poet. No eye of man hath ever beheld him: it is a vision of the
spirit. And as the language of souls is silent, he can say nothing of
his God, though he is so conscious of his everlasting presence. If
even his solemn speech, the voice of the poet, "far above music," could
tell of his God, then would he be but the idealised image of himself.
He may think, he does think far more deeply than the most adventurous
theologian, but he may never speak. The mind must commune with itself.

The God I know of, I shall ne'er
Know, though he dwells exceeding nigh.
_Raise thou the stone and find me there,_
_Cleave thou the wood and there am I,_
Yea in my flesh his spirit doth flow,
Too near, too far for me to know.

I must confess this fills one with an immense reverence, a feeling of
inexpressible awe. Yet, there is no fear associated with the emotion,
but only a sense of unearthly peace which almost asks that the silence
may be prolonged so that thought may have further scope. "Raise thou
the stone . . . cleave thou the wood," and we are in the presence of
the Everlasting; soul is face to face with the Soul of the world.

Yea, in my flesh his spirit doth flow,
Too near, too far for me to know.

Is this mysticism? I know not by what name to call it, except that to
me it is a reality transcending any merely sensible experience one ever
enjoys upon this earth. It is the kingdom of the Unseen; but only the
unseen things are real and eternal, for they are the hidden springs of
existence and life. Can one resist the melancholy, the sense of tears
in things when we reflect that, like our own bodily frame, the whole
visible world is hastening to dissolution? From the infinitesimal
insect whose earthly career is rounded off in a few moments, hardly
come before gone, to the longest-lived of living beings, to the oaks
that stand beyond a thousand years, to the hills that seemed so
enduring that the Hebrew poet called them "everlasting," to this earth,
to planets away in the infinite azure, from the grain of sand to the
totality of creations, from first to last, it is true that all is
passing away.

_Sunt lachrymae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt._

The melancholy Heraclitus, whose philosophy allures while it saddens
us, declares we never traverse the same river twice; the water over
which we once crossed has long since sped away to the eternal seas.
Seneca, centuries ago, noted the same of our own bod