"In vain they call upon the lofty Truth With sombre conjurations; for the dark She ne'er endures; for her abode is light. In Phoebus' world, in knowledge as in song, All things are bright. Bright beams the radiant sun; Clear runs and pure his bright Castalian fountain. Whate'er thou canst not clearly say thou know'st not. Twin-born with thought is word on lips of man; That which is darkly said is darkly thought; For wisdom true is like the diamond, A drop that's petrified of heavenly light; The purer that it is, the more its value, The more the daylight shines and glitters through it. The ancients builded unto Truth a temple, A fair rotunda, light as heaven's vault. And freely poured the sunshine from all sides Into its open round; the winds of heaven Amid its ranks of pillars gayly gambolled. But now instead we build a Tower of Babel, A heavy, barbarous structure. Darkness peeps From out its deep and narrow grated casements. Unto the sky the tower was meant to reach, But hitherto we've only had confusion. As in the realm of thought, in that of song It is; and poesy is e'er transparent ..." [36] A magister promotion corresponds approximately to our university commencements. It is the ceremony of bestowing the degree of master of arts. This was certainly an attractive doctrine, and it did not fail to command public approval. But it suffers from exactly the same limitation as Tegner's gospel of joy. It is only relatively (I might almost say temperamentally) true; and the opposite might be maintained with equal force, and in fact was so maintained by Atterbom, who declared (in the "Poetical Calendar for 1821") that there can be no such a conception as light without darkness. Darkness, he says, is the condition of all color and form. You distinguish the light and all things in it only by the contrasting effect of shadow--all of which, I fancy, Tegner would not have denied. More to the point would have been the query whether in poetry darkness and indistinctness are synonymous terms. It is only the most commonplace truths which can be made intelligible to all. Much of the best and highest thinking of humanity lies above the plane of the ordinary untrained intellect. What is light to me may be twilight or darkness to you. What to you is clear as the daylight, may to me be as densely impenetrable as the Cimmerian night. Christ himself recognized this fact when he said to his disciples: "I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now."