March 29.
To those who see only with their eyes, the distant is always indistinct
and little, becoming less and less as it recedes, till utterly lost; but
to the imagination, which thus reverses the perspective of the senses,
the far off is great and imposing, the magnitude increasing with the
distance.
* * * * *
I amused myself this morning with that most charming book "The
Doctor;"--it is not the second nor the third time of reading. How
delicious it is wherever it opens!--how brimful of erudition and wit,
and how rich in thought, and sentiment, and humour! but containing
assumptions, and opinions, and prognostications, in which I would not
believe;--no, not for the world!
* * * * *
How true what Southey says! (the Doctor I mean--I beg his pardon)--"We
make the greater part of the evil circumstances in which we are placed,
and then we fit ourselves for those circumstances by a process of
degradation, the effect of which most people see in the classes below
them, though they may not be conscious that it is operating in a
different manner, but with equal force, upon themselves."
The effect of those pre-ordained evils--if they are such--which we
inherit with our mortal state, inevitable death--the separation from
those we love--old age with its wants, its feebleness, its
helplessness--those sufferings which are in the course of nature, are
quite sufficient in the infliction, or in the fear of them, to keep the
spirit chastened, and the reflecting mind humble before God. But what I
_do_ deprecate, is to hear people preaching resignation to social,
self-created evils; fitting, or trying to fit, their own natures by "a
process of degradation" to circumstances which they ought to resist, and
which they do _inwardly_ resist, keeping up a constant, wearing,
impotent strife between the life that is _within_ and the life that is
_without_. How constantly do I read this in the countenances of those I
meet in the world!--They do not know themselves why there should be this
perpetual uneasiness, this jarring and discord within; but it is the
vain struggle of the soul, which God created in his own image, to fit
its strong, immortal nature for the society which men have framed after
their own devices. A _vain_ struggle it is! succeeding only in
appearance, never in reality,--so we walk about the world the masks of
ourselves, pitying each other. When we meet truth we are as much
astonished as I used to be at the carnival, when, in the midst of a
crowd of fantastic, lifeless, painted faces, I met with some one who had
plucked away his mask and stuck it in his hat, and looked out upon me
with the real human smile.
* * * * *
The Aurora Borealis is of almost nightly occurrence, but this evening it
has been more than usually resplendent; radiating up from the north,
and spreading to the east and west in form like a fan, the lower point
of a pale white, then yellow, amber, orange, successively, and the
extremities of a glowing crimson, intense, yet most delicate, like the
heart of an unblown rose. It shifted its form and hue at every moment,
flashing and waving like a banner in the breeze; and through this
portentous veil, transparent as light itself, the stars shone out with a
calm and steady brightness; and I thought, as I looked upon them, of a
character we both know, where, like those fair stars, the intellectual
powers shine serenely bright through a veil of passions, fancies, and
caprices. It is most awfully beautiful! I have been standing at my
window watching its evolutions, till it is no longer night, but morning.
* * * * *