t
Feeling the soft sweet night
Thrill to thy soul,
Thou saidst: "O God of Bliss,
Lord of the Blue Abyss,
Thou madest the whole!"

And the stars whispered low
To the God of Space, "We know,
God of Eternity,
Dear Lord, all Love is Thine,
Even by Love's Light we shine!
Thou madest Beauty!"

Of course here the religious feeling itself is part of the illusion, but
it serves to give great depth and beauty to simple feeling. Besides, the
poem illustrates one truth very forcibly--namely, that when we are
perfectly happy all the universe appears to be divine and divinely
beautiful; in other words, we are in heaven. On the contrary, when we are
very unhappy the universe appears to be a kind of hell, in which there is
no hope, no joy, and no gods to pray to.

But the special reason I wished to call attention to Victor Hugo's lyric
is that it has that particular quality called by philosophical critics
"cosmic emotion." Cosmic emotion means the highest quality of human
emotion. The word "cosmos" signifies the universe--not simply this world,
but all the hundred millions of suns and worlds in the known heaven. And
the adjective "cosmic" means, of course, "related to the whole universe."
Ordinary emotion may be more than individual in its relations. I mean that
your feelings may be moved by the thought or the perception of something
relating not only to your own life but also to the lives of many others.
The largest form of such ordinary emotion is what would be called national
feeling, the feeling of your own relation to the whole nation or the whole
race. But there is higher emotion even than that. When you think of
yourself emotionally not only in relation to your own country, your own
nation, but in relation to all humanity, then you have a cosmic emotion of
the third or second order. I say "third or second," because whether the
emotion be second or third rate depends very much upon your conception of
humanity as One. But if you think of yourself in relation not to this
world only but to the whole universe of hundreds of millions of stars and
planets--in relation to the whole mystery of existence--then you have a
cosmic emotion of the highest order. Of course there are degrees even in
this; the philosopher or the metaphysician will probably have a finer
quality of cosmic emotion than the poet or the artist is able to have. But
lovers very often, according to their degree of intellectual culture