While composing a little treatise on Eternity, I had the curiosity
to place a mirror before me; and ere long saw reflected there,
a curious involved worming and undulation in the atmosphere over my head.
The invariable moisture of my hair, while plunged in deep thought,
after six cups of hot tea in my thin shingled attic, of an August noon;
this seems an additional argument for the above supposition.
And how nobly it raises our conceit of the mighty, misty monster,
to behold him solemnly sailing through a calm tropical sea;
his vast, mild head overhung by a canopy of vapor,
engendered by his incommunicable contemplations, and that vapor--
as you will sometimes see it--glorified by a rainbow,
as if Heaven itself had put its seal upon his thoughts.
For d'ye see, rainbows do not visit the clear air;
they only irradiate vapor. And so, through all the thick
mists of the dim doubts in my mind, divine intuitions now
and then shoot, enkindling my fog with a heavenly ray.
And for this I thank God; for all have doubts; many deny;
but doubts or denials, few along with them, have intuitions.
Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly;
this combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes
a man who regards them both with equal eye.
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