Omens

“ Similarly omens, from being divine messages, each relating to a particular undertaking, may come to be merely occurrences that encourage or discourage a man, or a tribe, at any time; because, by tradition, they are lucky or unlucky. Or practically the same result may be reached by philosophy: as with those Stoics who explained that omens are prophetic not as sent by the gods, but as involved in the same procession of fatal events. ”

“ As for omens, there is no such thing as an omen. Destiny does not send us heralds. She is too wise or too cruel for that. ”

“ One general remark, however, it is important to make in regard to omens. An omen is not conceived to be a mere sign of what is destined to be—it is conceived as causing, in some mysterious way, the event it forebodes ”

“ The invocation implies the idea that thunder is caused by the Mahābhārata heroes, Arjuna and Sahādēva.9 To dream of a temple car in motion, foretells the death of a near relative. Night, but not day dreams, are considered as omens for good or evil. ”

“ Note.—Things which are accidentally the causes of hope or fear are called good or evil omens. ”

“ I have known the shooting of a star spoil a night's rest, and have seen a man in love grow pale and lose his appetite upon the plucking of a merrythought. A screech-owl at midnight has alarmed a family more than a band of robbers; nay, the voice of a cricket has struck more terror than the roaring of a lion. There is nothing so inconsiderable which may not appear dreadful to an imagination that is filled with omens and prognostics. A rusty nail or a crooked pin shoot up into prodigies. ”

“ Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams: and I will show wonders in heaven above, and signs in the earth beneath; blood and fire, and vapour of smoke: the sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood And then shall they see the Son of Man coming in a cloud, with power and great glory. ”

“ So comes the slow revolving of the year, The glory of nature ripening to decay, When in those paths by which, through loves austere, All men and beasts and blossoms find their way, By steady easings of the spirit’s dream, From sunlight past the pallid starlight’s beam. ”

“ As dawn is portent of the day's decline,
⁠As joy is prelude sweet to waiting sorrow,
⁠So ripened good is Nature's harvest sign:
Love, only, the immortal strain doth borrow,
⁠And, high exalted by a hope divine,
⁠Still whispers in the night of death,—To-morrow! ”

“ 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! ”

“ DREAMS OF HEAVEN.
We colour Heaven with our own human thoughts,
Our vain aspirings, fond remembrances;
Our passionate love, that seems unto itself
An Immortality.
Dream'st thou of Heaven?—what dreams are thine? ”

“ 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? Nail the wild star to its track On the half-climbed zodiac? Light is light which radiates, Blood is blood which circulates, Life is life which generates, And many-seeming life is one,— Wilt thou transfix and make it none? ”

“ Few—no such days as those seem now ever to be born. Sometimes we indeed gaze through the face into the heart of the sky, and for a moment feel that the ancient glory of the heavens has returned on our dream of life. ”

“ Which scarce has risen ere it die;
Or to a bird, whose rapid flight
Eludes the dazed observer's sight,
Or a stray shaft of glancing light,
That breaks upon the gathered gloom
Which veils some monumental tomb;
Or some sweet Spring flowers' fleeting bloom;—
Mixed part of reason, part belief,
Of pain and pleasure, joy and grief,
As changeful as the Spring, and brief;—
A wave, a shadow, a breath, a strife,
With change on change for ever rife:—
This is the thing we know as life. ”

“ How oft and suddenly the shadows roll
From out the depths of some dim realm of woe,
To wrap their darkness round the human soul.
Those days are darker than the very night;
For nights have stars, and sleep, and happy dreams;
But these days bring unto the spirit-sight
The mysteries of gloom, until it seems
The light is gone forever, and the dark
Hangs like a pall of death above the soul,
Which rocks amid the gloom like storm-swept bark,
And sinks beneath a sea where tempests roll.
____ Winter on the Atlantic.
A Reverie ["Did I dream of a song? or sing in a dream?"] ”

“ By various influences and agents the Past is summoned before us, more vivid than a dream. The process seems as magical as those whereof we read in fairy legends, where circles are drawn, wands waved, mystic syllables pronounced. Adjured by these rites, voices speak, or forms and faces shape themselves from nothing. ”

“ In waking dreams we pass the day,
And dreams the hours of darkness sway,
(Day-dreams or night-dreams—who can guess
Whether their truth is more or less?)
Perchance even Death is but a dream,
And fleshless skulls with visions teem.
The Gods we pray to and adore
Are shadows of our dreams—no more ”

“ Certainly the Gods come in dream. But who can say? See, beloved, how the night, mother of men, brings us her dark reposes lulling all things to sleep. There is no moon, but strange spirits as white as moonbeams moving among the trees. ”

“ From an evening cloud — was it a sign of grief?
And the bright day passed — is there much relief
That its dream dies not when its gleam is dead?
Great sky, thou art a prophet still!
And by thy shadows and by thy rays
We read the future if we will,
And all the fates of our future ways ”

“ The knell of dying Earth and of the Dawn;
The Dawn that will not break, that comes no more;
Never again; the beautiful, wild Dawn,
The young, the holy, radiant and wonderful,
First born of Heaven’s children, daughters of Light:
The Rose of God, the dream and youth of Day,
Whom Night hath slain and Darkness laid away,
Crying, “No more shall she awake the world! ”

“ If certain hours on their climb up the long ladder of time
Turned my confusion to rhyme, drove me to dare an attempt,
If by fair chance I might seem sometimes abreast of my theme,
Was I translating a dream? Was it a dream that you dreamt?
High and miraculous skies bless and astonish my eyes;
All my dead secrets arise, all my dead stories come true. ”

“ Fading, with the Night, the memory of a dead love, and the withered leaves of a blighted hope, and the sickly repinings and moody regrets that numb the best energies of the soul: and rising, broadening, rolling upward like a living flood, the manly resolve, and the dauntless will, and the heavenward gaze of faith——the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen! ”

“ But in those skyey spaces what dread change!
⁠Thus have we seen the mortal turn immortal;
⁠So doth the day's soul die, as through death's portal
The soul of man takes up its heavenward range.
⁠A million orbs endue
⁠The unfathomable blue—
Till, the long miracle of night withdrawn,
The world beholds once more the miracle of dawn. ”

“ To-day the spring sun rests upon the world like the eye of a mother, and shines warm upon every heart, the wicked as well as the good. Yes, thou Eternal One, we here now give our hands and our hearts to thy whole creation, and no longer hate anything which thou hast made.” We were overpowered, and we embraced with tears, and no words, in the first darkening of the night. ”

“ When sunset light has faded from our sight, And darkness comes to tell us of the night, We sleep, refreshed from earthly care and sorrow, To waken to another hopeful morrow.
When sun and stars shall no more please our sight, And darkness comes to tell us of the night, We sleep, unmindful of earth’s joy and sorrow, To waken to a never-ending morrow.
[Pg 93]
LIFE’S DAY.
When the morn has breathed her story, And the noon of life is past, When the sunset’s deepening glory Fills the waiting soul at last ”

“ Life was the poise of infinity, and I knew of no horizon, for I could look down upon the dawn. It came two weeks ago Sunday in my heart. I see the mystery of the Resurrection in its beauty, and why white lilies are its deepest symbol. How can there be a prison or a cage? Every twilight is a white horizon. The gulls know that and the sea tonight has lost its sorrow. ”

“ And bury the old gods where they lay
Sodden drunk with men's pain in the day,
In the dawn's first new burning white ray
That would shrivel like dead leaves the sacred lies,
The avengers, the graspers, the wringers of sighs,
Of blood from men's work-twisted hands, from their eyes
Of tears without hope ... But in the burning day
Of the dawn we would see them brooding to slay,
In a great wind whirled like dead leaves away.
In a hall on Olympus we held carouse,
In our talk as banners waving names,
Songs, phrases of the garlanded dead.
Yesterday I went back to that house ... ”

“ Driven on by the mad imaginings of a heart hovering between life and death, we fancy that the visible frame of things is replete with oracles. Or is it true; and do air and earth, divined by the sorrow-tutored spirit, possess true auguries? ”

“ In these strange dreams our lives may be again, all in the centre of our hopes, rejoicings and laments, until above the morning the gods wake to go about their work, haply to remember still Their idle dreams, haply to dream them all again in the stillness when shines the starlight of the gods. ”

“ The loveliness that is the secret shape
Of once-seen, sweet and oft-dreamed loveliness,
The brain that builds shape, memory, dream and all ...
A white moon stares Time's thinning fabric through,
And makes substantial insubstantial seem,
And shapes immortal mortal as a dream;
And eye and brain flicker as shadows do
Restlessly dancing on a cloudy wall. ”

“ Blew bubbles of dreams where elfin worlds were lost;
Worlds where my stranger soul sang songs to me,
And talked with spirits by a rainbowed sea,
Or smiled, an unfamiliar shape of frost,
Floating on gales of breathless melody.
Day comes to us in garish glory garbed ”

“ The angels left them as they entered the primeval night of chaos, the shoreless ocean between the sensuous and spiritual life. For alone with God through chaos do we arrive at the sensuous body; alone with God in chaos do we leave this body of corruption, from which is evolved the Body of the Spirit, 'glorious and unchangeable.' And again is clasped the thread of Identity, on which are strung the pearls of memory, and the Past and Future of Time become the Eternal Present! ”

“ Thy day is closing in, but the heavens are now wider aflame with Thy light than ever before—Thy light, which I, a pagan, standing on the last verge of the old world, declare to be darkness, the coming night of pity and justice which is imminent, which is the twentieth century. ”

“ Like a thick miasmic cloud, as we read this great pagan critic, all the fogs and vapours of turgid hyperborean superstition are driven away from the face of the warm sun. Once more what is permanent and interesting in this mad complicated comedy of human life emerges in bold and sharp relief. ”

“ Even as the night reveals a whole heaven of stars, so may the darkness of disappointment, the night of sorrow, open heaven to thy children's eyes, till brighter beams are abont us, and the consciousness of immortality fills up our souls and wipes the tears from every eye. ”

“ The breathing of Life and Death,
The secular Accomplices,
Renewing the visible miracle of the world.
The wistful stars
Shine like good memories. The young morning wind
Blows full of unforgotten hours
As over a region of roses. Life and Death
Sound on—sound on . . . ”

“ Groping in darkness as we have been for so long, we blinked and gasped, trying to accustom ourselves to the divine light of the new day that had dawned, and to discern and define beauties which the new world would present. ”

“ For, at the time we speak of, we were young—and every morning, whatever the atmosphere might be, rose bright and beautiful with hopes that, far as the eyes of the soul could reach, glittered on earth's, and heaven's, and life's horizon! ”

“ By gloom and by splendour.
High, away, alone, afar,
Mighty wills and workings are:
To them I surrender.
The processions of the night,
Sweeping clouds and battling light,
And wild winds in thunder,
Care not for the world of man,
Passionate on another plan:
O twin worlds of wonder!
Ancients of dark majesty!
Priests of splendid mystery!
The Powers of Night cluster:
In the shadows of the trees,
Dreams, that no man lives and sees,
The dreams! the dreams! muster. ”

“ Beyond a vision, 'tis so transiently
Scatter'd along the eternal vault; and yet
It dwells upon the soul, and sooths the soul,
And blends itself into the soul, until
Sunrise and sunset form the haunted epoch
Of sorrow and of love. ”

“ They come fraught with dim complex memories of all the evershifting spectacle of inanimate creation and of the more deeply stirring phenomena of life; of the storm and the lull, the splendour and the darkness of the outer world; of the storm and the lull, the splendour and the darkness of the changeful and the transitory lives of men. ”

“ To this I answer, a little Season will produce Mourning enough in you, when you shall see your Angelical Motions like Lightning, cast down with Confusion of Fear from their former Perfection of imaginary Glory, rational Dreams and Visions, Revelations, Inspirations, Experiences, or Voices proceeding from an incomprehensible Spirit. ”