than all books-is antecedent to them all. It is the maker of them; and cannot be made subject to them, until the Creator can be placed in bondage to his own workmanship. When this great truth shall fill the human heart, and be shadowed forth in human life, then the morning of the Universal Resurrection will dawn, then man shall arise from his grovelling position, among the coffins, the bones, and ashes of a buried Past, and live, and grow, and expand, in the bright sunlight of that Eternity in which he dwells.

THE TWO DOLONS.

FROM THE MS. SYMPHONY OF DOLON.

THE FIRST DOLON.

DOLON, wont to be much in the air, in the fields and woods, beneath the sky, the clouds, the branches and leaves, and in the mists, those clouds of earth, almost lived in nature, like a sea-fairy in the ocean, everywhere in which it is at home, and has a place where it may be as if it sought it by roaming; the gurgle-reserved silent meadows of high green waving grass, the atmosphere and air-like water, the rocks over which the waves oscillated reflected sunniness, like shadows on the country landscape of clouds passing overhead, the rocks ivied over with seaweed and vines and grass, like ruins of the sea-ages, the woods and caves of tree-coral, as if petrified forests of an ancient race of human fishes, and the coral edifice-like places with interwoven open intricate roofs, like the pinewoods, and near the surface, which was like the high heaven of the sea-earth, where seemed to be sky and clouds, which were outwardly only reflected to the sight of men, though to men it seems as if the light in the ocean must be air-like, or grave moon-light, for even the sunlit noon surface is like a bright day moonlight. Dolon had always been in Nature, unspecially and really as if in his proper place. Nature is not primarily a sentiment to children; sentiment may be a feeling in it, but it is place and not

sentiment which leads them to it. A child will act from the fulness of its affections and feelings as if from consciousness, but these are the spirit which thus affect him, and he acts from them as facts which buoy him up and float him; not as sentiment which is need of the fact, and makes him a seeker, as men, who away from their home, or outwardly related to their sphere, feel that which develops in them sentiment and aspiration, but does not put them in the natural position of the sentiment, and the sentiment thus acts, out of its place, from depths which the surface in its hurried action, is as if dissevered from. Children do all in the fact, as a mermaid may joy and frolic in the water which it is alway in, and as one who is out in the night may see shooting stars; the direct act is as if extra, while the regular course goes on, an exuberance of the real from the real. A child's whole person, as well as nature, (of which Dolon was an ideal-like though most natural exemplification, for the most natural is the most ideal and common,) shows that its proper sphere is Nature; out of Nature it is more of an individuality, like a king in un-state relations, than of an individual thing in life which individualizes by giving all things a place in it, and leaving them to their life in their own places like passengers in a vessel; a flower in the house is a flower in form, but in nature the form is the flower, the flower in life, and the flower is by its life rather than by that which is a form called self which Life has taken, as a boat is not a boat till it is launched. Life is the unpersonalizer of persons, the unifier of individuals, as playing is of a stagecompany; the relation of things to things, and a rotatory circle like the earth, which, by moving on its axis, faces all parts of the infinite space around it. Dolon, restrained in the house, would seek nature like a caged bird the air. Those deep, heaven-like eyes required the broad and high beautiful realities of nature, if only for freedom, and space, and color, which is somewhat of a good substitute for nature in houses, especially if of forms, as in carpets. The individual things of nature are related to man, as well as man is to man; and man must be with stars, and trees, and grasses, as he must with man, to be at ease. Life lives in her forms, and is evolved from them, like rays of light from the sun, and we truly live only in her atmosphere;

sun.

individualities are thus universalized, as if in the whole they neutralized each, and kept each other in active relation to her, like spans of horses; for, left to itself, the vital becomes a centred isolation in the individual, like water in anything whose pores are closed; as if individuality was only a form which Life, like Genius, had taken, and which has no life in itself, but by being in life; and out of it, it ceases to be, like rays of light separated from the All things in nature are centred to face each other, and the relation, represented to men by influence, is sure, however they may be as persons; the sea and the sky face, and the mutual relation goes on, though the sea tosses about, and the sky is covered with clouds; men receive influence from Nature, though they never look at her or think of her, and are busy in some mechanical labor, if only they be in her. There is as it were a quiet inward depth and gentle positiveness-like reserve, in men who live in the air; they have not the prominence and selfness of those who live in the house, and Nature is around them mighty and absolute as a Monarch, and gentle, quiet, and familiar-like, like a great family dog lying by the doorsteps in the yard, where the children are playing and the men are working. Children are troublesome or noisy, and often restless, within the house and in their present mode of life; for they are shut out from their life-place; the life which would be developed as unobviously and quietly as fruit grows, gives them an excitement or uneasiness of which activity is the effect. Nature is their play-ground and place, and their activity is modified from its original spirit of gentleness and unity, by its being without the Nature which acts on them, as the moon on the tides, and in which they are Beings in Life, and not, as in the house, beings who, the only Being, (like Noblemen from the cityCourt alone in the country places,) are not only free, but at needs to be Persons, for they are living things, and life is not around them to meet life, and they create a life for themselves out of their own life, like sailors at sea forming their cabin into a homelike room out of such materials as they have, or like parrots who encaged and taken from their native clime and woods, talk with the men instead of singing with their mates. Children in the house are as if obtrusive, and men interfere with men; that which in the air and great natural house would be harmony, is a noise

in the small artificial house, as even music makes a noise if confined; in Nature all sounds harmonize and blend; and children are more sociable with man by not being given to themselves in Nature, in which fact they recognise the greatness of man, as if next representative to Nature and theirself. A child is not so inquisitive and talkative in Nature; life answers there for itself, and all else, all outwardly seen, is Mystery, and inspires no questions, but a quiet, subdued wonder, like an under-current of comprehension in the mind's state of worship; and a child's looking is unoutward, as if the child saw by its personal power of motion, as if it could fly around like a bird up among stars, but the Being abode fast, and as the child-person remained there, took its own time, and the child instinctively acknowledges its reality by making no subject-personal of aught, and only gratifying his impulses. He talks and prates as he goes along in the horseman's arms, as if he were the horseman ; but even the horseman will have no cause to find fault with him, for any want of a deep down practical quiet realizing of his dependence and happinessexpressed gratitude. The infinite senses of man which are adapted to this infinite-like finite, great Nature, are disused and closed by his present life, and his nature becomes estranged from it, and he is as if a stranger in it, and when in it, its beauty comes to him rather through sight and feeling than unity. Deep and great is the soul's long denied appetite; it is as if faint to loss of consciousness, and slow is the reformation of the soul's form. Man in Nature is in an infinity; though there seems a limit, the difference is real between the effect as a reality and appearance; the horizon-enclosed lake will not answer for the ocean, though to the sight it is as large; there is a depth below the earth as well as above it, and the ground is as a solid-floored tree-top, like those which the birds alight on, though merely as tops the shrubs would answer as well. Men have made substitutes for the great Natural Building which is God's theatre and concert room, and though we can see and hear them wherever they are, neither they nor the music are as if they were on his stage, where living is the acting, and where voices rise in infinite fading cadences, like ripples disappearing as they go over the surface of the water like a sail. Men hear their own

voices now like finished echoes, and they can seldom get beyond themselves; for they carry their own limit about with them, from which they rebound, like waves in an enclosed place upon themselves; and all life radiates, and returns nor lingers. The purest holy incense rising from the altar will form a cloud in the roof of the greatest Cathedral, and smoke the pictures of Raphael and Guido on the walls.

When a little boy, Dolon loved to hear fairy stories, though he heard them as one hears music which is an atmosphere to the ear as air is to the lungs, and does not require listening, the sounds creating feelings which are in their kind and place what the blood is in its kind and place; and he sat much on the ground in the woods, as if a fairy land, and fairies were all around him, and he felt and seemed as if he saw them. He was a beautiful boy, with long auburn-brown hair, a fair and delicate complexion, light blue eyes, and eyelids which at the side-view lay gently-heavily folded over his eyes, as if the eyes were homes, like heaven air, for two little heavenly fairies, like a spring-fountain in the fresh meadows for little fishes, and the lids were curtains which opened them to the world and covered them from mortal sight, like a cave opening into a forest, and the eyes seemed inlets into the boy's being, and one could find him there as Dolon found fairies, and men find God, in the air, which was so like his eyes, only they were like a soul which had taken the eye for a form. We do not see the expression in eyes, when we look at them for it a second time; for when we first look, the spiritual in the eye suggests a form to us, and then we look as on a form for the type of the form that it created within us, and spirit is not to be bodily seen.

At length, his father said he must go to a regular school, and that it would not do for Dolon to be growing up so visonary and romantic. He did not see that the so-called visionary was as real to the inner sense, as the so-called real is to the outward sense; that Poetry is a fertility of humanity, and the real life of the deep and substantial part of man, in which also great experience goes on, even like that which a life in the world would give, only it is deeper and more individual within the man; and that the outward is not for the individual as an outward person, but as an