What suggestive power has the river to induce this more sombre train of reflection? Surely that embodied in the old proverb—Follow the river and you will come to the sea. Clough, in his little poem, "The Stream of Life," concludes with a note of sadness, almost of despair:
"O end to which all currents tend,
Inevitable sea,
To which we flow, what do we know,
What shall we guess of thee?
A roar we hear upon thy shore,
As we our course fulfil;
Scarce we divine a sun will shine
And be above us still."
The rushing rapid and the plunging waterfall have an influence all their own in rousing intuitions of more than human life and power. The dazzling and dashing rainbows of spray appeal to the sense of sight—the internal rhythmic sound from the lighter tones which are flung around like notes from a Ström Karl's magic harp, or the alluring song of a Lorelei, to the thunder of a Niagara, nature's diapason sounding the lowest note that mortal ears can catch, appeal to the sense of hearing—and underlying all is a vague sense of irresistible power. How touching, how profoundly true, the story in "Eckehard" of the little lad and his sister who wandered off until they came to the Rheinfal. There, gazing at the full sweep of that magnificent fall the little fellow throws into the swirling emerald of the waters at his feet a golden goblet, as an offering to the God whom he felt to be so near. Unconsciously he was a natural mystic. Movement, sound, and colour combined to produce in him, what it should produce in all, a sense of immanent Reality, self-moving, self-sustained. And yet even a waterfall may suggest far other thoughts—a downward course from the freshness of the uplands of youth to the broadening stream of manhood declining towards old age and the final plunge. The fall itself would thus convey vague feelings of loss of power and vigour—a loss that gathers speed as it approaches the end. So in Campbell's well-known "River of Life":
"When joys have lost their bloom and breath
And life itself is vapid,
Why, as we reach the Falls of Death,
Feel we its course more rapid? "
If so sad a train of reflections can be stimulated by the rapids and the falls of rivers, how much more so by their ending in the ocean! Old age and death can hardly fail to assert themselves in the minds of those who sail down some noble river and meditate:
"As the banks fade dimmer away,
As the stars come out, and the night wind
Brings up the stream
Murmurs and scents of the infinite sea."
Granting that the river's merging in the sea suggests the close of life as we know it here, must we also grant that the natural-mystic must give way to a partial, if not an absolute, tendency to pessimism? That a natural-mystic should be a pessimist would seem to be an anomaly. For he holds that he can hold living communion with the Real; and such communion would carry with it, surely, a strong hope, if not a conviction, that change in material form cannot affect the inner being, call it the spiritual essence, of which that form is a particular manifestation. Deny that nature has a soul and optimism becomes a ghastly mockery. Believe that nature and man are linked together as kindred forms of spiritual existence, and then, though there will not indeed be formal proof of immortality, there will be intuitive trust in the future. What the implications of such a trust may be is for the various philosophies and theologies to determine; but taken at its lowest value, it would secure a man from pessimism.
In the light of these general observations, let us consider the particular case now presented. The river is merged in the sea—it is absorbed—its existence as a river is terminated. But the "substance" of its being remains; diffused in a vaster whole, but not lost. What is this vaster whole? If we regard it as an Absolute, there may perchance be ground for pessimism. If, with certain scientists, we stop short at the conservation of energy, there is nothing ahead but a blank. But if we hold to the conservation of values, as at least a parallel to this conservation of energy, we are impelled to hold also to the conservation of all that is ultimate in individualities. For values imply modes of being which can allow of the experience of values as such. And the Nature-Mystic's direct communion with his environment is seen to be one mode by which the individual centre of life learns to live increasingly in the life of the Whole—the total Reality. There is, then, no absorption where values are conserved, but an ever richer content of experience, an ever deepening insight into its significance, and an ever keener enjoyment of the material it affords.
As a specific case of an optimistic creed based on an intuition of the essential kinship of all things, it is profitable to study the poetry of a Sufi mystic of the thirteenth century. How delicate the thought enshrined in the following lines: