Tankard

“ Yes, separated for ever from this external world, your thoughts must needs revert to yourself, and your vision dwell internally upon the bygone scenes of your ill-spent life; and I am not without hope that such a mental and constantly presented picture will send the blush of shame even upon your hardened features, that your soul, deadened as it now is to every good and holy impulse, will become softened and tender by repentance. ”

“ Will my soul sink, and shall I stand aghast, Beggared of hope, my heart a conscious blight, Amazed and lost—death's bitterness come and not passed? 25. Ah, no! for from thy heart the love will press, And shining from thy perfect human face, Will sink into me like the father's kiss; And deepening wide the gulf of consciousness Beyond imagination's lowest abyss, Will, with the potency of creative grace, Lord it throughout the larger thinking place. ”

“ And now the anguish of hope deferred created a fresh torture for him. Minds that have the habit of imaginative contemplation and poetic dreaming attribute to inanimate objects a soul, sensitive and variable as their own, and recognise in all things—be it form or colour, sound or perfume—a transparent symbol, an emblem of some emotion or thought; in every phenomenon and every group of phenomena they claim to discover a psychical condition, a moral significance. ”

“ But no; such thoughts, like the soul which gave them birth, can never die. O thought, what art thou? A blessing to angels, a curse to me. Distracted soul, sink into repose: others are happy, and wast thou born to be more wretched than they? Truly thou wast, and why? Because thou livest only in the regions of thought—thought which is burning my brain and piercing my lacerated heart. ”

“ When all the desires and energies of the soul, then, have been recollected in this enkindling of love, and when the soul itself has been touched and wounded in them all, and has been inspired with passion, what shall we understand the movements and digressions of all these energies and desires to be, if they find themselves enkindled and wounded with strong love and without the possession and satisfaction thereof, in darkness and doubt? ”

“ So in these depths of the soul's life the arrangements and re-arrangements of units go on, while on the surface the results appear from moment to moment in sensations keen or dull, in perceptions clear or vague, in judgments wise or foolish, in memories gay or sad, in sordid or lofty trains of thought, in gusts of anger or thrills of love. ”

“ I do not believe that either to myself or my friend were such words spoken, but the whole being is lifted up in vision and overmastered, and the words that came flying upward in consciousness perhaps represent our sudden harmony with a life which is beyond ourselves, we in our words interpreting the life of the spirit. ”

“ And not only does the face reveal the transitory feelings, the changes of mental state, as from joy to sorrow, but it registers with fidelity those states which have become fixed and abiding. Let a person harbor for any considerable time melancholy thoughts and dark forebodings; let him indulge in poignant grief, in anxious fears or bitter repinings; let him encourage by indulgence the growth of an inordinate love of the world, a mean and miserly spirit, or a sour and misanthropic temper, and how surely will this confirmed habit of his soul imprint itself upon his countenance! ”

“ Even so, also, everything that I call good, beautiful, and sacred, turns to a chimera, disturbing my spirit, and rending the heart out of my bosom, as soon as I assume that it stands not in me as a relation to a higher, real Being,—not a mere resemblance or copy of it in me;—when, in fine, I have within me an empty and fictitious consciousness only. ”

“ On the one hand, there are those that seem to spring from dimly lit or dark feeling, to arise,—as it were, hydra-like, to sting and madden, or mist-like, to benumb all life, and turn it into mere drift and dreaming,—from out of the obscure, undrained, swampy places of human ignorance and passion. ”

“ All that is crude—a mere reduction of ideality to sense—a transformation of the spiritual to the earthy—a leveling of soul to matter.
Are we not creatures of thought and passion? Is anything about us more earnest than that same thought and passion? Is there anything more real—more characteristic of that great and dim destiny to which we are born, and which may be written down in that terrible word—Forever? ”

“ The shadows of gloomy and soul-debasing Theory will flit away from your bewildered brain, and in this healthful atmosphere your spirit will regain its long-lost tone, and embrace once more the ethereal images of Hope and Joy and Faith. Probably you will yet find some one to love in this wide world of sorrow ”

“ You have all drawn veils over your Divine nature through this illusion, and from this illusion springs all the acts which keep you from realizing your Divine nature. Your greed, your vanity, your self-conceit, your love of praise, your love of self, your attachment to yourself, and all that is yours, your appetites all act as shades over the windows of the soul. ”

“ It seems to me nevertheless that my melancholy would be supportable and mild enough if it depended solely on my temperament, but it comes so much from outside causes, and what so comes fills my imagination to such a degree, and occupies my thoughts so exclusively, that most of the time I move as in a dream, and scarce listen to what I myself am saying. ”

“ As all scattered thinking was cut off in recollection, as all vagrant and unworthy desires have been killed by the exercises of detachment; so now all scattered willing, all hesitations between the indrawing and outflowing instincts of the soul, shall be checked and resolved. You are to push with all your power: not to absorb ideas, but to pour forth will and love. With this "conative act," as the psychologists would call it, the true contemplative life begins. ”

“ Say what you like, to get its joy, to breathe its peace, to face its truth, one must return with a clear conscience. All this may seem to you sheer sentimentalism; and indeed very few of us have the will or the capacity to look consciously under the surface of familiar emotions. ”

“ From such meditations, how horrible to start up amid the dreariness of night, nor find a human heart unto which to appeal for comfort,—a human voice from which to claim reply in annihilation of the spell that transfixed her mind. ”

“ All those imperceptible regrets, which never individually reach the consciousness, accumulate at last into a definite result; they become the voice of a feeling of emptiness and aspiration; their tone is melancholy itself. In youth the tone of these Aeolian vibrations of the heart is all hope—a proof that these thousands of indistinguishable accents make up indeed the fundamental note of our being, and reveal the tone of our whole situation. ”

“ No, Gentola̤, repeated embodiments do not inure the mortal expression of the Ego to the sorrows and vicissitudes of the physical plane, but through such experiences the Ego evolves into loftier, grander states of Being. Does the Ego and its mortal expression mutually experience joy and sorrow? Aye, truly, but the ego knows, while the objective expression or Soul only sees through a glass darkly. Only the fully freed Ego is capable of comprehending this occult statement, so patiently you will await its solution. ”

“ For this dark contemplation infuses into the soul love and wisdom jointly, to each one according to his capacity and need, enlightening the soul and purging it, in the words of the Wise Man, from its ignorances, as he said was done to himself. ”

“ But all these, at one point or another, somewhere link on intimately with human life and human experience. They stir comprehensible, even if alarming, emotions. They tend on the whole to exalt.
With this multitude of willows, however, it was something far different, I felt. Some essence emanated from them that besieged the heart. A sense of awe awakened, true, but of awe touched somewhere by a vague terror. ”

“ That thought is, perhaps, the first link in a chain of thoughts and images which will be the torment of your conscience and the bane of your life. That sentiment to which you imprudently pandered is perhaps the source of countless fears, regrets, remorse and sorrows. That imprudent glance is perhaps the first spark of a conflagration which nothing can extinguish, and which will destroy your brightest hopes. ”

“ When a man speaks to us, we hear his words, but merely infer his thoughts; when another cries out or writhes in pain, we hear the cry or see the writhing, but the pain, once more, is only inferred. And in like manner, aspiration, hope, doubt, despair, — the whole of the inner life of others, is reached indirectly only. ”

“ As in lofty experiences of appreciation of beauty, or of music, or when the chords of life are swept by a great love, or by a momentous moral issue, the spirit rises in mystical experience to a form of consciousness which no longer marks clock-time and succession of events, whether outward or inward. ”

“ Lifted far above commonplace psychology of the passions, however, was the planting and the growth of an emotion in a heart like hers.
Her prayer began. It began with the scene of her first meeting with him in the fields, for from that moment she fixed the origin of her unfaithfulness. Of the entire hidden life of poetic reverie and unsatisfied desires which she had been living before, her innocent soul took no account. Therefore, beginning with that afternoon, she passed in review the history of her thoughts and feelings. ”

“ What strange things are the nerves—I mean those more secret and mysterious ones in which I have some notion that the mind or soul, call it which you will, has its habitation; how they occasionally tingle and vibrate before any coming event closely connected with the future weal or woe of the human being. ”

“ WHEN this house of sensuality was now at rest—that is, was mortified—its passions being quenched and its desires put to rest and lulled to sleep by means of this blessed night of the purgation of sense, the soul went forth, to set out upon the road and way of the spirit, which is that of progressives and proficients, and which, by another name, is called the way of illumination or of infused contemplation, wherein God Himself feeds and refreshes the soul, without meditation, or the soul’s active help. Such, as we have said, is the night and purgation of sense in the soul. ”

“ Often have I asked myself with anguish, on waking from that formless state of denuded, keenly sentient being, Which is the unreality?—the trance of fiery, vacant, apprehensive, skeptical Self from which I issue, or these surrounding phenomena and habits which veil that inner Self and build a self of flesh-and-blood conventionality? Again, are men the factors of some dream, the dream-like unsubstantiality of which they comprehend at such eventful moments? ”

“ And when all the fearful particulars of her story are at length laid together, and we behold in connected order the image of her hapless existence, there is, in those dim recollections,—those feelings so simple, so impassioned and unspeakable, consuming the closely shrouded, woe-struck, yet ethereal spirit of the poor creature,—something which searches into the inmost recesses of the soul. ”

“ You are continually building, and so externalizing in your body conditions most akin to the thoughts and emotions you entertain. And not only are you so building from within, but you are also continually drawing from without, forces of a kindred nature. Your particular kind of thought connects you with a similar order of thought from without. If it is bright, hopeful, cheerful, you connect yourself with a current of thought of this nature. If it is sad, fearing, despondent, then this is the order of thought you connect yourself with. ”

“ Feeling, as I have heard Minerva say, is a property of matter, and matter, except, of course, that appertaining to myself and the other happy gods, is vile and perishable—quite immaterial, in fact. Thought alone is transcendent, incorruptible, and undying!”
“But, Pan, how can any one think thoughts without something to think them with? ”

“ The romantic spirit has sought in vain for the satisfactory emotional state, and for the worthy deed to perform, and now rests, scornful and yet terrified, in dizzy contemplation of the confused and meaningless maze of sensations into which the world has resolved itself. ”

“ Who can explain the involuntary emotions of human mind? How strange, that often, on the eve of some great misfortune, a sensible cloud should spread over the spirit; but whence it comes, or why, we cannot tell! ”

“ Melancholy, the subject of our present discourse, is either in disposition or habit. In disposition, is that transitory melancholy which goes and comes upon every small occasion of sorrow, need, sickness, trouble, fear, grief, passion, or perturbation of the mind, any manner of care, discontent, or thought, which causeth anguish, dullness, heaviness and vexation of spirit, any ways opposite to pleasure, mirth, joy, delight, causing frowardness in us, or a dislike. ”

“ Hence it proceeds, that every action of the mind, which operates with the same calmness and tranquillity, is confounded with reason by all those, who judge of things from the first view and appearance. Now 'tis certain, there are certain calm desires and tendencies, which, tho' they be real passions, produce little emotion in the mind, and are more known by their effects than by the immediate feeling or sensation. ”