Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, Baron, 1809-1892 -- Friends and associates
This wealth of waters might but seem to draw
From yon dark cave, but, son, the source is higher,
Yon summit half-a-league in air--and higher,
The cloud that hides it--higher still, the heavens
Whereby the cloud was moulded, and whereout
The cloud descended. Force is from the heights.
"_Force is from the heights_" is the thought which underlies the Sage's
interpretation of all that perplexes the younger man. We cannot fully
understand what is beyond and above us, but if we are wise we shall
steadily look upwards, and enough light will eventually be gained for our
guidance. "Lucerna pedibus meis verbum tuum." As God's law is enough to
guide our footsteps, though we cannot hope to understand His full counsel,
so the light by which the spiritual world is disclosed is sufficient for
those who look for it, though its disclosure is only gradual and partial.
If we are said not to know what we cannot submit in its entirety to
scientific tests, we can never know anything worth knowing. If, again, we
are to disbelieve in the spiritual world because it is filled with
mystery, what are we to say of the mysteries which face us in this
earth--inexplicable yet undeniable? The conception of God is not more
mysterious than the thought that a grain of sand may be divided a million
times, and yet be no nearer its ultimate division than it is now. Time and
space are full of mystery. A man under chloroform has been known to pass
many hours of sensation in a few minutes. Time is made an objective
measure of things, and yet its phenomena are so subjective that Kant
conceived it to have no real existence. When the younger man complains
that "the Nameless Power or Powers that rule were never heard nor seen,"
the Sage thus replies:
If thou would'st hear the Nameless, and wilt dive
Into the Temple-cave of thine own self,
There, brooding by the central altar, thou
May'st haply learn the Nameless hath a voice,
By which thou wilt abide, if thou be wise,
As if thou knewest, tho' thou canst not know;
For Knowledge is the swallow on the lake
That sees and stirs the surface-shadow there
But never yet hath dipt into the abysm,
The Abysm of all Abysms, beneath, within
The blue of sky and sea, the green of earth,
And in the million-millionth of a grain,
Which cleft and cleft again for evermore,
And ever vanishing, never vanishes,
To me, my son, more mystic than myself,
Or even than the Nameless is to me.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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