us turn our eyes upward to our celestial home.  Our natural character is vicious; let us stifle natural desires and mortify the flesh.  The experience of our senses and the knowledge of the wise are inadequate and delusive; let us accept the light of revelation, faith and divine illumination.  Through penitence, renunciation and meditation let us develop within ourselves the spiritual man; let our life be an ardent awaiting of deliverance, a constant sacrifice of will, an undying yearning for God, a revery of sublime love, occasionally rewarded with ecstasy and a vision of the infinite.  For fourteen centuries the ideal of this life was the anchorite or monk.  If you would estimate the power of such a conception and the grandeur of the transformation it imposes on human faculties and habits, read, in turn, the great Christian poem and the great pagan poem, one the ‘Divine Comedy’ and the other the ‘Odyssey’ and the ‘Iliad.’  Dante has a vision and is transported out of our little ephemeral sphere into eternal regions; he beholds its tortures, its expiations and its felicities; he is affected by superhuman anguish and horror; all that the infuriate and subtle imagination of the lover of justice and the executioner can conceive of he sees, suffers and sinks under.  He then ascends into light; his body loses its gravity; he floats involuntarily, led by the smile of a radiant woman; he listens to souls in the shape of voices and to passing melodies; he sees choirs of angels, a vast rose of living brightness representing the virtues and the celestial powers; sacred utterances and the dogmas of truth reverberate in ethereal space.  At this fervid height, where reason melts like wax, both symbol and apparition, one effacing the other, merge into mystic bewilderment, the entire poem, infernal or divine, being a dream which begins with horrors and ends in ravishment.  How much more natural and healthy is the spectacle which Homer presents!  We have the Troad, the isle of Ithica and the coasts of Greece; still at the present day we follow in his track; we recognize the forms of mountains, the color of the sea; the jutting fountains, the cypress and the alders in which the sea-birds perched; he copied a steadfast and persistent nature:  with him throughout we plant our feet on the firm ground of truth.  His book is a historical document; the manners and customs of his contemporaries were such as he describes; his Olympus itself is a Greek family.”

The manifest inferiority of our mixed languages to their one simple language is stated in the following paragraph, with which we must leave Taine for the present: