Iron/cs 1x1» 11.1 YS. 163

Winter, and one for the (log-days. The scholar must look long for the right hour for Platds Ti- maaus. At last the elect morning‘ arrives, the early dawn, — a few lights eonspiciuuis in the heaven, as of a worltl just created and still becoming, — and in its wide leisure we dare open that book.

There are days when the great are near us, when there is no fro\vn on their brow, no condescensioir even; when they take us by the hand, and we share their thought. There are days which are the car- nival of the year. The angels zlssmne flesh, and repeatedly become visible. The imagination of the gods is excited and rushes on every side into forms. Yesterday not a bird peeped; the world was barren, peaked, and pining: to-day ’tis inconceivably pop- ulous; creation swarms and melior-ates.

The (lays are made on a loom whereof the warp and woof are past and future time. They are majestically dressed, as if every god brought a thread to the skyey web. ’T is pitiful the things by which we are rich or poor, -— a matter of coins, coats, and carpets, a little more or less stone, or wood, or laaint, the fashion of a eloak or hat; like the luck of naked Indians, of whom one is proud in the possession of a glass bead or a red feather, and the rest miserable in the want of it. But the treasures which Nature spent itself to amass, —the

Secular, refined, composite "anatomy of man, which

Iii 5A