Country life -- England; England -- Social life and customs -- 19th century; Natural history -- Outdoor books
Stoop and touch the earth, and receive its influence; touch the
flower, and feel its life; face the wind, and have its meaning; let
the sunlight fall on the open hand as if you could hold it.
Something may be grasped from them all, invisible yet strong. It is
the sense of a wider existence--wider and higher. Illustrations
drawn from material things (as they needs must be) are weak to
convey such an idea. But much may be gathered indirectly by
examining the powers of the mind--by the light thrown on it from
physical things. Now, at this moment, the blue dome of the sky,
immense as it is, is but a span to the soul. The eye-glance travels
to the horizon in an instant--the soul-glance travels over all
matter also in a moment. By no possibility could a world, or a
series of worlds, be conceived which the mind could not traverse
instantaneously. Outer space itself, therefore, seems limited and
with bounds, because the mind is so penetrating it can imagine
nothing to the end of which it cannot get. Space--ethereal space, as
far beyond the stars as it is to them--think of it how you will,
ends each side in dimness. The dimness is its boundary. The mind so
instantly occupies all space that space becomes finite, and with
limits. It is the things that are brought before it that are
limited, not the power of the mind.
The sweet wind says, again, that the inner mind has never yet been
fully employed; that more than half its power still lies dormant.
Ideas are the tools of the mind. Without tools you cannot build a
ship. The minds of savages lie almost wholly dormant, not because
naturally deficient, but because they lack the ideas--the tools--to
work with. So we have had our ideas so long that we have built all
we can with them. Nothing further can be constructed with these
materials. But whenever new and larger materials are discovered we
shall find the mind able to build much more magnificent structures.
Let us, then, if we cannot yet discover them, at least wait and
watch as ceaselessly as the hills, listening as the wind blows over.
Three-fourths of the mind still sleeps. That little atom of it
needed to conduct the daily routine of the world is, indeed, often
strained to the utmost. That small part of it, again, occasionally
exercised in re-learning ancient thoughts, is scarcely half
employed--small as it is. There is so much more capacity in the
inner mind--a capacity of which but few even dream. Until favourable
times and chances bring fresh materials for it, it is not conscious
of itself. Light and freedom, colour, and delicious air--sunshine,
blue hill lines, and flowers--give the heart to feel that there is
so much more to be enjoyed of which we walk in ignorance.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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