. .
O cruel force,
That gives me not a chance
To fill my natural course;
With mathematic rod
Economising God;
Calling me to pre-ordered circumstance
Nor suffering me to dance
Over the pleasant gravel,
With music solacing my travel--
With music, and the baby buds that toss
In light, with roots and sippets of the moss!"
The longing for freedom to expand the dimly realised and
mystic elements in his soul-life was stirred within him by the
joyous bubbling of a spring. To kerb the artless, natural flow is
to "economise God"--so the limitations and restrictions of the
life that now is artificialise and deaden the divine within us.
There is more than metaphor in such a comparison; there is the
linkage of the immanent idea. His emotion culminates in the
concluding lines:
"One faith remains--
That through what ducts soe'er,
What metamorphic strains,
What chymic filt'rings, I shall pass
To where, O God,
Thou lov'st to mass
Thy rains upon the crags, and dim the sphere.
So, when night's heart with keenest silence thrills,
Take me, and weep me on the desolate hills."
There are indeed but few with any feeling for nature who have
not been moved to special trains of thought, the outcome of
characteristic moods, by the babblings and wayward wanderings
of brooks and rivulets. The appeal, therefore, is to a
wide experience. Can we be satisfied to join with Tylor in his
sense of disillusionment? Or shall we strive to get yet nearer to
the heart of things? If we cling to the deeper view, to us, as to
the men of old, the running stream will sing of the soul in
nature.
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