The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858

"But nothing is without cause; and for an emotion so strong as I experienced, on the sight of those mountains, there must have been one."

"Very likely! if you go after it, you will find it. You probably expect to find some beautiful enchantress keeping her court on the mountain-top, and a suite of fairies."

I started, for, absurd as it may seem, that very idea, half-formed, undeveloped from very shame at my superstition, had rested in my mind.

"And," said I, at a loss what to say, "are there no such things possible?"

"All things are possible to the imagination."

"To create?"

"Most certainly! Is not creation the act of bringing into existence? and does not your Hamlet exist as immortally as your Shakspeare? The only true existence, is it not that of the Idea? Have you not seen the pines transfigured?"

"And if I imagined a race of fairies inhabiting the Blue Mountain, should I find them?"

"If you imagined them, yes! But the imagination is not voluntary; it works to supply a necessity; its function is creation, and creation is needed only to fill a vacuum. The wild Arab, feeling his own insignificance, and comprehending the necessity for a Creating Power, finds between himself and that Power, which to him, as to you the other day, assumes a personality, an immense distance, and fills the space with a race half divine, half human. It was the necessity for the fairy which created the fairy. You do not feel the same distance between yourself and a Creator, and so you do not call into existence a creative race of the same character; but has not your own imagination furnished you with images to which you may give your reverence? It may be that you diminish that distance by degrading the Great First Cause to an image of your personality, and so are not so wise as the Arab, who at once admits it to be unattainable. Each man shapes that which he looks up to by his desires or fears, and these in their turn are the results of his degree of development."

"But God, is not He the Supreme Creator?"

"Is it not as we said, that you measure the Supreme by yourself? Can you not comprehend a supreme law, an order which controls all things?"

In my meditations this doubt had often presented itself to me, and I had as often put it resolutely aside; but now to hear it urged on me in this way from this mysterious presence troubled me, and I shrank from further discussion of the topic. I earnestly desired a fuller knowledge of the nature of my colloquist.

"Tell me," said I, "do you not take cognizance of my personality?—do you read my past and my future?"

"Your past and future are contained in your present. Who can analyze what you are can see the things which made you such; for effect contains its cause;—to see the future, it needs only to know the laws which govern all things. It is a simple problem: you being given, with the inevitable tendencies to which you are subject, the result is your future; the flight of one of your rifle-balls cannot be calculated with greater certainty."

"But how shall we know those laws?" said I.

"You contain them all, for you are the result of them; and they are always the same,—not one code for your beginning, and another for your continuance. Man is the complete embodiment of all the laws thus far developed, and you have only to know yourself to know the history of creation."

This I could not gainsay, and my mind, wearied, declined to ask further. I returned to camp and went to sleep.

Several days passed without any remarkable progress in my knowledge of this strange being, though I found myself growing more and more sensitive to the presence of it each day; and at the same time the incomprehensible sympathy with Nature, for I know not what else to call it, seemed growing stronger and more startling in the effects it produced on the landscape. The influence was no longer confined to twilight, but made noon-day mystical; and I began to hear strange sounds and words spoken by disembodied voices,—not like that of my dæmon, but unaccompanied by any feeling of personal presence connected therewith. It seemed as if the vibrations shaped themselves into words, some of them of singular significance. I heard my name called, and the strangest laughs on the lake at night. My dæmon seemed averse to answering any questions on the topic of these illusions. The only reply was,—"You would be wiser, not knowing too much."

Ere many days of this solitary life had passed, I found my whole existence taken up by my fantasies. I determined to make my excursion to the Blue Mountain, and, sending Steve down to the post-office, a three-days' journey, I took the boat, with Carlo and my rifle, and pushed off. The outlet of the Blue Mountain Lakes is like all the Adirondack streams, dark and shut in by forest, which scarcely permits landing anywhere. Now and then a log fallen into the water compels the voyager to get out and lift his boat over; then a shallow rapid must be dragged over; and when the stream is clear of obstruction, it is too narrow for any mode of propulsion but poling or paddling.

I had worked several weary hours, and the sun had passed the meridian, when I emerged from the forest into a wild, swampy flat,—"wild meadow," the guides call it,—through which the stream wound, and around which was a growth of tall larches backed by pines. Where the brook seemed to reënter the wood on the opposite side, stood two immense pines, like sentinels, and such they became to me; and they looked grim and threatening, with their huge arms reaching over the gateway. I drew my boat up on the boggy shore at the foot of a solitary tamarack, into which I climbed as high as I could to look over the wood beyond.

Never shall I forget what I saw from that swaying look-out. Before me was the mountain, perhaps five miles away, covered with dense forest to within a few hundred feet of the summit, which showed bare rock with firs clinging in the clefts and on the tables, and which was crowned by a walled city, the parapet of whose walls cut with a sharp, straight line against the sky, and beyond showed spire and turret and the tops of tall trees. The walls must have been at least a hundred and fifty feet high, and I could see here and there between the group of firs traces of a road coming down the mountain-side. And I heard one of those mocking voices say, "The city of silence!"—nothing more. I felt strongly tempted to start on a flight through the air towards the city, and why I did not launch forth on the impulse I know not. My blood rushed through my veins with maddest energy, and my brain seemed to have been replaced by some ethereal substance, and to be capable of floating me off as if it were a balloon. Yet I clung and looked, my whole soul in my eyes, and had no thought of losing the spectacle for an instant, even were it to reach the city itself. The glorious glamour of that place and moment, who can comprehend it? The wind swung my tree-top to and fro, and I climbed up until the tree bent with my weight like a twig under a bird's.

Presently I heard bells and strains of music, as though all the military bands in the city were coming together on the walls; and the sounds rose and fell with the wind,—one moment entirely lost, another full and triumphant. Then I heard the sound of hunting-horns and the baying of a pack of hounds, deep-mouthed, as if a hunting-party were coming down the mountain-side. Nearer and nearer they came, and I heard merry laughing and shouting as they swept through the valley. I feared for a moment that they would find me there, and drive me, intruding, from the enchanted land.

But I must fathom the mystery, let what would come. I descended the tree, and when I had reached the boat again I found the whole thing changed. I understood that my city was only granite and fir-trees, and my music only the wind in the tree-tops. The reaction was sickening; the sunshine seemed dull and cold after the lost glory of that enchantment. The Blue Mountain was reached, its destiny fulfilled for me, and I returned to my camp, sick at heart, as one who has had a dear illusion dispelled.

The next day my mind was unusually calm and clear. I asked my dæmon what was the meaning of the enchantment of yesterday.

"It was a freak of your imagination," it replied.

"But what is this imagination, then, which, being a faculty of my own, yet masters my reason?"

"Not at all a faculty, but your very highest self, your own life in creative activity. Your reason is a faculty, and is subordinate to the purposes of your imagination. If, instead of regarding imagination as a pendant to your mental organization, you take it for what it is, a function, and the noblest one your mind knows, you will see at once why it is that it works unconsciously, just as you live unconsciously and involuntarily. Men set their reason and feeling to subdue what they consider a treacherous element in themselves; they succeed only in dwarfing their natures, and imagination is inert while reason controls; but when reason rests in sleep, and you cease to live to the external world, imagination resumes its normal power. You dream;—it is only the revival of that which you smother when you are awake. You consider the sights and sounds of yesterday follies; you reason;—imagination demonstrates its power by overturning your reason and deceiving your very senses."

"You speak of its creations; I understand this in a certain sense; but if these were such, should not they have permanence? and can anything created perish?"

"Nonsense! what will these trees be tomorrow? and the rocks you sit on, are they not changing to vegetation under you? The only creation is that of ideas; things are thin shadows. If man is not creative, he is still undeveloped."

"But is not such an assumption trenching on the supremacy of God?" I asked.

"What do you understand by 'God?'"

"An infinitely wise and loving Controller of events, of course," I replied.

"Did you ever find any one whose ideas on the subject agreed with yours?"

"Not entirely."

"Then your God is not the same as the God of other men; from the Fee-Jeean to the Christian there is a wide range. Of course there is a first great principle of life; but this personality you all worship, is it not a creation?"

I now felt this to be the great point of the demon's urging; it recurred too often not to be designed. Led on by the sophistry of my tempter, I had floated unconsciously to this issue, practically admitting all; but when this suggestion stood completely unclothed before me, my soul rose in horror at the abyss before it. For an instant all was chaos, and the very order of Nature seemed disorder. Life and light vanished from the face of the earth; my night made all things dead and dark. A universe without a God! Creation seemed to me for that moment but a galvanized corse. What my emotions were no human being who has not felt them can conceive. My first impulse was to suicide; with the next I cried from the depths of my despair, "God deliver me from the body of this death!" It was but a moment,—and there came, in the place of the cold questioning voice of my dæmon, one of ineffable music, repeating words familiar to me from childhood, words linked to everything loved and lovely in my past:—"Ye believe in God, believe also in me." The hot tears for another moment blotted out the world from sight. I said once more to the questioner, "Now who are you?"

"Your own doubts," was the reply; and it seemed as if only I spoke to myself.

Since that day I have never reasoned with my doubts, never doubted my imagination.

ALL'S WELL

Sweet-voicèd Hope, thy fine discourse
Foretold not half life's good to me;
Thy painter, Fancy, hath not force
To show how sweet it is to be!
Thy witching dream
And pictured scheme
To match the fact still want the power;
Thy promise brave
From birth to grave
Life's boon may beggar in an hour.

Ask and receive,—'tis sweetly said;
Yet what to plead for know I not;
For Wish is worsted, Hope o'ersped,
And aye to thanks returns my thought.
If I would pray,
I've nought to say
But this, that God may be God still;
For Him to live
Is still to give,
And sweeter than my wish his will.