THE MINISTER’S WOOING.
Romance.
All prosaic and all bitter, disenchanted people talk as if poets and novelists made romances. They do, just as much as craters make volcanoes, no more. What is romance? Whence comes it? Plato spoke to the subject wisely, in his quaint way, some two thousand years ago, when he said, “Man’s soul, in a former state, was winged and soared among the gods: and so it comes to pass that, in this life, when the soul, by the power of music or poetry, or the sight of beauty, hath her remembrance quickened, forthwith there is a struggling and a pricking pain, as of wings trying to come forth, even as children in teething.” And if an old heathen, two thousand years ago, discoursed thus gravely of the romantic part of our nature, whence comes it that in Christian lands we think in so pagan a way of it, and turn the whole care of it to ballad-makers, romancers, and opera-singers?
Let us look up in fear and reverence, and say, “God is the great maker of romance; He, from whose hand came man and woman,—He, who strung the great harp of existence,—He is the great poet of life.” Every impulse of beauty, of heroism, and every craving for purer love, fairer perfection, nobler type and style of being, than that which closes like a prison-house around us, in the dim, daily walk of life, is God’s breath, God’s impulse, God’s reminder to the soul that there is something higher, sweeter, purer, yet to be attained....
The dullest street of the most prosaic town has matter in it for more smiles, more tears, more intense excitement, than ever were written in story or sung in poem; the reality is there, of which the romance is the second-hand recorder.