The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 07, No. 44, June, 1861 Creator by Various
page 69 of 272 (25%)
page 69 of 272 (25%)
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not? When the circle is almost ended, and all the momentum of
threescore-and-ten is gained, why not pass the line and enter into second childhood? What more beautiful truth in Nature's I Am, than obedience to this law? I've another fancy on the Big Blue to-night. It is a place for fancies. I remember--a long time ago it seems, and yet I am not so old as Saul's mother--the first knowledge that I had of life. I saw the sun come up one morning out of the sea, and with it there came out of the night of my past a consciousness. I was a soul, and held relations separate from other souls to that risen sun and that sea. From that hour I grew into life. A growth from the Unseen came to me with every day, born I knew not how into my soul. I sent out nothing to people the future. All came to me. Is this true, this faith or fancy that God sends a tidal wave through man, bringing with it from Heaven's ocean fragments set afloat from its shore to lodge in our lives, until there comes an ebb, and then begin our hopes and desires all to tend heavenward, or _elsewhere?_ Have you never felt, do you not now feel, that there is more of yourself _somewhere else_ than there is upon the Earth? I like to think thus, when I see a person ill, or in sorrow, or weighed down with weary griefs. I like to think that that which is ebbing here is flowing and ripening into fitness for the freed soul in that land where there shall be "no more sea." In insanity, does the kind Lord remove _all_ from this world in order to fit up the new life more gloriously? and are those whom most we pity clasped the closest in the Living Arms? |
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