The latter had much to do with it. (I am
convinced there are hours of Nature, especially of the atmosphere,
mornings and evenings, address'd to the soul. Night transcends, for
that purpose, what the proudest day can do.) Now, indeed, if never
before, the heavens declared the glory of God. It was to the full sky
of the Bible, of Arabia, of the prophets, and of the oldest poems.
There, in abstraction and stillness, (I had gone off by myself to
absorb the scene, to have the spell unbroken,) the copiousness, the
removedness, vitality, loose-clear-crowdedness, of that stellar
concave spreading overhead, softly absorb'd into me, rising so free,
interminably high, stretching east, west, north, south--and I, though
but a point in the centre below, embodying all.
As if for the first time, indeed, creation noiselessly sank into and
through me its placid and untellable lesson, beyond--O, so infinitely
beyond!--anything from art, books, sermons, or from science, old or
new. The spirit's hour--religion's hour--the visible suggestion of God
in space and time--now once definitely indicated, if never again. The
untold pointed at--the heavens all paved with it. The Milky Way, as if
some superhuman symphony, some ode of universal vagueness, disdaining
syllable and sound--a flashing glance of Deity, address'd to the
soul. All silently--the indescribable night and stars--far off and
silently.
THE DAWN.--_July 23_.--This morning, between one and two hours before
sunrise, a spectacle wrought on the same background, yet of quite
different beauty and meaning.
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