The Earthly Paradise

“ How beautiful is this green world, which we inhabit! See yonder, how the moonlight mingles with the mist! What a glorious night is this! Truly every man has a Paradise around him until he sins, and the angel of an accusing conscience drives him from his Eden. And even then there are holy hours, when this angel sleeps, and man comes back, and, with the innocent eyes of a child, looks into his lost Paradise again,--into the broad gates and rural solitudes of Nature. ”

“ I believe that there is an ideal hovering over the earth,—an ideal of that Paradise which is not the mere outcome of imagination, but the ultimate reality towards which all things are moving. I believe that this vision of Paradise is to be seen in the sunlight, and the green of the earth, in the flowing streams, in the beauty of spring time, and the repose of a winter morning. Everywhere in this earth the spirit of Paradise is awake and sending forth its voice. ”

“ In the spiritual Nature-Kingdom, man must everywhere seek his peculiar territory and climate, his best occupation, his particular neighborhood, in order to cultivate a Paradise in idea; this is the right system.... Paradise is scattered over the whole earth, and that is why it has become so unrecognizable. ”

“ Beneath him with new wonder now he views,
To all delight of human sense exposed,
205In narrow room, Nature's whole wealth, yea more,
A Heaven on Earth: For blissful Paradise
Of God the garden was, by him in the east
Of Eden planted ”

“ Amidst these numerous specimens of delightful scenery I found a mount for contemplation, and here I indulged it. “How much of the natural beauties of Paradise still remain in the world, although its spiritual character has been so awfully defaced by sin! But when divine grace renews the heart of the fallen sinner, Paradise is regained, and much of its beauty restored to the soul. As this prospect is compounded of hill and dale, land and sea, woods and plains, all sweetly blended together, and relieving each other in the landscape ”

“ No joys too blissful o'er her life to shed.
And thus the land became a Paradise,
A new-made Eden, redolent of joy,
Where beauty blossom'd under sunny skies,
And peaceful pleasure reign'd without alloy.
THE LAND'S END. I stood on the Land's End, alone and still.
Man might have been unmade, for no frail trace
Of mortal labour startled the wild place,
And only sea-mews with their wailing shrill,
Circled beneath me over the dark sea,
Flashing the waves with pinions snowy white,
That glimmer'd faintly in the gloomy light
Betwixt the foaming furrows constantly. ”

“ Whilst outside, the frozen wind, laden with rain and hail, was still blowing, the fine season, in The Paradise galleries, was already budding forth with the light stuffs, the flowery brilliancy of the tender shades, the rural gaiety of the summer dresses and the parasols. ”

“ Paradise is the eternal center of the universe of universes and the abiding place of the Universal Father, the Eternal Son, the Infinite Spirit, and their divine co-ordinates and associates. This central Isle is the most gigantic organized body of cosmic reality in all the master universe. Paradise is a material sphere as well as a spiritual abode. ”

“ In Bible vignettes of the eighteenth century, Paradise—which is the archetype of the virgin splendor of nature—is depicted as a flat tiresome garden entirely without elevations of any kind, in which the dear God has already begun to correct his own handiwork, and with the shears of a French gardener has carved out from the clumps of trees, straight avenues, pyramids, and the like. ”

“ On the Earth, created in all the variety that we behold in it, excepting that the climates are all happy, our Two first Parents live in the Garden of Paradise, planted by God. The unimaginably vast enclosing Sphere hangs by a golden chain from the battlements of Heaven. ”

“ The vision of these companions, as bright as stars, and as many in number, is so attractive, and so engrossing, that all other thoughts of Paradise die out of the mind and heart by the side of it. It is enough. It is Paradise. And if so, then the houris of earth are the Paradise of earth. ”

“ On both sides of our path spread the graceful undergrowth, waving in an ocean of green, and hiding the stumps with which the plain was covered, while far away, to right and left, the prospect was bounded by forest walls, and gloomy bulwarks and parapets of pines arose in front, as if designed, in their perfect denseness, to exclude the world from some bosky Garden of Paradise beyond. ”

“ Or enchanted silent fountains of a Persian Paradise.
There are beech and birch and elm-tree—evening-still or
morning-tossed—
And the splendid generous chestnuts with their flame-like
blooms embossed,
There are oak and ash and elder, till the very sun is lost
In the green, delicious gloaming that's the light of Paradise.
Deeper, wider, steadier this beauty ever grows,
And from field-side up to tree-top the endless colour flows,
Till road and house and wayside, in the first days of the rose,
Are fathoms deep in waves of green, submerged in Paradise. ”

“ For a few days—a week or so, perhaps—the contemplation of them would be restful. You would lie about on the sands and in the sunshine and believe that you had found Paradise. And then I think that you would begin to get just a little discontented. The sun doesn't always shine here, you know, and when the sun doesn't shine, all the land is colorless. The sea is gray and ugly, the marshes are flat and dreary, the wind, even in the summer time, is cold. ”

“ It is a Heaven descended upon earth, as if the finger of God had planted the garden with trees and fruits and flowers, and his hand had watered it! One fault only can be found by the critical eye. Perhaps the scene is too flat. If the ‘verdurous wall of Paradise’ had upreared itself behind our first parents, it would have closed them in more completely, and would have given effect to the blue hills that gleam enchantment in the distance. ”

“ The atmosphere is all morning, early morning, with purple hues on the hill-side, mists rising from the river, and a vague remoteness even in the nearest forest; deep shadows lie over the valley, but the rising sun shines on the mountain-peak, lighting it up with a golden radiance, while behind it, there seemed to spread away into distance the atmosphere of another country, a beautiful unseen Paradise. Towards this mountain-peak the youth is looking with ardent eyes; one feels sure that his hopes are there, and that sooner or later he will reach the golden country beyond. ”

“ All that we anticipated of the sunset, or the after-sunset, is now present. The ocean with its waves of Tyrian dye laced with silver, the tinted bergs, the dark-blue inland hills and brown headlands underlie a sky of unutterable beauty. The west is all one paradise of colors. Surely, nature, if she follows as a mourner on the footsteps of the fall, also returns jubilant and glorious to the scenes of Eden. Here, between the white light of day and the dark of the true evening, shade and brightness, like Jacob and the angel, now meet and wrestle for the mastery. ”

“ Our human history neither opens in forests nor in cities, but in gardens and orchards whose mythologies are woven into the faith of our race; the poets having made these their chosen themes from the beginning. And we turn, as with emotions of country and consanguinity to the classic pictures of the Paradise, "planted by the Lord God eastward in Eden, and wherein he put the man, whom he had formed to dress and keep it;" ”

“ Victor, in his book “De Situ Terrarum,” expresses himself thus:—“Paradise is a spot in the Orient productive of all kind of woods and pomiferous trees. It contains the Tree of Life: there is neither cold nor heat there, but perpetual equable temperature. It contains a fountain which flows forth in four rivers.”
Rabanus Maurus, with more discretion, says:—“Many folk want to make out that the site of Paradise is in the east of the earth, though cut off by the longest intervening space of ocean or earth from all regions which man now inhabits. ”

“ Who prevents its dark 2 forests, ghostly and uninhabitable, from being changed into infinite orchards, wreathing the hills with frail-floretted snow, far away to the half-lighted horizon of April, and flushing the face of all the autumnal earth with glow of clustered food? But Paradise was a place of peace, we say, and all the animals were gentle servants to us. Well: the world would yet be a place of peace if we were all peacemakers, and gentle service should we have of its creatures if we gave them gentle mastery. ”

“ The trees were fresh and green, birds warbled on every spray, transparent rivulets murmured through the meadows, the air was neither oppressively hot in summer, nor cold in winter, so that the temperature, and the attractive objects which presented themselves at every glance, seemed to realize the imagined charms and fascinations of Paradise. ”

“ The sombre jungle on the mountain side supplies the atmosphere of mystery which enhances the ideal peace of the cloistered Paradise, wrapt in the embrace of the haunted hills, and numbered among those visions of an earlier Eden, only realised in the Asiatic birthplace of Humanity which contained the typical Garden of the World, Divinely planted, where the Voice from Heaven deepened the music of whispering leaves and sighing breeze. ”

“ It lies before us fresh and fair as when, nearly six thousand years ago, it hung amongst the green foliage of Paradise, more beautiful than any fragrant peach on which the last ripening sunbeam glows in a now fallen world. ”

“ Around such chill mockery of a fire some few of us might sit on the withered leaves, spreading out each a palm towards the imaginary warmth, and talk over our exploded scheme for beginning the life of Paradise anew.
Paradise, indeed! Nobody else in the world, I am bold to affirm—nobody, at least, in our bleak little world of New England,—had dreamed of Paradise that day except as the pole suggests the tropic. Nor, with such materials as were at hand, could the most skilful architect have constructed any better imitation of Eve's bower than might be seen in the snow hut of an Esquimaux. ”

“ It is like roving through a paradise, to sit and look at them. His broad green lawns, his half-hidden temples, his life-like luxuriant trees, his fountains, his sunny streams—all flush into the eye like the bright opening of a Utopia, or some dream over a description from Boccaccio. ”

“ These gods, like men, require an abode. In the later stages of culture this abode is a Paradise on some more or less imaginary mountain-top, or effectually cut off from men by the magical tempests of the immeasurable main, or by the supreme and silent heights of heaven. But this exaltation of ideas took long to reach. At first a strange rock, a fountain, the recesses of a cavern, or the mysterious depths of the forest, enshrouded the divinity. ”

“ In fact, to us, fresh from sand and sea and “sleeping-sickness,” it was Paradise. And I said so to Du Toit as we off-saddled for a bite at midday, knee-haltering our ponies and taking our snack under the shade of a big mimosa. I said to him, “Let’s stop here! Anyway, if we find diamonds or tin, let’s stop here! What can we want more? Green trees, birds, flowers, grass, shade for the seeking, water for the digging! This is Paradise, and it’s good enough for me. ”

“ When a certain Province of Angels rebelled, they were doom’d to the wide Space contiguous to our Globe, and by their daily Rovings from Place to Place, they might indeed discover that little Spot of Earth, called Paradise ”

“ A land teeming with beings abject and low; a land where Paradise might have been nestling amongst the giant hills of the North, now laid waste and desolated of its ancient splendors—a land of dreams, but a land of unfulfilled desires. ”

“ From these chemically analytic conceptions of a Paradise in catacombs, undisturbed in its alkaline or acid virtues by the dread of Deity, or hope of futurity, I know not how far the modern reader may willingly withdraw himself for a little time, to hear of men who, in their darkest and most foolish day, sought by their labour to make the desert as the garden of the Lord, and by their love to become worthy of permission to live with Him for ever. ”

“ We have seen how the most ancient races conceived and cherished the notion of a Paradise of surpassing beauty, situate in remote and unknown regions, both celestial and terrestrial. It is not, therefore, surprising that the Paradise of the Hebrew race—the Mosaic Eden—should have been pictured as a luxuriant garden, stocked with lovely flowers and odorous herbs, and shaded by majestic trees of every description. ”

“ Many things happen according to God's will that men cannot understand, but we are spirits of the heavenly country. The beautiful land you have seen is but a bare desert compared with Paradise, where the first created humans live, and the souls of the patriarchs and prophets. It is but a little way from here, and the river you crossed flows from it. Before you came here, God told us to water it and make the flowers bloom, so that in it you might see a land somewhat like Paradise, wherein you might rest and be rewarded after your toil."
"Where do you live?" asked Eric of the angel. ”

“ Those who dwelt in inland plains and valleys, and those accustomed to cross the great mysterious deserts on which the oasis-mirage frequently appeared and vanished like the mythical floating island, conceived of a Paradise on earth. There are references in more than one land to a Paradise among the mountains. It figures in the fairy stories of Central Europe, for instance, as “the wonderful Rose Garden” with its linden Tree of Immortality, the hiding-place of a fairy lady, its dancing nymphs and its dwarfs ”

“ A light that gladdens the earth and shines to heaven, denotes the windings of their pilgrimage, and the freshness and beauty of Paradise in the midst of the desert, point out the places of their abode. ”