THE RAINBOW. 
259 
of the reality of my corporeal frame. I know that two 
is the multiple of one, and therefore contains one within 
it: thereby I am informed of the reality of my mental 
nature. I experience emotions that the mental nature 
cannot analyse: conscience warns me, love animates me, 
devotion calms me. I have a third possession—it is the 
Spirit. The threefold man is a part of a threefold 
system; and in every trembling of the heart to God, he 
bears testimony to the power of the rainbow to unlock 
the secrets of earth and heaven. 
I can now take comfort from the words of a renowned 
thinker, and agree with him that “the day is not 
wholly profane in which we have given heed to some 
natural object.” But I have lost all my faith in Emer¬ 
sonian transcendentalism in the acceptance of a faith 
which carries me far beyond the temporary shifts of a 
perverted Platonism which has sought to graft old saws 
on the root stocks of modern manners. One of Emer¬ 
son's brightest and most attractive passages is that 
wherein he pictures Nature as a duality; to me Nature 
appears as a triplicity, and in this view I find a solid 
basis of fact to supplant the eccentricities of fancy. The 
rainbow tells me of the presence of three powers in the 
ordering of the universe; and as its noble arch carries 
my eye to heaven, so my thoughts go with it, and the 
stars that have now succeeded to the spectral vision join 
in the mighty psalm—“There are three that bear 
record in heaven, and these three are one.” Trinity in 
unity is the thought forced upon us in every analysis of 
material things. The rainbow inspires us with wonder, 
not by its beauty only, but by its accord with a truth of 
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