The passage is too long to quote at
length; besides I have to confess I cannot at this moment recall
it all. But he tells first how in his youth Nature was all in all
to him, "nor needed a moral sense unborrowed from the eye," but
later the inner light came; and hear him in his maturer years:
"For I have learned
To look on Nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A Presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things."
"The still sad music of humanity!"--it was that I heard sounding
in the prayers of those devout Parsees and in the moan of that
mighty sea. Sweet, refreshing it was, though tinged with sadness,
as all our more precious musings must be, "since all we know is,
nothing can be known."
In one of my strolls along the beach I met a Parsee gentleman who
spoke excellent English.
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