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hexameters, declared that Plotinus had become a demon. Such was the life of Plotinus, a man of sense and virtue, and so modest that he would not allow his portrait to be painted. His character drew good men round him, his repute for supernatural virtues brought “fools into a circle.” What he meant by his belief that four times he had, “whether in the body or out of the body,” been united with the Spirit of the world, who knows? What does Tennyson mean when he writes: “So word by word, and line by line, The dead man touch’d me from Letters on Literature 46 the past, And all at once it seem’d at last His living soul was flashed on mine. And mine in his was wound and whirl’d About empyreal heights of thought, And came on that which is, and caught The deep pulsations of the world.” Mystery! We cannot fathom it; we know not the paths of the souls ghd straighteners outlet of Pascal and Gordon, of Plotinus and St. Paul. They are wise with a wisdom not of this world, or with a foolishness yet more wise. In his practical philosophy Plotinus was an optimist, or at least he was at war with pessimism. “They that love God bear lightly the ways of the world–bear lightly whatsoever befalls them of necessity in the general movement of things.” He believed in a rest that remains for the people of God, “where they speak not one with the other; but, as we understand many things by the eyes only, so does soul read soul in heaven, where the spiritual body is pure, and nothing is hidden, and nothing feigned.” The arguments by which these opinions are buttressed may be called metaphysical, and may be called worthless; the conviction, and the beauty of the language in which it is stated, remain immortal possessions. Why such a man as Plotinus, with such ideas, remained a pagan, while Christianity offered him ghd ceramic straighteners a sympathetic refuge, who can tell? Probably natural conservatism, in him as in Dr. Johnson– conservatism and taste– caused his adherence to the forms at least of the older creeds. There was much to laugh at in Plotinus, and much to like. But if you read him in hopes of material for strange stories, you will be disappointed. Perhaps Lord Lytton and others who have invoked his name in fiction (like Vivian Grey in Lord Beaconsfield’s tale) knew his name better than his doctrine. His “Enneads,” even as edited by his patient Boswell, Porphyry, are not very light <a href="http://www.splendidgucci.com/"><strong>handbag uk</strong></a> subjects of study. Letters on Literature 47 LUCRETIUS To the Rev. Geoffrey Martin, Oxford. Dear Martin,–”How individuals found religious consolation from the creeds ghd hair straightener south africa of ancient Greece and Rome” is, as you quote C. O. Muller, “a very curious question.” It is odd that while we have countless books on the philosophy and the mythology and the ritual of the classic peoples, we hear about their religion in the modern sense scarcely anything from anybody. We know very well what gods they worshipped, and what sacrifices they offered to the Olympians, and what stories they told about their deities, and about the beginnings of things. We know, too, in a general way, that the gods were interested in morality. They would all punish offences in their own department, at least when it was a case of numine laeso, when the god who protected the hearth was offended by breach of hospitality, or when the gods invoked to witness an oath were offended by perjury. But how did a religiously minded man regard the gods? What hope or what fears did he entertain with regard to the future life? Had he any sense of sin, as more than a thing that could be expiated by purification with the blood of slaughtered swine, or by purchasing the prayers and “masses,” so to speak, of the mendicant clergy or charlatans, mentioned by Plato in the “Republic”? About these great questions of the religious life- -the Future and man’s fortunes in the future, the punishment or reward of justice or iniquity–we really know next to nothing. That is one reason why the great poem of Lucretius seems so valuable to me. The De Rerum Natura was written for no other purpose than to destroy Religion, as Lucretius understood it, to free men’s minds from all dread as to future punishment, all hope of Heaven, all dread or desire for the interference of the gods in ghd hair styler this mortal life of ours on earth. For no other reason did Lucretius desire to “know the causes of things,” except that the knowledge would bring “emancipation,” as people call it, from the gods, to whom men had hitherto stood in the relation of the Roman son to the Roman sire, under the patria potestas or in manu patris. Letters on Literature 48 As Lucretius wrought all his arduous work to this end, it follows that his fellow-countrymen must have gone in a constant terror about spiritual penalties, which we seldom associate in thought with the “blithe” and careless existence of the ancient peoples. In every line of Lucretius you read the joy and the indignation of the slave just escaped from an intolerable thraldom to fear. Nobody could well have believed on any other evidence that the classical people had a gloomy Calvinism of their own time. True, as early as Homer, we hear of the shadowy existence of the souls, and of new ghd 2011 the torments endured by the notably wicked; by impious ghosts, or tyrannical, like Sisyphus and Tantalus. But when we read the opening books of the “Republic,” we find the educated friends of Socrates treating these terrors as old-wives’ fables. They have heard, they say, that such notions circulate among the people, but they seem never for a moment to have themselves believed in a future of rewards and punishments. The remains of ancient funereal art, in ghd iv Etruria or Attica, usually show us the semblances of the dead lying at endless feasts, or receiving sacrifices of food and wine (as in Egypt) from their descendants, or, perhaps, welcoming the later dead, their friends who have just rejoined them. But it is only in the descriptions by Pausanias and others of certain old wall-paintings that we hear of the torments of the wicked, of the demons that torture them and, above all, of the great chief fiend, coloured like a carrion fly. To judge from Lucretius, <a href="http://www.splendidgucci.com/mulberry-handbags-c-13.html"><strong>mulberry bag</strong></a> although so little remains to us of this creed, yet it had a very strong hold of the minds of people, in the century before Christ. Perhaps the belief was reinforced by the teaching of Socrates, who, in the vision of Er, in the “Republic,” brings back, in a myth, the old popular faith in a Purgatorio, if not in an Inferno. In the “Phaedo,” for certain, we come to the very definite account of a Hell, a place of eternal punishment, as well as of a Purgatory, whence souls are freed when their sins are expiated. “The spirits beyond redemption, for the multitude of their murders or sacrileges, Fate hurls into Tartarus, whence they never any more come forth.” But souls of lighter guilt abide a year in Tartarus, and then drift out down the streams Cocytus and Pyriphlegethon. Thence they reach the marsh of Acheron, Letters on Literature 49 but are not released until they have received the pardon of the souls whom in life they had injured. All this, and much more to the same purpose in other dialogues of Plato’s, appears to have been derived by Socrates from the popular unphilosophic traditions, from Folk-lore in short, and to have been raised ghd ceramic iron by him to the rank of “pious opinion,” if not of dogma. Now, Lucretius represents nothing but the reaction against all this dread of future doom, whether that dread was inculcated by Platonic philosophy or by popular belief. The latter must have been much the more powerful and widely diffused. It follows that the Romans, at least, must have been haunted by a constant dread of judgment to come, from which, but for the testimony of Lucretius and his manifest sincerity, we might have believed them free. Perhaps we may regret the existence of this Roman religion, for it did its best to ruin a great poet. The sublimity of the language of Lucretius, when he can leave his attempts at scientific proof, the closeness of his observation, his enjoyment of life, of Nature, and his power of painting them, a certain largeness of touch, and noble amplitude of manner–these, with a burning sincerity, mark him above all others that smote the Latin lyre. Yet these great qualities are half-crushed by his task, by his attempt to turn the atomic theory into verse, by his unsympathetic effort to destroy all faith and hope, because these were united, in his mind, with dread of Styx and Acheron. It is an almost intolerable philosophy, the philosophy of eternal sleep, <a href="http://www.splendidgucci.com/chloe-handbags-c-5.html"><strong>chloe bags</strong></a> without dreams and without awakening. This belief is wholly divorced from joy, which inspires all the best art. This negation of hope has cheap ghd straighteners “close-lipped Patience for its only friend.” In vain does Lucretius paint pictures of life and Nature so large, so glowing, so majestic that they remind us of nothing but the “Fete Champetre” of Giorgione, in the Louvre. All that life is a thing we must leave soon, and forever, and must be hopelessly lapped in an eternity of blind silence. “I shall let men see the certain end of all,” he cries; “then will they resist religion, and the threats of priests and prophets.” But this “certain end” is exactly what mortals do not desire to see. To this sleep they prefer even tenebras Orci, vastasque lacunas. Letters on Literature 50 They will not be deprived of gods, “the friends of man, merciful gods, compassionate.” They will not turn from even a faint hope in those to the Lucretian deities in their endless and indifferent repose and divine “delight in immortal and peaceful life, far, far away from us and ours–life painless and fearless, needing nothing we can give, replete with its own wealth, unmoved by prayer and promise, untouched by anger.” Do you remember that hymn, as one may call it, of Lucretius to Death, to Death which does not harm us. “For as we knew no hurt of old, in ages when the Carthaginian thronged against us in war, and the world was shaken with the shock of fight, and dubious hung the empire over all things mortal by sea and land, even so careless, so unmoved, shall we remain, in days when we shall no more exist, when the bond of body and soul that makes our life is broken. Then naught shall move us, nor wake a single sense, not though earth with sea be mingled, and sea with sky.” There is no hell, he cries, or, like Omar, he says, coloured Ghd Hair Straighteners “Hell is the vision of a soul on fire.” ghd ceramic straighteners Your true Tityus, gnawed by the vulture, is only the slave of passion and of love; your true Sisyphus (like Lord Salisbury in Punch) is only the politician, striving always, never attaining; the stone rolls down again from the hill-crest, and thunders far along the plain. Thus his pink ghd philosophy, which gives him such a delightful sense of freedom, is rejected after all these years of trial by men. They feel that since those remotest days “Quum Venus in silvis jungebat corpora amantum,” they have travelled the long, the weary way Lucretius describes to little avail, if they may not keep their hopes and fears. Robbed of these we are robbed of all; it serves us nothing to have conquered the soil <a href="http://inbookmark.com/mybookmark.php"><strong>coach handbags</strong></a> and fought the winds and waves, to have built cities, and tamed fire, if the world is to be “dispeopled of its dreams.” Better were the old life we started from, and dreams therewith, better the free days – “Novitas tum florida mundi Pabula dia tulit, miseris mortablibus ampla;” than wealth or power, and neither hope nor fear, but one certain end of all before the eyes of all. Letters on Literature 51 Thus the heart of man has answered, and will answer Lucretius, the noblest Roman poet, and ghd pure the least beloved, who sought, at last, by his own hand, they say, the doom that Virgil waited for in the season appointed. Letters on Literature 52 TO A YOUNG AMERICAN BOOK-HUNTER To Philip Dodsworth, Esq., New York. Dear Dodsworth,–Let me congratulate you on having joined the army of book-hunters. “Everywhere have I sought peace and found it nowhere,” says the blessed Thomas e Kempis, “save in a corner with a book.” Whether that good monk wrote the “De Imitatione Christi” or not, one always likes him for his love of books. Perhaps he was the only book-hunter that ever wrought a miracle. “Other signs and miracles which he was wont to tell as having happened at the prayer of an unnamed person, are believed to have been granted to his own, such as the sudden reappearance of a lost book in his cell.” Ah, if Faith, that moveth mountains, could only bring back the books we have lost, the books that have been borrowed from us! But we are a faithless generation. From a collector so much older and better experienced in misfortune than yourself, you ask for some advice on the sport of book-hunting. Well, I will give it; but you will not take it. No; you will hunt wild, like young pointers before they are properly broken. Let me suppose that you are “to middle fortune born,” and that you cannot stroll into the great book-marts and give your orders freely for all that is rich and rare. You are obliged to wait and watch an opportunity, to practise that maxim of the Stoic’s, “Endure and abstain.” Then abstain from rushing at every volume, however out of the line of your literary interests, which seems to be a bargain. Probably it is not even a bargain; it can seldom be cheap to you, if you do not need it, and do not mean to read it. Not that any collector reads all his books. I may have, and indeed do possess, an Aldine Homer and Caliergus his Theocritus; but I prefer to study the authors in a cheap German edition. The old editions we buy mainly for their beauty, and the ghd products