The intelligible forms of ancient poets, The fair humanities of old religion, The power, the beauty, and the majesty That had their haunts in dale or piny mountain, Or forest by slow stream, or pebbly spring, Or chasms and watery depths,all these have vanished; They live no longer in the faith of reason.
Wallenstein. Part i. Act ii. Sc. 4. (Translated from Schiller.)
An instinctive taste teaches men to build their churches in flat countries, with spire steeples, which, as they cannot be referred to any other object, point as with silent finger to the sky and star.4
The Friend. No. 14.
Note 1. Sed ita a principio inchoatum esse mundum ut certis rebus certa signa præcurrerent (Thus in the beginning the world was so made that certain signs come before certain events).Cicero: Divinatione, liber i. cap. 52.
Coming events cast their shadows before.Thomas Campbell: Lochiels Warning.
Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Defence of Poetry. [back]
Note 2. A phrase, says Coleridge, which I have borrowed from a Greek monk, who applies it to a patriarch of Constantinople. [back]