’Tis floating mid day’s setting glories; night
Wrapt in her sable robe, with silent step
Comes to our bed and breathes it in our ears.”
In all these dwells the spirit of poetry, and it is the highest office of the imagination, to extract from these the divine element. Is she the less able to do this, when from nature’s works she looks up with filial awe to nature’s God? By our admiration of the character and attributes of the Great Creator, are we led to regard the works of his hand, with emotions less enthusiastic and poetical? Strike out of our minds, when contemplating the features of the natural world, those ideas of system, order, and adaptation to wise and beneficent purposes so clearly expressed by them all—bid us ascribe all this glorious mechanism, so exquisitely formed and so skillfully arranged, to the unguided instinct of blind chance—and the tie that bound us in such an endearing relation to the scenes of earth, and sanctioned the communion of our better feelings with their ever eloquent spirit, is sundered for ever. There is a religion in every thing around us—and the spirit of poetry, that spirit which carries home to the imagination the pleasures of uncorrupted taste, is almost one and the same with the former. It is a religion which the creeds of men have never perverted, or their superstitions overshadowed. It is fresh from the hands of the Author, and is ever reminding us, with its still small voice, of the Great Spirit, whose presence pervades and quickens it. It glows from every star that sparkles in the far concave. It is among the hills and the vallies of the earth, where the desert mountain-top rears his snow-crowned summit into the frosts of an eternal winter, or the lowly dell slumbers in the quiet of a summer’s sun. It is this, uttering its appeal from the unbreathing things of nature with an ever faithful voice, that fills the spirit with lofty aspirings, until it struggles to cast off the chains which this earthly has thrown around her giant, though infant energies, and soar away beyond the influence of the cold sluggish atmosphere of sense—to attain something etherial and thrilling—something which shall satisfy her large desires, and open to the imagination a world of spiritual beauty and holiness.
And he, who reads the volume of nature’s works, a stranger to this blessed influence, does not read aright. He is blind to that peculiar grace and loveliness which characterize them as a part of the great system of universal order and harmony. It is to the imagination, chastened and elevated by moral feeling alone, that nature makes her choicest revelations. Indeed it is a libel upon the Author of the human mind to suppose that He has endowed it with powers that are to receive their most exquisite gratification without the pale of virtue. We are of those, who believe that the intellect of man is to receive its highest and noblest, as well as purest energies, in its nearest moral conformity to the first, infinite and eternal Intellect. And if the character of this creating Mind is impressed on the visible creation, he who sees the most excellence in the former will feel the strongest love for the latter. Those aspects of nature, which to the unsanctified taste are without form or comeliness, are to him invested with a most religious charm.
“Not a breeze
Flies o’er the meadow, not a cloud imbibes
The setting sun’s effulgence, not a strain
From all the tenants of the warbling shade
Ascends, but whence his bosom can partake