As We Sat On The Bank Eating Our Supper, The Clear Light Of The
Western Sky Fell On The Eastern Trees, And Was Reflected In The
Water, And We Enjoyed So Serene An Evening As Left Nothing To
Describe.
For the most part we think that there are few degrees
of sublimity, and that the highest is but little higher than that
which we now behold; but we are always deceived.
Sublimer
visions appear, and the former pale and fade away. We are
grateful when we are reminded by interior evidence of the
permanence of universal laws; for our faith is but faintly
remembered, indeed, is not a remembered assurance, but a use and
enjoyment of knowledge. It is when we do not have to believe,
but come into actual contact with Truth, and are related to her
in the most direct and intimate way. Waves of serener life pass
over us from time to time, like flakes of sunlight over the
fields in cloudy weather. In some happier moment, when more sap
flows in the withered stalk of our life, Syria and India stretch
away from our present as they do in history. All the events
which make the annals of the nations are but the shadows of our
private experiences. Suddenly and silently the eras which we
call history awake and glimmer in us, and _there_ is room for
Alexander and Hannibal to march and conquer. In short, the
history which we read is only a fainter memory of events which
have happened in our own experience. Tradition is a more
interrupted and feebler memory.
This world is but canvas to our imaginations. I see men with
infinite pains endeavoring to realize to their bodies, what I,
with at least equal pains, would realize to my imagination, - its
capacities; for certainly there is a life of the mind above the
wants of the body, and independent of it. Often the body is
warmed, but the imagination is torpid; the body is fat, but the
imagination is lean and shrunk. But what avails all other wealth
if this is wanting? "Imagination is the air of mind," in which
it lives and breathes. All things are as I am. Where is the
House of Change? The past is only so heroic as we see it.
It is the canvas on which our idea of heroism is painted, and
so, in one sense, the dim prospectus of our future field. Our
circumstances answer to our expectations and the demand of our
natures. I have noticed that if a man thinks that he needs a
thousand dollars, and cannot be convinced that he does not, he
will commonly be found to have them; if he lives and thinks a
thousand dollars will be forthcoming, though it be to buy
shoe-strings with. A thousand mills will be just as slow to
come to one who finds it equally hard to convince himself that
he needs _them_.
Men are by birth equal in this, that given Themselves and
their condition, they are even.
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