Light, or
gilded with the rays of the setting sun, like the battlements of
a city in the heavens, their grandeur appears thrown away on the
meanness of my employment; the drapery is altogether too rich for
such poor acting. I am hardly worthy to be a suburban dweller
outside those walls
"Unless above himself he can
Erect himself, how poor a thing is man!"
With our music we would fain challenge transiently another and
finer sort of intercourse than our daily toil permits. The
strains come back to us amended in the echo, as when a friend
reads our verse. Why have they so painted the fruits, and
freighted them with such fragrance as to satisfy a more than
animal appetite?
"I asked the schoolman, his advice was free,
But scored me out too intricate a way."
These things imply, perchance, that we live on the verge of
another and purer realm, from which these odors and sounds are
wafted over to us. The borders of our plot are set with flowers,
whose seeds were blown from more Elysian fields adjacent. They
are the pot-herbs of the gods. Some fairer fruits and sweeter
fragrances wafted over to us, betray another realm's vicinity.
There, too, does Echo dwell, and there is the abutment of the
rainbow's arch.
