7 "In itself perfectly pure." This is analogous to the description of the beautiful in the latter part of Diotima's Speech in the _Banquet_; a speech which is surely unequalled, both for elegance of composition and sublimity of sentiment. Indeed, all the disciples of Plato are remarkable for nothing so much as their profound and exalted conceptions of the Deity; and he who can read the works of Plotinus and Proclus in particular, and afterwards pity the weakness and erroneousness of their opinions on this subject, may be fairly presumed to be himself equally an object of pity and contempt. 8 "Let us depart," etc., _vide_ Hom., _Iliad,_ lib. ii., 140, et lib. ix., 27. 9 Porphyry informs us in his excellent treatise, _De Antro Nymph,_ that it was the opinion of Numenius, the Pythagorean (to which he also assents), that the person of Ulysses in the _Odyssey,_ represents to us a man, who passes in a regular manner, over the dark and stormy sea of generation; and thus, at length, arrives at that region where tempests and seas are unknown, and finds a nation who "Ne'er knew salt, or heard the billows roar." Indeed, he who is conscious of the delusions of the present life and the enchantments of this material house, in which his soul is detained like Ulysses in the irriguous cavern of Calypso, will like him continually bewail his captivity, and inly pine for a return to his native country. Of such a one it may be said as of Ulysses (in the excellent and pathetic translation of Mr Pope): "But sad Ulysses by himself apart Pour'd the big sorrows of his swelling heart, All on the lonely shore he sate to weep And roll'd his eyes around the restless deep Tow'rd the lov'd coast he roll'd his eyes in vain Till, dimmed with rising grief, they stream'd again." _Odyssey,_ book v., 103. Such a one too, like Ulysses, will not always wish in vain for a passage over the dark ocean of a corporeal life, but by the assistance of Mercury, who may be considered as the emblem of reason, he will at length be enabled to quit the magic embraces of Calypso, the Goddess of Imagination, and to return again into the arms of Penelope, or Philosophy, the long lost and proper object of his love. 10 See Pope's Homer's _Odyssey,_ book v., 182.