THE INFLUENCE OF MORAL FEELING ON THE PLEASURES OF THE IMAGINATION.
No. III.
The influence of moral feeling tends to heighten the pleasure which we derive from beholding the works of nature.
“Our sight,” says Addison, “is the most perfect and most delightful of all our senses. It fills the mind with the largest variety of ideas, converses with its object at the greatest distance, and continues the longest in action without being tired or satiated with its proper enjoyments.” Hence those pleasures of the imagination which are perceived through the medium of this sense, must necessarily be of a high order. Besides, they have this advantage above their fellows, that they are more obvious, and more easy to be acquired. We have but to open our eyes, and the scene in all its beauty and power enters. The colors paint themselves on the fancy, with scarcely a single effort of thought, and each object in the view, as it catches our glance, sends its appropriate impression to the mind, with an approach as gentle, and almost as imperceptible as the dawn of the morning.
This exhibition of nature is free to all. It is unfolded with equal beauty and variety to the humble peasant, as he treads homeward his weary way from the labors of the field, and the man of science and taste who can enjoy it at his leisure. For each the same glorious sun rises and sets, the same landscape of hill and valley and river is spread out, the same rich colors glow, the same fragrance perfumes the air.—In its full and ever changing variety, there is something to suit the disposition and character of every one. The sons of sorrow, whose only inheritance is melancholy and gloom, and in whose minds the bright things of earth meet no response, may find in the still sadness of the lonely vale, or in the steeps of the giant hill, a spirit in unison with their own. And they, over whose fair visions the cloud of disappointment has never flung its shade, whose souls are radiant with the hope and gladness of life’s young morn, may find their companions too in the joyous revels of nature. The gentle whisperings of the summer breeze, the gay sparkle and the rushing fall of the cascade, the mellow richness of the grove, the gorgeous drapery of sunset, with these, with every thing that breathes the spirit of joy, they can claim a kindred feeling.
The scene is ever before us in its unchanging beauty. It is not like the bright shadows that charm us on in boyhood and youth, only to vanish for ever from the sober realities of manhood. The breeze, that cooled the brow of the child in his early sports, plays with the same freshness around the wrinkles of age—the meadows wear as rich a green—the flowers bloom with equal loveliness—and nature, still fair and attractive, as when the morning stars first sang together, feels no decay from the lapse of years. What a barren and cheerless waste would be presented to the eye of man, were all this world of coloring to disappear with its ever varying distinctions of light and shade—what a rich source of innocent gratification had been wanting, if these had never been created. But
“The feet of hoary time
Through their eternal course, have traveled o’er
No speechless, lifeless desert;”
and the confidence of the future is founded upon the promise that seed time and harvest, summer and winter, shall never fail.
This power in the beauties of the natural world to excite and gratify the imagination, is emphatically the poetry of nature, sending out its appeal from every object which greets the eye. There is poetry in the pathless wood, when the summer breeze sweeps over the waves of its dark green foliage—in the bold scenery of the mountain’s height, inspiring the soul with feelings of grandeur and sublimity—in the green valley throwing a charm of hallowed tranquility around the spirit. It dwells in the rising and the setting sun, in the wild flowers of the forest, in the mighty winds, in the dark blue skies, in the golden and silver clouds of heaven, in the rainbow, in the seasons.
“Coming ever more and going still, all fair,
And always new with bloom and fruit,
And fields of hoary grain.”
It is written like a legible language on the broad face of the unsleeping ocean. It dwells among the stars of heaven. It is abroad in the tempest, girt with the stern magnificence of the storm-cloud, careering on the vollied lightning, and uttering its voice of sublimity in the deep-toned thunder.
“’Tis in the gentle moonlight—
’Tis floating mid day’s setting glories; night
Wrapt in her sable robe, with silent step
Comes to our bed and breathes it in our ears.”
In all these dwells the spirit of poetry, and it is the highest office of the imagination, to extract from these the divine element. Is she the less able to do this, when from nature’s works she looks up with filial awe to nature’s God? By our admiration of the character and attributes of the Great Creator, are we led to regard the works of his hand, with emotions less enthusiastic and poetical? Strike out of our minds, when contemplating the features of the natural world, those ideas of system, order, and adaptation to wise and beneficent purposes so clearly expressed by them all—bid us ascribe all this glorious mechanism, so exquisitely formed and so skillfully arranged, to the unguided instinct of blind chance—and the tie that bound us in such an endearing relation to the scenes of earth, and sanctioned the communion of our better feelings with their ever eloquent spirit, is sundered for ever. There is a religion in every thing around us—and the spirit of poetry, that spirit which carries home to the imagination the pleasures of uncorrupted taste, is almost one and the same with the former. It is a religion which the creeds of men have never perverted, or their superstitions overshadowed. It is fresh from the hands of the Author, and is ever reminding us, with its still small voice, of the Great Spirit, whose presence pervades and quickens it. It glows from every star that sparkles in the far concave. It is among the hills and the vallies of the earth, where the desert mountain-top rears his snow-crowned summit into the frosts of an eternal winter, or the lowly dell slumbers in the quiet of a summer’s sun. It is this, uttering its appeal from the unbreathing things of nature with an ever faithful voice, that fills the spirit with lofty aspirings, until it struggles to cast off the chains which this earthly has thrown around her giant, though infant energies, and soar away beyond the influence of the cold sluggish atmosphere of sense—to attain something etherial and thrilling—something which shall satisfy her large desires, and open to the imagination a world of spiritual beauty and holiness.
And he, who reads the volume of nature’s works, a stranger to this blessed influence, does not read aright. He is blind to that peculiar grace and loveliness which characterize them as a part of the great system of universal order and harmony. It is to the imagination, chastened and elevated by moral feeling alone, that nature makes her choicest revelations. Indeed it is a libel upon the Author of the human mind to suppose that He has endowed it with powers that are to receive their most exquisite gratification without the pale of virtue. We are of those, who believe that the intellect of man is to receive its highest and noblest, as well as purest energies, in its nearest moral conformity to the first, infinite and eternal Intellect. And if the character of this creating Mind is impressed on the visible creation, he who sees the most excellence in the former will feel the strongest love for the latter. Those aspects of nature, which to the unsanctified taste are without form or comeliness, are to him invested with a most religious charm.
“Not a breeze
Flies o’er the meadow, not a cloud imbibes
The setting sun’s effulgence, not a strain
From all the tenants of the warbling shade
Ascends, but whence his bosom can partake
Fresh pleasure unreproved.”
C.