Prelude

“ Still, compared with the actual rise and development of consciousness, these dim and uncertain preludes of it are even more faint and indistinct than are the first feeble rays which the sun sends up before him, compared with the glory which fills heaven and earth when the great luminary himself bursts above the sea. ”

“ What I find in consciousness is that a succession, such as a rhythm of drum-beats, a musical phrase, a verse of poetry, comes to me as one present whole, present in the sense that I know it all at once. ”

“ So darkness drops between the days, an interlude
When night's low sighing stirs the sleepy solitude.
So, when the little cycle of this life is rounded,
Before the spirit enters into life unbounded,
It waits to hear, with bated breath,
The solemn interlude of death. ”

“ To observe the succession at once is to have present with perfect clearness all the time-elements of the rhythm or of the phrase just as they are, — the succession, the tempo, the intervals, the pauses, — and yet, without losing any of their variety, to view them at once as one present musical idea. ”

“ And of this ever-new melody which constitutes our inner life every moment contains a resonance or an echo of past moments. "What are we really, what is our character, except the condensation of the history which we have lived since our birth, even before our birth, since we bring with us our prenatal dispositions? Without doubt we think only with a small part of our past; but it is with our complete past, including our original bias of soul, that we desire, wish, and act." ("Creative Evolution", pages 5-6.) ”

“ Ascend, oh my Soul, on the wings of the choral strain,
Invisible tier above tier upbuilding sublime;
Note as it scales after note in a rhythmical chain
Reaching from chaos and welter of struggle and pain,
Far into vistas empyreal receding from time.
Ascend! take wing on the thoughts of the Dead, my Soul,
Breathing in colour and stone, flashing through epic and song:
Thoughts that like avalanche snows gather force as they roll,
Mighty to fashion and knead the phenomenal throng
Of generations of men as they thunder along. ”

“ Must thrill in the night to its deep, solemn roll;
For it speaks in its belfry when kissed by the blast,
Like a broad blessing breathed from the lips of the Past.
Long years will roll o'er it, and yet every chime
Must unceasingly tell of an era sublime,
And more splendid, more dear than the rest of all Time. ”

“ By reflecting on the past and comparing it with the present, we prophesy of the future and often our prophecies are confirmed. By day we prophesy of the night, and the night comes; at night we prophesy of the morning, and the morning comes. ”

“ 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. ”

“ They set our reasonings at defiance, and we can refer them to only the will of Deity. We can only say regarding them, that the climax is a favourite figure in the book of Providence;—that God speaks to us in His dispensations, and, in the more eloquent turns of His discourse, piles up instance upon instance with sublime and impressive profusion. ”

“ 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. ”

“ All is still And voiceless in the past! A veil is drawn Across the future! by life's mystic rill We sit and ponder, watching for the dawn Of some yet unconceived, far-reaching thought, By which our nature's secret shall be taught! ”

“ Now that story is a symbol, and tells the truth. We see some one thing in this world, and suddenly it becomes particular and sacramental; a woman and a child, a man at evening, a troop of soldiers; we hear notes of music, we smell the smell that went with a passed time, or we discover after the long night a shaft of light upon the tops of the hills at morning: there is a resurrection, and we are refreshed and renewed. ”

“ BEHOLD! a waking vision crowns my soul With beatific radiance, and the light Of shining hope;—a golden-memoried dream That clings unto my youth, as clung the strange Leonine phantom to that mystic man, Lean Paracelsus. It has grown with me Like destiny, or that which seems to be My destiny, ambition: and its glow Inflames my fancy, as if some clear star Had burst in silvery light within my brain. ”

“ There is eloquence in the tongueless wind, and a melody in the flowing brooks and the rustling of the reeds beside them, which by their inconceivable relation to something within the soul, awaken the spirits to a dance of breathless rapture, and bring tears of mysterious tenderness to the eyes, like the enthusiasm of patriotic success, or the voice of one beloved singing to you alone. ”

“ Through the else silent darkness of the past, the spirit hears their slow and solemn footsteps. Onward they pass, like those hoary elders seen in the sublime vision of an earthly Paradise, attendant angels bearing golden lights before them, and, above and behind, the whole air painted with seven listed colors, as from the trail of pencils! ”

“ A fall, and a rise—a rise that reverses the fall, a rise that transcends the glory from which he fell,—that is the Bible's notion of the history of the world, and I, for my part, believe it to be true, and feel it to be the one satisfactory explanation of what I see round about me and am conscious of within me. ”

“ Transmitted through the atmosphere below, they eventually awaken an echo in the heart of some aspiring soul,—when, lo, a new poem, a new strain of melody, a new harmonious thought, is given to the world. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A period may be dawn ing which may be better suited to my constitution than the present one—a period in which we shall once again sit side by side and see the past rise up afresh out of your music, just as in our youth we used to dream together of our future in the music we both loved. ”

“ And ever back to the tale of the Creation, so that the remote historic incidents of the Ancestors, the tremendous and tremendously present lyric excitement and despair of the prophetic men and women, the pagan suggestion of the athletic genii, all unite like the simultaneous and consecutive harmonies of a titanic symphony, round the recurrent and dominant phrases of those central stories of how the universe and man were made, so that the beholder has the emotion of hearing not one part of the Old Testament, but the whole of it. ”

“ With straining eyes, to some far silvern spire;
Flowers among, sing to the gods cloud-hid.
One of these, onetime, opened velvet eyes
Upon the world—the years recall the day;
Those lights still shine, conscious of power alway,
But flattering men with feigned looks of surprise. ”

“ The primrose on the rock blooms in the same place year after year, and nature and it are faithful to their covenant, but the poet's eyes that fell upon them are sealed with dust. Generations have gone, the transient flower remains. 'One generation cometh and another goeth,' and the tragedy is made more tragical because the stage stands unaltered, and 'the earth abides for ever.' That is what sense has to say—'the foolish senses'—and that is all that sense has to say. ”

“ The Third Fate: “World after world threads its time through our loom. We watch the pattern grow. Days and eras and ages pass. We know nothing of meanings. We only weave. We know that the pattern brightens as new days come and always voices in the dark tell us of the changing pattern of a new day.” ”

“ But the beginning of things, of a world especially, is necessarily vague, tangled, chaotic, and exceedingly disturbing. How few of us ever emerge from such beginning! How many souls perish in its tumult! ”

“ A low murmur began; constantly it increased in volume and in eagerness; for it was a chant of triumph and greeting to the orb of day which they worshipped as the visible sign that their god smiled upon them. ”

“ They fell and died upon my ear,
As dew dies on the atmosphere;
And then an intense yearning thrilled
My Soul, that all might be fulfilled:
"Where art thou, Blessed Spirit, where?—
Whose Voice is dew upon the air!" ”

“ And if ancient chronicles were dumb, Countless stones in witness forth would come From the deepest entrails of the earth. But this highly-favored race has gone, Gone forever to the realms of night. We, we live! The moments are our own, And the living judge the right. ”

“ At the side of this vortex, which covers with deep oblivion the past, and impenetrable darkness the future, nature shudders and draws back, and the soul, with sinking heart, looks mournfully around upon this fair creation, and up to these beautiful heavens, and in plaintive accents demands, "Is there, then, no deliverance from this falling back into nothing? Must this conscious being cease—this reasoning, thinking power, and these warm affections, their delightful movements? ”

“ A march it was of military speed,
And Earth did change her images and forms
Before us, fast as clouds are changed in heaven.
Day after day, up early and down late,
From hill to vale we dropped, from vale to hill
Mounted—from province on to province swept,
Keen hunters in a chase of fourteen weeks,
Eager as birds of prey, or as a ship
Upon the stretch, when winds are blowing fair:
Sweet coverts did we cross of pastoral life,
Enticing valleys, greeted them and left
Too soon, while yet the very flash and gleam
Of salutation were not passed away. ”

“ The inarticulate voices of the past come calling in sylvan melody out of the closed lips of the centuries, re-awakening the life of our forebears and revealing to us a fleeting glimpse of something which we cannot define or understand. ”

“ What is the mere fidget of the foreground, the present, the transient, compared with the huge unchanging past, where everything is secured and established under the appearance of eternity?—and how, when the obstruction is wonderfully pierced, the page restored, the earth of the present shovelled away, shall we refrain from dashing{185} headlong into the world thrown open, serenely offering itself to our exploration? ”

“ The imagery is distinct and majestic; the prophecy, such as poets love to dwell upon, the Regeneration of Mankind—and that regeneration reflecting back splendour on the foregone time, from which it inherits so much of intellectual wealth, and memory of past virtuous deeds, as must render the possession of happiness and peace of tenfold value. ”

“ There are phases in nature which correspond to every phase of human thought and emotion; and this stern, cloudy scenery answers to the melancholy fatalism of Greek tragedy, or the kindred mournfulness of the Book of Job. ”

“ The trumpet of the day of judgment is about to sound; the dead are about to arise from their tombs; in the midst of thunder and lightning, and surrounded by archangels carrying flaming swords, the Eternal is about to pass judgment upon us all! ”

“ In it the all and each are manifested in most rapid transition; the spiral and undulatory movement of beautiful creation is felt throughout, and, as we listen, thought is most clearly, because most mystically, perceived. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Liberated from our own lusts, or using them, contemptuously and indifferently, as engines of vision, we see the life and death of worlds, the slow, long-drawn, moon-lit wave of Universe-drowning Nothingness.
We see the races of men, falling, rising, stumbling, advancing and receding—and we see the new race—in the hours of the "Great Noon-tide"—fulfilling its Prophet's hope—and we see the end of that also! ”

“ Abroad among them—elusive as that by which we know that a given moment belongs to dawn, not dusk—was the sense of questioning, of unrest, of expectancy that belongs to the dawn itself. Especially the youths and maidens—who, besides wisdom, knew something of spells—waited with a certain wistfulness for what might be, for Change is a kind of god even to the immortals. ”

“ Something in all three of us inspired the forms our bodies had assumed. Our attitudes expressed buried yearnings, emotions, tendencies⁠—whatever they may be termed⁠—that the spirit of the Past evoked. ”

“ Mediaeval love is first revealed in the sudden and almost simultaneous burst of song which, like the twitter and trill so dear to trouvères, troubadours, and minnesingers, fills the woods that yesterday were silent and dead, and greeted the earliest sunshine, the earliest faint green after the long winter numbness of the dark ages, after the boisterous gales of the earliest Crusade. ”

“ Of woods decaying, never to be decayed,
The stationary blasts of waterfalls,
And in the narrow rent at every turn
Winds thwarting winds, bewildered and forlorn,
The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky,
The rocks that muttered close upon our ears,
Black drizzling crags that spake by the way-side
As if a voice were in them, the sick sight
And giddy prospect of the raving stream,
The unfettered clouds and region of the Heavens,
Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light—
Were all like workings of one mind, the features
Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree ”