IIIEVENING
Thefuture is a great land; how the lights and the shadows throng over it—bright and dark, slow and swift! Pride and ambition build up great castles on its plains—great monuments on the mountains, that reach heavenward, and dip their tops in the blue of Eternity! Then comes an earthquake—the earthquake of disappointment, of distrust, or of inaction, and lays them low. Gaping desolation widens its breaches everywhere; the eye is full of them, and can see nothing beside. By and by the sun peeps forth—as now from behind yonder cloud—and reanimates the soul.
Fame beckons, sitting high in the heavens; and joy lends a halo to the vision. A thousand resolves stir your heart; your hand is hot and feverish for action; your brain works madly, and you snatch here and you snatch there, in the convulsive throes of your delirium. Perhaps you see some earnest, careful plodder, once far behind you, now toiling slowly but surely over the plain of life, until he seems near to grasping those brilliant phantoms which dance along the horizon of the future; and the sight stirs your soul to frenzy, and you bound on after him with the madness of a fever in your veins. But it was by no such action that the fortunate toiler has won his progress. His hand is steady, his brain is cool; his eye is fixed and sure.
The Future is a great land; a man can not go round it in a day; he can not measure it with a bound; he can not bind its harvests into a single sheaf. It is wider than the vision, and has no end.
Yet always, day by day, hour by hour, second by second, the hard present is elbowing us off into that great land of the future. Our souls, indeed, wander to it, as to a home-land; they run beyond time and space, beyond planets and suns, beyond far-off suns and comets, until, like blind flies, they are lost in the blaze of immensity, and can only grope their way back to our earth, and our time, by the cunning of instinct.
Cut out the future—even that little future which is theEveningof our life—and what a fall into vacuity. Forbid those earnest forays over the borders of Now, and on what spoils would the soul live?
For myself, I delight to wander there, and to weave every day the passing life into the coming life—so closely that I may be unconscious of the joining. And if so be that I am able, I would make the whole piece bear fair proportions and just figures—like those tapestries on which nuns work by inches and finish with their lives, or like those grand frescos which poet artists have wrought on the vaults of old cathedrals, gaunt and colossal—appearing mere daubs of carmine and azure, as they lay upon their backs, working out a hand’s breadth at a time—but when complete, showing symmetrical and glorious.
But not alone does the soul wander to those glittering heights where fame sits, with plumes waving in zephyrs of applause; there belong to it other appetities, which range wide and constantly over the broad future-land. We are not merely working, intellectual machines, but social puzzles, whose solution is the work of a life. Much as hope may mean toward the intoxicating joy of distinction, there is another leaning in the soul, deeper and stronger, toward those pleasures which the heart pants for, and in whose atmosphere the affections bloom and ripen.
The first may indeed be uppermost; it may be noisiest; it may drown with the clamor of midday the nicer sympathies. But all our day is not midday, and all our life is not noise. Silence is as strong as the soul; and there is no tempest so wild with blasts but has a wilder lull. There lies in the depth of every man’s soul a mine of affection, which from time to time will burn with the seething heat of a volcano and heave up lava-like monuments, through all the cold strata of his commoner nature.
One may hide his warmer feelings—he may paint them dimly—he may crowd them out of his sailing chart, where he only sets down the harbors for traffic; yet in his secret heart he will map out upon the great country of the Future fairy islands of love and of joy. There he will be sure to wander when his soul is lost in those quiet and hallowed hopes which take hold on heaven.
Love, only, unlocks the door upon that futurity where the isles of the blessed lie like stars. Affection is the stepping-stone to God. The heart is our only measure of infinitude. The mind tires with greatness; the heart—never. Thought is worried and weakened in its flight through the immensity of space; but love soars around the throne of the Highest, with added blessing and strength.
I know not how it may be with others, but with me the heart is a readier and quicker builder of those fabrics which strew the great country of the Future than the mind. They may not indeed rise so high as the dizzy pinnacles that ambition loves to rear; but they lie like fragrant islands in a sea whose ripple is a continuous melody.
And as I muse now, looking toward theEvening, which is already begun—tossed as I am with the toils of the past, and bewildered with the vexations of the present, my affections are the architect that build up the future refuge. And, in fancy at least, I will build it boldly—saddened, it may be, by the chance shadows of evening; but through all I will hope for a sunset, when the day ends, glorious with crimson and gold.