The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 76, February, 1864: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and PoliticsVarious
General
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 76, February, 1864: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
Much more man is microcosmic and macrocosmic. Natural and supernatural
meet concealedly in the out-world, but openly in him, and his early
desires grow into a future surpassing all desire. The poet sees his
destiny in our wishes,--sees right and wrong, kindness and greediness,
deepening into incalculable grandeurs of heaven and hell. He sees the
man never yet arrived, but now arriving, to inhabit each breast. "Far
off his coming" shines. We have many little gleams of generosity; we
have conviction, and can strike for the right. Nature is a fixed
quantity, a solid; but life is reinforced by life. Truth begets truth,
love kindles love, every end is a new beginning.
Therefore the perception of genius is prophetic,--an anticipation of
manhood for this boy, who is the King's son, child of Eternity, and only
changeling of Time. Wherever any magnanimity is revealed, I lay claim to
it. The courage of heroes, the purity of angels, the generosity of God,
is no more than I need. Only show virtue unmixed at the heart of this
system, and you open my destiny in that. If there be but the least spark
of pure benignity, it is a fire will spread through all and fill the
breast; for Good makes good, and what it is I must become. Man is heir
not to any possession or commodity, though it were a homestead in all
heavens, but to the moral power which we ache to exercise. To-day I am a
poor starveling of Nature, sucking many a dry straw, but so sure as God
I shall stream like the sun. The meanest creature is a promise of such
power, for in each is some radiation as well as suction. Man grows,
indeed, faster than he can be filled, and so is forever empty; but if
power is never a _plenum_, it is never drawn dry, and at least the
mantling foam of it fills the cup. Our expectation is that bead on the
draught of being, and boils over the brim.
Imagination is the spiritual sight, working upward from the fact,
downward from the law. In low experience it divines the tendency of
order, and descends on the other arc of this rainbow to construct the
world, and the man that must be. Imagination is the projection of each
beyond himself. A man shall not lift his meat to his lips without
prophecy and a consulting of this oracle: he shall first extend him to
think the savor and satisfaction of the meat. Shut into the horizon and
the moment, we have this only organ of communication with all that is
beyond; yet having here in rudiments and beginnings all that is beyond,
we laugh at the old limits, and explore the universe through every
dimension, through spaces beyond Space and times beyond Time.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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