Serene Falcon

Ingleside A: Eternal Right And Order

March 13th, 2008 at 2:35 pm

Two posts from ‘Ingleside and Wayside Musings‘: My copy has no titlepage, yet Google informs that this was written by the Rev. I. R. Vernon. Whatever, the influence of Carlyle is rather manifest — even perhaps partaking of Carlyle’s own influence to style, the surprising Jean-Paul Richter — allied to the natural fervency of the impassioned Victorian preacher…

 
STARS : These seem to me even as the quiet thoughts of Heaven; and some similes and meditations may well therefore be linked with them to introduce this hum­ble cluster of musings, a con­stellation of lesser lights, no doubt, which, however, I would hang somewhere, if I may, between earth and heaven ; stars, I would have them, abiding in the one, but still looking down upon the other. Thoughts re­moved from earth, but not alien from it: orbs watching and shining down upon the turmoil and the jostling, but taking no feverish or heated part in it: — this is the charac­ter which I would have my constellations to bear, however minute be their twinkle. Mild light, let them give, scarce perceived through the haze; light clear and vivid through the frost; light luminous and large now and then, and making a narrow quiet trembling path upon some restless ocean underneath. Stars with all the jewel-lights of dew-drops on a hoary autumn lawn; jasper; sapphire; a chalcedony ; an emerald ; beryl; jacinth; amethyst; opals ; pearls ; all hues of diamonds, and

“One star, the chrysolite.”

For all these are to be found on —

“Heaven’s star-sprinkled floor,”

which is our canopy.
Stars. Ay, you must wait for the quiet hours, when work is done, before you can find them ; they will not make their presence known in the busy day. Above the dust and the heat and the turbulence, they watch on, indeed, in grave contemplation ; but they are withdrawn behind a screen of light from that carefulness and trouble about many things which goes on beneath their shining. Stars are ever lovely ; stars watching, with their haunting eyes, over still lakes and sleeping mountains; over hushed autumn forests and vast prairies; over interminable miles of sand, and over hedge-patterned fields, and twinkling homesteads, and nestling farms ; over the great unquiet sea, and over the heaped dead in a battle-field; over a mounded churchyard, and over a dance in a garden ; — they are lovely, and perhaps as it were most at home, over all the scenes of quiet, and innocent gladness, and repose.
But they have to me a special charm, a charm of incon­gruity and yet of peculiar fitness, when I see them steal out one by one, or in faint clusters, into the dusking sky above the streets of a great City. They come — not with any scorn or sarcasm, — come in their sublime ethereal stillness to look upon the thronged streets, and the glittering wares, and the squalid back lanes; gay Regent Street; noisy Cheapside ; sedate Paternoster Row ; murky Seven Dials ;-— not with any touch of sarcasm, oh no ; — rather with a hint of hope-in-sadness ; still more, with a revelation, a message from God; a voice without speech or language speaking down through the smoke and the foul exhalations and the clang and clash and roar, — telling of what-not that is high and pure, and ethereal and peaceful ? Of infinity, amid that which is finite ; of calm, amid that which is an endless perturbation ; of rest, to weary toil; of peace, where there are many distractions ; of nobility, amid a whirl of mean­nesses and low aims ; of Heaven to that which, having Earth’s unloveliness, is shut out from all her beauty, except that of the clouds and the sky,
Still above these lower clouds and this blue atmosphere, they abide and watch, and are speechlessly eloquent; when the roar dies into a murmur, and the murmur into a few hours’ broken hush, while the sin-burdened, sorrow-laden, toiling, laughing, weeping City sleeps ; over all, those grave eyes are watching. There are the casinos, with their frantic revelry, and heat, and glare; there are the dens of vice and infamy; there is the murderer with his hand raised over his victim; there are the lonely wanderers in the street, or the the rows of dark, dumb, blind houses; there is a jumble of sleeping and waking, of laughing and sobbing, of living and dying, while over all —

“Starry tears are trembling on the mighty Midnight’s face.”

And above this close-packed speck on the world’s plains, where there is neither elbow-room nor air-room, and where acres are worth millions, there is reminding, but not mockery, in the prodigal exhibiting of infinite Space, with which —

“The night reveals Her hollow gulfs of stars.”

0 money-absorbed men in London; in Manchester; in Liverpool; in Glasgow; wheresoever; 0 nation of shop­keepers, more bent than ever now on earning this name ; 0 grave and honest men, shrewd and practical, yet ever looking down, looking down; ever in a whirl of busy life, ever set to the grindstone of money-making; — gradually growing more and more to be mere dull drudges in the heavy cart laden with this world’s short-lived but exacting wants and whims, requirements and conventionalities; 0 lofty spirits, in danger of ever-growing and even eternal lessening and degradation: — it is for you that those Stars are set in the heaven, above your Offices and Warehouses ; it is for you that they come from their radiant chamber when Night empties your counting-houses, and out in the streets you cannot elude them ; it is for you that they look down between the houses, over the roofs, over the courts, glittering like to fruit through the gaunt solitary tree here and there ; penetrating with their great gracious eyes your very being; — and oh, if you would listen, — and not still look only on or down, still absorbed, still absorbed; — if you would look up, — what a heart-stirring sermon you might gather from their silence ! what a lesson of vastness, contrasted with the ever-increasing pettiness of your lives ! What infinity, compared with your ends, which are growing more and more utterly finite! What a speech of Eternity, what silent bell-music, stealing over the jangling voices of Time !
How ? say you the necessities of business must make an artificial code of morality, at variance with, and that must supersede, the everlasting principles of Right ? Has not —

“The intense, clear, star-sown vault of heaven,”

a word to say about this ? As you emerge from the hot glaring office, and stand apart from the stream of men — ( in that recess, say, by St. Michael’s Church, Cornhill ), and look up, above the Temple-like Royal Exchange, and see those eternal Watchers; the abysses of black-blue between them ; and, across this, cast, like a light mist or scarf, the untold billions of the Milky Way; do not flimsy sophistries exhale ? can expedient Wrong ( profitable for this moment ) endure that glittering picture of eternal Right and Order ?