Round the boles of the pine-wood the ground-laurel creeps, Unkissed of the sunshine, unbaptized of showers, With buds scarcely swelled, which should burst into flowers!
Limbo is the place. In Limbo one has natural happiness without the beatific vision; no harps; no communal order; but wine and conversation and imperfect, various humanity. Limbo for the unbaptized, for the pious heathen, the sincere sceptic.
In Homer and Chaucer there is more of the innocence and serenity of youth than in the more modern and moral poets. The Iliad is not Sabbath but morning reading, and men cling to this old song, because they still have moments of unbaptized and uncommitted life, which give them an appetite for more.
The Augustinian doctrine of the damnation of unbaptized infants and the Calvinistic doctrine of reprobation. . . surpass in atrocity any tenets that have ever been admitted into any pagan creed.