The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 04, No. 23, September, 1859. Various

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СКАЧАТЬ thought, Pity is slain by Reverence. We are ready to cry out against the sluggish movement of the world and its lazy flux of life; but before the satire is spoken, we are fascinated by an undercurrent of this same world, earnest and full toward its sure goal,—of which, indeed, we only dream; but "the dream is from God,"3 and surer than sight. There is a profounder calm than appears to the eye, in the quiet cottages scattered up and down among the peaceful valleys; the rest of death is more untroubled than the marble face which it leaves as its visible symbol; and sleep, "the minor mystery of death," (ὑπνος τα μικρα του θανατου μυστηρια [Greek: hypnos ta mikra tou thanatou mystêria]4) has a deeper significance than is revealed in any external token. So what is sneeringly called the credulity of human nature is its holy faith, and, in spite of all the hard facts which you may charge upon it, is the glory of man. It introduces us into that region where "nothing is unexpected, nothing impossible."5 It was the glory of our childhood, and by it childhood is made immortal. Myth herself is ever a child,—a genuine child of the earth, indeed,—but received among men as the child of Heaven.

      Upon the slightest material basis have been constructed myths and miracles and fairy-tales without number; and so it must ever be. Thus man asserts his own inherent strength of imagination and faith over against the external fact. Whatsoever is facile to Imagination is also facile to Faith. Easy, therefore, in our thoughts, is the transition from the Cinder-wench in the ashes to the Cinderella of the palace; easy the apotheosis of the slave, and the passage from the weary earth to the fields of Elysium and the Isles of the Blessed.

      This flight of the Imagination, this vision of Faith,—these, reader, are only for the epoptæ. It matters not, that, by naked analysis, you can prove that the palaces of our fancy and the temples of our faith are but the baseless fabric of a dream. It may be that the greater part of life is made up of dreams, and that wakefulness is merely incidental as a relief to the picture. It may be, indeed, in the last analysis, that the ideal is the highest, if not the only real.

      For the sensible, palpable fact can, by the nature of things, exist for us only in the Present. But, my dear reader, it is just here, in this Present, that the tenure by which we have hold upon life is the most frail and shadowy. For, by the strictest analysis, there is no Present. The formula, It is, even before we can give it utterance, by some subtile chemistry of logic, is resolved into It was and It shall be. Thus by our analysis do we retreat into the ideal. In the deepest reflection, all that we call external is only the material basis upon which our dreams are built; and the sleep that surrounds life swallows up life,—all but a dim wreck of matter, floating this way and that, and forever evanishing from sight. Complete the analysis, and we lose even the shadow of the external Present, and only the Past and the Future are left us as our sure inheritance. This is the first initiation,—the veiling of the eyes to the external. But, as epoptæ, by the synthesis of this Past and Future in a living nature, we obtain a higher, an ideal Present, comprehending within itself all that can be real for us within us or without. This is the second initiation, in which is unveiled to us the Present as a new birth from our own life.

      Thus the great problem of Idealism is symbolically solved in the Eleusinia. For us there is nothing real except as we realize it. Let it be that myriads have walked upon the earth before us,—that each race and generation has wrought its change and left its monumental record upon pillar and pyramid and obelisk; set aside the ruin which Time has wrought both upon the change and the record, levelling the cities and temples of men, diminishing the shadows of the Pyramids, and rendering more shadowy the names and memories of heroes,—obliterating even its own ruin;—set aside this oblivion of Time, still there would be hieroglyphics,—still to us all that comes from this abyss of Time behind us, or from the abyss of Space around us, must be but dim and evanescent imagery and empty reverberation of sound, except as, becoming a part of our own life, by a new birth, it receives shape and significance. Nothing can be unveiled to us till it is born of us. Thus the epoptæ

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      1

      This picture is now in the Louvre. It is a composition of great dramatic power. Mrs. Stowe gives a graphic description of the effect it produced upon her, in her "Sunny Memories of Sunny Lands."

      2

      The worship of this Great Mother is not more wonderful for its antiquity in time than for its prevalence as regards space. To the Hindu she was the Lady Isani. She was the Ceres of Roman mythology, the Cybele of Phrygia and Lydia, and the Disa of the North. According to Tacitus, (Germania, c. 9,) she was worshipped by the ancient Suevi. She was worshipped by the Muscovite, and representations of he

1

This picture is now in the Louvre. It is a composition of great dramatic power. Mrs. Stowe gives a graphic description of the effect it produced upon her, in her "Sunny Memories of Sunny Lands."

2

The worship of this Great Mother is not more wonderful for its antiquity in time than for its prevalence as regards space. To the Hindu she was the Lady Isani. She was the Ceres of Roman mythology, the Cybele of Phrygia and Lydia, and the Disa of the North. According to Tacitus, (Germania, c. 9,) she was worshipped by the ancient Suevi. She was worshipped by the Muscovite, and representations of her are found upon the sacred drums of the Laplanders. She swayed the ancient world, from its southeast corner in India to Scandinavia in the northwest; and everywhere she is the "Mater Dolorosa." And who is it, reader, that in the Christian world struggles for life and power under the name of the Holy Virgin, and through the sad features of the Madonna?

3

Iliad, I. 63.

4

Euripides.

5

Archilochus.

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