strange owl!"

"He looks like a lion with a hat on."

"He is a mystic, who reads Schubert's History of the Soul, and
lives, for the most part, in the clouds of the Middle Ages. To him
the spirit-world is still open. He believes in the transmigration of
souls; and I dare say is now followingthe spirit of some departed
friend, who has taken the form of yonder pigeon."

"What a strange hallucination! He lives, I suppose, in the land
of cloud-shadows. And, as St. Thomas Aquinas was said to be lifted
up from the ground by the fervor of his prayers, so, no doubt, is he
by the fervor of his visions."

"He certainly appears to neglect all sublunary things; and, to
judge from certain appearances, since you seem fond of holy
similitudes, one would say, that, like St. Serapion the Sindonite,
he had but one shirt. Yet what cares he? he lives in that poetic
dream-land of his thoughts, and clothes his dream-children in
poetry."

"He is a poet, then, as well as a philosopher?"

"Yes; but a poet who never writes a line. There is nothing in
nature to which his imagination does not give a poetic hue. But the
power to make others see these objects in the same poetic light, is
wanting. Still he is a man of fine powers and feelings; for, next to
being a greatpoet, is the power of understanding one,--of finding
one's-self in him, as we Germans say."