with the spices, melodious with the voices of the East; sacred and exquisite and pure with the burning chastity of passion which completes and exceeds the snowy chastity of virgins. This to me, but what to the Secretary? Can he endure that the female form should stand thus in a poem, disrobed, unveiled, bathed in erotic splendor? Look at these voluptuous details, this expression of desire, this amorous tone and glow, this consecration and perfume lavished upon the sensual. No! Out with Solomon!—Here is Isaiah. The grand thunder-roll of that righteousness, like the eternal roar of God above the guilty world, utters coarse words. Amidst the bolted lightnings of that sublime denunciation, coarse thoughts, indelicate figures, indecent allusion, flash upon the sight, like gross imagery in a midnight landscape. Out with Isaiah!—Here is Montaigne. Open those great, those virtuous pages of the unflinching reporter of Man; the soul all truth and daylight, all candor, probity, sincerity, reality, eyesight. A few glances will suffice. Cant and vice and sniffle have groaned over these pages before. Out with Montaigne!—Here is Hafiz, the Anacreon of Persia, but more: a banquet of wine in a garden of roses, the nightingales singing, the laughing revellers high with festal joy; but a heavenly flame burns on every brow; a tone not of this sphere is in all the music, all the laughter, all the songs; a light of the Infinite trembles over every chalice and rests on every flower; and all the garden is divine. Still, when Hafiz cries out, “Bring me wine, and bring the famed veiled beauty, the Princess of the brothel,” &c., or issues similar orders, Mr. Harlan, whose virtue does not understand or endure such metaphors, must deal sternly with this kosmic man of Persia. Out with Hafiz!—Here is Virgil, ornate and splendid poet of old Rome; a master with a greater pupil, Alighieri! a bard above whose ashes Boccaccio kneels a trader, and arises a soldier of mankind; but he must lose those fadeless chaplets, the undying green of a noble fame; for here in the _Æneid_ is “_Dixerat; et niveis hinc atque hinc Diva lacertis_,” &c., and here in the _Georgics_ is “_Quo rapiat sitiens Venerem, interiusque recondat_,” &c., and there are other verses like these. Out with Virgil!—Here is Swedenborg. Open this poem in prose, the _Conjugial Love_—to me, a temple, though in ruins; the sacred fane, clothed in mist, filled with moonlight, of a great though broken mind. What spittle of critic epithets stains all here? “Lewd,” “sensual,” “lecherous,” “coarse,” “licentious,” &c. Of course these judgments are final. There is no appeal from the tobacco-juice of an expectorating and disdainful virtue. Out with Swedenborg!—Here is Goethe: the horrified squealing of prudes is not yet silent over pages of _Wilhelm Meister_; that high and chaste hook, the _Elective Affinities_, still pumps up oaths from clergymen; Walpurgis has hardly ceased its uproar over _Faust_. Out with