And so the Riddle resolves itself as Memory,--immeasurable Memory of all bodily fitness for the ends of life: a Composite glorified, doubtless, by some equally measureless inherited sense of all the vanished joys ever associated with such fitness.
Infinite, may we not term it--this Composite? Aye, but not merely because the multitudes of dead memories that make it are unspeakable. Equally unspeakable the width and the depth of the range of them throughout the enormity of Time.... O lover, how slender the beautiful witch,--the ghost within the ghost of you! Yet the depth of that ghost is the depth of the Nebulous Zone bespanning Night,--the luminous Shadow that Egypt figured of old as Mother of the Sun and the Gods, curving her long white womanâs-body over the world. As a vapor of phosphorus, or wake of a ship in the night,--only so with naked eye can we behold it. But pierced by vision telescopic, it is revealed as the further side of the Ring of the Cosmos,--dim belt of millions of suns seemingly massed together like the cells of a living body, yet so seeming only by reason of their frightful remoteness. Even thus really separated each from each in the awfulness of the Night of Time,--by silent profundities of centuries,--by interspaces of thousands and of myriads of years,--though collectively shaping to loveâs desire but one dim soft sweet phantom,--are those million-swarming memories that make for youth its luminous dream of beauty.
The poet who sang that beautiful things bring sadness, named as beautiful things music and sunset and night, clear skies and transparent waters. Their sadness he sought to explain by vague soul-memories of Paradise. Very old-fashioned this explanation; but it contains a shadowing of truth. For the mysterious sadness associated with the sense of beauty is certainly not of this existence, but of countless anterior lives,--and therefore indeed a sadness of reminiscence.
Elsewhere I try to explain why certain qualities of music, and certain aspects of sunset produce sadness, and even more than sadness. As for impressions of night, however, I doubt if the emotion that night evokes in this nineteenth century can be classed with the sadness that beauty brings. A wonderful night,--a tropical night, for instance, lucent and lukewarm, with a new moon in it, curved and yellow like a ripe banana,--may inspire, among other minor feelings something of tenderness; but the great dominant emotion evoked by the splendor of the vision is not sadness. Breaking open the heavens to their highest, night widens modern thought over the bounds of life and death by the spectacle of that Infinite whose veil is day. Night also forces remembrance of the mystery of our tether,--the viewless force that holds us down to this wretched little ball of a world. And the result is cosmic emotion--vaster than any sense of the sublime,--drowning all other emotion,--but nowise akin to the sadness that beauty causes. Anciently the emotion of night must have been incomparably less voluminous. Men who believed the sky to be a solid vault, never could have felt, as we feel it, the stupendous pomp of darkness. And our ever-growing admiration of those awful astral questions in the Book of Job, is mainly due to the fact that, with the progress of science, they continue to make larger and larger appeal to forms of thought and feeling which never could have entered into the mind of Job.