Hours in a Library, Volume 3: New Edition, with AdditionsStephen, Leslie
History
Hours in a Library, Volume 3: New Edition, with Additions
Stephen, Leslie
English literature -- History and criticism
So, when Fichte has achieved his deliverance from scepticism, his
mind is closed for ever against embarrassment and perplexity, doubt,
uncertainty, grief, repentance, and desire. 'All that happens belongs
to the plan of the eternal world and is good in itself.' If there
are beings perverse enough to resist reason, he cannot be angry with
them, for they are not free agents. They are what they are, and it is
useless to be angry with 'blind and unconscious nature.' 'What they
actually are does not deserve my anger; what might deserve it they
are not, and they would not deserve it if they were. My displeasure
would strike an impalpable nonentity,' an 'invulnerable nothing,'
as Shelley puts it. They are, in short, parts of the unreal dream to
which belong grief, and hope, and fear, and desire. Death is the last
of evils, he goes on; for the hour of death is the hour of birth to
a new and more excellent life. It is, as Shelley says, waking from
a dream. And now, when we have no longer desire for earthly things,
or any sense for the transitory and perishable, the universe appears
clothed in a more glorious form. 'The dead heavy mass, which did but
stop up space, has perished; and in its place there flows onward
with the rushing music of mighty waves, an eternal stream of life,
and power, and action, which issues from the original source of all
life—from thy life, O Infinite One! for all life is thy life, and only
the religious eye penetrates to the realm of true Beauty. In all the
forms that surround me I behold the reflection of my own being, broken
up into countless diversified shapes, as the morning sun, broken in a
thousand dewdrops, sparkles towards itself,' a phrase which recalls
Shelley's famous passage a little further on:—
Life, like a dome of many coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity.
The application, indeed, is there a little different; but Shelley has
just the same thought of the disappearance of the 'dead heavy mass' of
the world of space and time. Keats, too, is translated to the 'realm
of true beauty.'
He is a portion of the loveliness
Which once he made more lovely; he doth bear
The part, while the one spirit's plastic stress
Sweeps through the dull dense world, compelling there
All new successions to the forms they wear!
Torturing the unwilling dross that checks its flight
To its own likeness, as each mass may bear;
And bursting in its beauty and its might
From trees, and beasts, and men, into the heaven's light.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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