The Cecil Whig. [volume] (Elkton, Md.) 1841-current, 1886-03-06

VIC SledI ocean 10 DC swallowed up lOl-
ever, save the invincibIe footprints in
the sand? Are we the shadows, tie
myths, the spectral lights that fit ard
soar and beam through day and night
without purpose and without an end ?
Are We all this, and not the live. think
ing, practical men the philosophy of tie
materiaist's teaches? How many viii
answer no? How many can answer no?
For how many have absorbed the cree(s
and laws of existence to that depth that
they are able to answer no: But to nv
mind man is more than all of these. Oar
lives are more than all of this. Each
personification, each principle, each law
OF lie and living points me to a higher
purpose than the shadows, the children
OF circumstance, or the dream: and are
these lives of ours rounded by sleep?
Does the grave mean all? Does the mar.
row house into which we descend in pail
and cerement the final home of the soul?
Rather let me believe in an everything,
ever-moving existence that radates
| through thousand undiscoverable
stratas to the one perfect mineral Can
we truthfully consider our lives, can we
practically encompass the purposes for
which we have been constituted? In
Shakspeare's day we could not. but in
Emerson's day we can. The revelations
OF time IN their association with the ex-
poundings of science and philosophy
have made us men with knowledge of
ourselves. We learn to know our hves
We early place our ideals IN the path re
determine to tread, and we struggle on
to support and sustain the foundations of
those ideals until we have builded better
than we knew, and our own souls, our
own experience has been absorbed in the
primal ideal and made one with its height
and grandeur. Our lives are everything
does hot make his life chapter of great
interest in the records of creation. We
do not fear the sun because it burns, and
we pour the honey of the flowers into
our hearts, grating upon US their sim
plicity and sweetness. You may dream,
if you will; you may walk on the clouds
and Kiss the dewy lips of fancy, but to
be true man, an existence and life,
you must wander in the mud and hug
close to the thunder. You must not be
shocked by nakedness or turned into
swine by lust. They are a part of you
as holly as you are part of the divine
body of some woman, and you must as
simulate them with the creeds of your
ideal. Are our lives like a brook that
flows uurutfled between messy banks? |
should answer that 1t is a swollen torrent
rushing between high and Jagged rocks.
Is our existence a light word and wo-
manly smile? | should answer it is a
mighty sermon and bitter curse. Are
the days poems and the nights rhapso-
| dies? Is the morn a song OF advent and
the eve an elegy? Do the years enter
with BIB and cradle and go out with
coffin and an epitaph? Do the cycles
leap forth from the bosom of the past i'll
sunshine and fall into the vortex of the
| present under the shadow of cloud
| Let our daily lives answer these ques-
tions. Time and men are synonymous.
w hnl 10 L l.
mould them with a pressure of the fin
| ger. But through all moves soul that
| you nor | cannot reach, that we can but
stand off on the high hills and look for
in the stars, but which is our blood and
sinew, our meat and drink, which is our
thought and our action, our past and our
present, and eventually our eternity.
| And does it agree that our lives are
seven-staged, brief, unfruitful? Fathom
it, and it will tell you that our lives are
| looked upon by the Everlasting as stars
that twinkle in blue armament: we
radiate and dissolve and reappear, but
are perfection to the great dome, are its
is immensely; it is beg ond reach, but it
can be made little as a miser's heart: can
be cramped and haunted and lost as the
song of bird is lost amid the upfoar of
sea waves. Those lives are lost in that
way that pay attention TO those old
| saws about us as children of circum-
| stance" as Substances OF Dreams as
Shadows of fate Cast these theories
Off look around you at the grass grow
| ing, at the farmer sweating behind his
exen, at the merchant bustling behind
| his counter at the women kneading ard
baking stitching and sweeping at the
perfect ballad of the swayinc limbs Of
trees, at the sonnet of little waves rip.
| ping in pond, at the perfect sculpture
| of a horse paving the ground by the side
of his mare, at the serene and proper
| landscape of COW smoothing with its
| tongue the bearded cheek of the grass,
and life as the airy fabric of Dire. m
will change and its tguthfulnesS be fully
revealed to you. We cannot go on too
much. too fast, or too certainly. W.
| cannot cast away too much of the ba>r
aud trivial; we have an end, and an en-
beyond the end to win or loose, and it is
only just to ourselves that we cast Of
this mythns of dream substances. of
sleep-rounded lives, and touch the battle
aud rage and wrath OF life as it is. GRASP
me by the hand sternly when You greet
me that | may know you are after the
same universe! end | am reaching for.
Give me blood to drink, not ambrosia:
give me what the lap of the earth bears
to eat, and not the figs and olives of
Lebanon. Our lives make the worlds
life. 1t feeds upon us as leech upon
the body of health: let us give it pure
fluids, rosy flesh, when it sucks and
bites. Far from being shadows, far
from being frailties and forms wsped
about by the wind; we are solids and
substances placed here to build up solid
tiles and materials for the perpetuation
of spirituality and the reward Of m.!or-
tality.