Men nowhere, east or west, live yet a natural life, round which the vine clings, and which the elm willingly shadows.  Man would desecrate it by his touch, and so the beauty of the world remains veiled to him.  He needs not only to be spiritualized, but naturalized, on the soil of earth.  Who shall conceive what kind of roof the heavens might extend over him, what seasons minister to him, and what employment dignify his life!  Only the convalescent raise the veil of nature.  An immortality in his life would confer immortality on his abode.  The winds should be his breath, the seasons his moods, and he should impart of his serenity to Nature herself.  But such as we know him he is ephemeral like the scenery which surrounds him, and does not aspire to an enduring existence.  When we come down into the distant village, visible from the mountain-top, the nobler inhabitants with whom we peopled it have departed, and left only vermin in its desolate streets.  It is the imagination of poets which puts those brave speeches into the mouths of their heroes.  They may feign that Cato’s last words were

     “The earth, the air, and seas I know, and all
     The joys and horrors of their peace and wars;
     And now will view the Gods’ state and the stars,”

but such are not the thoughts nor the destiny of common men.  What is this heaven which they expect, if it is no better than they expect?  Are they prepared for a better than they can now imagine?  Where is the heaven of him who dies on a stage, in a theatre?  Here or nowhere is our heaven.

     “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, g_egenei~s, 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