Fin

“ A vision of the highest duty and reality overshines all that is trivial and passing. And this is life—the fulness, the charm, the infinite variety and strength of being. "How can he that is dead to the world live any longer therein?" ”

“ If the book of fate, dear lady, could be laid open before your eyes, it would appear to you only full of darkness and contradictions, unless you could perceive all the myriads of fine links and intricate threads which unite event and event together. ”

“ Mind and matter, hope and experience, longing and limitation, for an instant combine in a reconciliation that interprets and ennobles his environment. This is art's maturity, its fine and perfect flower. ”

“ But, for such an experience, this constitution of the finite is a fact determined from an absolute point of view, and every finite incompleteness and struggle appears as a part of a whole in whose wholeness the fragments find their true place, the ideas their realisation, the seeking its fulfilment, and our whole life its truth, and so its eternal rest, — that peace which transcends the storms of its agony and its restlessness. ”

“ Finvarra, and their Land of Heart's Desire,
Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood,
But joy is wisdom, Time an endless song. ”

“ Is it, in its final and pervading Power, a bad or a good sort of universe that we open our eyes upon, when we begin to exercise our senses? What are its final relations to me, and my final relations to it? Nobody doubts the existence of things and persons, so far as they are revealed to the senses. But what is our implied Common Sense of the final meaning of the Whole? ”

“ Again, when your own necessary activity comes into the foreground, your small energetic love perpetually pressing to deeper and deeper realisation--"tasting through and through, and seeking through and through, the fathomless ground" of the Infinite and Eternal--it seems rather a perpetually renewed encounter than a final achievement. ”

“ Now, what, then, is that world which is to exist absolutely, and which, therefore, is the absolute expression of the final end, and after the realization of which the final end will have been altogether achieved and made visible? Evidently that world which exists for its own sake, and not for the sake of another world. ”

“ The last hundred years have witnessed a succession of triumphs in this art, the removal of obstructions, the transcending of limits, and the opening new realms of thought, to an extent that makes the infinity of promise and hope very present with us. ”

“ But solemnity, and gravity, and all such emotional attributes, admit of various shades; and, do what we will with our defining, the truth must at last be confronted that we are dealing with a field of experience where there is not a single conception that can be sharply drawn. ”

“ The section traversed that day seemed while we were in it like a mighty chasm, a world half rent asunder, full of vast sublimities, but the next day, seen from the rim as a part of the mighty whole, it appeared comparatively little. One gets new meanings of the words almighty, eternity, infinity, in the presence of things done that seem to require them all. ”

“ This had been written with one foot in the grave and one finger in heaven. These lines, which had fallen one by one on the paper, were what might be called drops of soul. ”

“ Consider a moment in which direction you are to seek the interests of your life. Will you demand that the things about you shall already possess their perfection? 154 Will you ask from life that it be completed, finished, beautiful? ”

“ It must have unity of thought, emotion, and expression, all growing out of a definite vision of emotion, having a beginning, middle, and end, which mark the progress of the idea or feeling seeking formulation. ”

“ Except that I prize thy gentle heart,
Free from ambition, falsehood, or art,
And thy good mind,
Daily refined,
By pure desire
To fan the heaven-seeking fire:
May it rise higher and higher; ”

“ But directly some measure of insight into the secret of life has followed upon this effort, or directly, if the soul's good fortune has been exceptional, its great illuminative moment has been reached, the will finds itself irresistibly plunged into this struggle, finds itself inevitably ranged, on one side or the other, of the ultimate duality. ”

“ There littleness was not; the least of things
Seemed infinite; and there his spirit shaped
Her prospects, nor did he believe,—he saw. ”

“ Contemplation—impassioned contemplation—that, is with Wordsworth the end-in-itself, the perfect end. We see the majority of mankind going most often to definite ends, lower or higher ends, as their own instincts may determine ”

“ The question of our text implies, as we have already suggested, that our whole lives, with all their various and often opposite experiences, are yet an ordered whole, having a definite end. There is some purpose beyond the moment to be served. ”

“ Whatever may be his true and final destination, there is a spirit within him at enmity with nothingness and dissolution. This is the character of all life and being. Each is at once the centre and the circumference; the point to which all things are referred, and the line in which all things are contained. ”

“ When frail Nature can no more,
Then the Spirit strikes the hour:
My servant Death, with solving rite,
Pours finite into infinite.
Wilt thou freeze love's tidal flow,
Whose streams through Nature circling go? ”

“ During the years of your present re-embodiment, for a definite purpose, and toward a definite period, certain Spirits have occupied themselves in shaping the unfoldment of your Mediumship, the anticipated period has arrived, and with blended emotions, we, your Spirit friends, question the momentous future, which we trust contains the glorious fulfillment of a stupendous undertaking. ”

“ 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! ”

“ Oh, love thy God and fellow men, thyself consider last, For come it will when thou must count dark errors of the past, And when the fight of life is o'er, and life recedes from view, And heaven in all its glory shines midst the pure and good and true, Then you will see more clearly the proverb deep and vast— The mill will never grind with water that is past. ”

“ With how much of wonder, as scene succeeded scene, and creation followed creation,—as life sprang out of death, and death out of life,—must not that acute Intelligence have watched the course of the Divine Worker,—scornful of spirit and full of enmity, and yet aware, in the inner depths of his intellect, that what he dared insultingly to depreciate, he yet failed, in its ultimate end and purpose, adequately to comprehend! ”

“ Thou art the main-spring, the vital secret, the fountain-source, of our existence. What is life but a genial current of joy and grace that wells up incessantly from Thy centred self? Thou art the life, the inner vitality, of our senses. ”

“ And where truth was, the likeness of a liar,
⁠And where day was, the likeness of the night;
This is the end of every man's desire.
L'ENVOY.
Princes, and ye whom pleasure quickeneth,
⁠Heed well this rhyme before your pleasure tire;
For life is sweet, but after life is death.
⁠This is the end of every man's desire. ”

“ Others apart sat on a hill retired, In thoughts more elevate, and reasoned high Of providence, fore-knowledge, will, and fate, Fixed fate, free-will, fore-knowledge absolute, And found no end, in wandering mazes lost. ”

“ But if the history of any human soul could be perfectly known, who would wish to describe this passage from the dawn of the ideal to the morning of the real—this transition from life as it is imagined through hopes and dreams to life as it is known through action and submission? ”

“ Above us throughout the years is Thy Everlasting Will, beneath us when our years are done, shall be Thy Everlasting Arms. So for the bitter and the sweet, for the evil and the good, for the past and for the present, we, Thy servants, render Thee glory, thanks, and praise, O God of our fathers, That fashioneth us and all according to Thy desire, remembering those things which we have forgotten and foreknowing those things which are not yet. ”

“ Thou hast attained, of fame, or power, or pleasure,
When thy full coffers swell with hoarded treasure,
Not then, but now.
God's time may not be thine. When thou art willing,
His Spirit may have taken flight forever,
No more thy soul with keen conviction filling,
Softening thy spirit to repentance never,—
Now, sinner, now!
Now, Christian, now!
Look round, and see what souls are daily dying ”

“ My objections are 'Legion!' They are without number, like the stars in the sky: they come to us on all sides, from every quarter of the horizon, as if on the wings of the wind; and they leave in us, as they pass, ruins only, and darkness. ”

“ Nature, who lost, cannot remake him; Fate let him fall, Fate can't retake him; Nature, Fate, men, him seek in vain. And whither now, my truant wise and sweet, O, whither tend thy feet? I had the right, few days ago, Thy steps to watch, thy place to know: How have I forfeited the right? Hast thou forgot me in a new delight? I hearken for thy household cheer, O eloquent child! ”

“ Standing one on each side of the gushing fountain, and laving their hands in the limpid water, they called upon God to hear and register their vows of truth and love—vows which were, perhaps, less eloquent than deep, but uttered with all the quiet fervour of two young hearts as yet unseared and unsoured by the trouble, the duplicity, the selfishness, and the bitterness of the world. ”

“ And then I see that it has gradually expressed itself in law, in knowledge, in love; that it has gradually learnt, under the pressure of something which is itself and not itself, that to be gained life must be lost; that beauty, truth, love, are the realities which abide. ”

“ Details are melancholy; the plan is seemly and noble. In the actual world — the painful kingdom of time and place — dwell care, and canker, and fear. With thought, with the ideal, is immortal hilarity, the rose of joy. ”

“ He who resolves that he will not rest satisfied with appearances, shadows, illusions shall, by the piercing light of that resolve, disperse every fleeting phantasy, and shall enter into the substance and reality of life. ”

“ This universal soul, he calls Reason: it is not mine or thine or his, but we are its; we are its property and men. And the blue sky in which the private earth is buried, the sky with its eternal calm, and full of everlasting orbs, is the type of Reason. ”

“ For him it is not, as in the story itself, the last and crowning act of a series of developments, but the first and unique act, the creation of life itself in its supreme form, off-hand and immediately, in the cold and lifeless stone. ”

“ Into his spiritual sight will come the Principles of the divine Life, and as he approaches them, their incomparable beauty and majestic symmetry will astonish his vision, and gladden his heart with a gladness hitherto unknown. ”

“ It is an incomparably finer spectacle when beheld on shore, where the waving trees, the wild flight of the birds, the dark shadows and bright lights, the rushing of the torrents, all proclaim the strife of the unloosed elements. At sea the albatross and little petrel fly as if the storm were their proper sphere, the water rises and sinks as if fulfilling its usual task, the ship alone and its inhabitants seem the objects of wrath. On a forlorn and weather-beaten coast the scene is indeed different, but the feelings partake more of horror than of wild delight. ”

“ I have repeated: “I swear the earth shall surely be complete to him or her who shall be complete. The earth remains jagged and broken only to him or her who remains jagged and broken.” I have said all this to myself times innumerable. ”

“ But the moment the mind opens, and reveals the laws which traverse the universe, and make things what they are, then shrinks the great world at once into a mere illustration and fable of this mind. What am I? and What is? asks the human spirit with a curiosity new-kindled, but never to be quenched. ”

“ Through its laughing and its weeping, Through its living and its keeping, Through its follies and its labors, weaving in and out of sight, To the end from the beginning, Through all virtue and all sinning, Reeled from God's great spool of Progress, runs the golden thread of light. ”

“ To these four sections, the four operations of the soul correspond,—conjecture, faith, understanding, reason. As every pool reflects the image of the sun, so every thought and thing restores us an image and creature of the supreme Good. ”