Here, truly, was a doctrine to propagate, a
secret open to every one who would learn, towards a new management of
life,--nay! a new religion, or at least a new worship, maintaining
and visibly setting forth a single overpowering apprehension.
The worship of physical beauty a religion, the proper faculty of
which would be the bodily eye! Looked at in this way, some of the
well- [71] marked characteristics of the poetry of the Pleiad assumed
a hieratic, almost an ecclesiastical air. That rigid correctness;
that gracious unction, as of the medieval Latin psalmody; that
aspiring fervour; that jealousy of the profane "vulgar"; the sense,
flattering to one who was in the secret, that this thing, even in its
utmost triumph, could never be really popular:--why were these so
welcome to him but from the continuity of early mental habit? He
might renew the over-grown tonsure, and wait, devoutly, rapturously,
in this goodly sanctuary of earth and sky about him, for the
manifestation, at the moment of his own worthiness, of flawless
humanity, in some undreamed-of depth and perfection of the loveliness
of bodily form.
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