Page:The poems of George Eliot (Crowell, 1884).djvu/416

 Brushed back to show his great capacity—

A full grain's length at the angle of the brow

Proving him witty, while the shallower men

Only seem witty in their repartees.

Not that he 's vain, but that his doctrine needs

The testimony of his frontal lobe.

On all points he adopts the latest views;

Takes for the key of universal Mind

The "levitation" of stout gentlemen;

Believes the Rappings are not spirits' work,

But the Thought-atmosphere's, a stream of brains

In correlated force of raps, as proved

By motion, heat, and science generally;

The spectrum, for example, which has shown

The selfsame metals in the sun as here;

So the Thought-atmosphere is everywhere:

High truths that glimmered under other names

To ancient sages, whence good scholarship

Applied to Eleusinian mysteries—

The Vedas—Tripitaka—Vendidad—

Might furnish weaker proof for weaker minds

That Thought was rapping in the hoary past,

And might have edified the Greeks by raps

At the greater Dionysia, if their ears

Had not been filled with Sophoclean verse.

And when all Earth is vegetarian—

When, lacking butchers, quadrupeds die out,

And less Thought-atmosphere is reabsorbed

By nerves of insects parasitical,

Those higher truths, seized now by higher minds

But not expressed (the insects hindering),

Will either flash out into eloquence.

Or better still, be comprehensible

By rappings simply, without need of roots.