I have read of Alpine flowers leaning their cheeks on the snow. I wonder if any flowers grow near enough to that snow to touch it. I mean to go and see. So I went; there, sure enough, my little fringed purple bell, to which I had give the name of “suspirium,” was growing, not only close to the snow but in it.
Thus God’s grace, shining steadily on the waste places of the human heart, brings up heavenward sighings and aspirations, which pierce through the cold snows of affliction, and tell that there is yet life beneath.
God as an artist.
I was glad to walk on alone: for the scenery was so wonderful that human sympathy and communion seemed to be out of the question. The effect of such scenery to our generally sleeping and drowsy souls, bound with a double chain of earthliness and sin, is like the electric touch of the angel on Peter, bound and sleeping. They make us realize that we were not only made to commune with God, but also what a God He is with whom we may commune. We talk of poetry, we talk of painting, we go to the ends of the earth to see the artists and great men of this world; but what a poet, what an artist, is God! Truly said Michel Angelo, “The true painting is only a copy of the divine perfections—a shadow of his pencil.”
Soul-striving.
The human soul seems to me an imprisoned essence, striving after somewhat divine. There is strength in it, as of suffocated flame, finding vent now through poetry, now in painting, now in music, sculpture, or architecture; various are the crevices and fissures, but the flame is one.
Shadow.