Cloud atlas gentleness os strength10/3/2023 ![]() ![]() We are haunted by it in our loneliest walks. It is ever knocking at the door of our hearts in sweet and unexpected missions of grace and tenderness. But Eden still blooms wherever Beauty is in Nature and Beauty, we know, is everywhere. ![]() There stands no angel at its gates with flaming sword nor did it fade away with all its legendary beauties, drop its leaves into the melancholy streams, leaving no trace behind of its glades and winding alleys, its stretches of flowery mead, its sunny hill-sides, and valleys of happiness and peace. It is not cant, I hope, to say that Eden is not lost entirely. We, who, when we can, carry our hearts in our eyes, know very well, and have often said it before, that Eden is not so many days’journey away from our feet that we may not inhale its perfumes and press our brows against its sod whenever we wish. These memories of Eden! Let us cherish them, for they are not worthless or deceitful. Will you tarry awhile under its shadow, O serious and gentle stranger, and listen to some poor words of mine ? I turn aside and spread my own tent apart. These moods come upon us so like memories ! But you, graybeard travellers in the Desert of Life, you are not to be deceived by the trickery of the elements you know the moist mirage you are not to be beguiled by it from your track let the unwary dream dreams of bubbling wellsprings and pleasant shade, of palmy oases and tranquil repose as for you, you must goad your camels and press onward for Jerusalem.īut I like to chase phantoms I hate the plodding of the caravans. I sometimes believe, thinking on these things, that we have inherited from our father Adam a habit of day-dreaming that in this exile of coarse and work-day life our heated brows are sometimes fanned with breezes from some half-remembered Araby the Blest, and there instinctively come over us such visions of beatitude that the Paradise we have lost is recalled to us, and we live once more among the dreamy and grateful splendors of Eden. Than when they offered themselves to the ordinary waking senses. “come apparelled in more precious habit, More moving delicate and full of life, Into the eye and prospect of the soul,” The mere instincts of affinity are purified and deepened into tend crest affection, and all the external relations of existence The imagination is swayed by the sweetest impulses of humanity and the whole man is changed. Experience and memory present their pictures softened and made gentle by some mysterious power. There are few persons so hardened in the practical life as not to have recognized that in these moments of large and spiritual stillness all the processes of the mind seem to be instinctively attuned to harmonies almost celestial. Voices of old minstrels, wandering down to us on loving lips through the generations, murmur in our ears the dear burden of human affection for men and things and the same tale is poured abundantly into our hearts by all those great masters who, through their Art, have become to us oracles of Beauty and eloquent interpreters of the Love of God. Here, like those chimes which wander unheeded over the house-tops of the roaring town, till they drop down blessed dews of Heaven into still, grass-grown courts and deserted by-ways, the great universal human heart beats closer to our own, and our whole being palpitates with almost ethereal sympathies. And then, away from the city of our toil, the tumult of our ambitions, we gratefully find Vallombrosas of our own, where we walk not alone, but in the pleasant companionship of elevated thoughts, and of old sages and masters, long passed away, hut still wise and gentle to those who approach them with faith and simplicity. BLESSED are the shadows of porches and cloisters! Blessed the walls that shut us out from the dusty, dazzling world, and shed upon us the repose and consolation of our own serene humanity! We, harassed among the base utilities of life, made weary and sore by the ceaseless struggles of emulation and daily warfare, turn wistfully to the Peripatetic among the shady groves of Athens,- dream of quiet Saracenic courts, echoing with plashy fountains,- of hooded monks, pacing away their cloistered lives beneath storied vaults and little patches of sky,- knowing, while we dream, that out of these came of yore the happiness of the old eurekas and the deep sweetness of ancient knowledge. ![]()
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