Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 2.djvu/869

1858.] 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.

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