France -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction; French fiction -- Translations into English
Light gave birth to melody, melody gave birth to light; colors were
light and melody; motion was a Number endowed with Utterance; all
things were at once sonorous, diaphanous, and mobile; so that each
interpenetrated the other, the whole vast area was unobstructed and the
Angels could survey it from the depths of the Infinite.
They perceived the puerility of human sciences, of which he had spoken
to them.
The scene was to them a prospect without horizon, a boundless space into
which an all-consuming desire prompted them to plunge. But, fastened to
their miserable bodies, they had the desire without the power to fulfil
it.
The _Seraph_, preparing for his flight, no longer looked towards them;
he had nothing now in common with Earth.
Upward he rose; the shadow of his luminous presence covered the two
Seers like a merciful veil, enabling them to raise their eyes and see
him, rising in his glory to Heaven in company with the glad Archangel.
He rose as the sun from the bosom of the Eastern waves; but, more
majestic than the orb and vowed to higher destinies, he could not be
enchained like inferior creations in the spiral movement of the worlds;
he followed the line of the Infinite, pointing without deviation to the
One Centre, there to enter his eternal life,--to receive there, in his
faculties and in his essence, the power to enjoy through Love, and the
gift of comprehending through Wisdom.
The scene which suddenly unveiled itself to the eyes of the two Seers
crushed them with a sense of its vastness; they felt like atoms, whose
minuteness was not to be compared even to the smallest particle which
the infinite of divisibility enabled the mind of man to imagine, brought
into the presence of the infinite of Numbers, which God alone can
comprehend as He alone can comprehend Himself.
Strength and Love! what heights, what depths in those two entities, whom
the _Seraph’s_ first prayer placed like two links, as it were, to unite
the immensities of the lower worlds with the immensity of the higher
universe!
They comprehended the invisible ties by which the material worlds are
bound to the spiritual worlds. Remembering the sublime efforts of human
genius, they were able to perceive the principle of all melody in the
songs of heaven which gave sensations of color, of perfume, of thought,
which recalled the innumerable details of all creations, as the songs of
earth revive the infinite memories of love.
Brought by the exaltation of their faculties to a point that cannot
be described in any language, they were able to cast their eyes for an
instant into the Divine World. There all was Rejoicing.
Myriads of angels were flocking together, without confusion; all alike
yet all dissimilar, simple as the flower of the fields, majestic as the
universe.
Wilfrid and Minna saw neither their coming nor their going; they
appeared suddenly in the Infinite and filled it with their presence, as
the stars shine in the invisible ether.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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