It is because these poets have been more heedful than we to the ‘never-ending shadow.’ ... That is the essence of supreme poetry, that, and that alone, and its sole aim is to keep open ‘the great road that leads from the seen to the unseen.’ But that is life’s supreme aim, too, and it is easier far to attain in life than in the noblest of poems, for these have had to abandon the two great wings of silence. Not a single day is trivial. It is essential that this idea should sink into our life and take root therein. There is no question of being sad. Small joys, faint smiles, and great tears, all these fill up the same nook in time and space. You can play in life as innocently ‘as a child about a death-bed,’ and it is not the tears that are indispensable. Smiles as well as tears open the gates of the other world. Go or come, you will find all you need in the darkness, but never forget that you are close to the gate.
After this lengthy digression, I return to my starting-point, which was that ‘it is well that men should be reminded that the very humblest of them has the power to fashion, after a divine model that he chooses not, a great moral personality, composed in equal parts of himself and the ideal.’ It is only in the depths of life that this ‘great moral personality’ can be carved out; and only by means of incessant ‘revelations of the divine’ can we add to the stores of the ideal we require. To every man is it given to attain in spirit to the heights of virtuous life, and to know at all times what his conduct should be, would he act like a hero or a saint. But more than this is needed. It is essential that the spiritual atmosphere about us should be transformed to such a degree that it ends by resembling the atmosphere of Swedenborg’s beautiful countries of the age of gold, wherein the air permitted not a falsehood to leave the lips. An instant comes then, when the smallest ill that we fain would commit falls at our feet like a leaden ball upon a disc of bronze; when everything changes, though we know it not, into beauty, love, or truth. But this atmosphere enwraps those only who have been heedful to ventilate their life sufficiently by at times flinging open the gates of the other world. It is when we are near to those gates that we see; it is when we are near to those gates that we love. For to love one’s neighbour does not mean only to give oneself to him, to serve, help, and sustain others. We may possibly be neither good, nor noble, nor beautiful, even in the midst of the greatest sacrifice; and the sister of charity who dies by the bedside of a typhoid patient may perchance have a mean, rancorous, miserable soul. To love one’s neighbour in the immovable depths means to love in others that which is eternal; for one’s neighbour, in the truest sense of the term, is that which approaches the nearest to God; in other words, all that is best and purest in man; and it is only by ever lingering near the gates I spoke of, that you can discover the divine in the soul. Then will you be able to say with the great Jean Paul: ‘When I desire to love most tenderly one who is dear to me, and wish to forgive him everything, I have but to look at him for a few moments in silence.’ To learn to love, one must first learn to see. ‘I lived for twenty years by my sister’s side,’ said a friend to me, one day, ‘and _I saw her_ for the first time at the moment of our mother’s death.’ Here, too, it had been necessary that death should violently fling open an eternal gate, so that two souls might behold each other in a ray of the primeval light. Is there one amongst us who has not near to him sisters he has never seen?