The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, No. 57, July, 1862 by Various
page 84 of 292 (28%)
page 84 of 292 (28%)
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shadows of darkness. "Why is it," says Richter, "that the night puts
warmer love in our hearts? Is it the nightly pressure of helplessness, or is it the exalting separation from the turmoils of life,--that veiling of the world in which for the soul nothing then remains but souls,--that causes the letters in which loved names are written to appear like phosphorus-writing by night, on _fire_, while day, in their cloudy traces, they but _smoke_?" Insensibly we wandered into one of those weird passages of psychological speculation, the border territory where reason and illusion hold contested sway,--where the relations between spirit and matter seem so incomprehensibly involved and complicated that we can only feel, without being able to analyze them, and even the old words created for our coarse material needs seem no more suitable than would a sparrow's wings for the flight of an eagle. "It is emphatically true of these themes," I remarked, after a long rambling talk, half reverie, half reason, "that language conceals the ideas, or, rather, the imaginations they evolve; for the word idea implies something more tangible than vagaries which the Greek poet would have called 'the dream of the shadow of smoke.' But yet more unsatisfactory than the impotence of the type is the obscurity of the thing typified. We can lay down no premises, because no basis can be found for them,--and establish no axioms, because we have no mathematical certainties. Objects which present the assurance of palpable facts to-day may vanish as meteors to-morrow. The effort to crystallize into a creed one's articles of faith in these mental phantasmagoria is like carving a cathedral from sunset clouds, or creating salient and retreating lines of armed hosts in the northern lights. Though willing dupes to the pretty fancy, we know that before |
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