God works with all who dare to win, Spiritualism has incarnated itself into our literature, art, music, philosophy and legislation; and it gathers strength and courtly symmetry as it sweeps through the land, destined to become the universal religion of the enlightened world. "They builded wiser than they knew; The conscious stone to beauty grew." CHAPTER XXIV. POETIC TESTIMONY. "Sounding through the dreamy dimness Where I faint and weary lay, Spake a poet: 'I will lead thee To the land of songs to-day.' Sweet and heavenly sings the Poet Laureate of England: 'How pure at heart and sound in head, With what divine affections bold Should be the man whose thought would hold An hour's communion with the dead. In vain shalt thou, or any, call The spirits from their golden day, Except, like them, thou too canst say My spirit is at peace with all.” Exalted minds dwell in the element of the spiritual. The spiritual is the real. Poets are the soul's prophets. Unlike metaphysicians, they give us the product of their spiritual life and intuitive insight, and appeal to the consciousness and deep sympathies of humanity for the verification. Poets are divinity-appointed interpreters, employing the shadows of the outer world to reveal the substance of the world within. From the Vedic hymns of the Hindoos their glory gleams all along the pages of thought and culture. Brain, sunned from heaven, pen afire with truth, their lines ever tender, glow with the fadeless radiance of immortal love. Divest God of the attribute of love-disrobe literature of its ideal-strip poetry of its Spiritualism, and the residuum is shells-nothing but shells. The nature-poet of Galilee, Jesus, walked under Syrian skies a Spiritualist, guarded by a legion of angels. Want of space warrants but a few quotations from the rich poesy fields of Spiritualism. Grand this apostrophe of Coleridge: "Contemplant Spirits! ye that hover o'er And ye of plastic power, that interfused LONGFELLOW's testimony: "Some men there are, I have known such, who think And touch each other only at a point. But these two worlds are not divided thus, Save for the purpose of common speech. They form one globe, in which the parted seas "A drowsiness is stealing over me Which is not sleep; for, though I close mine eyes, I am awake, and in another world. Dim faces of the dead and of the absent Come floating up before me." |