“To the eye of vulgar Logic,” says he, “what is man?  An omnivorous Biped that wears Breeches.  To the eye of Pure Reason what is he?  A Soul, a Spirit, and divine Apparition.  Round his mysterious ME, there lies, under all those wool-rags, a Garment of Flesh (or of Senses), contextured in the Loom of Heaven; whereby he is revealed to his like, and dwells with them in UNION and DIVISION; and sees and fashions for himself a Universe, with azure Starry Spaces, and long Thousands of Years.  Deep-hidden is he under that strange Garment; amid Sounds and Colors and Forms, as it were, swathed in, and inextricably over-shrouded:  yet it is sky-woven, and worthy of a God.  Stands he not thereby in the centre of Immensities, in the conflux of Eternities?  He feels; power has been given him to know, to believe; nay does not the spirit of Love, free in its celestial primeval brightness, even here, though but for moments, look through?  Well said Saint Chrysostom, with his lips of gold, ‘the true SHEKINAH is Man:’  where else is the GOD’S-PRESENCE manifested not to our eyes only, but to our hearts, as in our fellow-man?”

In such passages, unhappily too rare, the high Platonic Mysticism of our Author, which is perhaps the fundamental element of his nature, bursts forth, as it were, in full flood:  and, through all the vapor and tarnish of what is often so perverse, so mean in his exterior and environment, we seem to look into a whole inward Sea of Light and Love;—­though, alas, the grim coppery clouds soon roll together again, and hide it from view.

Such tendency to Mysticism is everywhere traceable in this man; and indeed, to attentive readers, must have been long ago apparent.  Nothing that he sees but has more than a common meaning, but has two meanings:  thus, if in the highest Imperial Sceptre and Charlemagne-Mantle, as well as in the poorest Ox-goad and Gypsy-Blanket, he finds Prose, Decay, Contemptibility; there is in each sort Poetry also, and a reverend Worth.  For Matter, were it never so despicable, is Spirit, the manifestation of Spirit:  were it never so honorable, can it be more?  The thing Visible, nay the thing Imagined, the thing in any way conceived as Visible, what is it but a Garment, a Clothing of the higher, celestial Invisible, “unimaginable formless, dark with excess of bright”?  Under which point of view the following passage, so strange in purport, so strange in phrase, seems characteristic enough:—­

“The beginning of all Wisdom is to look fixedly on Clothes, or even with armed eyesight, till they become transparent.  ‘The Philosopher,’ says the wisest of this age, ‘must station himself in the middle:’  how true!  The Philosopher is he to whom the Highest has descended, and the Lowest has mounted up; who is the equal and kindly brother of all.

“Shall we tremble before clothwebs and cobwebs, whether woven in Arkwright looms, or by the silent Arachnes that weave unrestingly in our Imagination?  Or, on the other hand, what is there that we cannot love; since all was created by God?