:
At length the man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day."
But this fall from the Ideal is not what Calvinistic theology declares it to be, reprobation either intellectual or spiritual!
"Oh, joy that in our embers
Is something that doth live,
That nature yet remembers
What was so fugitive."
True education shall lead out the imprisoned spirit, growingly conscious of individuality, by means of the symbolism of the prison-house itself which is that correlation of necessary forces we call the material universe.
The material universe, as I have already said, is the symbolization of everything in God except his creativeness which is the spiritual essence that he shares with Humanity, his only-begotten Son. It is the body of God, and human language is the body of individualized Humanity, whose imperfections correspond with its various partial developments and short-comings. And it is ever growing towards perfection in the form of poetry, bearing witness to the creativeness (or genius) of man forevermore. As breath is to the material body, keeping men alive in nature, so language is to the social body, keeping individuals alive in history and literature; and as the material universe is symbolical of God's wisdom, so the echoes of the universe tossed from the lips of men are symbolic images of the wisdom of man. Language, in short, being of both natures, spiritual and material, makes an elemental sphere for the intellectual life, beyond the material; in short, makes a metaphysical world, in which the finite and infinite spirits commune with other finite spirits and with the Infinite One; for by words every minutest shade of individual consciousness may be communicated from one finite mind to another, making not only an immortal communion of men possible, but a communion of God and Humanity also that shall have no end. Heaven and earth pass away, but the Word of the Lord endureth forever.