How like the circumambient element
The spirit with its undulating flow!
The heart—the soul—Oh, Mother Nature, why
This universal bond of sympathy.
After two pages much in this manner, we are told that Geraldine is the name of the maiden, and are informed, with comparatively little circumlocution, of her character. She is beautiful, and kind-hearted, and somewhat romantic, and “some thought her reason touched”—for which we have little disposition to blame them. There is now much about Kant and Fichte; about Schelling, Hegel and Cousin; (which latter is made to rhyme with gang;) about Milton, Byron, Homer, Spinoza, David Hume and Mirabeau; and a good deal, too, about the scribendi cacoïthes, in which an evident misunderstanding of the quantity of cacoïthes brings, again, into very disagreeable suspicion the writer’s cognizance of the Latin tongue. At this point we may refer, also, to such absurdities as
Truth with her thousand-folded robe of error
Close shut in her sarcophagi of terror—
And
Where candelabri silver the white halls.
Now, no one is presupposed to be cognizant of any language beyond his own; to be ignorant of Latin is no crime; to pretend a knowledge is beneath contempt; and the pretender will attempt in vain to utter or to write two consecutive phrases of a foreign idiom, without betraying his deficiency to those who are conversant.