[Dr. Alexander Geddes, 1737-1802, was, _inter alia_, author of a revised translation of the Scriptures.]
How often I have occasion to notice with pure delight the depth of the exceeding blueness of the Mediterranean from my window! It is often, indeed, purple; but I am speaking of its blueness--a perfect blue, so very pure an one. The sea is like a night-sky; and but for its _planities_, it were as if the night-sky were a thing that turned round and lay in the day-time under the paler Heaven. And it is on this expanse that the vessels have the fine white dazzling cotton sails.
Centuries before their mortal incarnation, Jove was wont to manifest to the gods the several creations as they emerged from the divine ideal. Now it was reported in heaven that an unusually fair creation of a woman was emerging, and Venus, fearful that her son should become enamoured as of yore with Psyche (what time he wandered alone, his bow unslung, and using his darts only to cut out her name on rocks and trees, or, at best, to shoot hummingbirds and birds of Paradise to make feather-chaplets for her hair, and the world, meanwhile, grown loveless, hardened into the Iron Age), entreats Jove to secrete this form [of perilous beauty]. But Cupid, who had heard the report, and fondly expected a re-manifestation of Psyche, hid himself in the hollow of the sacred oak beneath which the Father of Gods had withdrawn as to an unapproachable adytum, and beheld the Idea emerging in its _First Glory_. Forthwith the wanton was struck blind by the splendour ere yet the blaze had defined itself with form, and now his arrows strike but vaguely.
I have somewhere read, or I have dreamt, a wild tale of Ceres' loss of Proserpine, and her final recovery of her daughter by means of Christ when He descended into hell, at which time she met Him and abjured all worship for the future.
It were a quaint mythological conceit to feign that the gods of Greece and Rome were some of the _best_ of the fallen spirits, and that of their number _Apollo_, Mars, and the Muses were converted to Christianity, and became different saints.
The ribbed flame--its snatches of impatience, that half-seem, and only _seem_ that half, to baffle its upward rush--the eternal unity of individualities whose essence is in their distinguishableness, even as thought and _fancies_ in the mind; the points of so many cherubic swords snatched back, but never discouraged, still fountaining upwards:--flames self-snatched up heavenward, if earth supply the fuel, heaven the dry light air--themselves still making the current that will fan and spread them--yet all their force in vain, if of itself--and light dry air, heaped fuel, fanning breeze as idle, if no inward spark lurks there, or lurks unkindled. Such a spark, O man! is thy Free Will--the star whose beams are Virtue!