Two worlds are ours: ’tis only sin
Forbids us to descry
The mystic heaven and earth within
Plain as the sea and sky.
The stars and the mountains, the oceans and winds, may exist for nobler and sublimer purposes than “to furnish man with the dictionary and grammar of his municipal speech,” but for us at least it should be our first and chief cause of thankfulness to God when we commemorate the glories of the world in which he has placed us, that it is by the reflection of those glories that we grow conscious of ourselves, exactly as it is by the reverberation of a luminous ray that we become aware of the presence of holy Light.
But, in those primeval ages which saw the birth of language, the instinctive perception of this harmony, and the application of the perceived analogy to the purposes of language, was far more quick and vivid than it can be now, when our minds are obscured by discussion, dried up by logic, and too often choked by the unnecessary gold of a vocabulary inexhaustible and ready made. “As we go back in history,” says Mr. Emerson, “language becomes more picturesque, until its infancy, when it is all poetry; or all spiritual facts are represented by natural symbols.” To the primal man his words were like the fragments of coloured glass in the kaleidoscope, readily admitting of a thousand new uses, “changing their place and their effect with every emotion which agitated his language, and lending themselves with a lustre ever-new to all the new combinations of his thought.”
The dawn of language took place in the bright infancy, in the joyous boyhood of the world; the glory-clouds still lingered among the valleys, upon the hills, and those splendors of creative power which had smitten asunder the mists that swathed the primeval chaos had not yet ceased to quiver in the fresh and radiant air. Everything was new; the soil was clad in the vernal luxuriance of green and untrodden herbage, and a blissful innocence gave to the new child of Heaven a life of “happy yesterdays and confident to-morrows.” He looked at all things with the large open eyes of childish wonderment, and the[178] simplest facts of the eternal Order were to him miraculous events. To him “the warmth, the west wind, the ornaments of springtide returned unforeseen, and the sunrise, was but a long phenomenon which might in the morning fail the longings of night. If an arch of resplendent colours unfolded itself from heaven to earth, and there broke into a shower of brilliant atoms, sowing the soil with a dust of precious stones, it announced a message and a promise of God. If the moon disappeared in an eclipse, it was devoured by a black dragon; the thunder was the wrath of the Almighty, and the manna was his bread. The adolescent race had all the delicacy of tact, and all the freshness of sentiment, which in youthful souls identifies itself with the poetry of things. In fact, life was itself a poesy full of mystery and full of grace.”
And this delicacy of tact, this youthfulness of sensation, this ever-fresh capacity for that wonder which is the parent of all knowledge and all thought, was allied most closely to religion and to poetic insight. “They seem to me,” says Plato,[179] “to frame a right genealogy, who make Iris the daughter of Thaumas.”
Upon the breast of new-created earth
Man walked; and when and wheresoe’er he moved,