poetry. "Those lucent syrups tinct with cinnamon and sugared dainties" from Samarcand to cedared Lebanon, show that Keats had not got over his boyish taste for sweet things, and reached the maturity and gravity of appetite which dictated the Miltonian description. He died at twenty-four years. Had he lived longer, he might have sung of roast and boiled as sublimely as Milton has done.
Epicurus, in exalting cookery and eating and drinking to a plane of philosophical importance, was a true friend of his race, and showed himself the most sensible and wisest of all the Greek philosophers. A psychometrical critic of the philosopher of the garden says:—
"The first and last necessity is eating. The animated world is unceasingly eating and digesting itself. None could see this truth clearly but an enthusiast in diet like Epicurus, who, discovering the unexceptionableness of the natural law, proceeded to the work of adaptation. Ocean, lake, streamlet, was separately interrogated, 'How much delicious food do you contain? What are your preparations? When should man partake?' In like manner did the enthusiast peregrinate through Nature's empire, fixing his chemical eye upon plant and shrub and berry and vine,—asking every creeping thing, and the animal creation also, 'What can you do for man?' And such truths as the angels sent! Sea, earth, and air were overflowing and heavily laden with countless means of happiness. 'The whole was a cupboard of food or cabinet of pleasure.' Life must not be sacrificed by man, for thereby he would defeat the end sought. Man's fine love of life must save him from taking life." (This is not doctrine to promulgate in the latitude of Quincy Market, O clairvoyant Davis!) "In the world of fruit, berries, vines, flowers, herbs, grains, grasses, could be found all proper food for 'bodily ease and mental tranquillity.'
"Behold the enthusiast! classifying man's senses to be gratified at the table. All dishes must be beautifully prepared and disposed to woo and win the sense of sight; the assembled articles must give off odors harmoniously blended to delight and cultivate the sense of smell; and each substance must balance with every other in point of flavor, to meet the natural demands of taste; otherwise the entertainment is shorn of its virtue to bless and tranquillize the soul! . . . .
"But lo, the fanatic in eating appears! Miserably hot with gluttonous debauchery. He has feasted upon a thousand deaths! Belshazzar's court fed on fish of every type, birds of every flight, brutes of every clime, and added thereto each finer luxury known in the catalogue of the temperate Epicurus. . . . .
"Behold the sceptics. A shivering group of acid ghouls at their scanty board. . . . . Bread, milk, bran, turnips, onions, potatoes, apples, yield so much starch, so much sugar, so much nitrogen, so much nutriment! Enough! to live is the end of eating, not to be pleased and made better with objects, odors, flavors. Therefore welcome a few articles of food in violation of every fine sensibility. Stuff in and masticate the crudest forms of eatables,—bad-cooking, bad-looking, bad-smelling, bad-tasting, and worse-feeling,—down with them hastily,—and then, between your headaches and gastric spasms, pride yourself upon virtues and temperance not possessed by any student in the gastronomic school of Epicurus! Let it be perpetually remembered to the credit of this apostle of alimentation and vitativeness with temperance, that, in his religious system, eating was a 'sacramental' process, and not a physical indulgence merely, as the ignorant allege."
Bravo for the seer of Poughkeepsie! In the above extracts, quoted from his "Thinker," he has vindicated the much maligned Epicurus better than his disciples Lucretius and Gassendi have done, and by some mysterious process (he calls it psychometry) he seems to know more of the old Athenian, and to have a more intimate knowledge of his doctrines, than can be found in Brucker or Ritter.
When it is considered how our mental states may be modified by what we eat
