And half were of its show’rs.”
But it is not so easy to shake the throne of fancy, or to lay the genius of romance. He will ever wave his wand of enchantment over the human mind. The poet will still build his air-castles, and the ghost-seer indulge in his wild visions of nonentity.
The wonders of creation will still affect us, according to the quality of intellect or genius, or the constitution or cultivation of the mind. The poor Indian will still “see God in clouds, and hear him in the wind,” and the untutored rustic be startled by the shadow of a shade. To him the slightest change in the regular course of nature will still be a special miracle: thunder, the awful voice of Divine reproof; lightning, the flashes of Divine displeasure; the scintillations of the aurora, the spectral forms of contending armies; and the comet foretel the wreck of mighty empires. Against this untutored devotion I would not breathe a thought,—it is the voice of the Deity speaking to the savage.
But it is the privilege, the duty of intellect, to think more deeply of the physiology of nature; and to learn from the physical sciences, its real utility in the grand scheme of the creation.
Philosophy, rising from the sublime study of these beautiful phenomena, regards them as the pure effect of those elemental laws, by which the integrity of the universe is preserved. And what ought this philosophy to teach us? Not the superstition of the bigot—for the age of special miracles is, for the present, past; not the pride of the fatalist, who refers all to chance and necessity; not the mania of the astrologer, who plumes himself on his prophetic wisdom, and presumes to interpret to the letter the mysterious voice of his Creator; but that true wisdom, which threw over Boyle, and Locke, and Newton, the mantle of humility and devotion.
The autumn floods had descended from the mountains of Gwent; the banks of the meandering Wye were desolate, and her woods leafless; yet the Abbey of Tintern was still majestic and unchanged.
It had been decided, that when the summer sun shone again on Wyndcliff, the wanderers should revisit the beautiful valleys that lay beneath it, in memory of happy hours; but ere this was fulfilled, changes manifold had come over their destiny, from which might be fashioned a true love-story.
For Astrophel, Ida had unconsciously worked a spell of natural witchcraft, and his wild thoughts were ever chastened by the pure light of her devotion. And Evelyn almost confessed to Castaly, that there might be a sort of animal magnetism. He has neglected the study of the atomic theory, for the contemplation of the animated atoms that play around his domestic hearth; and the heart and life of Castaly, a poetry in themselves, have since interwoven many a blushing flower on the classic pages of his philosophy.
THE END.