Zemstvo

“ The World moulders away the fabric of our early nature, and Solitude rebuilds it on a firmer base.
CHAPTER II. THE VICTORY. O EARTH! Reservoir of life, over whose deep bosom brood the wings of the Universal Spirit, shaking upon thee a blessing and a power,—a blessing and a power to produce and reproduce the living from the dead, so that our flesh is woven from the same atoms which were once the atoms of our sires, and the inexhaustible nutriment of Existence is Decay! O eldest and most solemn Earth, blending even thy loveliness and joy with a terror and an awe! ”

“ The effulgence of the sun terminated and no more light or heat?
When we observe that in the kingdom of minerals the divine bounties are continuous, how much more shall we expect and realize in the divine spiritual Kingdom! How much greater the radiation of the lights of God and the bounty of life everlasting upon the soul of man! As the body of the universe is continuous, indestructible, the bounties and bestowals of the divine spirit are everlasting. ”

“ Each one of those little shining points is a great Sun, like our own Sun, giving light and warmth, doubtless, to numerous unseen worlds revolving round it; each, the centre of a solar system, filled with myriads of millions of inhabitants, human beings like ourselves, with thoughts, and feelings, and hopes, and joys,—husbands, wives, children, old grey-haired grandsires just stepping into their graves, and little nurslings but newly born into existence. ”

“ I don’t mean the worn-out earth of our possession, but a young Earth, a virginal planet undisturbed by the vision of a future teeming with the monstrous forms of life and death, clamorous with the cruel battles of hunger and thought. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And thus we picture to ourselves a heaven shut off from earth, with all its sins and cares, by the untroubled and impenetrable sky—a place of light and repose, its pavement illuminated by the sun and countless other shining bodies—a place of peace, but also a place of power. ”

“ I have no eloquence, ladies and gentlemen, to express the vision of man's material destiny that opens out before me. I see the desert continents transformed, the poles no longer wildernesses of ice, the whole world once more Eden. I see the power of man reach out among the stars. ”

“ Not the future alone but the desert places through which he had come had blossomed, and the beauty which was revealed to him at last was the beauty in all things that have form or being—in the earth no less than in the sky, in the flesh no less than in the spirit, for were not earth and flesh, after all, only sky and spirit in the making? ”

“ In the blue depths of ether, he said, lay that “Country of the Soul,”—its boundary alone visible in the line of milky light, that separates it, as by a barrier of stars, from the dark earth. “Oh, realm of purity! [pg 108] Home of the yet unfallen Spirit!—where, in the days of her primal innocence, she wandered, ere her beauty was soiled by the touch of earth, or her resplendent wings had withered away. ”

“ The benighted pivot regions shall become habitable. I will control the atmosphere. The laws of creation are desecrated by that monstrous icy waste. Earth is the vast estate of humanity, and the mystery, richness of that world of frigid savageness was destined for progression to conquer. I shall realize the stupendous ambition of civilization. ”

“ For the drunken Earth spins softly afloat down there,
And the stars burn low, and the sky is sapphirine,
And the little winds of Space are in our hair!
⁠The little winds of Space
⁠Blow in the Love-god's face,
The only God that lacks not praise and prayer;
⁠Who sole preserves his power
⁠While dynasties devour
Temples and shrines and stones without repair. ”

“ Surely, if you could but see how the land is as the garden of Eden before you, and around you a desolate wilderness, you would suffer yourselves to be charmed into its ways of pleasantness and its paths of peace. You do not know the beautiful capacities which this earth, this very sin-stained, death-struck earth, bears in its redeemed bosom. Where sin abounds to sorrow, grace may much more abound to peace. ”

“ Under the shadow of the mountain, the heavens full of cloudy cohorts, like armies of horsemen and chariots, your soul is loosened from the narrow judgments of human life, and touched with a full sense of immortality and the liberty of a spiritual state. An hour goes past. How full has it been of feelings struggling to be thoughts, and thoughts deliquescing into feeling! ”

“ Wherefore confess we must on grounds the same That earth, sun, moon, and ocean, and all else, Exist not sole and single—rather in number Exceeding number. Since that deeply set Old boundary stone of life remains for them No less, and theirs a body of mortal birth No less, than every kind which here on earth Is so abundant in its members found. Which well perceived if thou hold in mind, Then Nature, delivered from every haughty lord, And forthwith free, is seen to do all things Herself and through herself of own accord, Rid of all gods. ”

“ There is no touch of civilization here; the quiet and solitude is unbroken, save by the thunder of the bergs breaking their long imprisonment. Somehow one feels older, grayer, sadder, after witnessing these great and startling throes of Nature, phenomena which have been in operation thousands of years. It reminds the observer only too forcibly how infinitesimal is the space he occupies upon this planet, and how utterly insignificant is his personality in the vast scheme of the universe. ”

“ People who live in high mountain-regions, and never look upon extensive plains, regard the earth as a sublime range, a massive dome in which peak towers above peak, as the Caucasians do, or as a lofty cone, like the Thibetans. On conceptions like these stand those religious systems which place the seat of the gods, the first home of the human race, or the abode of the dead, among lofty mountains. ”

“ To those who have never been outside the confines of civilization, it is not logically possible even to guess at the extraordinary influence—a fascination amounting to witchery—that the silence and solitude of the desert exercises over one. Yet if I were asked to define the essence and subtlety of this influence, I could but answer that it is indefinable; all the same a glamour that, like the force of gravity, is irresistible. ”

“ What is the odd power that earth holds over men? When one walks through the quietude of country roads, of forest and stream, of field and meadow-land, one is stirred by strange emotions. The trivialities of life seem of slight importance. ”

“ Saw wingèd monsters fighting to bring forth men;
Earth, and her savage youth, her monstrous lusts,
Mastered and curbed, till these, too, pulsed into music,
And became for man the fountain of his own power;
Earth, on her shining way,
Coloured and warmed by the sun, and quietly spinning
Her towns and seas to shadow and light in turn ”

“ Now in health this globe of which your body is the centre is in harmony. The heat of this globe is a protection to itself, like a walled city, to admit none but supposed friends. Now as every person has the same globe or heat, each person is a world or nation of itself. ”

“ But when the perfection of the natural world is attained—when it becomes, so to say, spiritualized, and its grosser elements are absorbed—then the human being can live on its surface arid develop his faculties from century to century.
The thoughtful reader will perceive from this statement that the spirits who have inhabited these superior planets must have attained a far greater perfection than those who have inhabited your earth, and the spiritual existence, or heaven, to which such beings migrate, is in advance of the heavens in which the dwellers of earth are born. ”

“ Its vegetation is of rapid growth and beautiful beyond anything that your planet can display.
As the atmosphere of the spirit world is not so dense as yours, and as the rays of the spiritual sun are not obliged to penetrate through so much cloud and vapor, the colors of all objects are sparkling and beautiful in variety and tone.
The specific gravity of the spirit upon his globe is not so great, comparatively, as that of man in the natural world. ”

“ Let the hearts and lives of all men be formed after this heavenly pattern, and what a different world would this of ours be! The wilderness would indeed be changed to Eden, the desert to the garden of the Lord. ”

“ Verdant fields and bright sunshine were constant reminders of Heaven's choicest blessings and never-failing truth, while the stormy conflicts of nature's elements taught the heart a wholesome lesson in the thought that life has its changing moods, its bitter conflicts, its merciless storms. ”

“ During these solar revolutions the human races sweep round and round this planet. Cave-dwellers, lake-dwellers and those of a neolithic or any other age appear and disappear over and over again, and in each of those we who now read, write and think of them were ourselves the very Egos whose past we are trying to trace. ”

“ Love of the Earth, life close to Nature, and denial of so-called civilization was the first step upwards. In the Simple Life, in this return to Nature, lay the opening of the little path that climbed to the stars and heaven. ”

“ It would be on such occasions the fault of the divine familiars themselves if their haunts and shrines were empty, for earth and air and day and night, as we go, still affect us as moods of their sympathy, still vibrate to the breath of their passage; so that our progress, under the expanding sun, resembles a little less a journey through space than a retracing of the course of the ages. ”

“ But in order to be saved, to go to heaven—an imaginary abode in the atmosphere, a sort of ethereal paradise in the upper strata of the air that surrounds this globe, either with or without sunlight—in order to get one up there some clown of a priest will mumble off masses, a sort of ribald fustian composition that will raise your spirit or your soul right up into the pure upper strata of this terrestrial atmospheric crust. ”

“ Shall Men for whom our Age
Unbaffled powers of vision hath prepared,
To explore the world without and world within,
Be joyless as the blind? Ambitious Souls—
Whom Earth, at this late season, hath produced
To regulate the moving spheres, and weigh
The planets in the hollow of their hand ”

“ At such favorable seasons the outside world, with all its current of daily events, is barred out, and one goes into the silent sanctuary of the inner temple of soul to commune and aspire. The spiritual hearing becomes delicately sensitive, so that the ‘still, small voice’ is audible, the tumultuous waves of external sense are hushed, and there is a great calm. ”

“ And all this, too, ere a reasoning, intelligent being had been numbered among terrestrial creatures, and when, perhaps, each successive creation was witnessed by none save those "morning stars who sang together, and those sons of God who shouted for joy." The delight and comfort of the human race formed, doubtless, one of the many reasons why this globe was so bountifully garnished. ”

“ Either from the pure atmosphere, the healthy life we lead, or the accordant tone of our spirits, we find ourselves unusually sensitive to all the slightest touches, the most minute rays of that grace and harmony which bathes every landscape in cloudless sunshine. ”

“ Spirit, recognized or unrecognized, is the positive, potential, intelligent force of the universe, whose energies ceaselessly, unerringly turn the wheels of evolution. So called decadence of civilizations is but the recouping of spiritual forces adjusting themselves to changing conditions. All man inhabited planets necessarily pass through similar experiences. Like the alternate flowing and ebbing of ocean's tides are the advancements and retrogressions of civilizations, both being a fulfilling of natural law, whose infinite, intelligent, forceful activities are known by many names. ”

“ We take in conception the sum of the conditions of existence, and we give them an ideal being and a definite home in space, the second great creation which completes the central one of Humanity. In the bosom of space we place the world, and we conceive of the world and this our Mother Earth as gladly welcomed to that bosom with the simplest and purest love, and we give our love in return. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But all this is little enough, unless we have also that inner force which sways a period, a generation, and which sometimes inclines us more and more to Nature, reviving in our hearts the desire of the land. ”

“ If at one moment life stood before his mental gaze, an illuminated little speck or disc, softly rounded with mysterious sleep, the next moment this mere span shot out into an illimitable plain, whereon he himself stood—a plain covered with forests, parted by seas, studded with cities and huge concourses of men, mapped out into civilizations, over-canopied by stars. ”