I will listen, I will learn—till
My Soul is as large as the Shining World.²
We stare at the Fire—look into the Clouds—
And when ideas or intuitions come to us and the
Voices of our Soul start to speak: we trust them.³
The split-second flutter of knowing is
Visible in our eyes as we see:
The invisible nuance of Soul …⁴
Let there be many windows to the Soul,
That all the Glory of the universe may Beautify it.⁵
In my Soule yet me thinketh I here a Blisful Soun!⁶
The deeds of earth, however etherealized
By piety or genius, are without value,
Except as manifestations of the Spirit.⁷
With wide-embracing Love
Thy soul animates Eternal years—
Pervades & broods above—Changes,
Sustains, dissolves, creates—and Rears—⁸
The Soul’s Superior Instants occur to Her alone—
When friend and earth’s occasion have Infinite Withdrawn—⁹
Ah! from the Soul itself must issue forth a Light,
A Glory, a fair luminous cloud enveloping the earth—
And from the Soul itself must there be sent
A sweet & potent Voice, of its own birth,
Of all sweet sounds—the Life & Element!¹⁰
¹ George Eliot, Middlemarch
² Ursula K. Le Guin, Solitude
³ Hermann Hesse tr. Damion Searls, Demian
⁴ Susan Griffin, Celebration
⁵ Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Progress
⁶ Geoffrey Chaucer, The Complaint of Troilus
⁷ Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Artist of the Beautiful
⁸ Emily Brontë, Last Lines
⁹ Emily Dickinson, The Soul’s Superior Instants
¹⁰ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Dejection: An Ode