Profundity

“ There is not once but always a “sustained level of clear thought and fine feeling.” There is obscurity at times, but 12it is usually the obscurity of profundity, and intelligent study generally reveals a meaning that is worth the effort. ”

“ It is all a mere mass of change; a mass of thought in a continuous change is what you call a mind. ... The torch is leading the procession. The circle is a delusion. [Or take the example of a river.] It is a continuous river passing on; every moment a fresh mass of water passing on. So is this life; so is all body, so is all mind. ”

“ Great Nature's hand, in every plan, Had laid in wise design, But what design, or use, is in This theory of thine? If, when our earth-career is done, All conscious life must cease, And we drift on, and on, and on, In endless, dreamy peace— If Heaven is but a mystic spell, Whose glowing visions thrall, Why should we have a life beyond? Why have a Heaven at all? ”

“ Resting the head upon the hand, gazing down upon the ground, the strange and marvellous inner sight of the mind penetrates the solid earth, grasps in part the mystery of its vast extension upon either side, bearing its majestic mountains, its deep forests, its grand oceans, and almost feels the life which in ten thousand thousand forms revels upon its surface. Returning upon itself, the mind joys in the knowledge that it too is a part of this wonder—akin to the ten thousand thousand creatures, akin to the very earth itself. ”

“ Would a mountain, a river, or a building be sublime to us if we did not read their masses and lines as symbols of force? Would even the illimitable extent of sea or sky, the endlessness of time, or the countlessness of stars or sands or waves, bring us anything but fatigue or depression if we did not apprehend them, in some way and however vaguely, as expressions of immeasurable power—power that created them, or lives in them, or can count them; so that what impresses us is not the mere absence of limits, but the presence of something that overpowers any imaginable limit? ”

“ Width of thought is surely born, in some sort, of majestic sights—cloud forms, and a burning sky, rock pinnacles, and wandering, deep-down valleys, the gray-violet shadows on the hills, the frozen serenity of far snows. ”

“ CREATION.
"Let there be light!" and Chaos fled
Back to his midnight cell,
And light, the earliest gift of Heaven,
On cradled nature fell.
Earth from the encroaching waters rose,
Strong Ocean knew his place,
Bold rivers forced their unknown way,
Young streams began their race. ”

“ But beyond the heat and light, I felt the presence of the sun as I felt it in the solitary valley, the presence of the resistless forces of the universe; the sun burned in the sky as I stood and pondered. Is there any theory, philosophy, or creed, is there any system or culture, any formulated method able to meet and satisfy each separate item of this agitated pool of human life? ”

“ In these pantheistic sympathies I dimly recall that another sect finds three great mysteries in its esoteric view of the world. The wind whistling through the trees, the river breaking over its rocks, the movements of man and his voice,—or, indeed, his silence,—are the expression of the great mysteries of body, of word, and of thought. ”

“ We get out of depth directly, and are like people who cannot swim. For how can the human mind, for one moment, expect to solve the mysteries of the deep things of God? How can it aspire either to fathom its depths, or to scale its heights? Think for one moment what man is, a little creature on this little ball of earth, here for a few years, and then passing away for ever. ”

“ You have built up a wall of your own excellencies that you cannot see God; and then you cry, ‘He hath hidden Himself from me.’ Pull down your miserable mud walls, and let the light of Heaven shine in upon you. ”

“ And what does it matter after all, under the great Dome, a few hordes of factmongers more or less, glimmering and wonderless, crawlers on the bottom of the sea of time, lovers of the ooze of knowledge, feeling with slow, myopic mouths at Infinite Truth?
But when I see my four faces—the faces of my four special boys, when I hear the college bells ringing to them, it matters a great deal. My soul will not wait. What is the ridge-pole of the world? The distance of a ridge-pole does not count. The extent of a universe does not seem to make very much difference. ”

“ Yet we have experienced almost as strong emotions of vagueness, terror, sublimity, strength, and beauty while gazing upon the vast panorama of groups and clusters of chaotic peaks that stretch away in almost endless variety of form in confused and disorderly arrangement. ”

“ And thus the nature of the world stands firm With never blows from outward, nor can be Nowhere disparted—since all height and depth Have always inward to the centre pressed (If thou art ready to believe that aught Itself can rest upon itself ) ; or that The ponderous bodies which be under earth Do all press upwards and do come to rest Upon the earth, in some way upside down, Like to those images of things we see At present through the waters. ”

“ To live to the depths of your nature as well as to the heights. Truly there are stars in the heights and they will be a garland for your forehead. But the depths are equal to the heights. Wondrous deep are the depths, very fertile is the lowest deep. There are stars there also, brighter than the stars on high. The name of the heights is Wisdom and the name of the depths is Love. How shall they come together and be fruitful if you do not plunge deeply and fearlessly? Wisdom is the spirit and the wings of the spirit, Love is the shaggy beast that goes down. ”

“ But have you ever climbed a mountain up and up and up, through thick woods, over rough, almost impassable trails, into clouds dense and chilling, stormy and angry, over treacherous snows and frightful cliffs, and come out at last on the very top to see both earth and heaven, yourself between, the clouds dispersed, the hardships and dangers all forgotten, the whole world real and yours? Well, that is doubt become achievement. ”

“ Before their eyes in sudden view appear The secrets of the hoary Deep—a dark Illimitable ocean, without bound, Without dimension; where length, breadth, and height, And time, and place, are lost; where eldest Night And Chaos, ancestors of Nature, hold Eternal anarchy, amidst the noise Of endless wars, and by confusion stand. ”

“ I wander less in my thoughts, am less dissipated, am aware how shallow was the current of my thoughts before. Deep streams are dark, as if there were a cloud in their sky; shallow ones are bright and sparkling, reflecting the sun from their bottoms. ”

“ At such a moment the mind is often affected with a sense of vastness all around. The eternal river, eluding the utmost range of vision, like the dimly visible destiny of man, has faded away into the unknown. ”

“ As a whole landscape bursts from the darkness with all its heights and depths revealed, under a flash of lightning--so the whole destined chain of events passed before her soul, and shuddering, she recognized the depth to which she was fallen. ”

“ How can we read the life, when we cannot spell the heart?
How shall we measure another, we who can never know
From the juttings above the surface the depth of the vein below?
Even our present way is known to ourselves alone,
Height and abyss and torrent, flower and thorn and stone;
But we gaze on another's path as a far-off mountain scene,
Scanning the outlined hills, but never the vales between. ”

“ Between these two lines there is a gulf fixed like that between the finite and the infinite, between matter and spirit, between man and the idea, between motion and the object moved, between the creature and God. Ask Love the Divine to grant you his wings and you can cross that gulf. ”

“ A faint, searching woods perfume of dampness greets your nostrils. And somehow, mysteriously, in a manner not to be understood, the forces of the world seem in suspense, as though a touch might crystallize infinite possibilities into infinite power and motion. ”

“ If we could climb high enough, and see deep enough, to read a spiritual panorama in like manner, we should look into the mystery of the intent that builds the worlds and works with "birth and death and infinite motion" to evolve the wonders of all human and angelic history. ”

“ Looking upwards into the deep azure of the sky, intently gazing into space and forgetting for a while the life around and beneath, there comes into the mind an intense desire to rise, to penetrate the height, to become part and parcel of that wondrous infinity which extends overhead as it extends along the surface. ”

“ Is it not sufficient unto Thee that each object grows by itself and not in a chain of antecedents and consequences ? Even as bubbles rise by themselves on the surface of the deep, may we not spring into existence on the surface of Thy illimitable life? ”

“ The ideas of obscurity, danger, and infinity, all powerful and acknowledged sources of the sublime, are excited at the view of a range of frozen summits, cold, fixed, and everlasting as the imaginary nature of those destinies, with whom a noble bard has peopled them ”

“ How shall the disposition of the weight be altered so as to press the spirit upward towards God, instead of downward and away? How shall the pillar of cloud which rises between us and him become one of fire, to reflect upon us constantly the light of his countenance, and to guide us over the sands of life's desert? ”

“ Life hangs upon a little thread, but what think you of mountains hanging upon a thread? In my fancy I said, ‘If Fate had decreed one of the Sisters to cut that thread while I witnessed the singular spectacle, what convulsions upon the land and sea about us might not have followed!’ But Nature had an admirable way of taking down these rock-giants, hanging between the heavens and the earth. ”

“ How much wider is the whole circle of heaven than thyself?—Wider than thou canst express.
“Among ourselves also, how vast the difference we may observe in men’s degrees of power! To you and me, and many another like us, many things are impossible which are quite easy to others. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The vast universe, its myriad worlds, and the plains of boundless earth which we had left—the extent of shoreless sea around—contracted to my view—they and all that they contained, shrunk up to one point, even to our tossing bark, freighted with glorious humanity. ”

“ Above the earth and all created things,
The sun and starry heavens—yea, and above
The mind of man, until they did attain
Where light no shadow has, and life no death,
Where past or future are not, nor can be,
But an eternal present, and the Lamb
His people feeds from indeficient streams. ”

“ The imaginative movement by which the complex vision of the soul plunges into the abysses of stellar space, seeking to fathom, at least in a mental act, immensity beyond immensity, and gulf beyond gulf, is a definite human experience. It is the actual experience of the soul itself, dropping its plummet into immensity, and finding immensity unfathomable. ”

“ How like the vast interminable deep is this thronging, surging mass of humanity, where they, like restless waves, pause awhile on the margin of the boundless sea until the ebb tide moves out in the vast sea of life. ”

“ In the depths of the earth I saw innumerable powers in motion, and multiplying to infinity; whilst upon its surface, and beneath the heavens, there teemed ten thousand varieties of living creatures. Everything around is alive with an infinite number of forms; while mankind fly for security to their petty houses, from the shelter of which they rule in their imaginations over the wide-extended universe. ”

“ What is it that you are concealing beneath the surface of your stagnant water? for you are like stagnant pools which men believe to be deep, though they would not drown a cat! To think that you should be such a mighty, undeveloped force, a force which might mould the future, and yet you lie about as inert as logs of wood! ”

“ But if the soul is quick and strong, it bursts over that boundary on all sides, and expands another orbit on the great deep, which also runs up into a high wave, with attempt again to stop and to bind. ”

“ By the side of such wonderful achievements of the mind, what signifies the weakness and fragility of our body; what signifies the dimensions of the planet—our residence—the grain of sand on which it has happened to us to appear for a few moments! ”

“ We stare wildly about us, and discover—or it may be we never make the discovery—that it was not actually the sky that has tumbled down but merely a frail structure of our own rearing, which never rose higher than the housetops, and has fallen because we founded it on nothing. ”

“ The peak is calculated to enchain the eye by its towering height and faultless symmetry. Did Nature herself design and fashion it for its strange destiny? Was it indeed reserved for its present consecration? Who may know? Life is a chain of sequences divinely ordered. ”

“ The eyes of God are set in the hollows of his head, for so it seems to me must the Omnipotent Power sit silently upon the great cliffs of Time noting the struggles and the passages of all the countless little creatures that fill the vast sea of this world. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The philosopher picked out his way through the dark and labyrinthine path, between effects and causes, and slowly approaching towards the light, he gathered semblances of the great Reality, like a mirage, beautiful and truthful, although still but a cloud-reflection of the vast Unseen. ”

“ There is a kind of eloquence issuing from the depth of the soul, as from a spring, rolling along its copious floods, sweeping all before it, overwhelming by its very force, carrying, upsetting, engulphing its adversaries, and more dazzling and more thundering than the bolt which leaps from crag to crag. ”