A Hindoo sage said, "As a dancer, having exhibited herself to the
spectator, desists from the dance, so does Nature desist, having
manifested herself to soul - . Nothing, in my opinion, is more
gentle than Nature; once aware of having been seen, she does not
again expose herself to the gaze of soul."
It is easier to discover another such a new world as Columbus
did, than to go within one fold of this which we appear to know
so well; the land is lost sight of, the compass varies, and
mankind mutiny; and still history accumulates like rubbish before
the portals of nature. But there is only necessary a moment's
sanity and sound senses, to teach us that there is a nature
behind the ordinary, in which we have only some vague pre-emption
right and western reserve as yet. We live on the outskirts of
that region. Carved wood, and floating boughs, and sunset skies,
are all that we know of it. We are not to be imposed on by the
longest spell of weather. Let us not, my friends, be wheedled
and cheated into good behavior to earn the salt of our eternal
porridge, whoever they are that attempt it. Let us wait a
little, and not purchase any clearing here, trusting that richer
bottoms will soon be put up. It is but thin soil where we stand;
I have felt my roots in a richer ere this. I have seen a bunch
of violets in a glass vase, tied loosely with a straw, which
reminded me of myself.
I am a parcel of vain strivings tied
By a chance bond together,
Dangling this way and that, their links
Were made so loose and wide,
Methinks,
For milder weather.
A bunch of violets without their roots,
And sorrel intermixed,
Encircled by a wisp of straw
Once coiled about their shoots,
The law
By which I'm fixed.
A nosegay which Time clutched from out
Those fair Elysian fields,
With weeds and broken stems, in haste,
Doth make the rabble rout
That waste
The day he yields.
And here I bloom for a short hour unseen,
Drinking my juices up,
With no root in the land
To keep my branches green,
But stand
In a bare cup.
Some tender buds were left upon my stem
In mimicry of life,
But ah! the children will not know,
Till time has withered them,
The woe
With which they're rife.
But now I see I was not plucked for naught,
And after in life's vase
Of glass set while I might survive,
But by a kind hand brought
Alive
To a strange place.
That stock thus thinned will soon redeem its hours,
And by another year,
Such as God knows, with freer air,
More fruits and fairer flowers
Will bear,
While I droop here.
This world has many rings, like Saturn, and we live now on the
outmost of them all. None can say deliberately that he inhabits
the same sphere, or is contemporary with, the flower which his
hands have plucked, and though his feet may seem to crush it,
inconceivable spaces and ages separate them, and perchance there
is no danger that he will hurt it. What do the botanists know?
Our lives should go between the lichen and the bark. The eye may
see for the hand, but not for the mind. We are still being born,
and have as yet but a dim vision of sea and land, sun, moon and
stars, and shall not see clearly till after nine days at least.
That is a pathetic inquiry among travellers and geographers after
the site of ancient Troy. It is not near where they think it is.
When a thing is decayed and gone, how indistinct must be the
place it occupied!
The anecdotes of modern astronomy affect me in the same way as do
those faint revelations of the Real which are vouchsafed to men
from time to time, or rather from eternity to eternity. When I
remember the history of that faint light in our firmament, which
we call Venus, which ancient men regarded, and which most modern
men still regard, as a bright spark attached to a hollow sphere
revolving about our earth, but which we have discovered to be
_another world_, in itself, - how Copernicus, reasoning long and
patiently about the matter, predicted confidently concerning it,
before yet the telescope had been invented, that if ever men came
to see it more clearly than they did then, they would discover
that it had phases like our moon, and that within a century after
his death the telescope was invented, and that prediction
verified, by Galileo, - I am not without hope that we may, even
here and now obtain some accurate information concerning that
OTHER WORLD which the instinct of mankind has so long predicted.
Indeed, all that we call science, as well as all that we call
poetry, is a particle of such information, accurate as far as it
goes, though it be but to the confines of the truth. If we can
reason so accurately, and with such wonderful confirmation of our
reasoning, respecting so-called material objects and events
infinitely removed beyond the range of our natural vision, so
that the mind hesitates to trust its calculations even when they
are confirmed by observation, why may not our speculations
penetrate as far into the immaterial starry system, of which the
former is but the outward and visible type? Surely, we are
provided with senses as well fitted to penetrate the spaces of
the real, the substantial, the eternal, as these outward are to
penetrate the material universe. Veias, Menu, Zoroaster,
Socrates, Christ, Shakespeare, Swedenborg, - these are some of our
astronomers.
There are perturbations in our orbits produced by the influence
of outlying spheres, and no astronomer has ever yet calculated
the elements of that undiscovered world which produces them.
I perceive in the common train of my thoughts a natural and
uninterrupted sequence, each implying the next, or, if interruption
occurs, it is occasioned by a new object being presented to my
_senses_. But a steep, and sudden, and by these means unaccountable
transition, is that from a comparatively narrow and partial, what
is called common sense view of things, to an infinitely expanded
and liberating one, from seeing things as men describe them, to
seeing them as men cannot describe them.
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