British Quarterly Review, American Edition, Vol. LIV: July and October, 1871Various
History
British Quarterly Review, American Edition, Vol. LIV: July and October, 1871
Various
English periodicals
And we have less need to be philosophically warned
against the possible caricature of the latter doctrine (of which the
teachers of nescience remind us), than to be cautioned against the
partial truth of the former, which, in isolation, may so easily drift
into exaggeration and a lie.
The intellectual intuition of the infinite, which we have endeavoured
to vindicate, so far attests this correspondence; but the inspired
utterance of the Poet in reference to the soul of nature, no less
bears it witness. The identity or affinity of the force within him and
the forces without, is felt by the poet when the speculative thinker
perceives it not. He cannot analyse into its constituent elements the
mystic meaning of the universe which is flashed into his soul in
moments of glowing inspiration, as the chemist analyses his earths in
a crucible. But he is the
'Mighty prophet, seer blest,
With whom these truths do rest,
Which we are toiling all our years to find
In darkness lost.'
And he may be able to help the merely scientific explorer out of that
abyss of mystery in which he is speculatively lost, and to save him
from erecting an altar to 'the unknown God.' While his soul, in 'a
wise passiveness,' lies open to the visitations of the supernatural,
he sees a vision, and he hears a voice, of which he can give no
scientific explanation, but which announces to him the 'open secret.'
Perhaps the finest description of the characteristics of the soul's
intuitions is that given by Lowell, 'the prevailing poet' of America.
He writes--
'As blind nestlings, unafraid,
Stretch up wide-mouthed to every shade,
By which their downy dream is stirred,
Taking it for the mother-bird;
So, when God's shadow, which is light,
My wakening instincts falls across,
Silent as sunbeams over moss,
_In my heart's-nest half-conscious things
Stir with a helpless sense of wings,
Lift themselves up_, and tremble long
With premonitions sweet of song.'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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