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"Such harmony is in immortal souls;

But, whilst this muddy vesture of decay

Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it."—

- Act V. Sc. 1.

And the same idea appears in plain prose thus : —

"For though we Christians do continually aspire and pant after the land of promise, yet it will be a token of God's favour towards us in our journeyings through this world's wilderness, to have our shoes and garments (I mean those of our frail bodies) little worn or impaired." 1

And surely the author of the "Cymbeline" was not far from the same conception, when he wrote concerning Jupiter's tablet, delivered down out of his "radiant roof," thus:

:

"[Ghosts vanish. POSTHUMUS wakes, and finds the Tablet.]

Posth. What fairies haunt this ground? A book? O, rare one! Be not, as is our fangled world, a garment

Nobler than that it covers. . . . . .

[Reads the Tablet.]

'Tis still a dream, or else such stuff as madmen

Tongue, and brain not; either both, or nothing:
Or senseless speaking, or a speaking such
As sense cannot untie. Be what it is,

The action of my life is like it, which

I'll keep, if but for sympathy."— Act V. Sc. 4.

Again, Prospero says to Miranda in the "Tempest": — "Lend thy hand,

And pluck my magic garment from me. - So:

Lie there, my art." Act 1. Sc. 2.

Materialistic science, on the one hand, and unphilosophical theology, on the other, have, in all times, come equally short of comprehending the great truth here indicated. One thinks there is nothing but the garment, or, at least, that the garment covers nothing: the other thinks likewise that the garment covers nothing nobler than itself; but that the Maker of it, when it was finished and pronounced good, plucked it from him and hung it in the heavens, and that he has ever since sat apart on a throne above his "radiant roof," contemplating and judging his 1 Dedication to the Hist. of Life and Death.

handiwork, only occasionally delivering down a miraculous tablet; but that his art lasted six days, and ceased altogether some six thousand years ago. As that book, that

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rare one," has been more worshipped, in our "newfangled mansions," than what of truth it contains and reveals, so, on the other hand, has the physical garment been held nobler than that it covers. The ancients knew better than this; for they held with Bacon, Shakespeare's plays, Berkeley, Goethe, Jean Paul, and many more modern disciples of the Higher Philosophy, that the visible world was but the vest of Cupid, the visible manifestation of the Invisible Essence, which is eternally weaving the web of His physical garment, in the Roaring Loom of Time and Space. Indeed, the hieroglyphic Sacred Books of the ancient Egyptians seem to read much to the same effect, as deciphered by Seyffarth : "I am that I am. weave the garments (bodies) of men. I am the shining garment of the sky. I have fashioned the verdure of the earthly pasture. I have woven the hosts of worlds, — the High and Holy God. Songs and anthems of praise to the Master Architect, who made the world, who made it for the habitation of man, the Creator's image." 2 As the highest ancient, so the highest modern voice, still exclaims:- "O thou unfathomable mystic All, garment and dwelling-place of the Unnamed; and thou articulate-speaking Spirit of Man, who mouldest and modellest that Unfathomable Unnameable even as we see, - is not there a miracle!" 3

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Time and Space, as necessary laws of thought, divine or human, as fundamental principles or conditions of ideas or things, and those complex keys which alone unlock the door of the inner sanctuaries, have tasked the brains of the deepest thinkers from Plato and his cave down to Kant, or Cousin; and this author, too, seems to have understood

1 Bacon's Theory of the Firmament.
2 Summary (N. York, 1857), p. 65–8.
* Carlyle's French Rev., I. 344.

something of their nature. He knew that Time carried a wallet at his back wherein he put alms for oblivion; and Imogen, at the departure of Posthumus, watched him,—

"till the diminution

Of space had pointed him sharp as my needle;
Nay, followed him, till he had melted from

The smallness of a gnat to air.” — Cymb., Act 1. Sc. 4. And Belarius, leaving his companions at the cave, to ascend the mountains, says to them:

"Consider

When you above perceive me like a crow,
That it is place which lessens and sets off."
Ibid. Act III. Sc. 3.

He understood, too, how things appear great or small to
mortal eyes, without much reference to what they really
are in themselves, and that the truest greatness is some-
times scarcely visible at all to common senses; as when
Belarius says to his boys of the forest and mountain :-
"And often, to our comfort, shall we find

The sharded beetle in a safer hold

Than is the full-winged eagle.” — Ib., Act III. Sc. 3. Which may remind the reader of Jean Paul in search of happiness, now soaring above the clouds of life, and again sinking down under a leaf in a furrow of his garden, or rather, again, alternating between the two; or of Emerson, who says:

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"There is no great and no small

To the soul that maketh all."

But unto "poor unfledged" boys of the forest, that have 66 never wing'd from view o' the nest," it is

"A cell of ignorance, travelling abed,

A prison for a debtor, that dares not

To stride a limit.".

-Ib., Act III. Sc. 3.

"The common people," says Bacon, "understand not many excellent virtues; the lowest virtues draw praise from them; the middle virtues work in them astonishment or admiration; but of the highest virtues they have no

sense or perceiving at all; but shows and species virtutibus similes serve best with them"; and so, according to Hanılet, the groundlings were, for the most part, "capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows and noise."

§ 9. REMEMBRANCE AND OBLIVION.

The doctrine of Plato, that human knowledge is but reminiscence, seems to have taken strong hold of Bacon's mind. In the way in which this doctrine is generally stated and received, it would appear that Plato conceived the human soul to have had an existence, as such, previous to its birth into this world, and that, in that former state of existence, it was in possession of all knowledge; and so, that the acquisition of knowledge in this world was simply a process of recollection or reminiscence of what had been better known before. So Origen and some learned fathers of the Church seem to have understood him. Burton expounds him thus: "Plato in Timao and in his Phædon (for aught I can perceive) differs not much from this opinion, that it [the soul] was from God at first, and knew all, but being inclosed in the body, it forgets, and learns anew, which he calls reminiscentia, or recalling, and that it was put into the body for a punishment." It may be doubted whether Plato has been correctly interpreted in this his expression is somewhat obscure. Bacon states the doctrine a little differently, thus: "That all knowledge is but remembrance, and that the mind of man by nature knoweth all things, and hath but her own native and original motions (which by the strangeness and darkness of this tabernacle of the body are sequestered) again revived and restored." Here the idea is, that it is the nature of the mind to know all things, and what is wanting is, that its native and original powers, for a time overshadowed and repressed, should be restored to activity, whereby the strangeness and dark1 Anat. of Mel., I. 217 (Boston, 1862). 2 Adv. of Learn., Works (Mont.), II. 4.

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ness of the tabernacle might be cleared up and ignorance disappear. Something of the sound and quality of this statement may be discovered as a sort of ground-swell rolling underneath the dialogue of the Bishops concerning young Henry V., the late wicked Prince Hal, who had all at once begun to reason in divinity, and debate of commonwealth affairs, war, and any cause of policy:

"Cant. Since his addiction was to courses vain;

His companies unletter'd, rude, and shallow;
His hours fill'd up with riots, banquets, sports;
And never noted in him any study,
Any retirement, any sequestration

From open haunts and popularity.

Ely. The strawberry grows underneath the nettle,
And wholesome berries thrive and ripen best,
Neighbour'd by fruit of baser quality:
And so the Prince obscur'd his contemplation
Under the veil of wildness; which, no doubt,
Grew like the summer grass, fastest by night,
Unseen, yet crescive in his faculty.

Cant. It must be so; for miracles are ceas'd;
And therefore we must needs admit the means

How things are perfected."- Hen. V., Act 1. Sc. 1.

And when Prospero is sounding the youthful Miranda as to her remembrance of her origin, we have this dialogue: :

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Pros. By what? by any other house, or person?

Of any thing the image tell me, that

Hath kept with thy remembrance.

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And rather like a dream than an assurance

That my remembrance warrants. Had I not

Four or five women once, that tended me?

Pros. Thou hadst, and more, Miranda. But how is it,
That this lives in thy mind? What seest thou else

In the dark backward and abysm of time?

If thou remember'st aught, ere thou cam'st here,
How thou cam'st here, thou may'st.

Mir.

But that I do not."- - Act I. Sc. 2.

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