Instead of ripening and culturing that airy soil, from which Nature, duly known, can evoke fruits so rich and flowers so fair, they strive but to exclude it from their gaze; they esteem that struggle of the intellect from men's narrow world to the spirit's infinite home, as a disease which the leech must extirpate with pharmacy and drugs, and know not even that it is from this condition of their being, in its most imperfect and infant form, that poetry, music, art--all that belong to an Idea of Beauty to which neither SLEEPING nor WAKING can furnish archetype and actual semblance--take their immortal birth.

When we, O Mejnour in the far time, were ourselves the neophytes and aspirants, we were of a class to which the actual world was shut and barred.

Our forefathers had no object in life but knowledge.

From the cradle we were predestined and reared to wisdom as to a priesthood.

We commenced research where modern Conjecture closes its faithless wings.