—­and there are the flowers in the garden, those Praelarissimi and Nobilisimi in the Court of God, the Pansy, the Blue Larkspur, the Purple Anemone;—­and what are all these things?—­ Just symbols; just mirrorings of a beauty in the World of Ideas within; just places where the Spirit has touched matter, and matter, at that fiery and creative touch, has flamed up into the likeness of God, which is Beauty.—­What is Vision?—­It is to have luminous forms rising in the imagination, like Wordsworth had, like Shelley; it is with shut eyes to see the beauty and wonder of the Gods; it is to have no grayness or dearth or darkness within; but to have the ‘bliss of solitude’ crowded with beautiful squadrons of deities, trembling with the light of legions on legions of suns.  For: 

     Not all we are here
     Where this darkness oppresses us;
     Not this oblivion
     Of Beauty expresses us.

     Gaze not on it,
     To be stained with its stain;
     The Lonely All-Beautiful
     Calls us again.

     In galleried palaces,
     Turquoise blue,
     With the sweetness of many suns
     Filtering through,—­

     In the Suns’s own garden,
     Where galaxies flame
     For lilac and daffodil,
     Each on his stem,—­

     Where apple-bloom Capricorn
     Hangs from his tree,
     Glittering dim o’er
     The dim blue sea,—­

     And billowing dim o’er
     The dim blue lawns
     Of heaven come the nebular
     Sunsets and dawns,—­

     We too have the regallest
     Part of our being,
     Far beyond dreaming of,
     Hearing of, seeing.

     And the Lonely All-Beautiful
     Calls to us here:—­
     “My knights, my commissioned,
     My children dear!

     “The hell where affrighted,
     Enchanted, ye roam,—­
     Ye set forth to make it
     A heaven for my home!”

—­And it is Vision, not to mistake mankind for less or other than Deific Essence cruelly encumbered over with oblivion; it is to see the flame of Eternal Beauty and valiant Godhood in all men; and not to rest or sit content without doing something to uncover that Beauty, to rescue that Godhood.—­You go into the slums of a great city; and you do not wonder that the God-essence, inmingling and involved in the clay which is (the lower) man, goes there quite distraught and unrecognizable; where life is so far from the great reflexion of the Worlds of Beauty; where the Sun is no bright brother and confidential friend, but a breeder up of pestilences; where the sky is shut away and there are no flowers to bloom;—­whether we like it or no, these things, the unperverted manifestations of the formative pressure of the Spirit, are needed to keep men sane.  Beauty you must have, to nourish the Divine within you; alas for him that thinks he may attain to the Good or the True, and in a thin