" Of Plotinus, we have
eulogies by Porphyry and Longinus, and the favor of the Emperor
Gallienus,--indicating the respect he inspired among his
contemporaries. If any one who had read with interest the "Isis and
Osiris" of Plutarch should then read a chapter called "Providence,"
by Synesius, translated into English by Thomas Taylor, he will find
it one of the majestic remains of literature, and, like one walking
in the noblest of temples, will conceive new gratitude to his
fellowmen, and a new estimate of their nobility. The imaginative
scholar will find few stimulants to his brain like these writers. He
has entered the Elysian Fields; and the grand and pleasing figures
of gods and daemons and demoniacal men, of the "azonic" and the
"aquatic gods," daemons with fulgid eyes, and all the rest of the
Platonic rhetoric, exalted a little under the African sun, sail
before his eyes. The acolyte has mounted the tripod over the cave at
Delphi; his heart dances, his sight is quickened. These guides speak
of the gods with such depth and with such pictorial details, as if
they had been bodily present at the Olympian feasts. The reader of
these books makes new acquaintance with his own mind; new regions of
thought are opened. Jamblichus's "Life of Pythagoras" works more
directly on the will than the others; since Pythagoras was eminently
a practical person, the founder of a school of ascetics and
socialists, a planter of colonies, and nowise a man of abstract
studies alone.
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