Mrs. Atherton. Mr. Gower was telling us just before you came in, that he found him, from your account, a much more imaginative personage than he had supposed—quite a poetical philosopher.
Gower. Behmen holds a poet’s doctrine, surely, when he represents all nature as struggling towards an ideal,—striving to bring forth now, as it once did—ere Lucifer had fallen,—longing and labouring, in fellowship with our human aspiration.
Willoughby. Such a notion must tend to remove from the mind that painful sense we sometimes have of the indifference of nature to our thoughts and doings.
Atherton. To remove that feeling from the imagination, at least.
Willoughby. And that is enough; for only in imagination can it have existence. Man is so much greater than nature.
Gower. It does, indeed, make all the difference to poets and artists, whether they read sympathy or apathy in the face of creation. Think of the various forms and agencies of nature—of the swart Cyclopean forces under the earth—of the deftly-woven threadwork of the tissues—of vapour-pageantries, and cloud-cupolas, and fairy curls of smoke—of the changeful polity of the seasons, advancing and disgracing frost or sunshine—of the waves lashing at the land, and the land growing into the waves,—of all these ministries as working, like thoughtful man, toward a divine standard; as rejoicing, in their measure, through every descending range of being, under the restoring hand of the Divine Artificer, and panting to recover the order and the beauty of the Paradise which shines above,—of the Eden which once blossomed here below. Think of the earth, resigning herself each winter to her space of sleep, saying inwardly, ‘I have wrought another year to bring the offspring of my breast nearer to the heavenly pattern hidden in my heart. I rest, another circuit nearer to the final consummation.’ Then there is that upper Paradise—substantial, yet ethereal,—as full of beauty, for finer senses, as earth’s fairest spots for more gross, without aught that is hurtful or discordant. Fill up Behmen’s outline. Picture the heavenly hills and valleys, whispering one to another in odorous airs,—a converse only broken sweetly, from time to time, by the floating tones of some distant angel-psalm, as the quiet of a lake by a gliding swan. There run rivers of life—the jubilant souls of the meditative glens through which they wend. There are what seem birds, gorgeous as sunset clouds, and less earthly,—animal forms, graceful as the antelope, leaping among crags more lustrous than diamond,—creatures mightier than leviathan; and mild-eyed as the dove couching among immortal flowers, or bathing in the crystal sea. The very dust is dazzling and priceless, intersown with the sapphire, the sardonyx, the emerald of heaven; and all the ground and pavement of that world branching with veins as of gold and silver, an arborescent glory, instinct with mysterious life.
Willoughby. Thank you, Gower.
Gower. Thank you, Willoughby. You are my informant. I never read a line of Behmen on my own account, and, what is more, never will.
Kate. Helen and I want you very much to tell us something about the Rosicrucians.
Atherton. You have read Zanoni——