FullReads

“Shall I ever again have any of those prodigious reveries which sometimes came to me in former days? One day, in youth, at sunrise, sitting in the ruins of the castle of Faucigny; and again in the mountains, under the noonday sun, above Lavey, lying at the foot of a tree and visited by three butterflies; once more at night upon the shingly shore of the Northern Ocean, my back upon the sand and my vision ranging through the Milky Way;–such grand and spacious, immortal, cosmogonic reveries, when one reaches to the stars, when one owns the infinite! Moments divine, ecstatic hours; in which our thought flies from world to world, pierces the great enigma, breathes with a respiration broad, tranquil, and deep as the respiration of the ocean, serene and limitless as the blue firmament; … instants of irresistible intuition in which one feels one’s self great as the universe, and calm as a god…. What hours, what memories! The vestiges they leave behind are enough to fill us with belief and enthusiasm, as if they were visits of the Holy Ghost.”[13]

[13] Op cit., i. 43-44

Here is a similar record from the memoirs of that interesting German idealist, Malwida von Meysenbug:–

“I was alone upon the seashore as all these thoughts flowed over me, liberating and reconciling; and now again, as once before in distant days in the Alps of Dauphine, I was impelled to kneel down, this time before the illimitable ocean, symbol of the Infinite. I felt that I prayed as I had never prayed before, and knew now what prayer really is: to return from the solitude of individuation into the consciousness of unity with all that is, to kneel down as one that passes away, and to rise up as one imperishable. Earth, heaven, and sea resounded as in one vast world-encircling harmony. It was as if the chorus of all the great who had ever lived were about me. I felt myself one with them, and it appeared as if I heard their greeting: ‘Thou too belongest to the company of those who overcome.'”[14]

[14] Memoiren einer Idealistin, Ste Auflage, 1900, iii. 166. For years she had been unable to pray, owing to materialistic belief.

The well known passage from Walt Whitman is a classical expression of this sporadic type of mystical experience.

“I believe in you, my Soul …

Loaf with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat;… Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice. I mind how once we lay, such a transparent summer morning. Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth,

And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own, And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own, And that all the men ever born are also my brothers and the women my sisters and lovers,

And that a kelson of the creation is love.”[15]

[15] Whitman in another place expresses in a quieter way what was probably with him a chronic mystical perception: “There is,” he writes, “apart from mere intellect, in the make-up of every superior human identity, a wondrous something that realizes without argument, frequently without what is called education (though I think it the goal and apex of all education deserving the name), an intuition of the absolute balance, in time and space, of the whole of this multifariousness this revel of fools, and incredible make-believe and general unsettiedness, we call THE WORLD; a soul-sight of that divine clue and unseen thread which holds the whole congeries of things, all history and time, and all events, however trivial, however momentous, like a leashed dog in the hand of the hunter. [Of] such soul-sight and root-centre for the mind mere optimism explains only the surface.” Whitman charges it against Carlyle that he lacked this perception. Specimen Days and Collect, Philadelphia, 1882, p. 174.