MRS. ATHERTON. And certainly our most favoured moments of ascent into the ideal world have their origin usually in some suggestion that has reached us through the senses. I remember a little song of Uhland’s called _The Passing Minstrel_—a brief parable of melody, like so many of his pieces,—which, as I understood it, was designed to illustrate this very truth. The poet falls asleep on a ‘hill of blossoms’ near the road, and his soul flutters away in dream to the golden land of Fable. He wakes, as one fallen from the clouds, and sees the minstrel with his harp, who has just passed by, and playing as he goes, is lost to sight among the trees. ‘Was it he,’ the poet asks, ‘that sang into my soul those dreams of wonder?’ Another might inform the fancy with another meaning, according to the mood of the hour. It appeared to me an emblem of the way in which we are often indebted to a sunset or a landscape, to a strain of music or a suddenly-remembered verse, for a voyage into a world of vision of our own, where we cease altogether to be aware of the external cause which first transported us thither. ATHERTON. That must always be true of imagination. But Platonism discards the visible instead of mounting by it. Considered morally, too, this asceticism sins so grievously. It misuses the iron of the will, given us to forge implements withal for life’s husbandry, to fashion of it a bolt for a voluntary prison. At Alexandria, doubtless, Sin was imperious in her shamelessness, at the theatre and at the mart, in the hall of judgment and in the house of feasting, but there was suffering as well as sin among the crowds of that great city, with all their ignorance and care and want, and to have done a something to lessen the suffering would have prepared the way for lessening the sin. Footnote 11: Philo gives an account of the Therapeutæ referred to in the letter, in his treatise _De Vitâ Contemplativâ_. Passages corresponding with those contained in the letter contributed by Atherton, concerning the enmity of the flesh and the divine nature of the soul, are to be found in the works of Philo, _Sacr. Leg. Alleg._ lib. iii. p. 101 (ed. Mangey); lib. ii. p. 64; _De eo quod det. potiori insid. soleat_, pp. 192, 208. Philo’s interpretation of the scriptural account concerning Babel is contained in the _De Confus. Linguarum_, p. 424. His exposition of Gen. i. 9, illustrates the same principle, _Sacr. Leg. Alleg._ lib. i. p. 54; so of Gen. xxxvii. 12; _De eo quod pot._ p. 192. Eusebius shows us how Eleazar and Aristobulus must have prepared the way for Philo in this attempt to harmonize Judaism with the letters and philosophy of Greece. _Præp. Evang._ lib. viii. 9, 10. CHAPTER II. La philosophie n’est pas philosophie si elle ne touche à l’abîme; mais elle cesse d’être philosophie si elle y tombe.—COUSIN.