"Although we see celestial bodies move
Above the earth, the earth we till and love."
We can conceive of nothing more fair than something which we have
experienced. "The remembrance of youth is a sigh." We linger in
manhood to tell the dreams of our childhood, and they are half
forgotten ere we have learned the language. We have need to be
earth-born as well as heaven-born, , as was said of
the Titans of old, or in a better sense than they. There have
been heroes for whom this world seemed expressly prepared, as if
creation had at last succeeded; whose daily life was the stuff of
which our dreams are made, and whose presence enhanced the beauty
and ampleness of Nature herself. Where they walked,
"Largior hic campos aether et lumine vestit
Purpureo: Solemque suum, sua sidera norunt."
"Here a more copious air invests the fields, and clothes with
purple light; and they know their own sun and their own stars."
We love to hear some men speak, though we hear not what they say;
the very air they breathe is rich and perfumed, and the sound of
their voices falls on the ear like the rustling of leaves or the
crackling of the fire. They stand many deep. They have the
heavens for their abettors, as those who have never stood from
under them, and they look at the stars with an answering ray.
Their eyes are like glow-worms, and their motions graceful and
flowing, as if a place were already found for them, like rivers
flowing through valleys.
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