It is nowise singular if this symbolical property and disposition of human nature announces itself as distinctly in the earliest development and in the most perfect of the productions of artistic genius, whether we take into consideration the whole existing state of mankind, or his original and essential constitution relatively to the world and to God. We have already remarked, on more than one occasion, that man, as soon as he was deprived of those higher faculties which he had abused to his ruin, fell thereby more entirely than would seem originally to have been the case, under the dominion of figurative fancy, and that, consequently, his whole nature and consciousness became greatly changed from what it was at the beginning. If man did at the very first possess the faculty and the power to communicate his thoughts to others inwardly by a mere operation of his will, and without having recourse to the external medium of words, he no longer enjoys this privilege; and if any wonderful phenomena in any way resembling thereto be now found, they only form so many remarkable exceptions, instead of making the rule of human life and consciousness as they now are. As at present constituted, man feels that his state is pre-eminently symbolical: he sees in symbolism a necessary requirement for his earthly pursuits--a substitute for those immediate powers of cogitation which he has lost. And all this is true, independently of any use he may freely choose to make of symbols for the higher purposes of spiritual life. Man, at the beginning, was placed on this earth as its first-born son, in the midst of the telluric universe, or, in other words, in the center of a planetary world akin to and similar to his own. Now, whatever may be the case, or whatever it may be allowable to think of any other of the starry spheres--though in the invisible world of spirits all perhaps is more immediately full of and instinct with essence, and is not veiled in material emblems, this is not the case with this earth. Terrestial nature, in all its organic productions and warring elements of life, is throughout symbolical. Man, therefore, viewed from this position of his earthly habitation, is surrounded by a symbolical world of sensuous emblems. And if we can, or, rather, if we will, believe the grand intimation with which revelation opens, the first and highest destination of man is even symbolical--to be the Divine image.