be perfect and fully nourished on the pastures of truth and beauty, lifts the soul heavenwards to the dwelling of the gods. There, on a certain day, gods and demigods ascend the heavens—Zeus leading the way in a winged chariot—to hold high festival, and all who can may follow. The gods and the immortal souls, whose steeds have full-grown wings, are carried by a revolution of the spheres into a celestial world beyond, where all space is filled by a sea of intangible essence which the mind—"lord of the soul"—alone can contemplate: and here are the absolute ideas of Truth and Beauty and Justice. And in these divine pastures of pure knowledge the soul feeds during the time that the spheres revolve, and rests in perfect happiness, and then returns to the heavens whence it came, where the steeds feast in their stalls on nectar and ambrosia.
But only to a few souls out of many is it granted to see those celestial visions. The rest are carried into the gulfs of space by the plunging of the unruly horses, or lamed by unskilful driving; and often the wings droop or are broken, and the soul fails to see the light, and sinks to earth "beneath the double load of forgetfulness or vice." And then she takes the form of a man, and becomes a mortal creature; and, according to the degree in which she has attained to celestial truth, she is implanted in one of nine classes,—the highest being that of the philosophers, artists, poets, or lovers—and the lowest stage of all, the tyrant. Ten thousand years must be passed by the soul in this state of probation, before she can return to the place
