Thus we often love to dream our silent way even through the noisy world. And dreamers are with dreamers spiritually, though in the body apart; nor wandering at will think they whence they come, or whither they are going, assured by delight that they will reach their journey's end—like a bee, that in many a musical gyration goes humming round men's heads and tree-tops, aimlessly curious in his joy, yet knowing instinctively the straight line that intersects all those airy circles, leading to and fro between his hive in the garden and the honey-dew on the heather hills.
What can it be that now recalls to our remembrance a few lines of Esop, the delightful old Fabulist, the Merry and Wise, who set our souls a-thinking and our hearts a-feeling in boyhood, by moral lessons read to them in almost every incident befalling in life's common walks—solemn as Simonides in this his sole surviving elegiac strain?
"What weary woe, what endless strife
Bring'st thou to mortal men, O Life!
Each hour they draw their breath.
Alas! the wretches all despair
To flee the ills they cannot bear,
But through the gates of Death.
And yet how beautiful art Thou
On Earth and Sea—and on the brow
Of starry Heaven! The Night
Sends forth the moon Thee to adorn;
And thee to glorify the Morn
Restores the Orb of Light.
Yet all is full of Pain and Dread;
Bedrench'd in tears for ever shed;
The darkness render'd worse
By gleams of joy—and if by Heaven
A Blessing seemeth to be given,
It changes to a curse."
Even in our paraphrase are not these lines very impressive? In the original they are much more solemn. They are not querulous, yet full of lamentation. We see in them not a weak spirit quarrelling with fate, but a strong spirit subdued by a sense of the conditions on which life has been given; conditions against which it is vain to contend, to which it is hard to submit, but which may yet be borne by a will deriving strength from necessity, and in itself noble by nature. Nor, dark as the doctrine is, can we say it is false. Intellect and Imagination may from doleful experiences have too much generalised their inductions, so as to seem to themselves to have established the Law of Misery as the Law of Life. But perhaps it is only thus that the Truth can be made available to man, as it regards the necessity of Endurance. All is not wretchedness; but the soul seeks to support itself by the belief that it is really so. Holding that creed, it has no excuse for itself, if at any time it is stung to madness by misery, or grovels in the dust in a passion of grief; none, if at any time it delivers itself wholly up, abandoning itself to joy, and acts as if it trusted to the permanence of any blessing under the law of Mutability. The Poet, in the hour of profound emotion, declares that every blessing sent from heaven is a Nemesis. That oracular response inspires awe. A salutary fear is kept alive in the foolish by such sayings of the wise. Even to us—now—they sound like a knell. Religion has instructed Philosophy; and for Fate we substitute God. But all men feel that the foundations of Faith are laid in the dark depths of their being, and that all human happiness is mysteriously allied with pain and sorrow. The most perfect bliss is ever awful, as if we enjoyed it under the shadow of some great and gracious wing that would not long be detained from heaven.
It is not for ordinary minds to attempt giving utterance to such simplicities. On their tongues truths become truisms. Sentiments, that seem always fresh, falling from the lips of moral wisdom, are stale in the mouths of men uninitiated in the greater mysteries. Genius colours common words with an impressive light, that makes them moral to all eyes—breathes into them an affecting music, that steals into all hearts like a revelation and a religion. They become memorable. They pass, as maxims, from generation to generation; and all because the divinity that is in every man's bosom responds to the truthful strain it had of yore itself inspired. Just so with the men we meet on our life-journey. One man is impressive in all his looks and words, on all serious or solemn occasions; and we carry away with us moral impressions from his eyes or lips. Another man says the same things, or nearly so, and perhaps with more fervour, and his locks are silver. But we forget his person in an hour; nor does his voice ever haunt our solitude. Simonides—Solon—Esop!—why do such lines of theirs as those assure us they were Sages? The same sentiments are the staple of many a sermon that has soothed sinners into snoring sleep.
Men take refuge even in ocular deception from despair. Over buried beauty, that once glowed with the same passion that consumes themselves, they build a white marble tomb, or a green grass grave, and forget much they ought to remember—all profounder thoughts—while gazing on the epitaph of letters or flowers. 'Tis a vision to their senses, with which Imagination would fain seek to delude Love. And 'tis well that the deception prospers; for what if Love could bid the burial-ground give up or disclose its dead? Or if Love's eyes saw through dust as through air? What if this planet—which men call Earth—were at all times seen and felt to be a cemetery circling round the sun that feeds it with death, and not a globe of green animated with life—even as the dewdrop on the rose's leaf is animated with millions of invisible creatures, wantoning in bliss born of the sunshine and the vernal prime.
Are we sermonising overmuch in this our L'Envoy to these our misnamed Recreations? Even a sermon is not always useless; the few concluding sentences are sometimes luminous, like stars rising on a dull twilight; the little flower that attracted Park's eyes when he was fainting in the desert, was to him beauteous as the rose of Sharon; there is solemnity in the shadow of quiet trees on a noisy road; a churchyard may be felt even in a village fair; a face of sorrow passes by us in our gaiety, neither unfelt nor unremembered in its uncomplaining calm; and sweet from some still house in the city stir is
"The voice of psalms, the simple song of praise."