Hyperion to Bellarmin
What's all the artful knowledge in the world, what’s the whole proud perfection of human thought, compared to the unstudied tones of this spirit that knew neither what it knew nor what it was?
Who wouldn’t rather have their grape in a cluster, full and fresh, just as it sprang from the root, than the dried plucked berries that the merchant crams into the crate and sends out into the world? What’s the wisdom of a book compared to the wisdom of an angel?
She seemed always to say so little, and said so much.
Once I walked her home in the gloaming; like dreams wisps of dewy mist came stealing over the meadow, like eavesdropping genii the blissful stars peeped through the boughs.
You seldom heard a ‘how beautiful!’ from her lips, even though this pious heart left no lisping leaf, no murmur of a burn unheeded.
But this time she did indeed speak it out to me — ‘how beautiful!’
‘Well, that will be for our sake!’ I said, rather in the way that children say things, neither in jest nor in earnest.
‘I can imagine what you mean,’ she responded, ‘I best like to picture the world to myself as the life of a couthie household where everyone fits in with the others without even having to think about it, and we live for the pleasure and joy of each other because that’s how it comes from the heart.’
‘Happy, sublime faith!’ I cried.
She was silent a while.
‘So we too are children of the house,’ I finally resumed, ‘we are and we shall be.’
‘Shall for ever be,’ she responded.
‘Shall we?’ I asked.
‘In this I put my trust in nature,’ she continued, ‘as I do every day.’
Oh, to have been Diotima when she said this! But you don’t know what she said, my Bellarmin! You didn’t see it and didn’t hear it.
‘Youre right,’ I cried to her; ‘eternal beauty, nature suffers no loss in herself, just as she suffers no addition. Her costume will be tomorrow different from today; but our best, us, us she cannot do without and you least of all. We believe we’re eternal, for our soul feels the beauty of nature. She'll be mere patchwork, no longer divine, no longer complete, if ever you’re missing in her. She doesn’t deserve your heart if she has to blush before your hopes.’