What a curious kind of thing shadow is,—that invisible veil, falling so evenly and so lightly over all things, bringing with it such thoughts of calmness and rest. I wonder the old Greeks did not build temples to Shadow, and call her the sister of Thought and Peace. The Hebrew writers speak of the “overshadowing of the Almighty;” they call his protection “the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.” Even as the shadow of Mont Blanc falls like a Sabbath across this valley, so falls the sense of his presence across our weary life-road.
Heimweh.
Why? why this veil of dim and indefinable anguish at sight of whatever is most fair, at hearing whatever is most lovely? Is it the exiled spirit, yearning for its own? Is it the captive, to whom the ray of heaven’s own glory comes through the crevice of his dungeon wall?
Seeing and feeling.
It is not enough to open one’s eyes on scenes; one must be able to be “en rapport” with them. Just so in the spiritual world, we sometimes see great truths,—see that God is beautiful and surpassingly lovely; but at other times we feel both nature and God, and O, how different seeing and feeling!
POGANUC PEOPLE.
Longing for love in the unlovely.
There are hard, sinful, unlovely souls, who yet long to be loved, who sigh in their dark prison for that tenderness, that devotion, of which they are consciously unworthy. Love might redeem them; but who can love them? There is a fable of a prince, doomed by a cruel enchanter to wear a loathsome, bestial form, till some fair woman should redeem him by the transforming kiss of love. The fable is a parable of the experience of many a lost human soul....