Again:
'What is the worst? Nay, do not ask—
In pity from the search forbear:
Smile on—nor venture to unmask
Man's heart, and view the hell that's there!'
Merciful God! how men suffer when they fly from Thee. When they refuse to listen to the sublime voice implanted within, which calls them to Thee, forever reminding them that they were made for things infinite, eternal! O ye men of pleasure, it is the very greatness of your nature which torments you: there is nothing save God capable of filling the immeasurable depths of your longing! How different the language of Klopstock, as already quoted: 'What recompense could I ask? I have tasted the cup of angels in singing of my Redeemer!'
One of the most dangerous, yet most brilliant among the novelists of the present day, says:
'Properly speaking, love is not a violent aspiration of every faculty toward a created being; it is rather a holy thirst of the most ethereal part of our being for the unknown. Tormented with intuitions of an eternal love, filled with torturing and insatiate desires for the infinite, we vainly seek their gratification in the dying forms which surround us, and obstinately adorn our perishable idols with that immaterial beauty which haunts our dreams. The emotions of the senses do not suffice us; in the treasure house of the simple joys of nature there is nothing sufficiently exquisite to fill our high demands; we would fain grasp heaven, and it is not within our reach. Then we seek it in a creature fallible as ourselves; we expend upon it all the high energies given us for far nobler ends. We refuse to worship God, and kneel before a worm like ourselves! But when the veil falls, when we see behind the clouds of incense and the halos woven by love, only a miserable and imperfect creature—we blush for our delusion, overturn our idol in our despair, and trample it rudely under foot. But as we must love, and will not give our hearts to God, for whom they were created, we seek another idol—and are again deceived! Through this bitter, bitter school we are purified and enlightened, until, abandoning all hope of finding perfection on earth, we are at last ready to offer God that pure, but now broken-hearted worship, which should never have been given save to Him alone.'—George Sand.
Thus is it that 'love's best interpreter is still a sigh.'
Let him who would in safety delight his soul with mystic intuitions of the infinite, turn to that most exquisite of all poems, the Apocalypse, for 'blessed is he that readeth and heareth the words of this prophecy, and keepeth those things which are written in it.' St. Jerome says 'it contains as many mysteries as words'—as many truths as mysteries—and these truths are all revelations of the infinite. 'Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee the crown of life,' says He who can bring thee into that heavenly city which needeth no temple: 'For the Lord God Almighty is the temple thereof, and the Lamb! And the city hath no need of the sun, nor of the moon to shine in it. For the glory of God hath enlightened it, and the Lamb is the lamp of it.' There shall we feed upon the infinite!
The pantheistic feeling into which the imaginative mind so readily falls, is thus sketched by a poet of our own times:
'I seated myself, after sunset, by the water's side; nothing was to be heard save the dash of the waves as they broke upon the lonely shore; and I gradually fell into that state so well known among solitary travellers:—no distinct remembrance of my own separate being remained to me: I seemed to be but a part of some great whole, to undulate with the lake, to vegetate with the trees, to sigh with the winds, to blossom with the flowers.'
This feeling of the infinite so pervaded antiquity, that man almost lost the consciousness of his own personality in the immensity of the universe, regarding himself but as an element of the absolute unity of the world. His imagination fell into profound reverie, he felt himself but as an integral part of a universal movement drawing all things to a single centre, confounding all beings with one sole substance. We have only to open the Vedas to convince ourselves how deeply this feeling pervaded the early philosophy of the Hindoos. For example: