Encore

“ These two grand divisions of Eternity, of which the one is continually effacing the other, are entirely unlike. The one is dark with sorrow and disappointment, the other bright with prosperity and joy. The Past is the region of sobs, the Future is the realm of song. ”

“ He stood and gazed, then, with his arms folded on his chest, while the people walking to and fro passed and repassed him, and many a one commented as they went, and assigned him a history and a character from their own imagination. How seldom is it, in the busy world with which we mingle, that any of the conjectures regarding our thoughts, our feelings, our state of existence, are correct! ”

“ How the new time fades and vanishes, leaving me the plain, bold guest of the past! Rude, ungenerous Nature screams for my life, and I greet her claim with blows and laughter. The thunderous surge is booming in my ears and the ethereal touch of the mists is on my face ”

“ Came ever up from the moving crowd,
"You're in the old way, and I'm in the new,
That is the false, and this is the true,"—
Or, "I'm in the old way, and you're in the new,
That is the false, and this is the true." ”

“ Connected by no link with the ever active Present, a monotonous Future stretched before them, made more dreary by its contrast with the keen excitement and ever-shifting variety of their past life of peril and pleasure. ”

“ HISTORY.
Among the fathomless things that are about us and within us, is the continuity of time. This gives to life one of its most solemn aspects. We may think to ourselves: Would there could be some halting-place in life, where we could stay, collecting our minds, and see the world drift by us. ”

“ A century seems a long, long time
For thee to lie in gloom.
How didst thou know when to arise?
And thy new garment don;
Thou mightst have slept thy life away
Whilst time was going on.
Was there a power within thy soul?
A wish within thy heart?
To soar above all other flowers,
And with the birds take part
In singing songs of grateful joy
That thou hast waked from sleep,
That thou again dost see the light,
[Pg 209] Hast risen from the deep;
The grave where thou so long hast lain.
To raise thy head on high,
And looking up to Deity
Once more; then droop and die. ”

“ All these things seemed to have happened so long ago, and yet we were living still. Living, did I say? Ay, if such an existence as ours could be called a life, fourteen of us were living still. Who would be the next to go? ”

“ How noble, how sacred, how wonderful is life! A few years, comparably brief as moments, on the mortal plane of existence, to be followed by an endless Eternity, spent in gleaning wisdom and happiness from the rich fields of infinite progression. ”

“ We cry, like children, to be left behind. Our human speech is dim. Yet, latest born Of God's Eternity, there came to me, In saddened streets last week, from lips forlorn A sound more solemn than the sleepless sea! ”

“ There was a glamour and a glitter about that past playground of religion which makes our present creed of science barren and chilly. If to-day we write the word Eternity in white chalk on a blackboard, and gazing at it try to recall what it used to signify, we shall find this exercise of the spirit most joyous. The word reminds us how we used to slip away from hurry to bathe in a sea of timelessness, refreshing to every taut nerve. ”

“ What a strange feeling it is, and no doubt we have all experienced it, that which comes over us as we turn over and read the old letters of our youthful days. An entirely new life rises before us, with all its hopes and sorrows. ”

“ This was the experience, then, of ‘distinct pre-eminence’ in whose recollection his mind was ‘nourished and invisibly repaired.’ It is in such a moment that the soul’s strength is shown; when common objects evoke what he calls the imagination, the reality, of which they are a suggestion. ”

“ Do we begin again in our new existence to learn much by experience, or have we full powers? My soul, whither wilt thou emigrate? Where wilt thou lodge the first night after leaving this body? Will an angel soothe thy fluttering, for sadly flurried wilt thou be in entering upon eternity? ”

“ As I peer back through the shadow of my years, seeing not too clearly, but through the thickening veil of wish and after-thought, I seem to view my life divided into four distinct parts: the Age of Miracles, the Days of Disillusion, the Discipline of Work and Play, and the Second Miracle Age. ”

“ What becomes of all our emotions, our impressions," he pursued after a long pause, "all the material of thought that life pours into us at such a rate during such a memorable three months as these? There are twenty moments a week—a day, for that matter, some days—that seem supreme, twenty impressions that seem ultimate, that appear to form an intellectual era. ”

“ The last word must now be spoken, the word that breaks the future off from the past; the word that wrings the heart, and leaves it to the tumult of its own pulsations; "the word that makes us linger; yet, farewell!" ”

“ The spirit of meditation and retrospection seems to hover over those solemn effigies resting in their eternal sleep, guarding in inimitable and awful silence secrets of the historic past that can never be solved. ”

“ Might there some more gladdening dream from out the Infinite Silence at times refresh the slumberer in the cradle of Eternity!—might there, from time to time, prophetic whispers fall upon his ear, that there is a Light and a Day! ”

“ I stop to say that, during the months past, as before, her life had gone sweetly, pleasantly, without ruffle or labor or care or sickness, or division, even, into hours and days and nights,—a flowing onward, like time,—an existence so serenely perfect as not to be a subject of consciousness. ”

“ You have your histories; we have our living pictures to remind us of the past, and they satisfy our home cravings. Eternity is perfect—all embracing, all reaching, never beginning, and without an end. ”

“ About him is the atmosphere of the new, and dotted every here and there around him are the living mementoes of the old—a dying age, which in a little while will cease to be, and is already out of date and romantic. ”

“ So arises in era after era an outward and mortal expression of the inward immortal life; and at once the old struggle begins to repeat itself between the flesh and the spirit, the form and the reality. ”

“ What is a passing emotion or half-formed thought to last in so many years of a man's changing, inconsequential life? But what has fixed the emotion of that evening in my recollection so that the slightest shadows remain indelible was an event of strange finality, an event not likely to be forgotten in a life-time—as you shall see. ”

“ I never sent you one of those homespun letters, in fact, without quite a persuasion that it will be the last. But life always seems to keep new, somehow; and apresent hour always seems to me worthy any two of the past or the future. ”

“ This silence seemed to him, fancifully, more than mere lack of words—it conveyed a sense of reserve force, of quiet appraisal of himself and his words, of the experiences of men who have been close to realities, who have done things in the world. ”

“ Oh, what unknown worlds and marvelous we shall journey through, with our friends and our relatives that have preceded us, and with those whom we shall precede!"
"No, we are not mortals! Our infinite lives are numbered by myriads and myriads of centuries, just as are numbered by myriads of myriads the stars in the firmament—mysterious worlds, ever different, ever new, that we are successively to inhabit." ”

“ How do you know, sir, that we have not met before, centuries ago? Do you not sometimes foresee a whole scene, just as it afterward takes place? Do you not sometimes look upon a strange face with a shudder? Does not a feature—a smile—or an expression of them combined—sometimes awake the slumbering memory of ages? Is it not so? have you never communed with the dead? ”

“ When they who go before
Go furnished—or because their span was brief,
When in the acquist of what is life’s true gage,
Truth, knowledge, and that other worthiest lore,
They had fulfilled already a long age. ”

“ Hour after hour I sit while the scenes are being shifted; and as I gaze upon the panorama of the past, I realize how crowded with incidents my life has been. Every day seems like a romance within itself, and the years grow into ponderous volumes. ”

“ I observe, then, in the first place, that the propriety of this simile is seen in the brevity of life. What more rapid and momentary than a story? It is heard, and passes. Though it beguiles us for the time, it dies away in sound, or melts from before, the eye. ”

“ But what were those signs of the coming of that Just One, which had been so long and so clearly foretold, and whereby they might easily have discerned those times, had not the veil been on their heart? They are many in number ”

“ Grieve not, dear friend of old days, that I have not escaped the illusion common to all—the idea that those we have not looked on this long time—full five years, let us say—have remained as they were while we ourselves have been moving onwards and downwards in that path in which our feet are set. ”

“ You, in whose hands are the destinies of so many men, do your heart not feel moved? Are you indifferent to appear gloriously known in our annals, to occupy a distinguished place in the memories of the current epoch, and to conclude the greatest work that the world has seen? ”

“ And men fed upon them, and mighty they grew.
Ears giddy with custom that sound might not hear,
But it woke up the rest, like an earthquake near;
And that same night of the letter, some strange
Compulsion of soul brought a sense of change ”

“ For the essential bitterness and pain that lies at the heart of all transitory earthly things—the gnawing sense of incompleteness and vanity that touches the section of transitory existence men call "life," met face to face with this passing glimpse of reality, timeless and unconditioned, which the sound of the splendid name flashed so terrifically before his awakened soul-vision,—and threatened to overwhelm him. ”

“ It may be—who shall tell, when I go back There whence I came, and looking down behold The place that my once eager heart shall lack, And all my dead desires a-lying cold, But I may have the might then to enfold The hopes of brave men in my heart?—but long Life lies before first with its change and wrong. ”

“ What one broke off with
At the drowsiest?
Was he afraid, or tranquil?
Might he know
How conscious consciousness could grow,
Till love that was, and love too blest to be,
Meet—and the junction be Eternity? ”

“ The longest continued story in the most thrilling of the cheap weeklies reaches, as we are given to understand, a conclusion at some time. Imagine an infinite continued story, with the poor lovers eternally weeping and quarreling, and you will see what an infinite historical process in the world would mean. ”

“ The Present!—the Present!—its amusements, its gayeties, its fashions, absorbs nearly all their thoughts. They have little relish to look towards the future, except to anticipate the continuance of the novelty and joyousness of the spring-time of life. ”

“ But impatience of the way and the wayfaring was to disappear from a later century—an age that has found all things to be on a journey, and all things complete in their day because it is their day, and has its appointed end. ”

“ So down through the kaleidoscopic procession of the ages, at intervals some great soul shines out in full-orbed strength and beauty. The light of history reveals that these are they who have passed through tribulation. ”

“ In such a solemn scene, and at such solemn moments the spirit of nature works wonders in the minds of the roughest men--quickens the sympathies, and stirs into life the tenderest memories. It was so with Rough-and-Ready at the present time. ”

“ In all this the continuities and the discontinuities are absolutely co-ordinate matters of immediate feeling. The conjunctions are as primordial elements of 'fact' as are the distinctions and disjunctions. In the same act by which I feel that this passing minute is a new pulse of my life, I feel that the old life continues into it, and the feeling of continuance in no wise jars upon the simultaneous feeling of a novelty. They, too, compenetrate harmoniously. ”

“ The great work has now reached its final climax. The imagination of the modern seer, soaring beyond sorrow, doubt, death, has pierced for a moment through the mystery of things and shown us the unspeakable. ”

“ For whiles can I scarcely think it that our days are wholly done. And trust not thy life in my hands in the day when most I seem Like the Dwarfs that are long departed, and most of my kindred I dream. ”

“ The memory that obtrudes is of a clouded page in my life—a chapter which I fatuously hoped had been closed and laid aside forever—something to be regretted, to stand as a warning in the future, and yet inclining me to a greater charity. This I know is the experience of many men. ”