Light, or
gilded with the rays of the setting sun, like the battlements of
a city in the heavens, their grandeur appears thrown away on the
meanness of my employment; the drapery is altogether too rich for
such poor acting. I am hardly worthy to be a suburban dweller
outside those walls
"Unless above himself he can
Erect himself, how poor a thing is man!"
With our music we would fain challenge transiently another and
finer sort of intercourse than our daily toil permits. The
strains come back to us amended in the echo, as when a friend
reads our verse. Why have they so painted the fruits, and
freighted them with such fragrance as to satisfy a more than
animal appetite?
"I asked the schoolman, his advice was free,
But scored me out too intricate a way."
These things imply, perchance, that we live on the verge of
another and purer realm, from which these odors and sounds are
wafted over to us. The borders of our plot are set with flowers,
whose seeds were blown from more Elysian fields adjacent. They
are the pot-herbs of the gods. Some fairer fruits and sweeter
fragrances wafted over to us, betray another realm's vicinity.
There, too, does Echo dwell, and there is the abutment of the
rainbow's arch.
A finer race and finer fed
Feast and revel o'er our head,
And we titmen are only able
To catch the fragments from their table.
Theirs is the fragrance of the fruits,
While we consume the pulp and roots.
What are the moments that we stand
Astonished on the Olympian land!
We need pray for no higher heaven than the pure senses can
furnish, a _purely_ sensuous life. Our present senses are but
the rudiments of what they are destined to become. We are
comparatively deaf and dumb and blind, and without smell or taste
or feeling. Every generation makes the discovery, that its
divine vigor has been dissipated, and each sense and faculty
misapplied and debauched. The ears were made, not for such
trivial uses as men are wont to suppose, but to hear celestial
sounds. The eyes were not made for such grovelling uses as they
are now put to and worn out by, but to behold beauty now
invisible. May we not _see_ God? Are we to be put off and
amused in this life, as it were with a mere allegory? Is not
Nature, rightly read, that of which she is commonly taken to be
the symbol merely? When the common man looks into the sky, which
he has not so much profaned, he thinks it less gross than the
earth, and with reverence speaks of "the Heavens," but the seer
will in the same sense speak of "the Earths," and his Father who
is in them.
