" Ye were small
once; a few years ago ye were not at all. Ye have beauty, strength,
thoughts, "ye have compassion on one another." Old age comes-on you, and
gray hairs; your strength fades into feebleness; ye sink down, and again
are not. "Ye have compassion on one another": this struck me much: Allah
might have made you having no compassion on one another,--how had it
been then! This is a great direct thought, a glance at first-hand into
the very fact of things. Rude vestiges of poetic genius, of whatsoever
is best and truest, are visible in this man. A strong untutored
intellect; eyesight, heart: a strong wild man,--might have shaped
himself into Poet, King, Priest, any kind of Hero.
To his eyes it is forever clear that this world wholly is miraculous. He
sees what, as we said once before, all great thinkers, the rude
Scandinavians themselves, in one way or other, have contrived to see:
That this so solid-looking material world is, at bottom, in very deed,
Nothing; is a visual and tactual Manifestation of God's-power and
presence,--a shadow hung-out by Him on the bosom of the void Infinite;
nothing more. The mountains, he says, these great rock-mountains, they
shall dissipate themselves "like clouds"; melt into the Blue as clouds
do, and not be! He figures the Earth, in the Arab fashion, Sale tells
us, as an immense Plain or flat Plate of ground, the mountains are set
on that to _steady_ it.
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