These facts may suggest the advantage which the country-life
possesses for a powerful mind, over the artificial and curtailed life
of cities. We know more from nature than we can at will
communicate. Its light flows into the mind evermore, and we forget
its presence. The poet, the orator, bred in the woods, whose senses
have been nourished by their fair and appeasing changes, year after
year, without design and without heed,--shall not lose their lesson
altogether, in the roar of cities or the broil of politics. Long hereafter,
amidst agitation and terror in national councils,--in the hour of
revolution,--these solemn images shall reappear in their morning
lustre, as fit symbols and words of the thoughts which the passing
events shall awaken. At the call of a noble sentiment, again the
woods wave, the pines murmur, the river rolls and shines, and the
cattle low upon the mountains, as he saw and heard them in his
infancy. And with these forms, the spells of persuasion, the keys of
power are put into his hands.
3. We are thus assisted by natural objects in the expression of
particular meanings. But how great a language to convey such
pepper-corn informations! Did it need such noble races of creatures,
this profusion of forms, this host of orbs in heaven, to furnish man
with the dictionary and grammar of his municipal speech? Whilst
we use this grand cipher to expedite the affairs of our pot and kettle,
we feel that we have not yet put it to its use, neither are able. We are
like travellers using the cinders of a volcano to roast their eggs.
Whilst we see that it always stands ready to clothe what we would
say, we cannot avoid the question, whether the characters are not
significant of themselves. Have mountains, and waves, and skies, no
significance but what we consciously give them, when we employ
them as emblems of our thoughts? The world is emblematic. Parts of
speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of
the human mind. The laws of moral nature answer to those of matter
as face to face in a glass. "The visible world and the relation of its
parts, is the dial plate of the invisible." The axioms of physics
translate the laws of ethics. Thus, "the whole is greater than its part;"
"reaction is equal to action;" "the smallest weight may be made to
lift the greatest, the difference of weight being compensated by
time;" and many the like propositions, which have an ethical as well
as physical sense. These propositions have a much more extensive
and universal sense when applied to human life, than when confined
to technical use.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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