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XXXV.

THE PASSAGE OF LIFE.

SWEEP away the Illusion of Time; glance, if thou have eyes, from the near moving-cause to its far distant Mover: The stroke that came transmitted through a whole galaxy of elastic balls, was it less a stroke than if the last ball only had been struck, and sent flying? Oh, could I (with the Time-annihilating Hat) transport thee direct from the Beginnings to the Endings, how were thy eyesight unsealed, and thy heart set flaming in the Light-sea of celestial wonder! Then sawest thou that this fair Universe, were it in the meanest province thereof, is in very deed the star-domed City of God; that through every star, through évery grass-blade, and through every Living Soul, the glory of a present God still beams. But Nature, which is the Time-vesture of God, and reveals Him to the wise,-hides Him from the foolish.

Again, could anything be more miraculous than an actual authentic ghost? The English Johnson longed, all his life, to see one; but could not, though he went to Cock Lane,1 and thence to the church-vaults, and tapped on coffins. Foolish Doctor! Did he never, with the mind's eye as well as with the body's, look round him into that full tide of human Life he so loved; did he never

so much as look into Himself? The good Doctor was a Ghost, as actual and authentic as heart could wish; well nigh a million of Ghosts were travelling the streets by his side.

Once more I say, sweep away the illusion of Time; compress the threescore years into three minutes what else was he, what else are we? Are we not Spirits, shaped into a body, into an Appearance; and that fade away again into air, and Invisibility? This is no metaphor, it is a simple scientific fact. We start out of Nothingness, take figure, and are Apparitions; round us, as round the veriest spectre, is Eternity, and to Eternity minutes are as years and æons. Come there not tones of Love and Faith, as from celestial harp-strings, like the Song of beatified Souls? And again, do we not squeak and gibber (in our discordant, screech-owlish debatings and recriminatings); and glide bodeful, and feeble, and fearful; or uproar (poltern), and revel in our mad Dance of the Dead,-till the scent of the morning-air summons us to our still Home; and dreamy Night becomes awake and Day?

Where now is Alexander of Macedon: does the steel Host, that yelled in fierce battle-shouts at Issus and Arbela,2 remain behind him; or have they all vanished utterly, even as perturbed goblins must? Napoleon too, and his Moscow Retreats and Austerlitz Campaigns! 3 Was it all other than the veriest Spectre-hunt, which has now, with its howling tumult that made Night hideous, flitted away? Ghosts! There are nigh a thousand million walk

ing the earth openly at noontide; some halfhundred have vanished from it, some half-hundred have arisen in it, ere thy watch ticks once.

O Heaven, it is mysterious, it is awful to consider that we not only carry each a future Ghost within him; but are, in very deed, Ghosts! These Limbs, whence had we them; this stormy Force; this life-blood with its burning Passion? They are dust and shadow; a Shadow - system gathered round our Me; wherein, through some moments or years, the Divine Essence is to be revealed in the Flesh. That warrior on his strong war-horse, fire flashes through his eyes; force dwells in his arm and heart; but warrior and war-horse are a vision; a revealed Force, nothing more. Stately they tread the Earth as if it were a firm substance: fool! the Earth is but a film; it cracks in twain, and warrior and war-horse sink beyond plummet's sounding. Plummet's? Fantasy herself will not follow them. A little while ago they were not; a little while and they are not, their very ashes are not.

So it has been from the beginning, so it will be to the end. Generation after generation takes to itself the Form of a Body; and forth-issuing from Cimmerian Night, on Heaven's Mission APPEARS. What Force and Fire is in each he expends: one grinding in the mill of Industry; one hunterlike climbing the giddy Alpine heights of Science; one madly dashed in pieces on the rocks of Strife, in war with his fellow-and then the Heaven-sent is recalled; his earthly Vesture falls

away, and soon even to Sense becomes a vanished Shadow.

Thus, like some wild - flaming, wild - thundering train of Heaven's Artillery, does this mysterious MANKIND thunder and flame, in long-drawn, quicksucceeding grandeur, through the unknown Deep. Thus, like a God-created, fire-breathing Spirithost, we emerge from the Inane; haste stormfully across the astonished Earth; then plunge again into the Inane. Earth's mountains are levelled, and her seas filled up, in our passage. Can the Earth, which is but dead and a vision, resist spirits which have reality and are alive? On the hardest adamant some footprint of us is stamped in; the last Rear of the host will read traces of the earliest Van. But whence?-O Heaven, whither? Sense knows not; Faith knows not; only that it is through Mystery to Mystery, from God and to God.

"We are such stuff

As Dreams are made of, and our little Life
Is rounded with a sleep!"

Thomas Carlyle.

XXXVI.

THE GREATNESS AND LITTLENESS OF

HUMAN LIFE.

BUT further (if it be allowable to speculate), one can conceive even the same kind of feeling, and a most transporting one, to come over the soul of the faithful Christian, when just separated from the body, and conscious that his trial is once for all over. Though his life has been a long and painful discipliné, yet when it is over, we may suppose him to feel at the moment the same sort of surprise at its being ended, as generally follows any exertion in this life, when the object is gained and the anticipation over. When we have wound up our minds for any point of time, any great event, an interview with strangers, or the sight of some wonder, or the occasion of some unusual trial, when it comes, and is gone, we have a strange reverse of feeling from our changed circumstances.

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Such, but without any mixture of pain, without any lassitude, dulness, or disappointment, may be the happy contemplation of the disembodied spirit; as if it said to itself, "So all is now over; this is what I have so long waited for; for which I have nerved myself; against which I have prepared, fasted, prayed, and wrought righteousness. Death is come and gone,—it is over. Ah! is it possible? What an easy trial, what a cheap price for eternal

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