and who so ardently longs for a return to his true country, that to him, as to Ulysses when fighting for Ithaca,
"Slow seems the fun to move, the hours to roll;
His native home deep-imag'd in his soul".[1]
But here it is requisite to observe that our ascent to this region of Beauty must be made by gradual advances, for, from our association with matter, it is impossible to pass directly, and without a medium, to such transcendent perfection; but we must proceed in a manner similar to those who pass from darkness to the brightest light, by advancing from places moderately enlightened, to such as are the most luminous of all. It is necessary therefore, that we should become very familiar with the most abstract contemplations; and that our intellectual eye should be strongly irradiated with the light of ideas which precedes the splendours of the beautiful itself, like the brightness which is seen on the summit of mountains previous to the rising of the sun. Nor ought it to seem strange, if it should be some time before even the liberal soul can recognize the beautiful progeny of intellect as its kindred and allies; for, from its union with body, it has drunk deep of the cup of oblivion, and all its energetic powers are stupefied by the intoxicating draught; so that the intelligible world, on its first appearance, is utterly unknown by us, and our recollection of its inhabitants entirely lost; and we become familiar to Ulysses on his first entrance into Ithaca, of whom Homer says,
"Yet had his mind, thro' tedious absence lost
The dear remembrance of his native coast".[2]
For,
"Now all the land another prospect bore,
Another port appeared, another shore,
And long-continued ways, and winding floods
And unknown mountains crowned with unknown woods":
until the goddess of wisdom purges our eyes from the mists of sense and says to each of us, as she did to Ulysses,
"Now lift thy longing eyes, while I restore
The pleasing prospect of thy native shore."
For then will
" . . . . the prospect clear,
The mists disperse, and all the coast appear."