No song of nightingale
Within its depths is heard;
And only is its moss
By friendship's roses stirred.
In vain their aching hands
Forsaken brides may wring;
No answer from the grave
The cries of orphans bring:
Yet is it there alone
The longed-for rest is found;
Alone through these dark gates
May pass the homeward bound.
The silent heart beneath,
That pain and sorrow bore,
Hath only found true peace
There, where it beats no more.
REASON, RHYME, AND RHYTHM.
CHAPTER V.—ORDER, SYMMETRY, AND PROPORTION.
No numbers can be conceived of but as a collection of unities; in adding unity, many, to itself, we only form a unity of a higher rank: it is in taking unities successively from these numbers that we return to the first unity. Thus variety or plurality, which at first seemed destructive of unity, actually rests upon it, admitting it as an elementary constituent of its very being. The collective idea of the world, infinite variety, collection of individualities, could not exist in us without the idea of unity; and closely associated with the conception of unity, is the idea of Absolute Order.
Whatever may be the disturbances which we witness either in physical or moral nature, we always believe that Order will succeed the momentary interruption of law. Even when we see earth a prey to the most dreadful catastrophes, we always regard such a state of things as a passing crisis, destined to return to the law of order. Surrounded as it is from the cradle to the grave by an infinite variety of phenomena, the human mind for their investigation devotes itself to the search of a small number of laws, which will link them all, persuaded there is no phenomenon or being so rebellious to a correct classification, that its proper place or role cannot be assigned it in the great system of Eternal Order. Even the savage believes in the periodic return, in the constant and regular recurrence of natural phenomena: such convictions must be based upon an instinctive belief in an Absolute and Universal Order.
If we turn our gaze upon the Author of all things at the time of the creation, we will perceive that He must have conceived the grand plan of the universe as a single or united thought; that He has distributed being to all that is in different degrees; that He has subjected them all to the immutable laws of His wisdom; and that the laws under which they are ranged to receive the Divine action are, in fact, the necessary conditions of their existence. The more distant the link in the chain of being is from God, the more are the laws multiplied, divided, ramified, so as to weave in their vast net that infinite variety which extends to the utmost limits of creation; but as we approach Him in thought, these innumerable laws form themselves into groups, these groups are again resolved into more general laws, until at last we arrive at one which embraces all the others, to which they are all attached as to a common centre, and from which they obtain force and direction.