The Sun-land behind the hillocks of the God's acre, behind the pest-cloud of Death, is covered by a complete, an impenetrable darkness of twelve inches, or of as many holy nights. He showed, and not badly, what an immense leap beyond all terrestrial analogies and experiences it is, to hope for, i. e. to create, a world, a transcendent Arcadia, a world of which we know neither copy nor original, which wants no less than a form and a name, map and globe, another Vespucius Americus, of which, neither chemistry nor astronomy can give us the compounds or the quarters; a universe of air, on which, from the leaf-stripped, faded soul, a new body will bud forth, i. e. a nothing on which nothing is to embody itself.
O, my good Karlson! how could your noble soul omit a second world which is already contained in this physical first one, like bright crystals in dark earth, namely, the sun-world of Virtue, Truth, and Beauty,[1] glowing in our souls, whose golden vein inexplicably extends its ramification through the dark, dirty clump of the sensuous world.
It was now my turn to answer: "I will lessen your two difficulties, and then I will give my innumerable proofs. You are no materialist,[2] you therefore take for granted that bodily and mental activity only accompany and mutually excite each other. Yes, the body represents the keys of the inner Harmonica through all its scales. Hitherto only the corporeal outward signs have been called feelings, as the swelling heart and the slowly-beating
- ↑ Beauty in this connection, I adopt in the same sense which Schiller gives to it in his æsthetic critique, a prize essay of his genius on Beauty, which here, like Longinus, is at once the subject and the delineator of the exalted.
- ↑ If he had been, I would have read page 224 in the third part of Hesperus to him.
