builds a marble palace for centuries, stores it with art treasures, that all the generations may throng in and out, feeding the eye and feasting the hunger for beauty, in form and color. But God spent millions of years upon this body, fearfully and wonderfully made, storing the soul's temple with intellect, memory and judgment, with conscience, affections and moral sentiments. And did He build this soul that goes laughing, weeping, inventing, praying, through life, for that goal named a black hole in the ground?—N. D. Hillis.
(1538)
IMMORTALITY, FEELING OF
Living on the surface of the earth sense
impressions constrain us to regard the earth
as flat and still, and the sun and other
heavenly bodies as moving across the heavens
above our heads. But astronomers know
that by long watching of the heavenly bodies
an observer comes often to feel the motion
and sense the rotundity of the earth.
So of the man who will live in the
spiritual altitudes. He reasonably believed
before in the future life, but all
his impressions have been earthly, materialistic.
But on the higher level he
actually "lays hold on the powers of an
endless life."
(1539)
IMMORTALITY, INTIMATIONS OF
Eugene Field is the author of this:
Upon the mountain height, far from the sea,
I found a shell;
And to my listening ear the lonely thing
Ever a song of ocean seemed to sing,
Ever a tale of ocean seemed to tell.
How came the shell upon that mountain height?
Ah, who can say?
Whether there dropt by some too careless hand,
Or whether there cast when ocean swept the land,
Ere the eternal had ordained the day.
Strange, was it not! Far from its native deep,
One song it sang—
Sang of the awful mysteries of the tide,
Sang of the misty sea, profound and wide,
Ever with echoes of the ocean rang.
And as the shell upon the mountain height
Sings of the sea,
So do I ever, leagues and leagues away—
So do I ever, wandering where I may,
Sing, O my home! sing, O my home! of thee. (Text.)
(1540)
A solemn murmur in its soul
Tells of the world to be,
As travelers hear the billows roll,
Before they reach the sea.
(1541)
IMMORTALITY OF INFLUENCE
Richard Watson Gilder writes this verse about a dead poet:
I read that, in his sleep, the poet died
Ere the day broke;
In a new dawn, as rose earth's crimson tide,
His spirit woke.
Yet still with us his golden spirit stayed,
On the same page
That told his end, his living verse I read—
His lyric rage.
Behold! I thought, they call him cold in death;
But hither turn,
See where his soul, a glorious, flaming breath,
Doth pulse and burn.
This is the poet's triumph, his high doom!
After life's stress—
For him the silent, dark, o'ershadowing tomb
Is shadowless.
And this the miracle and mystery—
In that he gives
His soul away, magnificently free,
By this he lives. (Text.)
—The Outlook.
(1542)
IMMORTALITY, PROOF OF
"Proof," asks the Soul, "that that which is shall be?
That which was not, persist eternally?
Faith fails before the mortal mystery."
Yet more miraculous miracle were this:
The mortal, dreaming immortality;
The finite, framing forth infinity;
The shallow, lightly plumbing the abyss;
Ephemeral lips, creating with a kiss;
The transcient eye, fixt on eternity! (Text.)
—Grace Ellery Channing, The Century.
(1543)
