How poetical and how solemn to
approach, under the guidance of this thought, and gaze on the mind
of God as on an ancient awful mirror; and even as in a clear lake we
behold the forms of the surrounding scenery reflected from the white
strip of pebbled shore up to the gray scalp of the mountain summit,
and tremble as we look down on the "skies of a far nether world," on
an inverted sun, and on snow unmelted amidst the water; so to see
the entire history of man, from the first glance of life in the eye
of Adam, down to the last sparkle of the last ember of the general
conflagration, lying silently and inverted there--how sublime, but
at the same time how bewildering and how appalling! Our readers will
find, in the "Pleasures of Imagination," an expansion--perhaps they
may think it a dilution--of this Platonic idea.
They will find there, too, the germ of the famous theory of Alison
and Jeffrey about Beauty. These theorists held 'that beauty resides
not so much in the object as in the mind; that we receive but what
we give; that our own soul is the urn whence beauty is showered over
the universe; that flower and star are lovely because the mind has
breathed on them; that the imagination and the heart of man are the
twin beautifiers of creation; that the dwelling of beauty is not in
the light of setting suns, nor in the beams of morning stars, nor in
the waves of summer seas, but in the human spirit; that sublimity
tabernacles not in the palaces of the thunder, walks not on the
wings of the wind, rides not on the forked lightning, but that it is
the soul which is lifted up there; that it is the soul which, in its
high aspirings,'
"Yokes with whirlwinds and the northern blast,
and scatters grandeur around it on its way.
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