]) the great vision of the sea; places the listener
'In the sun's palace-porch,
And murmurs as the ocean murmurs there.'
Now, on some moonless night, in some fitting condition of the
atmosphere, if Lord Rosse would permit the reader and myself to walk
into the front drawing-room of his telescope, then, in Mrs. Barbauld's
words, slightly varied, I might say to him,--Come, and I will show you
what is sublime! In fact, what I am going to lay before him, from Dr.
Nichol's work, is, or at least _would_ be, (when translated into
Hebrew grandeur by the mighty telescope,) a step above even that object
which some four-and-twenty years ago in the British Museum struck me as
simply the sublimest sight which in this sight-seeing world I had seen.
It was the Memnon's head, then recently brought from Egypt. I looked at
it, as the reader must suppose, in order to understand the depth which
I have here ascribed to the impression, not as a human but as a
symbolic head; and what it symbolized to me were: 1. The peace which
passeth all understanding. 2. The eternity which baffles and confounds
all faculty of computation; the eternity which _had_ been, the
eternity which _was_ to be. 3. The diffusive love, not such as
rises and falls upon waves of life and mortality, not such as sinks and
swells by undulations of time, but a procession--an emanation from some
mystery of endless dawn.
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