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Updated: May 28, 2025
It opens a gulf that the imagination cannot clear; it opens vistas from which we instinctively shrink; it opens up abysms of time in which our whole historic period would be but a day; it opens up a world of struggle, delay, waste, failure that palls the imagination.
Down in the abysms of New World humanity there had form'd and harden'd a primal hardpan of national Union will, determin'd and in the majority, refusing to be tamper'd with or argued against, confronting all emergencies, and capable at any time of bursting all surface bonds, and breaking out like an earthquake.
There was still something Herculean in his task; he looked boldly down into the black abysms of Time, not without some shrinking, it is true, saw the "huge first Nothing," faced the spectres as they rose before him, wrestled with them, and triumphantly conquered by acknowledging each phantom as a friendly power a creature on whose shoulders he had raised himself to higher and higher levels; he saw that though the blackness was peopled with uncouth and gigantic forms, out of all these there at last arose the being Man, who could put all creatures under his feet.
Once returned from the abysms of the utter North to that little house upon the outskirts of Meudon, it was not the philosopher, the daring observer, the man of iron energy that imposed himself on his family, but a fat and even plaintive jester, a farceur incarnate and kindly, the co-equal of his children, and, it must be written, not seldom the comic despair of Madame Lavalle, who, as she writes five years after the marriage, to her venerable mother, found "in this unequalled intellect whose name I bear the abandon of a large and very untidy boy."
And Tennyson, in his wonderful verse describing the temporary lifting of the veil for him, has described a phase of Cosmic Consciousness in the following words: "For knowledge is the swallow on the lake That sees and stirs the surface-shadow there, But never yet hath dippt into the abysm, The Abysm of all Abysms, beneath, within The blue of sky and sea, the green of earth, And in the million-millionth of a grain Which cleft and cleft again for evermore And ever vanishing, never vanishes. . .
"My lord," came a voice as out of a fog. Nelson turned. The giant was following them at a panther-prowl. Only the eyes lived; abysms through which the boy gazed down to behold the last nicker of a drowning soul. It was not quite out, that gallant little light. Down there in the tumult of dark waters it fought for life despairingly. Without, the man was black and white and strangely still.
He roused himself during a long journey to take a drink of something held to his lips by someone, and sank back, tucking sleep around him like a warm blanket. In all his life he had never had such a gorgeous sleep as that, his weary and harassed brain revelled in moments of semi-consciousness, and then sank back into the last abysms of oblivion.
He stood looking for some time at the track of the Milky Way, till his gaze plunged into one of those abysms of blackness where no star shines, and the ghastliness of the distance suggested flooded in upon him.
Stars that looked upon her early in the night had gone down into blue abysms below the horizon, and the midnight song of a mocking-bird, swinging in a lemon-tree beneath her window, had long since hushed itself with the chirp of crickets and gossip of the katydids. A tap on the facing of her open door finally aroused her, and she hastily attempted to hide her work, as Dr. Grey asked,
He answered unspoken questions; he filled great vacancies of my ignorance; into what had been abysms of thought he poured a whole treasury of intelligence and brought floods of light.
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