And in the midst of our great wondering, we wonder why some of us are given faith to trust without question, while the rest of us are left to eat out our life’s vitals with asking.
I have walked once in summer by the side of a little marsh filled with mint and white hawthorn. The mint and white hawthorn have with them a vivid, rare, delicious perfume. It makes you want to grovel on the ground—it makes you think you might crawl in the dust all your days, and well for you. The perfume lingers with you afterward when years have passed. You may scream and kick and struggle and weep right lustily every day of your life, but in your moments of calmness sometimes there will come back to you the fragrance of a swamp filled with mint and white hawthorn.
It is meltingly beautiful.
What does it mean?
What would it tell?
Why does the marsh, and the mint and white hawthorn, freeze over in the fall? And why do they come again, voluptuous, enticing, in the damp spring days—and rack the souls of wretches who look and wonder?
You are superb, Devil! You have done a magnificent piece of work. I kneel at your feet and worship you. You have wrought a perfection, a pinnacle of fine, invisible damnation.
The world is like a little marsh filled with mint and white hawthorn. It is filled with things likewise damnably beautiful. There are the green, green grass-blades and the gray dawns; there are swiftly-flowing rivers and the honking of wild geese, flying low; there are human voices and human eyes; there are stories of women and men who have learned to give up and to wait; there is poetry; there is Charity; there is Truth.
The Devil has made all of these things, and also he has made human beings who can feel.
Who was it that said, long ago, “Life is always a tragedy to those who feel”?