I find myself humming Blake's Jerusalem as I contemplate these mysterious forces of nature so beloved of Artemis. Why is there so much beauty in the world? Which was created first, the flower-clad meadows, or the eye?
Emerson encapsulated the question nicely:
"In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes,
I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods,
Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook,
To please the desert and the sluggish brook.
The purple petals fallen in the pool
Made the black water with their beauty gay;
Here might the red-bird come his plumes to cool,
And court the flower that cheapens his array.
Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why
This charm is wasted on the earth and sky,
Tell them, dear, that, if eyes were made for seeing,
Then beauty is its own excuse for Being;
Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose!
I never thought to ask; I never knew;
But in my simple ignorance suppose
The self-same power that brought me there, brought you."
And I fancy that while the ink flowed from Emerson's quill with those immortal and gentle words, far across the Atlantic Ocean, in a vicarage sheltered deep within a craggy fold of blasted heath known as the Yorkshire moors, a young girl in feeble health feverishly wrote these:
I find myself humming Blake's Jerusalem as I contemplate these mysterious forces of nature so beloved of Artemis. Why is there so much beauty in the world? Which was created first, the flower-clad meadows, or the eye?
Emerson encapsulated the question nicely:
"In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes,
I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods,
Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook,
To please the desert and the sluggish brook.
The purple petals fallen in the pool
Made the black water with their beauty gay;
Here might the red-bird come his plumes to cool,
And court the flower that cheapens his array.
Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why
This charm is wasted on the earth and sky,
Tell them, dear, that, if eyes were made for seeing,
Then beauty is its own excuse for Being;
Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose!
I never thought to ask; I never knew;
But in my simple ignorance suppose
The self-same power that brought me there, brought you."
And I fancy that while the ink flowed from Emerson's quill with those immortal and gentle words, far across the Atlantic Ocean, in a vicarage sheltered deep within a craggy fold of blasted heath known as the Yorkshire moors, a young girl in feeble health feverishly wrote these:
"No coward soul is mine
No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere
I see Heaven's glories shine
And Faith shines equal arming me from Fear
"O God within my breast
Almighty ever-present Deity
Life, that in me hast rest,
As I Undying Life, have power in Thee
Vain are the thousand creeds
That move men's hearts, unutterably vain,
Worthless as withered weeds
Or idlest froth amid the boundless main
To waken doubt in one
Holding so fast by thy infinity,
So surely anchored on
The steadfast rock of Immortality.
With wide-embracing love
Thy spirit animates eternal years
Pervades and broods above,
Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates and rears
Though earth and moon were gone
And suns and universes ceased to be
And Thou wert left alone
Every Existence would exist in thee
There is not room for Death
Nor atom that his might could render void
Since thou art Being and Breath
And what thou art may never be destroyed."