GOWER. How forlorn do those texts of Scripture look that you discern scattered over the works of such writers, so manifestly transported from a region of vitality and warmth to an expanse of barrenness. They make the context look still more sterile, and while they say there must be life _somewhere_, seem to affirm, no less emphatically, that it is not in the neighbourhood about them. They remind me of those leaves from the chestnut and the birch I once observed upon a glacier. There they lay, foreign manifestly to the treeless world in which they were found; the ice appeared to have shrunk from them, and they from the ice; each isolated leaf had made itself a cup-like cavity, a tiny open sarcophagus of crystal, in which it had lain, perhaps for several winters. Doubtless, a tempest, which had been vexing some pleasant valley far down beneath, and tearing at its trees, must have whirled them up thither. Yet the very presence of the captives reproached the poverty of the Snow-King who detained them, testifying as they did to a genial clime elsewhere, whose products that ice-world could no more put forth, than can such frozen speculations as this of Dionysius, the ripening ‘fruits of the Spirit.’ WILLOUGHBY. His lurking fatalism and his pantheism were forgiven him, no doubt, on consideration of his services to priestly assumption. He descends from his most cloudy abstraction to assert the mysterious significance and divine potency of all the minutiæ of the ecclesiastical apparatus and the sacerdotal etiquette. What a reputation these writings had throughout the middle age! ATHERTON. Dionysius is the mythical hero of mysticism. You find traces of him everywhere. Go almost where you will through the writings of the mediæval mystics, into their depths of nihilism, up their heights of rapture or of speculation, through their over-growth of fancy, you find his authority cited, his words employed, his opinions more or less fully transmitted, somewhat as the traveller in the Pyrenees discerns the fame of the heroic Roland still preserved in the names and in the legends of the rock, the valley, or the flower. Passages from the Areopagite were culled, as their warrant and their insignia, by the priestly ambassadors of mysticism, with as much care and reverence as the sacred verbenæ that grew within the enclosure of the Capitoline by the Feciales of Rome. MRS. ATHERTON. ‘Oh, sweet Fancy, let her loose,’ as Keats says. I think my husband has been learning in Mr. Gower’s school. How far he went to fetch that simile! GOWER. Perhaps he has my excuse in this case, that he could not help it. WILLOUGHBY. Or he may at once boldly put in the plea of Sterne, who in one place lays claim to the gratitude of his readers for having voyaged to fetch a metaphor all the way to the Guinea coast and back.