Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/298

Rh Sirius, the three in Orion's, belt, the North star, the Pointers, and some of those others "which outwatch the Bear," and never set.

Well, poor tired girl, here is one thing to be had without money, God's costliest stars to you come cheap as wishing ! All night long this beauty broods over the sleeping town, — a hanging garden, not Babylonian, bub Heavenly, whereof the roses are eternal, and thornless also. How large and beautiful they seem as you stand in dismal lanes and your eyes do not fail of looking upwards; full of womanly reproach as you look at them from amid the riot and uproar and debauchery of wicked men. Yet they cost nothing — everybody's stars. The dew of their influence comes upon her, noiseless and soft and imperceptible, and lulls her wearied limbs.

At one touch of this wonder-working hand the maiden's brain triumphs over her mere muscles, her mind over the tired flesh; the material sky is transfigured into the spiritual heaven, and the bud of beauty opens into the flower of love. Now she walks, dreamy, in the kingdom of God. What a world of tropic luxuriance springs up around her!—fairer than artists paint, her young "Imagination bodies forth the forms of things unseen," nor needs a poet's pen to give those " airy nothings a local habitation and a name." No garden of Eden did poet ever describe so fair, for God "giveth to his beloved even in their sleep" more than most wakeful artists can reconstruct when "the meddling intellect misshapes the forms of things." What a Kingdom of Heaven she walks in; the poor tired maiden from the shop now become the new Eve in this Paradise of dreams! But forms of earth still tenant there. It is still the daily life, but now all glorified : sleep and love are the] Moses and Elias who work this real and not miraculous transfiguration. The little close-pent shop is a cathedra] now, vaster than St Peter's, richer too than all Genoese marbles in its vari-coloured decoration: the furniture and