Recalling the student of Plato to penetrate as far as he can into that mysterious community, there, long before, in the imagination of Pythagoras is the first dream of the Perfect City, with all those peculiar ethical sympathies which the Platonic Republic enforces already well defined--the perfect mystic body of the Dorian soul, built, as Plato requires, to the strains of music. As a whole, and in its members severally, it would reproduce and visibly reflect to others that inward order and harmony of which each one was a part. As such, the Pythagorean order (it was itself an "order") expanded and was long maintained in those cities of Magna Graecia which had been the scene of the practical [57] no less than of the speculative activity of its founder; and in one of which, Metapontum, so late as the days of Cicero what was believed to be the tomb of Pythagoras was still shown. Order, harmony, the temperance, which, as Plato will explain to us, will convince us by the visible presentment of it in the faultless person of the youthful Charmides, is like a musical harmony,--that was the chief thing Pythagoras exacted from his followers, at least at first, though they were mainly of the noble and wealthy class who could have done what they liked--temperance in a religious intention, with many singular scruples concerning bodily purification, diet, and the like. For if, according to his philosophy, the soul had come from heaven, to use the phrase of Wordsworth reproducing the central Pythagorean doctrine, "from heaven," as he says, "trailing clouds of glory," so the arguments of Pythagoras were always more or less explicitly involving one in consideration of the means by which one might get back thither, of which means, surely, abstinence, the repression of one's carnal elements, must be one; in consideration also, in curious questions, as to the relationship of those carnal elements in us to the pilgrim soul, before and after, for which he was so anxious to secure full use of all the opportunities of further perfecting which might yet await it, in the many revolutions of its existence. In the midst of that aesthetically [58] so brilliant world of Greater Greece, as if anticipating Plato, he has, like the philosophic kings of the Platonic Republic, already something of the monk, of monastic ascêsis, about him. Its purpose is to fit him for, duly to refine his nature towards, that closer vision of truth to which perchance he may be even now upon his way. The secrecy again, that characteristic silence of which the philosopher of music was, perhaps not inconsistently, a lover, which enveloped the entire action of the Pythagoreans, and had indeed kept Pythagoras himself, as some have thought, from committing his thoughts to writing at all, was congruous with such monkish discipline. Mysticism--the condition of the initiated--is a word derived, as we know, from a Greek verb which may perhaps mean to close the eye that