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As for my studies! how can you, who have, and in no moderate draught, drank of the old stream of Castaly, how can you ask me now to change them? Are not the ancients my food, my aliment, my solace in sorrow my sympathizers, my very benefactors, in joy? Take them away from me, and you take away the very winds which purify and give motion to the obscure and silent current of my life.
And even if I cannot get up to the granite junctions in the glen, the stream comes down from them pure to the Garry; but in Beddington Park I am stopped by the newly-erected fence of a building speculator; and the bright Wandel, divine of waters as Castaly, is filled by the free public with old shoes, obscene crockery, and ashes.
It is to no avail that the Muse of Poetry be called, even by such a clarion note as Whitman's, to migrate from Greece and Ionia and to placard REMOVED and TO LET on the rocks of the snowy Parnassus. Calliope's call is not yet closed, nor are the epics of Asia ended; the Sphinx is not yet silent, nor the fountain of Castaly dry.
"But," cried Anthony Hamilton, taking a pinch of snuff with the air of a man about to utter a witty thing, "but what have we we spirits of the world, not imps of the closet," and he glanced at Huet "to do with scholarship? All the waters of Castaly, which we want to pour into our brain, are such as will flow the readiest to our tongue."
That chapter is the sublimity of disgust! There never was anyone hurt spiritually or morally by the great French masterpiece of fiction. The man who can say the book is defiling, would draw defilement from the fount of Castaly. The Philadelphia school board has declared itself an aggregation of asses.
"But," cried Anthony Hamilton, taking a pinch of snuff with the air of a man about to utter a witty thing, "but what have we we spirits of the world, not imps of the closet," and he glanced at Huet "to do with scholarship? All the waters of Castaly, which we want to pour into our brain, are such as will flow the readiest to our tongue."
All truly great men are spiritualists even mystics. A materialist may be a logician, a mathematician, in a limited way; but never an orator nor a poet. He is of the earth earthly; an intellectual Antaeus the moment his feet leave the sodden clay he is strangled by the gods. For him there is no Fount of Castaly whose sweet waters make men mad.
O Phoibos, lord of Lykia and of Delos, who lovest the spring of Castaly on thy Parnassos, be this the purpose of thy will, and grant the land fair issue of her men. For from gods come all means of mortal valour, hereby come bards and men of mighty hand and eloquent speech.
Ye nymphs of Castaly that hold the steep of Parnassus, say, was it ever a bowl like this that old Chiron set before Heracles in the rocky cave of Pholus? Was it nectar like this that beguiled the shepherd to dance and foot it about his folds, the shepherd that dwelt by Anapus, on a time, the strong Polyphemus who hurled at ships with mountains?
It represented heaven itself such a heaven, as in the nights of June might have shone down over the streams of Castaly. Here and there were painted rosy and aerial clouds, from which smiled, by the limner's art, faces of divinest beauty, and on which reposed the shapes of which Phidias and Apelles dreamed.
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