Flowers and Fruit From the Writings of Harriet Beecher Stowe
9781465664914
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
When we feel a thing ourselves, we can see very quick the same in others. When a finely constituted nature wishes to go into baseness, it has first to bribe itself. Evil is never embraced, undisguised, as evil, but under some fiction which the mind accepts, and with which it has the singular power of blinding itself in the face of daylight. The power of imposing on one’s self is an essential preliminary to imposing on others. The man first argues himself down, and then he is ready to put the whole weight of his nature to deceiving others. Perhaps it is so, that souls once intimately related have ever after this a strange power of affecting each other,—a power that neither absence nor death can annul. How else can we interpret those mysterious hours in which the power of departed love seems to overshadow us, making our souls vital with such longings, with such wild throbbings, with such unutterable sighings, that a little more might burst the mortal bond? Is it not deep calling unto deep? the free soul singing outside the cage to her mate beating against the bars within? Scarcely conscious, she lay in that dim, clairvoyant state, when the half-sleep of the outward senses permits a delicious dewy clearness of the soul, that perfect ethereal rest and freshness of the faculties, comparable only to what we imagine of the spiritual state,—season of celestial enchantment, in which the heavy weight “of all this unintelligible world” drops off, and the soul, divinely charmed, nestles like a wind-tossed bird in the protecting bosom of the One All-perfect, All-beautiful. What visions then come to the inner eye have often no words corresponding in mortal vocabularies. The poet, the artist, and the prophet in such hours become possessed of divine certainties which all their lives they struggle, with pencil or song or burning words, to make evident to their fellows. The world around wonders, but they are unsatisfied, because they have seen the glory and know how inadequate the copy.
