Explore "Iris. From "The Professor at the Breakfast-Table." By Oliver Wendell Holmes" by Dinah Mulock on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
I love to look at this "Rainbow," as her father used sometimes to call her, of ours. Handsome creature that she is in forms and colors, fit for a sea-king's bride, it is not her beauty alone that holds my eyes upon her. Let me tell you one of my fancies, and then you will understand the strange sort of fascination she has for me.
It is in the hearts of many men and women -- let me add children -- that there is a _Great Secret_ waiting for them, -- a secret of which they get hints now and then, perhaps oftener in early than in later years. These hints come sometimes in dreams, sometimes in sudden startling flashes, -- second wakings, as it were, -- a waking out of the waking state, which last is very apt to be a half-sleep. I have many times stopped short and held my breath, and felt the blood leaving my cheeks, in one of these sudden clairvoyant flashes. Of course I cannot tell what kind of a secret this is; but I think of it as a disclosure of certain relations of our personal being to time and space, to other intelligences, to the procession of events, and to their First Great Cause. This secret seems to be broken up, as it were, into fragments, so that we find here a word and there a syllable, and then again only a letter of it; but it never is written out for most of us as a complete sentence, in this life.