503d STATION.
Lampoon on the Chaplain.—Praise of Him.—The Diamond. — Opinions against Immortality.—Eden Jokes.
E two fellow-carriers formed the rear-guard. I wished to enter into discourse, but Phylax had a very poor opinion of me; at most he thought me a fickle sentimentalist who only portrays feelings. Yet feelings are the sponge of atmospheric air, which the poet, on his high Parnassus, as well as the philosophical diver in his depths, must hold in his mouth, and yet poetry has cast an earlier light on many obscure works of nature than philosophy, as the dark new moon borrows light from Venus.
But the philosopher sms against poets more than you sin against the followers of Kant, from whom you seem to expect that they shall write pleasingly. Your arguments are ideas, not reasonings, when you say that philosophy's attendants are like those of Turkish ladies, mute, black, and deformed; that the philosophical market-place is a forium morionum,[1] and that beauty is forbidden to philosophers, as it was to the Helots, who were killed for possessing it. Is it not evident that a certain barbarous,
- ↑ A market-place in Rome where deformed beings were sold, and fetched a higher price the uglier they were.
