as a young child plays with graybeards and in
churches. Genius studies the causal thought, and far
back in the womb of things sees the rays parting from
one orb, that diverge, ere they fall, by infinite
diameters. Genius watches the monad through all his
masks as he performs the metempsychosis of nature.
Genius detects through the fly, through the
caterpillar, through the grub, through the egg, the
constant individual; through countless individuals
the fixed species; through many species the genus;
through all genera the steadfast type; through all
the kingdoms of organized life the eternal unity.
Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never
the same. She casts the same thought into troops of
forms, as a poet makes twenty fables with one moral.
Through the bruteness and toughness of matter, a
subtle spirit bends all things to its own will. The
adamant streams into soft but precise form before it,
and whilst I look at it its outline and texture are
changed again. Nothing is so fleeting as form; yet
never does it quite deny itself. In man we still trace
the remains or hints of all that we esteem badges of
servitude in the lower races; yet in him they enhance
his nobleness and grace; as Io, in Aeschylus,
transformed to a cow, offends the imagination; but how
changed when as Isis in Egypt she meets Osiris-Jove,
a beautiful woman with nothing of the metamorphosis
left but the lunar horns as the splendid ornament of
her brows!