Oversoul

“ The answer of the Over-Soul;
Their music murmurs in the ear
Like whisperings of eternity.
They call us back to Nature's breast,
To end life's awful mystery,
And dream in the eternal rest
That comes beyond Euthanasy. ”

“ And while such things bethought this new-come folk,
That breath was breathed, the olden spell was broke:
From far away within the unknown land,
O'er belts of forest and o'er wastes of sand,
A cry came thrilling, like a cry of pain
From suffering heart and half-awakened brain;
As one thought dead who wakes within the tomb,
And, reaching, cries for sunshine in the gloom.
In that strange country's heart, whence comes the breath
Of hot disease and pestilential death.
Lie leagues of wooded swamp, that from the hills
Seem stretching meadows ”

“ Today I lost a nation in the cycle of my soul. What is the blood but the history of my planets as engraved upon the constellations of my flesh? It is the book of the angel of judgment for the first syllable of my song, as the emotions, the intellect, and, alas, the will, for the second, third, and fourth. The flesh is the ebb tide from God, as the emotions are the flood. The intellect is the second ebb, and in the will pray God that it may be flood! ”

“ Death roams in cities' smoke, and in still night,
When men sleep in their beds, walketh about!
How many in walled cities lie and groan,
Turning themselves upon their beds,
Talking with death, answering his hard demands!
How many walk in darkness, terrors are round
The curtains of their beds, destruction is
Ready at the door! How many sleep
In earth, cover'd with stones and deathy dust,
Resting in quietness, whose spirits walk
Upon the clouds of heaven, to die no more!
Yet death is terrible, tho' borne on angels' wings. ”

“ Loneliness and endurance are written deep in their clefts and cañons and precipices. In the long season of the sun, they look unshrinking back to the glaring sky, with a stern defiance. It is as the very wrath of God, but they will not melt before it. In the season of the rains, black clouds hang low upon them, guarding their sullen gloom. But just as in the sternest heart is here and there a spot of gentleness, so in these forbidding fastnesses there are bits of verdure and soft beauty too. ”

“ Thy tortured limbs seem cords strung by the storm,
Thy thoughts a tangled skein, unclear, disordered,
And all the past that should have been forgotten
Rising up ghostly, in fantastic guise,
{75} To make the present worse, to slay all hope,
To quench the beacon that till now has been
Thy only stay in night's deep gloom and horror!
This, O my soul! is Unrest, and thou knowest
Its misery but too well! All the old scars
Of former battles bleed once more within thee,
As if thy life were oozing, drop by drop. ”

“ Heavy and coarse beasts trampled upon me with the dull steps of terribly heavy feet; cold tusks of bloody mouths tore my tender body—and in my powerless sorrow I bit the sand, I swallowed the dust of the ground—I was dying of despair. Crushed, I was dying every day. Every day I was dying of despair. ”

“ Body aching from the fierce winter's blast and the fingers gone stiff, immovable, almost unfeeling ... with no hope for the future, but always the ceaseless watch and wait until the great Peace of Death overtakes the tired body and a troubled soul leaves its burden to be carried on by those who follow after. ”

“ Sitting there in the dark and the cold, he grew barely conscious of his own pain. This is Nature’s mercy. When the wound is beyond bearing she draws away the sufferer’s consciousness, and an extremity of agony brings its own relief, if only for a little while. ”

“ We awoke when the sun was pouring its golden light over the world, and brilliantly illumined the gloomy scene of desolation. The bare, black burned lime hills rose there above each other, wrapped themselves in black smoke-clouds, and seemed to accuse us to awakening nature as the cause of the disaster. ”

“ There lay the ghastly dead, cold and pale in the grey light of the morning,—across them in heaps the wounded, quivering with intensity of agony, grasping the gory ground with convulsive clutches, and tearing up the earth, which was soon to cover them, in handfuls, while their eyes, starting from the sockets, were becoming glazed and terrible in death. ”

“ As the deep death-fraught sounds long lingering dwell
Sick to the heart of Love and Hope and Fear
Soul-jaundiced, I do loathe Life's upland steep
And with strange envy muse the dead man's dreamless sleep. ”

“ A thick fog envelopes everything, and at the same time it freezes intensely. You will tell me that this cold gloom will be succeeded by a cheerful spring, and endeavour to encourage me to hope for a spiritual change resembling it;—but it will be lost labour. Nature revives again; but a soul once slain lives no more. ”

“ For so an impure vapour—begotten of the slime of the earth by the fevers and adulterous heats of an intemperate summer sun, striving by the ladder of a mountain to climb to heaven and rolling into various figures by an uneasy, unfixed revolution, and stopped at the middle region of the air, being thrown from his pride and attempt of passing towards the seat of the stars—turns into an unwholesome flame and, like the breath of hell, is confined into a prison of darkness and a cloud, till it breaks into diseases, plagues and mildews, stinks and blastings. ”

“ As if some destiny were pacing upon it with heavy tread.
Perchance all is being changed!
I fain would see in a rose-hued radiance
The joys of men and their hopes,
And be healed and with a free spirit,
O, fain would I live
Or be dead
Or else depart
To distant regions!
O, fain would I be happier!
Amid turmoil a new day is being born,
A great matter is approaching with dire tread,
O, would that I were liberated!
Would that the curse were removed from me,
That I may not be damned!
With strange turmoil the earth is tossing;
With heavy tread something paces hither ”

“ It is fearful in the darkness! There is a sound of singing as at some burial; but so soft, almost out of hearing, far away, far from me.... How one longs for the light! But I can't bear to get up—the same people again, the same talk, the same torture. ”

“ Apocalypse Chapter 16
The seven vials are poured out. The plagues that ensue.
16:1. And I heard a great voice out of the temple, saying to the seven angels: Go and pour out the seven vials of the wrath of God upon the earth.
16:2. And the first went and poured out his vial upon the earth. And there fell a sore and grievous wound upon men who had the character of the beast: and upon them that adored the image thereof.
16:3. And the second angel poured out his vial upon the sea. And there came blood as it were of a dead man: and every living soul died in the sea. ”

“ You feel as if it were a struggle for life,—as if it were a war waged by the spirits of darkness against these celestial forms. The struggle is over: the darkness has prevailed. These mighty mountain torches are extinguished one after one; and cold, ghastly piles, of sepulchral hue, which you shiver to look up at, and which remind you of the dead, rise still and calm in the firmament above you. ”

“ Do you not behold the clouds open, and destruction lurid and dire pour down on the blasted earth? See you not the thunderbolt fall, and are deafened by the shout of heaven that follows its descent? Feel you not the earth quake and open with agonizing groans, while the air is pregnant with shrieks and wailings,—all announcing the last days of man? ”

“ How enviable and blissful sleep the dead whose wounds bleed and ache no longer! How wretched and pitiable are the living as they lie on the ground, tortured by the wounds which the howling night wind has dried so that they bleed no more! Those poor deserted ones in the valley and on the hills the sun has awakened, and the air resounds with their moans and cries and despairing groans, and heart-rending entreaties for relief. ”

“ Phantom-like, and alone with night, they passed
Through Dis’s kingdom, lifeless, joyless, waste,
As, pale and ghostly will a forest seem,
Between pale clouds and the moon’s grudging beam. [50]
The first stage Orcus, where before the gate,
In forecourt, watchful, if with closed eyes, wait—
Padlocks on Hell’s jaws—Mourning, vengeful Care,
In many aspects; pale Disease and Fear,
Age looking back, Hunger counselling ill,
With Neediness that numbs the nerve of will:—
Forms of terror they all; and, no less dread,
Death, and Sleep, his cousin, sharing one bed ”

“ Rock of Ages, cleft for me, Let me hide myself in Thee; Let the water and the blood, From Thy wounded side which flowed, Be of sin the double cure; Save from wrath and make me pure. Not the labor of my hands Can fulfill Thy law’s demands; Could my zeal no respite know, Could my tears forever flow, All for sin could not atone; Thou must save, and Thou alone. ”

“ Then come the diseases that arise from injury to the shadow-soul. It strikes one as strange at first to see men who have been walking, say, through forest or grass land on a blazing hot morning quite happily, on arrival at a piece of clear ground or a village square, most carefully go round it, not across, and you will soon notice that they only do this at noontime, and learn that they fear losing their shadow. ”

“ Could it be that though coldness wrapped the suffering clay, passion and sense should still survive, and that while every external trace of life had fled, consciousness should still cling to the cold corpse destined for the earth? ”

“ Death thou hast seen
In his first shape on Man; but many shapes
Of Death, and many are the ways that lead
To his grim cave, all dismal; yet to sense
More terrible at the entrance, than within.
Some, as thou sawest, by violent stroke shall die;
By fire, flood, famine, by intemperance more
In meats and drinks, which on the earth shall bring
Diseases dire, of which a monstrous crew
Before thee shall appear; that thou mayest know
What misery the inabstinence of Eve
Shall bring on Men. ”

“ Then the feverishness increases, becomes more defined, and passes slowly into abiding pain. To some come darker moments when the unrest deepens into a mental agony of which all the other woes of earth are mockeries—moments when the forsaken soul can only cry in terror for the Living God. ”

“ Gaunt-cheeked, hollow-eyed wretches, smeared all over with dust and mud, bruised, bleeding, the long fear of imminent death yet written on our countenances, we were, indeed, a sight to frighten the daylight. ”

“ It is the place of skulls, where death holds his carnival in companionship with worms, and hell laughs in the face of heaven. Dark storms are gathering there—convolving clouds, charged with no common wrath. Terrors set themselves in battle-array before the Son of God; and tempests burst upon him, which might sweep all mankind in a moment to eternal ruin. ”

“ When we faint in the valley of the shadow of death, let us feel the assuring pressure of the nail-pierced hand. When the heavens are flaming above and the earth is dissolving beneath, "be thou our strong rock, for a house of defence to save us"! ”

“ And thus, I thought, is it with my life at present. Yet if the fire beneath persists and conquers, that black dead mass will become all radiant, life-giving, fit for the altar or the domestic hearth. Yes, and it shall be so.’
‘My tendency at present is to the deepest privacy. ”

“ Fatality has cast us into a well of burning and boiling lava, of rocks on fire, of boiling water, in a word, filled with every kind of eruptive matter? We are about to be expelled, thrown up, vomited, spit out of the interior of the earth, in common with huge blocks of granite, with showers of cinders and scoriae, in a wild whirlwind of flame, and you say—the most fortunate thing which could happen to us. ”

“ CYCLE.
On the morning after both storms were dissolved into a still cloudiness.—And out of the great griefs came only errors. Weaklings that we are! when at our sham execution fate touches us with the rod, not with the sword, we sink impotently from the block, and feel the process of dying reach far into our life! All fevers, including spiritual ones, are cooled by the freshness of a new morning, just as sad evening stirs all their embers into a glow. ”

“ Most men cling to life in grim desperation, like a climber to a cliff giving way, or a drowning man clutching at any straw. How beautiful the contrast of the placid, tranquil acquiescence expressed in that phrase of our text! No doubt there will always be the shrinking of the bodily nature from death. ”

“ The oases are full of fever, of the incredible languors of the heat—breath is a weight upon the lungs, blood is weariness in the veins, life is an oppression and an exhaustion. It revives, but it remembers. There is a swift spring-time of life, a resilience, a jet, of the eternal force, and age comes like night with a stride. ”

“ Though there was a beautiful moonlight, so thick a cloud of dust arose from the houses which had fallen down, or were still falling all around, that it was impossible to discern any object at the distance of ten paces; and from amid this dense canopy, which hung suspended over the whole city, shrieks, groans, and sobs, wild lamentations for the dead, the moans of the crushed and wounded, yells of agony, and exclamations of terror were heard on all sides. Humanity, however, in the midst of this awful scene was busy at the work of salvation. ”

“ This mortal air is one wide pestilence, that kills us all at last. Whom the Death-cloud spares, sleeping, dies in silent watches of the night. He whom the spears of many battles could not slay, dies of a grape-stone, beneath the vine-clad bower he built, to shade declining years. We die, because we live. ”

“ Pain and disease were instinctively as much shunned by me as if I held my life on the frailest tenure; death was as formidable as my natural soldiership would suffer it to be; and even when the thought occurred that I might defy extinction, it threw but a darker shade over the common terrors, to conceive that I must undergo the suffering of death without the peace of the grave. ”