Article #58 - Immortality

The following noble passage occurs in the Dies Borealis, or “Christopher under Canvass”: North – Oh, my friends, if this winged and swift life be all our life what a mo[u]rnful taste have we had of a possible happiness! We have, as it were, from some cold and dark edge of a bright world just looked in and been plucked away again; have we come to experience pleasure by fits and glimpses, but intertwined with pain, burthensome labor, with weariness and with indifference? Have we come to try the solace and joy of a warm, fearless and confiding affection, to be then chilled or blighted by bitterness, by separation, by change of heart; or by the dread sunderer of loves – Death? Have we found the gladness and the strength of knowledge. When some rays of truth flashed in upon our soul in the midst of error and uncertainty or amidst continuous, necessitated, uninstructed avocations of the understanding – and is that all? Have we felt in a fortunate hour the charm of the Beautiful, that invests, as with mantle the visible creation, or have we found ourselves lifted above the earth by sudden apprehension of sublimity? Have we had the consciousness of such feeling which seemed to us as if they might themselves make up a life  almost angel’s life – and where they “instant come and instant gone”? Have we known the consolation of doing right in the midst of much that we have done wrong, and was that also a coruscation of a transient sunshine. Have we lighted up our thoughts to see Him who is above? Light, Truth and Bliss, to be in the next instant plunged into the darkness of anni[hi]lation. Have all these things been but [a] flower that we have pulled by the side of a hard and tedious way and that after gladdening us for a brief season with hue and color, wither in our hands, and are like ourselves – nothing.