Nor was the dream of the
ancient Chaldean 'all a dream.' The stars of heaven, the beauty and the
glory above us, have their influences and their power, not evil and
malignant and partial and irrevocable, but holy and tranquillizing and
benignant, a moral influence, by which all may profit if they will do
so. And I have often marvelled at the hard depravity of that human
heart which could sanction a deed of violence and crime in the calm
solitudes of Nature, and surrounded by the enduring evidences of an
overruling Intelligence. I could conceive of crime, growing up rank and
monstrous in the unwholesome atmosphere of the thronged city, amidst the
taint of moral as well as physical pestilence, and surrounded only by
man and the works of man. But there is something in the harmony and
quiet of the natural world which presents a reproving antagonism to the
fiercer passions of the human heart; an eye of solemn reprehension looks
out from the still places of Nature, as if the Great Soul of the
Universe had chosen the mute creations of his power to be the witnesses
of the deeds done in the body, the researchers of the bosoms of men.
"And then, even at that awful moment, I could feel the bland and gentle
ministrations of Nature; I could feel the fever of my heart cooling, and
a softer haze of melancholy stealing over the blackness of my despair;
and the fierce passions which had distracted me giving place to the calm
of a settled anguish, a profound sorrow, the quiet gloom of an
overshadowing woe, in which love and hatred and wrong were swallowed up
and lost.
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