All Nature began to minister to
one who had begun to lift his head from the baptism of fire. He had
thought that Nature could never more be anything to him; and she was
waiting on him like a mother. The next moment he was offended with
himself for receiving ministrations the reaction of whose loveliness
might no longer gather around the form of Mary St. John. Every
wavelet of scent, every toss of a flower's head in the breeze, came
with a sting in its pleasure--for there was no woman to whom they
belonged. Yet he could not shut them out, for God and not woman is
the heart of the universe. Would the day ever come when the
loveliness of Mary St. John, felt and acknowledged as never before,
would be even to him a joy and a thanksgiving? If ever, then
because God is the heart of all.
I do not think this mood, wherein all forms of beauty sped to his
soul as to their own needful centre, could have lasted over many
miles of his journey. But such delicate inward revelations are none
the less precious that they are evanescent. Many feelings are
simply too good to last--using the phrase not in the unbelieving
sense in which it is generally used, expressing the conviction that
God is a hard father, fond of disappointing his children, but to
express the fact that intensity and endurance cannot yet coexist in
the human economy. But the virtue of a mood depends by no means on
its immediate presence. Like any other experience, it may be
believed in, and, in the absence which leaves the mind free to
contemplate it, work even more good than in its presence.
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