Paschal Beverly Randolph

“ Deity is never to be seen, for He ever recedes from telescopic or visual scrutiny. But He is always to be felt; and whosoever feels for God is sure to touch and find him! for when we feel for him, he invariably comes forth and whispers to the soul: Here am I! But the inscrutable Being dwells within the Everlasting Shadow,—behind the Everlasting Flame; for He is the Eternal Fire! and the quintessence of All Heat; not the heat of combustion, but its opposites, like unto that which is evolved from within our souls when we truly Love. ”

“ Gradually the old clock-face seemed to clarify and expand, until, no longer obstructed by substance, I gazed out, and down, and up, through an avenue of the most astonishing light I had ever beheld. It seemed to me that I no longer occupied my body, but that, freed from flesh and time, I had become a denizen of Eternity; and on a fleecy vapor I was sustained in mid-air by the potent arm of a strange-looking old man—the veritable and precise image of him who, ten days before, had occasioned us such a fright by his mysterious conversations and evanishment. ”

“ Some thoughts are light and fantastic, like bubbles on the sea; they are beautiful while the sun shines, but the very ray that reveals their beauty also seals their doom—for the heat kills them; they burst, and forever disappear, being hollow and of but little substance: other thoughts are round, heavy, and solid as a cannon-ball, and like them, too, their mission is to batter down the mounds erected by unwise men. Words are but the garments of thought. Geometry is the Soul of all Sciences—order, symmetry, and form! ”

“ There is no power on earth either for good or ill, but Passion underlies it. That alone is the spring of all human action, and the father and mother alike of all the good and evil on the Earth! It is the golden key of Mystery, the fountain of Weakness and of Strength; and through its halo alone can man sense the ineffable essence of the Godhead! The materials in the vessels are charged with life,—with the very essence of the human soul, hence with celestial and divine magic power! ”

“ In life I had, so it seemed, builded stronger than I thought, and had reached a mental eminence—occupied a throne so lofty—that mankind wondered, stood aloof, and gazed at me from afar off; and by reason of my thought had gathered from me, and thus condemned the Thinker to an utter solitude, even in the most thronged and busy haunts of men; and I walked through earth's most crowded cities more lonely than the hermit of the desert, whose eyes are never gladdened by the sight of human form, and through the chambers of whose brain no human voice goes ringing. ”

“ On the other hand there are those exactly opposite; whose every step is a triumph, and whose touch transforms everything to gold, money, fame; success flows in upon them like a rolling tide, and they revel in delight without a shadow, till life on earth closes on them in a blaze of wealth and glory; yet these people are not half as able, good, noble, true, as the other class. ”

“ She lives!—lives with the rich blood of the South in her veins; with the vigor of the North in her constitution; with the clear brains of the temperate zone, the depth of thought of the Orient, the versatility of France, and earnestness of purpose, and boldness of resolution of the New World; lives these three hundred years that you think her dead, as she lived the countless centuries before you thought her born; and may she never cease to have a fitting casket for her jewels, and remain a reflex of the glorious truth and beauty of the superlative wisdom, power and goodness. ”

“ Story of a Monad.
"Up, up, up, there in the steep and silent heaven there shines a radiant sun, more glorious than even a seraph might tell. Its essence is not matter, but spirit; and from its surface there go forth three kinds of light; the one in rays, another in waves. Condensed, the former becomes matter, and the latter is the ocean in which it is upborne,—in which the worlds are floating, and in which all things have a being. Aye! all things ride upon the billows of this infinite sea, even as a shallop or an egg-shell sails upon the tiny wavelets of a lake. ”

“ My mind framed a desire to behold something of the future that should be as plain as the pictures of the past had been, and if there was any means whereby the blows of fate might be softened, any field in which to live and act free from the loneliness hitherto endured, and when next my eyes glanced through the magic tube, there passed across the field of vision a solitary human head and bust. ”

“ Death is standing at the cabin door; he is gazing down below, looking up aloft, glaring out over the bleak, into the farther night. See! he is stalking about the deck—the icy deck—very slippery it is, and where you fall you die, for he has trodden on the spot. Ah, me! ah, me! Woe, woe, a terrible woe is here, Tom Clark! Tom Clark, don't you hear? Death stands glamoring on you! Hark! he is whistling in the rigging; he is swinging on the snapping ends of yonder loosened halliards; if they strike you you are dead, for they are Whips, and Death is snapping them! He is calling you, Tom Clark ”

“ There's a depth beneath them all, and into these deeps I believe it possible to dive, and to bring up many a pearl, and crystal, and grains of golden sand from the floor of his being—from out the silver sea of life, whose waters flow soul-ward, and have their rise beneath the throne, whereon sitteth for evermore the Infinite Eternal—the great I am: Aye, it is possible to know oneself, notwithstanding that, to ninety-nine persons in a hundred, there seems to be an impenetrable cloud, circumvolving them—an obscurity, thick as darkest night, hemming them in on all sides. ”

“ The common sense of mankind knows full well that he is no man, but only a satyr, who demands what cannot be granted, save with a shudder of unutterable horror and disgust; pangs past endurance, or at the risk of health and life.
The action of the muscles is as clear an expression of a passion, and the mental states behind it, as are the tones which utter it; for "Actions speak louder than words" is not only a truism, but an absolute and unqualified truth itself. Wherefore if you mean love, look love from top to toe, and all over! ”

“ It looked, for all the world, as if the greatest possible favor that could be done for it, would be to tread on the tail of its coat, or knock a chip off its shoulder, or as if its supreme delight would be to be permitted to wrap itself in a star-spangled banner; move across the room in three strides and a straddle; fire off two horse-pistols, and die like a son of a—gun, after having exercised a special penchant for divorced women—separating wives from their husbands, for the sake of position, wealth, beauty and passion. ”

“ I rejoice in the presence of such a fact, and fold her as a sister folds another to her soul. People are false to the light within them. It is a great thing to be true to self—to stand forth the champion of your noblest thought, when all fingers point at at you with scorn, all heels are upraised to crush the sweet life out of you, and when only God and your own stout heart are on your side. ”

“ How, let me ask, in God's Holy Name, can you expect home, happiness or heaven in a family where the wife never, from the altar, where she swore her life away, to the grave that closes over her fretted corpse, never realizes the slightest marriage joy, or anything else than utter and profound disgust? How can a man be constant, faithful, good or great, who is in a sense, compelled to run after harlots because his wife is concentrated ice? You can't expect perfection from conditions themselves imperfect! But there is a clear passage and open water out of this Polar sea of marriage land. ”