all these have shown me; yea, and I would recount their greetings and mine in that sweet language of the spirits.’—­But the glorious Wonder drew back majestic with a frown, saying, ’Not so, presumptuous child of man; the things I have shown thee, and the greetings thou hast heard, and the songs wherewith I filled thee, cannot worthily be told in other than the language of spirits:  and where is the alphabet of men that can fix that unearthly tongue,—­or how shouldst thou from henceforth, or thy fellows upon earth, attain to its delicate conceptions? behold, all these thine intimates are wroth with thee; they discern evil upon thy soul:  the place of their sojourn is too pure for thee.’

“Then was there a peal of thunder, like the bursting of a world, whereupon all that restless sea of shadows, and their bright abode, vanished suddenly; and there ensued a flood of darkness, peopled with shoaling fears, and I heard the approach of hurrying sounds, with demoniac laughter, and shouts coming as for me, nearer and louder, saying, ‘Cast out!  Cast out!’ and it rushed up to me like an unseen army, and I fled for life before it, until I came to the extreme edge of that spiritual world, where, as I ran looking backwards for terror at those viewless hunters, I leaped horribly over the unguarded cliff, and fell whirling, whirling, whirling, until my senses failed me—­

“When I came to myself, I was by the sun-dial in my garden, leaning upon the pedestal, and the thin shadow still pointed to twelve.

“In astonishment, I ran hastily to my chamber, and strove to remember the strains I had heard.  But, alas! they had all passed away:  scarcely one disjointed note of that rare music lingered in my memory:  I was awakened from a vivid dream, whereof the morning remembered nothing.  Nevertheless, I toiled on, a rebel against that fearful Power, and deprived of her wonted aid:  my songs, invita Minerva, are but bald translations of those heavenly welcomings:  my humble pyramid, far from being the visioned apotheosis of that of a Cephren, bears an unambitious likeness to the meaner Asychian, the characteristic of which, barring its presumptuous motto, must be veiled in one word from Herodotus (2-136),—­alas! for the bathos of translation, the cabalistic—­[Greek:  phelikos], ‘built up of mud.’

“Was not Rome lutea as well as marmorea? and is not beautiful Paris anciently Lutetia, with its tile-sheds for Tuileries, and a Bourbe-bonne for its Sovereign?”

All these sonnets, with others, were published by me elsewhere, as I state further on.  The volume also contains some of my less faulty translations, as from Sappho, AEschylus, Pythagoras, Virgil, Horace, Dante, Petrarch, &c.  And here I will give a chance specimen out of my “Septuagint of Worthies,” to each one of whom I have appropriated a page or two of explanatory prose besides his fourteen lines of poetry.  Take my sonnet on “Sylva” Evelyn:—­