From: The Dial, Vol. I, No. III (Jan. 1841)
Author:
Published: Weeks Jordan and Company 1841 Boston
WHAT is there in the full moon, that it should disturb the soul with these thousand old dim recollections? Why should her long shadows point ever to the past? Why should they waken melancholy? Childhood and youth, romance and love, sad and merry hours,—ye are all out there in the moonlight! Ye have gone out from my soul, and hang all around me in this silvered darkness. Mysterious power of association! How strangely Nature mirrors the soul! How her phases reflect back, and give us again our long-lost dreams! He who has never hung with fond sadness on the wondrous moon, has never loved.
All human knowledge is but approximation. Man can never compass the Infinite, any more than he can inhale the whole atmosphere. Yet what he does know, mirrors the Infinite. Every drop of night-dew reflects the whole star-firmament; every pure night-thought hath a glimmer of the All-True within its bosom. All is prophesied in each. Every part is an evangel inspired by the whole. Each opening flower is a Messiah of the uncontained dispensation of Beauty; each visitation of high thought a herald, who proclaims the coming of the kingdom of Truth;—and each virtuous deed a voice crying in the wilderness, “Make straight the pathway of our God.”
What should we be but for the gentle teachings of this green summer time? I feel that I am at God’s school, when I sit on the grass, under these elms, and look about me, and think upon Nature’s impersonality. Man has not broken into the charmed circle in any way. Least of all does Nature imitate the obtrusiveness of our moral codes. She reads her mysterious fables, but we are not pestered by the word “application” at the bottom of the picture. What lesson, before another, shall she point us to, who is thus infinitely wealthy? Generously she lets the soul feed its own instincts, grazing where it will in her green pastures,—knowing that if we love her wisely, we cannot be poisoned or starved in her company. Thus she feeds us as she does the bee and butterfly, with many flowers and odors, trusting that like theirs, our appropriative instincts will be unfolded harmoniously, and that we shall come evermore to her law by coming to ourselves.
And here come the bee and the butterfly themselves to tell us about it. But, as I said, they obtrude not their precepts upon us. Nay, they seem rather shy than not. And yet these two insects have been, unconsciously to themselves and to man, preachers and parable-bringers since Thought began.
So come here, thou little citizen of this green republic, and tell us more than the dull books, which prate as if they knew all about thee. We may fling aside Kirby and Spence, now thou art here. Come, leave that clover-blossom awhile, where thou art rolling thyself about and packing away thy nectar;—cease that monotonous talking to thyself,—that hurried merchant-like air:—leave dunning the poor, drooping, insolvent field-flowers, for they will pay thee one day:—come out of the sunshine, thou hot, petulant, systematic little worker, and tell us why thou hast ever been a stirrer of deep thoughts and resolves to the earnest soul! And thou, my lady butterfly,—gay dancer in the breeze, living air-flower,—silent ever, but not from thought,—making thy demure morning calls on the very flowers at whose doors the disappointed bee has been grumbling;—who made thee a proverb and a perpetual homily in the courts of kings,—or saw thee flitting along in thy relations of the street or the ball-room? Did some poet invent these correspondences, or stand they not as they have ever stood, written in the double-leaved book of the Most High?
For indeed God writes all his decrees dually. They are simultaneously proclaimed at the two open gates of His city, to the inhabitants of the suburbs,—which open gates are nature and the soul. They who hear one proclamation rejoice, but feebly. But they who hear both, mingle faith and wisdom with their joy. The gliding river tells me of this fleeting time; the sunrise, of the appearing of God’s truth; the fragrance of the fields, going forever silently up to heaven, teaches me how to pray without ceasing; the young green spring says more to me of the New Birth than libraries of sermons;—and so all the world over, and from the beginning of time, has nature been a scroll, whose letters and pages are nought, till the soul’s language, in which it is written, be mastered.
I am no Swedenborgian, nor must the following lines be bound down to a dogmatic meaning; yet I will confess that they were written after rising from an hour or two spent over the attractive writings of the great Seer of Sweden.
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