And yet will you have rendered no assistance to the untiring queen;
other thoughts will have filled your mind, and it will be without your
knowledge that the act will have been purified in the silence of your
being, and will have flown into the precious waters that lie in the
great reservoir of truth and beauty, which, unlike the shallower
reservoir of true or beautiful thoughts, has an ever unruffled surface,
and remains for all time out of reach of the breath of life.
Emerson tells us that there is not an act or event in our life but,
sooner or later, casts off its outer shell, and bewilders us by its
sudden flights from the very depths of us, on high into the empyrean.
And this is true to a far greater extent than Emerson had foreseen, for
the further we advance in these regions, the diviner are the spheres we
discover.
We can form no adequate conception of what this silent activity of the
souls that surround us may really mean. Perhaps you have spoken a pure
word to one of your fellows by whom it has not been understood. You look
upon it as lost and dismiss it from your mind. But one day,
peradventure, the word comes up again extraordinarily transformed, and
revealing the unexpected fruit it has borne in the darkness; then
silence once more falls over all. But it matters not; we have learned
that nothing can be lost in the soul, and that even to the very pettiest
there come moments of splendor.
It is unmistakably borne home to us that even the unhappiest and the
most destitute of men have at the depths of their being and in spite of
themselves a treasure of beauty that they cannot despoil. They have but
to acquire the habit of dipping into this treasurer. It suffices not
that beauty should keep solitary festival in life; it has to become a
festival of every day.
There needs no great effort to be admitted into the ranks of those
"whose eyes no longer behold earth in flower and sky in glory in
infinitesimal fragments, but indeed in sublime masses," and I speak here
of flowers and sky that are purer and more lasting than those that we
behold.
Thousands of channels there are through which the beauty of our soul may
sail even unto our thoughts. Above all is there the wonderful, central
channel of love.
Is it not in love that are found the purest elements of beauty that we
can offer to the soul?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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