Blavatsky on the Tears of the Angels

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Mystic Verse and Insights Series · 2 pages

Two pages of descriptive prose, prefaced by eight lines from The Lay of the Old Woman Clothed in Grey: A Legend of Dover which set night against itself — lovely when one fond voice is heard, terrible when that voice has become the moaning of the sick.

The prose that follows describes a spring night on the seashore with the winds chained and the elements lulled, where the only sound is the scarcely audible ripple of the wave running over the moist sand and kissing shells and pebbles, likened to the soft regular breathing of a sleeping bosom. Man is placed deliberately between two magnitudes — the star-hung dome above and the slumbering earth below — and is said to feel small, insignificant and helpless standing between them. The central idea is that heaven and earth are asleep but their souls are awake and confabulating, whispering unspeakable mysteries to one another, and that at such hours the occult side of Nature lifts her dark veils and reveals what could not be extorted from her by day. The imagery draws the sky down to the ground: the firmament seems to approach and bend over the earth, the sidereal meadows exchange embraces with the daisy-decked valleys, the heavenly dome falls prostrate into the arms of the quiet sea, and the millions of stars peep into and bathe in every lakelet and pool. The title comes from the closing turn, in which those twinkling orbs appear to the grief-furrowed soul as the eyes of angels looking down with ineffable pity on human suffering — and what falls at night is not read as dew.

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