ATHERTON. Think how the traditions of every people have embellished with their utmost wealth of imagination some hidden spot upon the surface of the earth, which they have pourtrayed as secluded from all the tumult and the pain of time—a serene Eden—an ever-sunny Tempe—a vale of Avalon—a place beyond the sterner laws and rougher visitations of the common world—a fastness of perpetual calm, before which the tempests may blow their challenging horns in vain—they can win no entrance. Such, to the fancy of the Middle Age, was the famous temple of the Sangreal, with its dome of sapphire, its six-and-thirty towers, its crystal crosses, and its hangings of green samite, guarded by its knights, girded by impenetrable forest, glittering on the onyx summit of Mount Salvage, for ever invisible to every eye impure, inaccessible to every failing or faithless heart. Such, to the Hindoo, was the Cridavana meadow, among the heights of Mount Sitanta, full of flowers, of the song of birds, the hum of bees—‘languishing winds and murmuring falls of waters.’ Such was the secret mountain Kinkadulle, celebrated by Olaus Magnus, which stood in a region now covered only by moss or snow, but luxuriant once, in less degenerate days, with the spontaneous growth of every pleasant bough and goodly fruit. What places like these have been to the popular mind, even such a refuge for the Ideal from the pursuit of the Actual—that the attainment of Ecstasy, the height of Contemplation, the bliss of Union, has been for the mystic. GOWER. So those spiritual Lotos-eaters will only ——hearken what the inner spirit sings, There is no joy but calm; or, in their ‘fugitive and cloistered virtue,’ as Milton calls it, say, ——let us live and lie reclined On the hills like gods together, careless of mankind. ATHERTON. Some; not all, however. Neither should we suppose that even those who have sunk to such a state—— WILLOUGHBY. They would say—risen— ATHERTON. Be it by sinking or rising, they have not been brought to that pass without a conflict. From life’s battle-field to the hospital of the hermitage has been but a step for a multitude of minds. Hiding themselves wounded from the victor (for the enemy they could not conquer shall not see and mock their sufferings), they call in the aid of an imaginative religionism to people their solitude with its glories. The Prometheus chained to his rock is comforted if the sea nymphs rise from the deep to visit him, and Ocean on his hippogriff draws near. And thus, let the gliding fancies of a life of dreams, and Imagination, the monarch of all their main of thought, visit the sorrow of these recluses, and they think they can forget the ravages of that evil which so vexed them once. Hence the mysticism of the visionary. He learns to crave ecstasies and revelations as at once his solace and his pride.