and they illustrate the more intimate power of beauty, the more
fundamental reach of emotion, and the richness of their mutual life in
the soul. Under the aspect of truth he likens our knowledge of the ideal
to that which the prisoners of the cave had of the shadows on the wall;
under the aspect of beauty he figures our love for it as that of the
passionate lover. As truth, again,--taking up in his earliest days what
seems the primitive impulse and first thought of man everywhere and at
all times,--under the image of the golden chain let down from the
throne of the god, he sets forth the heavenly origin of the ideal and
its descent on earth by divine inspiration possessing the poet as its
passive instrument; and later, bringing in now the cooperation of man in
the act, he again presents the ideal as known by reminiscence of the
soul's eternal life before birth, which is only a more defined and
rationalized conception of inspiration working normally instead of by
the special act and favour of God. As beauty, again, he shows forth the
enthusiasm evoked by the ideal in the image of the charioteer of the
white and black horses mastering them to the goal of love. In these
various ways the first idealist thought out these distinctions of truth
and beauty as having a real community, though a divided life in the mind
and heart; and, as he developed,--and this is the significant
matter,--the poet in him controlling his speech told ever more
eloquently of the charm with which beauty draws the soul unto itself,
for to the poet beauty is nearer than truth. It is the persuasion with
which he sets forth this charm, rather than his speculation, which has
fastened upon him the love of later ages. He was the first to discern in
truth and beauty equal powers of one divine being, and thus to effect
the most important reconciliation ever made in human nature.

So, too, from the other great source of the race's wisdom, we are told
in the Scriptures that though we be fallen men, yet is it left to us to