Then a
dim light breaks upon him, and with it a faint hope revives, for he
seems to see in all the forms of life, innumerably varied, a spirit
rushing upward from death--a something in escape from the terror of the
downward cataract, of the rest that knows not peace. "Is it not," he
asks, "the soaring of the silver dove of life from its potsherd-bed--the
heavenward flight of some higher and incorruptible thing? Is not
vitality, revealed in growth, itself an unending resurrection?"
The vision also of the oneness of the universe, ever reappearing through
the vapours of question, helps to keep hope alive in him. To find, for
instance, the law of the relation of the arrangements of the leaves on
differing plants, correspond to the law of the relative distances of the
planets in approach to their central sun, wakes in him that hope of a
central Will, which alone can justify one ecstatic throb at any seeming
loveliness of the universe. For without the hope of such a centre,
delight is unreason--a mockery not such as the skeleton at the Egyptian
feast, but such rather as a crowned corpse at a feast of skeletons. Life
without the higher glory of the unspeakable, the atmosphere of a God, is
not life, is not worth living.
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