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Title: Letters and social aims

Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson

Release Date: August 12, 2023 [eBook #71393]

Language: English

Credits: Emmanuel Ackerman, Laura Natal and the Online Distributed
         Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LETTERS AND SOCIAL AIMS ***


                        LETTERS

                          AND

                      SOCIAL AIMS.




                           BY

                   RALPH WALDO EMERSON.




                      [Illustration]




                          BOSTON:
                JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY,
       LATE TICKNOR & FIELDS, AND FIELDS, OSGOOD, & CO.
                           1876.




                       COPYRIGHT, 1875.
                BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON.


            UNIVERSITY PRESS: WELCH, BIGELOW, & CO.,
                          CAMBRIDGE.




CONTENTS.

                              PAGE

  POETRY AND IMAGINATION           1

  SOCIAL AIMS                     69

  ELOQUENCE                       97

  RESOURCES                      119

  THE COMIC                      137

  QUOTATION AND ORIGINALITY      155

  PROGRESS OF CULTURE            183

  PERSIAN POETRY                 211

  INSPIRATION                    239

  GREATNESS                      267

  IMMORTALITY                    287




                      POETRY AND IMAGINATION.





                        POETRY AND IMAGINATION.


THE perception of matter is made the common-sense, and for cause. This
was the cradle, this the go-cart, of the human child. We must learn the
homely laws of fire and water; we must feed, wash, plant, build. These
are ends of necessity, and first in the order of nature. Poverty, frost,
famine, disease, debt, are the beadles and guardsmen that hold us to
common-sense. The intellect, yielded up to itself, cannot supersede this
tyrannic necessity. The restraining grace of common-sense is the mark of
all the valid minds,--of Æsop, Aristotle, Alfred, Luther, Shakspeare,
Cervantes, Franklin, Napoleon. The common-sense which does not meddle
with the absolute, but takes things at their word,--things as they
appear,--believes in the existence of matter, not because we can touch
it, or conceive of it, but because it agrees with ourselves, and the
universe does not jest with us, but is in earnest,--is the house of
health and life. In spite of all the joys of poets and the joys of
saints, the most imaginative and abstracted person never makes, with
impunity, the least mistake in this particular,--never tries to kindle
his oven with water, nor carries a torch into a powder-mill, nor seizes
his wild charger by the tail. We should not pardon the blunder in
another, nor endure it in ourselves.

But whilst we deal with this as finality, early hints are given that we
are not to stay here; that we must be making ready to go;--a warning
that this magnificent hotel and conveniency we call Nature is not final.
First innuendoes, then broad hints, then smart taps, are given,
suggesting that nothing stands still in nature but death; that the
creation is on wheels, in transit, always passing into something else,
streaming into something higher; that matter is not what it
appears;--that chemistry can blow it all into gas. Faraday, the most
exact of natural philosophers, taught that when we should arrive at the
monads, or primordial elements (the supposed little cubes or prisms of
which all matter was built up), we should not find cubes, or prisms, or
atoms, at all, but spherules of force. It was whispered that the globes
of the universe were precipitates of something more subtle; nay,
somewhat was murmured in our ear that dwindled astronomy into a
toy;--that too was no finality;--only provisional,--a makeshift;--that
under chemistry was power and purpose: power and purpose ride on matter
to the last atom. It was steeped in thought,--did everywhere express
thought; that, as great conquerors have burned their ships when once
they were landed on the wished-for shore, so the noble house of Nature
we inhabit has temporary uses, and we can afford to leave it one day.
The ends of all are moral, and therefore the beginnings are such. Thin
or solid, everything is in flight. I believe this conviction makes the
charm of chemistry,--that we have the same avoirdupois matter in an
alembic, without a vestige of the old form; and in animal transformation
not less, as in grub and fly, in egg and bird, in embryo and man;
everything undressing and stealing away from its old into new form, and
nothing fast but those invisible cords which we call laws, on which all
is strung. Then we see that things wear different names and faces, but
belong to one family; that the secret cords, or laws, show their
well-known virtue through every variety,--be it animal, or plant, or
planet,--and the interest is gradually transferred from the forms to the
lurking method.

This hint, however conveyed, upsets our politics, trade, customs,
marriages, nay, the common-sense side of religion and literature, which
are all founded on low nature,--on the clearest and most economical mode
of administering the material world, considered as final. The admission,
never so covertly, that this is a makeshift, sets the dullest brain in
ferment;--our little sir, from his first tottering steps,--as soon as he
can crow,--does not like to be practised upon, suspects that some one is
"doing" him,--and, at this alarm, everything is compromised;--gunpowder
is laid under every man's breakfast-table.

But whilst the man is startled by this closer inspection of the laws of
matter, his attention is called to the independent action of the
mind,--its strange suggestions and laws,--a certain tyranny which
springs up in his own thoughts, which have an order, method, and beliefs
of their own, very different from the order which this common-sense
uses.

Suppose there were in the ocean certain strong currents which drove a
ship, caught in them, with a force that no skill of sailing with the
best wind, and no strength of oars, or sails, or steam, could make any
head against, any more than against the current of Niagara: such
currents--so tyrannical--exist in thoughts, those finest and subtilest
of all waters,--that, as soon as once thought begins, it refuses to
remember whose brain it belongs to,--what country, tradition, or
religion,--and goes whirling off--swim we merrily--in a direction
self-chosen, by law of thought, and not by law of kitchen clock or
county committee. It has its own polarity. One of these vortices or
self-directions of thought is the impulse to search resemblance,
affinity, identity, in all its objects, and hence our science, from its
rudest to its most refined theories.

The electric word pronounced by John Hunter a hundred years
ago,--_arrested and progressive development_,--indicating the way upward
from the invisible protoplasm to the highest organisms,--gave the poetic
key to Natural Science,--of which the theories of Geoffroy St. Hilaire,
of Oken, of Goethe, of Agassiz, and Owen, and Darwin, in zoölogy and
botany, are the fruits,--a hint whose power is not yet exhausted,
showing unity and perfect order in physics.

The hardest chemist, the severest analyzer, scornful of all but dryest
fact, is forced to keep the poetic curve of nature, and his result is
like a myth of Theocritus. All multiplicity rushes to be resolved into
unity. Anatomy, osteology, exhibit arrested or progressive ascent in
each kind; the lower pointing to the higher forms, the higher to the
highest, from the fluid in an elastic sack, from radiate, mollusk,
articulate, vertebrate,--up to man; as if the whole animal world were
only a Hunterian museum to exhibit the genesis of mankind.

Identity of law, perfect order in physics, perfect parallelism between
the laws of Nature and the laws of thought exist. In botany we have the
like, the poetic perception of metamorphosis,--that the same vegetable
point or eye which is the unit of the plant can be transformed at
pleasure into every part, as bract, leaf, petal, stamen, pistil, or
seed.

In geology, what a useful hint was given to the early inquirers on
seeing in the possession of Professor Playfair a bough of a fossil tree
which was perfect wood at one end, and perfect mineral coal at the
other. Natural objects, if individually described, and out of
connection, are not yet known, since they are really parts of a
symmetrical universe, like words of a sentence; and if their true order
is found, the poet can read their divine significance orderly as in a
Bible. Each animal or vegetable form remembers the next inferior, and
predicts the next higher.

There is one animal, one plant, one matter, and one force. The laws of
light and of heat translate each other;--so do the laws of sound and of
color; and so galvanism, electricity, and magnetism are varied forms of
the selfsame energy. While the student ponders this immense unity, he
observes that all things in nature, the animals, the mountain, the
river, the seasons, wood, iron, stone, vapor,--have a mysterious
relation to his thoughts and his life; their growths, decays, quality,
and use so curiously resemble himself, in parts and in wholes, that he
is compelled to speak by means of them. His words and his thoughts are
framed by their help. Every noun is an image. Nature gives him,
sometimes in a flattered likeness, sometimes in caricature, a copy of
every humor and shade in his character and mind. The world is an immense
picture-book of every passage in human life. Every object he beholds is
the mask of a man.

    "The privates of man's heart
    They speken and sound in his ear
    As tho' they loud winds were";

for the universe is full of their echoes.

Every correspondence we observe in mind and matter suggests a substance
older and deeper than either of these old nobilities. We see the law
gleaming through, like the sense of a half-translated ode of Hafiz. The
poet who plays with it with most boldness best justifies himself,--is
most profound and most devout. Passion adds eyes,--is a
magnifying-glass. Sonnets of lovers are mad enough, but are valuable to
the philosopher, as are prayers of saints, for their potent symbolism.

Science was false by being unpoetical. It assumed to explain a reptile
or mollusk, and isolated it,--which is hunting for life in graveyards.
Reptile or mollusk or man or angel only exists in system, in relation.
The metaphysician, the poet, only sees each animal form as an inevitable
step in the path of the creating mind. The Indian, the hunter, the boy
with his pets, have sweeter knowledge of these than the savant. We use
semblances of logic until experience puts us in possession of real
logic. The poet knows the missing link by the joy it gives. The poet
gives us the eminent experiences only,--a god stepping from peak to
peak, nor planting his foot but on a mountain.

Science does not know its debt to imagination. Goethe did not believe
that a great naturalist could exist without this faculty. He was himself
conscious of its help, which made him a prophet among the doctors. From
this vision he gave brave hints to the zoölogist, the botanist, and the
optician.


_Poetry._--The primary use of a fact is low: the secondary use, as it is
a figure or illustration of my thought, is the real worth. First, the
fact; second, its impression, or what I think of it. Hence Nature was
called "a kind of adulterated reason." Seas, forests, metals, diamonds,
and fossils interest the eye, but 'tis only with some preparatory or
predicting charm. Their value to the intellect appears only when I hear
their meaning made plain in the spiritual truth they cover. The mind,
penetrated with its sentiment or its thought, projects it outward on
whatever it beholds. The lover sees reminders of his mistress in every
beautiful object; the saint, an argument for devotion in every natural
process; and the facility with which Nature lends itself to the thoughts
of man, the aptness with which a river, a flower, a bird, fire, day, or
night, can express his fortunes, is as if the world were only a
disguised man, and, with a change of form, rendered to him all his
experience. We cannot utter a sentence in sprightly conversation without
a similitude. Note our incessant use of the word _like_,--like fire,
like a rock, like thunder, like a bee, "like a year without a spring."
Conversation is not permitted without tropes; nothing but great weight
in things can afford a quite literal speech. It is ever enlivened by
inversion and trope. God himself does not speak prose, but communicates
with us by hints, omens, inference, and dark resemblances in objects
lying all around us.

Nothing so marks a man as imaginative expressions. A figurative
statement arrests attention, and is remembered and repeated. How often
has a phrase of this kind made a reputation. Pythagoras's Golden Sayings
were such, and Socrates's, and Mirabeau's, and Burke's, and Bonaparte's.
Genius thus makes the transfer from one part of Nature to a remote part,
and betrays the rhymes and echoes that pole makes with pole. Imaginative
minds cling to their images, and do not wish them rashly rendered into
prose reality, as children resent your showing them that their doll
Cinderella is nothing but pine wood and rags: and my young scholar does
not wish to know what the leopard, the wolf, or Lucia, signify in
Dante's Inferno, but prefers to keep their veils on. Mark the delight of
an audience in an image. When some familiar truth or fact appears in a
new dress, mounted as on a fine horse, equipped with a grand pair of
ballooning wings, we cannot enough testify our surprise and pleasure. It
is like the new virtue shown in some unprized old property, as when a
boy finds that his pocket-knife will attract steel filings and take up a
needle; or when the old horse-block in the yard is found to be a Torso
Hercules of the Phidian age. Vivacity of expression may indicate this
high gift, even when the thought is of no great scope, as when Michel
Angelo, praising the _terra cottas_, said, "If this earth were to become
marble, woe to the antiques!" A happy symbol is a sort of evidence that
your thought is just. I had rather have a good symbol of my thought, or
a good analogy, than the suffrage of Kant or Plato. If you agree with
me, or if Locke or Montesquieu agree, I may yet be wrong; but if the
elm-tree thinks the same thing, if running water, if burning coal, if
crystals, if alkalies, in their several fashions, say what I say, it
must be true. Thus, a good symbol is the best argument, and is a
missionary to persuade thousands. The Vedas, the Edda, the Koran, are
each remembered by their happiest figure. There is no more welcome gift
to men than a new symbol. That satiates, transports, converts them. They
assimilate themselves to it,--deal with it in all ways, and it will last
a hundred years. Then comes a new genius, and brings another. Thus the
Greek mythology called the sea "the tear of Saturn." The return of the
soul to God was described as "a flask of water broken in the sea." Saint
John gave us the Christian figure of "souls washed in the blood of
Christ." The aged Michel Angelo indicates his perpetual study as in
boyhood,--"I carry my satchel still." Machiavel described the papacy as
"a stone inserted in the body of Italy to keep the wound open." To the
Parliament debating how to tax America, Burke exclaimed, "Shear the
wolf." Our Kentuckian orator said of his dissent from his companion, "I
showed him the back of my hand." And our proverb of the courteous
soldier reads: "An iron hand in a velvet glove."

This belief that the higher use of the material world is to furnish us
types or pictures to express the thoughts of the mind is carried to its
logical extreme by the Hindoos, who, following Buddha, have made it the
central doctrine of their religion, that what we call Nature, the
external world, has no real existence,--is only phenomenal. Youth, age,
property, condition, events, persons,--self, even,--are successive
_maias_ (deceptions) through which Vishnu mocks and instructs the soul.
I think Hindoo books the best gymnastics for the mind, as showing
treatment. All European libraries might almost be read without the swing
of this gigantic arm being suspected. But these Orientals deal with
worlds and pebbles freely.

For the value of a trope is that the hearer is one; and indeed Nature
itself is a vast trope, and all particular natures are tropes. As the
bird alights on the bough,--then plunges into the air again, so the
thoughts of God pause but for a moment in any form. All thinking is
analogizing, and 'tis the use of life to learn metonymy. The endless
passing of one element into new forms, the incessant metamorphosis,
explains the rank which the imagination holds in our catalogue of mental
powers. The imagination is the reader of these forms. The poet accounts
all productions and changes of Nature as the nouns of language, uses
them representatively, too well pleased with their ulterior to value
much their primary meaning. Every new object so seen gives a shock of
agreeable surprise. The impressions on the imagination make the great
days of life: the book, the landscape, or the personality which did not
stay on the surface of the eye or ear, but penetrated to the inward
sense, agitates us, and is not forgotten. Walking, working, or talking,
the sole question is how many strokes vibrate on this mystic
string,--how many diameters are drawn quite through from matter to
spirit; for, whenever you enunciate a natural law, you discover that you
have enunciated a law of the mind. Chemistry, geology, hydraulics, are
secondary science. The atomic theory is only an interior process
_produced_, as geometers say, or the effect of a foregone metaphysical
theory. Swedenborg saw gravity to be only an external of the
irresistible attractions of affection and faith. Mountains and oceans we
think we understand:--yes, so long as they are contented to be such, and
are safe with the geologist,--but when they are melted in Promethean
alembics, and come out men, and then, melted again, come out words,
without any abatement, but with an exaltation of power!--

In poetry we say we require the miracle. The bee flies among the
flowers, and gets mint and marjoram, and generates a new product, which
is not mint and marjoram, but honey; the chemist mixes hydrogen and
oxygen to yield a new product, which is not these, but water; and the
poet listens to conversation, and beholds all objects in nature, to give
back, not them, but a new and transcendent whole.

Poetry is the perpetual endeavor to express the spirit of the thing, to
pass the brute body, and search the life and reason which causes it to
exist;--to see that the object is always flowing away, whilst the spirit
or necessity which causes it subsists. Its essential mark is that it
betrays in every word instant activity of mind, shown in new uses of
every fact and image,--in preternatural quickness or perception of
relations. All its words are poems. It is a presence of mind that gives
a miraculous command of all means of uttering the thought and feeling of
the moment. The poet squanders on the hour an amount of life that would
more than furnish the seventy years of the man that stands next him.

The term genius, when used with emphasis, implies imagination; use of
symbols, figurative speech. A deep insight will always, like Nature,
ultimate its thought in a thing. As soon as a man masters a principle,
and sees his facts in relation to it, fields, waters, skies, offer to
clothe his thoughts in images. Then all men understand him: Parthian,
Mede, Chinese, Spaniard, and Indian hear their own tongue. For he can
now find symbols of universal significance, which are readily rendered
into any dialect; as a painter, a sculptor, a musician, can in their
several ways express the same sentiment of anger, or love, or religion.

The thoughts are few; the forms many; the large vocabulary or
many-colored coat of the indigent unity. The savans are chatty and
vain,--but hold them hard to principle and definition, and they become
mute and near-sighted. What is motion? what is beauty? what is matter?
what is life? what is force? Push them hard, and they will not be
loquacious. They will come to Plato, Proclus, and Swedenborg. The
invisible and imponderable is the sole fact. "Why changes not the violet
earth into musk?" What is the term of the ever-flowing metamorphosis? I
do not know what are the stoppages, but I see that a devouring unity
changes all into that which changes not.

The act of imagination is ever attended by pure delight. It infuses a
certain volatility and intoxication into all nature. It has a flute
which sets the atoms of our frame in a dance. Our indeterminate size is
a delicious secret which it reveals to us. The mountains begin to
dislimn, and float in the air. In the presence and conversation of a
true poet, teeming with images to express his enlarging thought, his
person, his form, grows larger to our fascinated eyes. And thus begins
that deification which all nations have made of their heroes in every
kind,--saints, poets, lawgivers, and warriors.


_Imagination._--Whilst common-sense looks at things or visible nature as
real and final facts, poetry, or the imagination which dictates it, is a
second sight, looking through these, and using them as types or words
for thoughts which they signify. Or is this belief a metaphysical whim
of modern times, and quite too refined? On the contrary, it is as old as
the human mind. Our best definition of poetry is one of the oldest
sentences, and claims to come down to us from the Chaldæan Zoroaster,
who wrote it thus: "Poets are standing transporters, whose employment
consists in speaking to the Father and to matter; in producing apparent
imitations of unapparent natures, and inscribing things unapparent in
the apparent fabrication of the world"; in other words, the world exists
for thought: it is to make appear things which hide: mountains,
crystals, plants, animals, are seen; that which makes them is not seen:
these, then, are "apparent copies of unapparent natures." Bacon
expressed the same sense in his definition, "Poetry accommodates the
shows of things to the desires of the mind"; and Swedenborg, when he
said, "There is nothing existing in human thought, even though relating
to the most mysterious tenet of faith, but has combined with it a
natural and sensuous image." And again: "Names, countries, nations, and
the like are not at all known to those who are in heaven; they have no
idea of such things, but of the realities signified thereby." A symbol
always stimulates the intellect; therefore is poetry ever the best
reading. The very design of imagination is to domesticate us in another,
in a celestial, nature.

This power is in the image because this power is in nature. It so
affects, because it so is. All that is wondrous in Swedenborg is not his
invention, but his extraordinary perception;--that he was necessitated
so to see. The world realizes the mind. Better than images is seen
through them. The selection of the image is no more arbitrary than the
power and significance of the image. The selection must follow fate.
Poetry, if perfected, is the only verity; is the speech of man after the
real, and not after the apparent.

Or, shall we say that the imagination exists by sharing the ethereal
currents? The poet contemplates the central identity, sees it undulate
and roll this way and that, with divine flowings, through remotest
things; and, following it, can detect essential resemblances in natures
never before compared. He can class them so audaciously, because he is
sensible of the sweep of the celestial stream, from which nothing is
exempt. His own body is a fleeing apparition,--his personality as
fugitive as the trope he employs. In certain hours we can almost pass
our hand through our own body. I think the use or value of poetry to be
the suggestion it affords of the flux or fugaciousness of the poet. The
mind delights in measuring itself thus with matter, with history, and
flouting both. A thought, any thought, pressed, followed, opened, dwarfs
matter, custom, and all but itself. But this second sight does not
necessarily impair the primary or common sense. Pindar and Dante, yes,
and the gray and timeworn sentences of Zoroaster, may all be parsed,
though we do not parse them. The poet has a logic, though it be subtile.
He observes higher laws than he transgresses. "Poetry must first be good
sense, though it is something better."

This union of first and second sight reads nature to the end of delight
and of moral use. Men are imaginative, but not overpowered by it to the
extent of confounding its suggestions with external facts. We live in
both spheres, and must not mix them. Genius certifies its entire
possession of its thought, by translating it into a fact which perfectly
represents it, and is hereby education. Charles James Fox thought
"Poetry the great refreshment of the human mind,--the only thing, after
all; that men first found out they had minds, by making and tasting
poetry."

Man runs about restless and in pain when his condition or the objects
about him do not fully match his thought. He wishes to be rich, to be
old, to be young, that things may obey him. In the ocean, in fire, in
the sky, in the forest, he finds facts adequate and as large as he. As
his thoughts are deeper than he can fathom, so also are these. 'Tis
easier to read Sanscrit, to decipher the arrowhead character, than to
interpret these familiar sights. 'Tis even much to name them. Thus
Thomson's "Seasons" and the best parts of many old and many new poets
are simply enumerations by a person who felt the beauty of the common
sights and sounds, without any attempt to draw a moral or affix a
meaning.

The poet discovers that what men value as substances have a higher value
as symbols; that Nature is the immense shadow of man. A man's action is
only a picture-book of his creed. He does after what he believes. Your
condition, your employment, is the fable of _you_. The world is
thoroughly anthropomorphized, as if it had passed through the body and
mind of man, and taken his mould and form. Indeed, good poetry is always
personification, and heightens every species of force in nature by
giving it a human volition. We are advertised that there is nothing to
which he is not related; that everything is convertible into every
other. The staff in this hand is the _radius vector_ of the sun. The
chemistry of this is the chemistry of that. Whatever one act we do,
whatever one thing we learn, we are doing and learning all
things,--marching in the direction of universal power. Every healthy
mind is a true Alexander or Sesostris, building a universal monarchy.

The senses imprison us, and we help them with metres as limitary,--with
a pair of scales and a foot-rule, and a clock. How long it took to find
out what a day was, or what this sun, that makes days! It cost thousands
of years only to make the motion of the earth suspected. Slowly, by
comparing thousands of observations, there dawned on some mind a theory
of the sun,--and we found the astronomical fact. But the astronomy is in
the mind: the senses affirm that the earth stands still and the sun
moves. The senses collect the surface facts of matter. The intellect
acts on these brute reports, and obtains from them results which are the
essence or intellectual form of the experiences. It compares,
distributes, generalizes, and uplifts them into its own sphere. It knows
that these transfigured results are not the brute experiences, just as
souls in heaven are not the red bodies they once animated. Many
transfigurations have befallen them. The atoms of the body were once
nebulæ, then rock, then loam, then corn, then chyme, then chyle, then
blood; and now the beholding and co-energizing mind sees the same
refining and ascent to the third, the seventh, or the tenth power of the
daily accidents which the senses report, and which make the raw material
of knowledge. It was sensation; when memory came, it was experience;
when mind acted, it was knowledge; when mind acted on it as knowledge,
it was thought.

This metonymy, or seeing the same sense in things so diverse, gives a
pure pleasure. Every one of a million times we find a charm in the
metamorphosis. It makes us dance and sing. All men are so far poets.
When people tell me they do not relish poetry, and bring me Shelley, or
Aikin's Poets, or I know not what volumes of rhymed English, to show
that it has no charm, I am quite of their mind. But this dislike of the
books only proves their liking of poetry. For they relish Æsop,--cannot
forget him, or not use him; bring them Homer's Iliad, and they like
that; or the Cid, and that rings well: read to them from Chaucer, and
they reckon him an honest fellow. "Lear" and "Macbeth" and "Richard
III." they know pretty well without guide. Give them Robin Hood's
ballads, or "Griselda," or "Sir Andrew Barton," or "Sir Patrick Spense,"
or "Chevy Chase," or "Tam O'Shanter," and they like these well enough.
They like to see statues; they like to name the stars; they like to talk
and hear of Jove, Apollo, Minerva, Venus, and the Nine. See how
tenacious we are of the old names. They like poetry without knowing it
as such. They like to go to the theatre and be made to weep; to Faneuil
Hall, and be taught by Otis, Webster, or Kossuth, or Phillips, what
great hearts they have, what tears, what new possible enlargements to
their narrow horizons. They like to see sunsets on the hills or on a
lake shore. Now, a cow does not gaze at the rainbow, or show or affect
any interest in the landscape, or a peacock, or the song of thrushes.

Nature is the true idealist. When she serves us best, when, on rare
days, she speaks to the imagination, we feel that the huge heaven and
earth are but a web drawn around us, that the light, skies, and
mountains are but the painted vicissitudes of the soul. Who has heard
our hymn in the churches without accepting the truth,--

    "As o'er our heads the seasons roll,
    And soothe with _change of bliss_ the soul"?

Of course, when we describe man as poet, and credit him with the
triumphs of the art, we speak of the potential or ideal man,--not found
now in any one person. You must go through a city or a nation, and find
one faculty here, one there, to build the true poet withal. Yet all men
know the portrait when it is drawn, and it is part of religion to
believe its possible incarnation.

He is the healthy, the wise, the fundamental, the manly man, seer of the
secret; against all the appearance, he sees and reports the truth,
namely, that the soul generates matter. And poetry is the only
verity,--the expression of a sound mind speaking after the ideal, and
not after the apparent. As a power, it is the perception of the symbolic
character of things, and the treating them as representative: as a
talent, it is a magnetic tenaciousness of an image, and by the treatment
demonstrating that this pigment of thought is as palpable and objective
to the poet as is the ground on which he stands, or the walls of houses
about him. And this power appears in Dante and Shakspeare. In some
individuals this insight, or second sight, has an extraordinary reach
which compels our wonder, as in Behmen, Swedenborg, and William Blake,
the painter.

William Blake, whose abnormal genius, Wordsworth said, interested him
more than the conversation of Scott or of Byron, writes thus: "He who
does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments, and in stronger and
better light than his perishing mortal eye can see, does not imagine at
all. The painter of this work asserts that all his imaginations appear
to him infinitely more perfect and more minutely organized, than
anything seen by his mortal eye.... I assert for myself that I do not
behold the outward creation, and that to me it would be a hindrance, and
not action. I question not my corporeal eye any more than I would
question a window concerning a sight. I look through it, and not with
it."

     *     *     *     *     *

'Tis a problem of metaphysics to define the province of Fancy and
Imagination. The words are often used, and the things confounded.
Imagination respects the cause. It is the vision of an inspired soul
reading arguments and affirmations in all nature of that which it is
driven to say. But as soon as this soul is released a little from its
passion, and at leisure plays with the resemblances and types for
amusement, and not for its moral end, we call its action Fancy. Lear,
mad with his affliction, thinks every man who suffers must have the like
cause with his own. "What, have his daughters brought him to this pass?"
But when, his attention being diverted, his mind rests from this
thought, he becomes fanciful with Tom, playing with the superficial
resemblances of objects. Bunyan, in pain for his soul, wrote "Pilgrim's
Progress"; Quarles, after he was quite cool, wrote "Emblems."

Imagination is central; fancy, superficial. Fancy relates to surface, in
which a great part of life lies. The lover is rightly said to fancy the
hair, eyes, complexion of the maid. Fancy is a wilful, imagination a
spontaneous act; fancy, a play as with dolls and puppets which we choose
to call men and women; imagination, a perception and affirming of a real
relation between a thought and some material fact. Fancy amuses;
imagination expands and exalts us. Imagination uses an organic
classification. Fancy joins by accidental resemblance, surprises and
amuses the idle, but is silent in the presence of great passion and
action. Fancy aggregates; imagination animates. Fancy is related to
color; imagination, to form. Fancy paints; imagination sculptures.


_Veracity._--I do not wish, therefore, to find that my poet is not
partaker of the feast he spreads, or that he would kindle or amuse me
with that which does not kindle or amuse him. He must believe in his
poetry. Homer, Milton, Hafiz, Herbert, Swedenborg, Wordsworth, are
heartily enamored of their sweet thoughts. Moreover, they know that this
correspondence of things to thoughts is far deeper than they can
penetrate,--defying adequate expression; that it is elemental, or in the
core of things. Veracity, therefore, is that which we require in
poets,--that they shall say how it was with them, and not what might be
said. And the fault of our popular poetry is that it is not sincere.

"What news?" asks man of man everywhere. The only teller of news is the
poet. When he sings, the world listens with the assurance that now a
secret of God is to be spoken. The right poetic mood is or makes a more
complete sensibility,--piercing the outward fact to the meaning of the
fact; shows a sharper insight: and the perception creates the strong
expression of it, as the man who sees his way walks in it.

'Tis a rule in eloquence, that the moment the orator loses command of
his audience, the audience commands him. So, in poetry, the master
rushes to deliver his thought, and the words and images fly to him to
express it; whilst colder moods are forced to respect the ways of saying
it, and insinuate, or, as it were, muffle the fact, to suit the poverty
or caprice of their expression, so that they only hint the matter, or
allude to it, being unable to fuse and mould their words and images to
fluid obedience. See how Shakspeare grapples at once with the main
problem of the tragedy, as in "Lear" and "Macbeth," and the opening of
"The Merchant of Venice."

All writings must be in a degree exoteric, written to a human _should_
or _would_, instead of to the fatal _is_: this holds even of the bravest
and sincerest writers. Every writer is a skater, and must go partly
where he would, and partly where the skates carry him; or a sailor, who
can only land where sails can be blown. And yet it is to be added, that
high poetry exceeds the fact, or nature itself, just as skates allow the
good skater far more grace than his best walking would show, or sails
more than riding. The poet writes from a real experience, the amateur
feigns one. Of course, one draws the bow with his fingers, and the other
with the strength of his body; one speaks with his lips, and the other
with a chest voice. Talent amuses, but if your verse has not a necessary
and autobiographic basis, though under whatever gay poetic veils, it
shall not waste my time.

For poetry is faith. To the poet the world is virgin soil: all is
practicable; the men are ready for virtue; it is always time to do
right. He is a true re-commencer, or Adam in the garden again. He
affirms the applicability of the ideal law to this moment and the
present knot of affairs. Parties, lawyers, and men of the world will
invariably dispute such an application as romantic and dangerous: they
admit the general truth, but they and their affair always constitute a
case in bar of the statute. Free-trade, they concede, is very well as a
principle, but it is never quite the time for its adoption without
prejudicing actual interests. Chastity, they admit, is very well,--but
then think of Mirabeau's passion and temperament!--Eternal laws are very
well, which admit no violation,--but so extreme were the times and
manners of mankind, that you must admit miracles,--for the times
constituted a case. Of course, we know what you say, that legends are
found in all tribes,--but this legend is different. And so, throughout,
the poet affirms the laws; prose busies itself with exceptions,--with
the local and individual.

I require that the poem should impress me, so that after I have shut the
book, it shall recall me to itself, or that passages should. And
inestimable is the criticism of memory as a corrective to first
impressions. We are dazzled at first by new words and brilliancy of
color, which occupy the fancy and deceive the judgment. But all this is
easily forgotten. Later, the thought, the happy image which expressed
it, and which was a true experience of the poet, recurs to mind, and
sends me back in search of the book. And I wish that the poet should
foresee this habit of readers, and omit all but the important passages.
Shakspeare is made up of important passages, like Damascus steel made up
of old nails. Homer has his own,--

    "One omen is good, to die for one's country";

and again,--

    "They heal their griefs, for curable are the hearts of the noble."

Write, that I may know you. Style betrays you, as your eyes do. We
detect at once by it whether the writer has a firm grasp on his fact or
thought,--exists at the moment for that alone, or whether he has one eye
apologizing, deprecatory, turned on his reader. In proportion always to
his possession of his thought is his defiance of his readers. There is
no choice of words for him who clearly sees the truth. That provides him
with the best word.

Great design belongs to a poem, and is better than any skill of
execution,--but how rare! I find it in the poems of
Wordsworth,--"Laodamia," and the "Ode to Dion," and the plan of "The
Recluse." We want design, and do not forgive the bards if they have only
the art of enamelling. We want an architect, and they bring us an
upholsterer.

If your subject do not appear to you the flower of the world at this
moment, you have not rightly chosen it. No matter what it is, grand or
gay, national or private, if it has a natural prominence to you, work
away until you come to the heart of it: then it will, though it were a
sparrow or a spider-web, as fully represent the central law, and draw
all tragic or joyful illustration, as if it were the book of Genesis or
the book of Doom. The subject--we must so often say it--is indifferent.
Any word, every word in language, every circumstance, becomes poetic in
the hands of a higher thought.

The test or measure of poetic genius is the power to read the poetry of
affairs,--to fuse the circumstance of to-day; not to use Scott's antique
superstitions, or Shakspeare's, but to convert those of the nineteenth
century, and of the existing nations, into universal symbols. 'Tis easy
to repaint the mythology of the Greeks, or of the Catholic Church, the
feudal castle, the crusade, the martyrdoms of mediæval Europe; but to
point out where the same creative force is now working in our own houses
and public assemblies, to convert the vivid energies acting at this
hour, in New York and Chicago and San Francisco, into universal symbols,
requires a subtile and commanding thought. 'Tis boyish in Swedenborg to
cumber himself with the dead scurf of Hebrew antiquity, as if the Divine
creative energy had fainted in his own century. American life storms
about us daily, and is slow to find a tongue. This contemporary insight
is transubstantiation, the conversion of daily bread into the holiest
symbols; and every man would be a poet, if his intellectual digestion
were perfect. The test of the poet is the power to take the passing day,
with its news, its cares, its fears, as he shares them, and hold it up
to a divine reason, till he sees it to have a purpose and beauty, and to
be related to astronomy and history, and the eternal order of the world.
Then the dry twig blossoms in his hand. He is calmed and elevated.

The use of "occasional poems" is to give leave to originality. Every one
delights in the felicity frequently shown in our drawing-rooms. In a
game-party or picnic poem each writer is released from the solemn
rhythmic traditions which alarm and suffocate his fancy, and the result
is that one of the partners offers a poem in a new style that hints at a
new literature. Yet the writer holds it cheap, and could do the like all
day. On the stage, the farce is commonly far better given than the
tragedy, as the stock actors understand the farce, and do not understand
the tragedy. The writer in the parlor has more presence of mind, more
wit and fancy, more play of thought, on the incidents that occur at
table, or about the house, than in the politics of Germany or Rome. Many
of the fine poems of Herrick, Jonson, and their contemporaries had this
casual origin.

I know there is entertainment and room for talent in the artist's
selection of ancient or remote subjects; as when the poet goes to India,
or to Rome, or Persia, for his fable. But I believe nobody knows better
than he, that herein he consults his ease, rather than his strength or
his desire. He is very well convinced that the great moments of life are
those in which his own house, his own body, the tritest and nearest ways
and words and things, have been illuminated into prophets and teachers.
What else is it to be a poet? What are his garland and singing robes?
What but a sensibility so keen that the scent of an elder-blow, or the
timber-yard and corporation-works of a nest of pismires is event enough
for him,--all emblems and personal appeals to him. His wreath and robe
is to do what he enjoys; emancipation from other men's questions, and
glad study of his own; escape from the gossip and routine of society,
and the allowed right and practice of making better. He does not give
his hand, but in sign of giving his heart; he is not affable with all,
but silent, uncommitted, or in love, as his heart leads him. There is no
subject that does not belong to him,--politics, economy, manufactures,
and stock-brokerage, as much as sunsets and souls; only, these things,
placed in their true order, are poetry; displaced, or put in kitchen
order, they are unpoetic. Malthus is the right organ of the English
proprietors; but we shall never understand political economy, until
Burns or Béranger or some poet shall teach it in songs, and he will not
teach Malthusianism.

Poetry is the _gai science_. The trait and test of the poet is that he
builds, adds, and affirms. The critic destroys: the poet says nothing
but what helps somebody; let others be distracted with cares, he is
exempt. All their pleasures are tinged with pain. All his pains are
edged with pleasure. The gladness he imparts he shares. As one of the
old Minnesingers sung,--

    "Oft have I heard, and now believe it true,
    Whom man delights in, God delights in too."

Poetry is the consolation of mortal men. They live cabined, cribbed,
confined, in a narrow and trivial lot,--in wants, pains, anxieties, and
superstitions, in profligate politics, in personal animosities, in mean
employments,--and victims of these; and the nobler powers untried,
unknown. A poet comes, who lifts the veil; gives them glimpses of the
laws of the universe; shows them the circumstance as illusion; shows
that nature is only a language to express the laws, which are grand and
beautiful,--and lets them, by his songs, into some of the realities.
Socrates; the Indian teachers of the Maia; the Bibles of the nations;
Shakspeare, Milton, Hafiz, Ossian, the Welsh Bards,--these all deal with
nature and history as means and symbols, and not as ends. With such
guides they begin to see that what they had called pictures are
realities, and the mean life is pictures. And this is achieved by words;
for it is a few oracles spoken by perceiving men that are the texts on
which religions and states are founded. And this perception has at once
its moral sequence. Ben Jonson said, "The principal end of poetry is to
inform men in the just reason of living."


_Creation._--But there is a third step which poetry takes, and which
seems higher than the others, namely, creation, or ideas taking forms of
their own,--when the poet invents the fable, and invents the language
which his heroes speak. He reads in the word or action of the man its
yet untold results. His inspiration is power to carry out and complete
the metamorphosis, which, in the imperfect kinds, arrested for ages,--in
the perfecter, proceeds rapidly in the same individual. For poetry is
science, and the poet a truer logician. Men in the courts or in the
street think themselves logical, and the poet whimsical. Do they think
there is chance or wilfulness in what he sees and tells? To be sure, we
demand of him what he demands of himself,--veracity, first of all. But
with that, he is the lawgiver, as being an exact reporter of the
essential law. He knows that he did not make his thought,--no, his
thought made him, and made the sun and the stars. Is the solar system
good art and architecture? The same wise achievement is in the human
brain also, can you only wile it from interference and marring. We
cannot look at works of art but they teach us how near man is to
creating. Michel Angelo is largely filled with the Creator that made and
makes men. How much of the original craft remains in him, and he a
mortal man! In him and the like perfecter brains the instinct is
resistless, knows the right way, is melodious, and at all points divine.
The reason we set so high a value on any poetry,--as often on a line or
a phrase as on a poem,--is, that it is a new work of Nature, as a man
is. It must be as new as foam and as old as the rock. But a new verse
comes once in a hundred years; therefore Pindar, Hafiz, Dante, speak so
proudly of what seems to the clown a jingle.

The writer, like the priest, must be exempted from secular labor. His
work needs a frolic health; he must be at the top of his condition. In
that prosperity he is sometimes caught up into a perception of means and
materials, of feats and fine arts, of fairy machineries and funds of
power hitherto utterly unknown to him, whereby he can transfer his
visions to mortal canvas, or reduce them into iambic or trochaic, into
lyric or heroic rhyme. These successes are not less admirable and
astonishing to the poet than they are to his audience. He has seen
something which all the mathematics and the best industry could never
bring him unto. Now at this rare elevation above his usual sphere, he
has come into new circulations, the marrow of the world is in his bones,
the opulence of forms begins to pour into his intellect, and he is
permitted to dip his brush into the old paint-pot with which birds,
flowers, the human cheek, the living rock, the broad landscape, the
ocean, and the eternal sky were painted.

These fine fruits of judgment, poesy, and sentiment, when once their
hour is struck, and the world is ripe for them, know as well as coarser
how to feed and replenish themselves, and maintain their stock alive,
and multiply; for roses and violets renew their race like oaks, and
flights of painted moths are as old as the Alleghanies. The balance of
the world is kept, and dewdrop and haze and the pencil of light are as
long-lived as chaos and darkness.

Our science is always abreast of our self-knowledge. Poetry begins, or
all becomes poetry, when we look from the centre outward, and are using
all as if the mind made it. That only can we see which we are, and which
we make. The weaver sees gingham; the broker sees the stock-list; the
politician, the ward and county votes; the poet sees the horizon, and
the shores of matter lying on the sky, the interaction of the
elements,--the large effect of laws which correspond to the inward laws
which he knows, and so are but a kind of extension of himself. "The
attractions are proportional to the destinies." Events or things are
only the fulfilment of the prediction of the faculties. Better men saw
heavens and earths; saw noble instruments of noble souls. We see
railroads, mills, and banks, and we pity the poverty of these dreaming
Buddhists. There was as much creative force then as now, but it made
globes, and astronomic heavens, instead of broadcloth and wine-glasses.

The poet is enamored of thoughts and laws. These know their way, and,
guided by them, he is ascending from an interest in visible things to an
interest in that which they signify, and from the part of a spectator to
the part of a maker. And as everything streams and advances, as every
faculty and every desire is procreant, and every perception is a
destiny, there is no limit to his hope. "Anything, child, that the mind
covets, from the milk of a cocoa to the throne of the three worlds, thou
mayest obtain, by keeping the law of thy members and the law of thy
mind." It suggests that there is higher poetry than we write or read.

Rightly, poetry is organic. We cannot know things by words and writing,
but only by taking a central position in the universe, and living in its
forms. We sink to rise.

    "None any work can frame,
    Unless himself become the same."

All the parts and forms of nature are the expression or production of
divine faculties, and the same are in us. And the fascination of genius
for us is this awful nearness to Nature's creations.

I have heard that the Germans think the creator of Trim and Uncle Toby,
though he never wrote a verse, a greater poet than Cowper, and that
Goldsmith's title to the name is not from his "Deserted Village," but
derived from the "Vicar of Wakefield." Better examples are Shakspeare's
Ariel, his Caliban, and his fairies in the "Midsummer Night's Dream."
Barthold Niebuhr said well, "There is little merit in inventing a happy
idea, or attractive situation, so long as it is only the author's voice
which we hear. As a being whom we have called into life by magic arts,
as soon as it has received existence acts independently of the master's
impulse, so the poet creates his persons, and then watches and relates
what they do and say. Such creation is poetry, in the literal sense of
the term, and its possibility is an unfathomable enigma. The gushing
fulness of speech belongs to the poet, and it flows from the lips of
each of his magic beings in the thoughts and words peculiar to its
nature."[1]

This force of representation so plants his figures before him that he
treats them as real; talks to them as if they were bodily there; puts
words in their mouth such as they should have spoken, and is affected by
them as by persons. Vast is the difference between writing clean verses
for magazines, and creating these new persons and situations,--new
language with emphasis and reality. The humor of Falstaff, the terror of
Macbeth, have each their swarm of fit thoughts and images, as if
Shakspeare had known and reported the men, instead of inventing them at
his desk. This power appears not only in the outline or portrait of his
actors, but also in the bearing and behavior and style of each
individual. Ben Jonson told Drummond "that Sidney did not keep a decorum
in making every one speak as well as himself."

This reminds me that we all have one key to this miracle of the poet,
and the dunce has experiences that may explain Shakspeare to him,--one
key, namely, dreams. In dreams we are true poets; we create the persons
of the drama; we give them appropriate figures, faces, costume; they are
perfect in their organs, attitude, manners: moreover, they speak after
their own characters, not ours;--they speak to us, and we listen with
surprise to what they say. Indeed, I doubt if the best poet has yet
written any five-act play that can compare in thoroughness of invention
with this unwritten play in fifty acts, composed by the dullest snorer
on the floor of the watch-house.


_Melody, Rhyme, Form._--Music and rhyme are among the earliest pleasures
of the child, and, in the history of literature, poetry precedes prose.
Every one may see, as he rides on the highway through an uninteresting
landscape, how a little water instantly relieves the monotony: no matter
what objects are near it,--a gray rock, a grass-patch, an alder-bush, or
a stake,--they become beautiful by being reflected. It is rhyme to the
eye, and explains the charm of rhyme to the ear. Shadows please us as
still finer rhymes. Architecture gives the like pleasure by the
repetition of equal parts in a colonnade, in a row of windows, or in
wings; gardens, by the symmetric contrasts of the beds and walks. In
society, you have this figure in a bridal company, where a choir of
white-robed maidens give the charm of living statues; in a funeral
procession, where all wear black; in a regiment of soldiers in uniform.

The universality of this taste is proved by our habit of casting our
facts into rhyme to remember them better, as so many proverbs may show.
Who would hold the order of the almanac so fast but for the ding-dong,

    "Thirty days hath September," etc.;

or of the Zodiac, but for

    "The Ram, the Bull, the heavenly Twins," etc.?

We are lovers of rhyme and return, period and musical reflection. The
babe is lulled to sleep by _yo-heave-o_. Soldiers can march better and
fight better for the drum and trumpet. Metre begins with pulse-beat, and
the length of lines in songs and poems is determined by the inhalation
and exhalation of the lungs. If you hum or whistle the rhythm of the
common English metres,--of the decasyllabic quatrain, or the
octosyllabic with alternate sexisyllabic, or other rhythms, you can
easily believe these metres to be organic, derived from the human pulse,
and to be therefore not proper to one nation, but to mankind. I think
you will also find a charm heroic, plaintive, pathetic, in these
cadences, and be at once set on searching for the words that can rightly
fill these vacant beats. Young people like rhyme, drum-beat, tune,
things in pairs and alternatives; and, in higher degrees, we know the
instant power of music upon our temperaments to change our mood, and
give us its own: and human passion, seizing these constitutional tunes,
aims to fill them with appropriate words, or marry music to thought,
believing, as we believe of all marriage, that matches are made in
heaven, and that for every thought its proper melody or rhyme exists,
though the odds are immense against our finding it, and only genius can
rightly say the banns.

Another form of rhyme is iterations of phrase, as the record of the
death of Sisera:--

  "At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down: at her feet he bowed, he
  fell: where he bowed, there he fell down dead."

The fact is made conspicuous, nay, colossal, by this simple rhetoric.

  "They shall perish, but thou shalt endure: yea, all of them shall wax
  old like a garment; as a vesture shalt thou change them, and they shall
  be changed: but thou art the same, and thy years shall have no end."

Milton delights in these iterations:--

            "Though fallen on evil days,
    On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues."

    "Was I deceived, or did a sable cloud
    Turn forth its silver lining on the night?
    I did not err, there does a sable cloud
    Turn forth its silver lining on the night."

                                           _Comus._

    "A little onward lend thy guiding hand,
    To these dark steps a little farther on."

                                           _Samson._

So in our songs and ballads the refrain skilfully used, and deriving
some novelty or better sense in each of many verses:--

    "Busk thee, busk thee, my bonny bonny bride,
    Busk thee, busk thee, my winsome marrow."

                                           HAMILTON.

Of course rhyme soars and refines with the growth of the mind. The boy
liked the drum, the people liked an overpowering jewsharp tune. Later
they like to transfer that rhyme to life, and to detect a melody as
prompt and perfect in their daily affairs. Omen and coincidence show the
rhythmical structure of man; hence the taste for signs, sortilege,
prophecy and fulfilment, anniversaries, etc. By and by, when they
apprehend real rhymes, namely, the correspondence of parts in
nature,--acid and alkali, body and mind, man and maid, character and
history, action and reaction,--they do not longer value rattles and
ding-dongs, or barbaric word-jingle. Astronomy, Botany, Chemistry,
Hydraulics and the elemental forces have their own periods and returns,
their own grand strains of harmony not less exact, up to the primeval
apothegm "that there is nothing on earth which is not in the heavens in
a heavenly form, and nothing in the heavens which is not on the earth in
an earthly form." They furnish the poet with grander pairs and
alternations, and will require an equal expansion in his metres.

There is under the seeming poverty of metres an infinite variety, as
every artist knows. A right ode (however nearly it may adopt
conventional metre, as the Spenserian, or the heroic blank-verse, or one
of the fixed lyric metres) will by any sprightliness be at once lifted
out of conventionality, and will modify the metre. Every good poem that
I know I recall by its rhythm also. Rhyme is a pretty good measure of
the latitude and opulence of a writer. If unskilful, he is at once
detected by the poverty of his chimes. A small, well-worn, sprucely
brushed vocabulary serves him. Now try Spenser, Marlow, Chapman, and see
how wide they fly for weapons, and how rich and lavish their profusion.
In their rhythm is no manufacture, but a vortex, or musical tornado,
which falling on words and the experience of a learned mind, whirls
these materials into the same grand order as planets and moons obey, and
seasons, and monsoons.

There are also prose poets. Thomas Taylor, the Platonist, for instance,
is really a better man of imagination, a better poet, or perhaps I
should say a better feeder to a poet, than any man between Milton and
Wordsworth. Thomas Moore had the magnanimity to say, "If Burke and Bacon
were not poets (measured lines not being necessary to constitute one),
he did not know what poetry meant." And every good reader will easily
recall expressions or passages in works of pure science which have given
him the same pleasure which he seeks in professed poets. Richard Owen,
the eminent paleontologist, said:--

  "All hitherto observed causes of extirpation point either to continuous
  slowly operating geologic changes, or to no greater sudden cause than
  the, so to speak, spectral appearance of mankind on a limited tract of
  land not before inhabited."

St. Augustine complains to God of his friends offering him the books of
the philosophers:--

  "And these were the dishes in which they brought to me, being hungry,
  the Sun and the Moon instead of Thee."

It would not be easy to refuse to Sir Thomas Browne's "Fragment on
Mummies" the claim of poetry:--

  "Of their living habitations they made little account, conceiving of
  them but as _hospitia_, or inns, while they adorned the sepulchres of
  the dead, and, planting thereon lasting bases, defied the crumbling
  touches of time, and the misty vaporousness of oblivion. Yet all were
  but Babel vanities. Time sadly overcometh all things, and is now
  dominant, and sitteth upon a Sphinx, and looketh unto Memphis and old
  Thebes, while his sister Oblivion reclineth semi-somnous on a pyramid,
  gloriously triumphing, making puzzles of Titanian erections, and turning
  old glories into dreams. History sinketh beneath her cloud. The
  traveller as he paceth through those deserts asketh of her, Who builded
  them? and she mumbleth something, but what it is he heareth not."

Rhyme, being a kind of music, shares this advantage with music, that it
has a privilege of speaking truth which all Philistia is unable to
challenge. Music is the poor man's Parnassus. With the first note of the
flute or horn, or the first strain of a song, we quit the world of
common-sense, and launch on the sea of ideas and emotions: we pour
contempt on the prose you so magnify; yet the sturdiest Philistine is
silent. The like allowance is the prescriptive right of poetry. You
shall not speak ideal truth in prose uncontradicted: you may in verse.
The best thoughts run into the best words; imaginative and affectionate
thoughts into music and metre. We ask for food and fire, we talk of our
work, our tools, and material necessities in prose, that is, without any
elevation or aim at beauty; but when we rise into the world of thought,
and think of these things only for what they signify, speech refines
into order and harmony. I know what you say of mediæval barbarism and
sleighbell-rhyme, but we have not done with music, no, nor with rhyme,
nor must console ourselves with prose poets so long as boys whistle and
girls sing.

Let Poetry then pass, if it will, into music and rhyme. That is the form
which itself puts on. We do not enclose watches in wooden, but in
crystal cases, and rhyme is the transparent frame that allows almost the
pure architecture of thought to become visible to the mental eye.
Substance is much, but so are mode and form much. The poet, like a
delighted boy, brings you heaps of rainbow bubbles, opaline, air-borne,
spherical as the world, instead of a few drops of soap and water. Victor
Hugo says well, "An idea steeped in verse becomes suddenly more incisive
and more brilliant: the iron becomes steel." Lord Bacon, we are told,
"loved not to see poesy go on other feet than poetical dactyls and
spondees"; and Ben Jonson said, "that Donne, for not keeping of accent,
deserved hanging."

Poetry being an attempt to express, not the common-sense, as the
avoirdupois of the hero, or his structure in feet and inches, but the
beauty and soul in his aspect as it shines to fancy and feeling,--and so
of all other objects in nature,--runs into fable, personifies every
fact:--"the clouds clapped their hands,"--"the hills skipped,"--"the sky
spoke." This is the substance, and this treatment always attempts a
metrical grace. Outside of the nursery the beginning of literature is
the prayers of a people, and they are always hymns, poetic,--the mind
allowing itself range, and therewith is ever a corresponding freedom in
the style which becomes lyrical. The prayers of nations are
rhythmic,--have iterations, and alliterations, like the marriage-service
and burial-service in our liturgies.

Poetry will never be a simple means, as when history or philosophy is
rhymed, or laureate odes on state occasions are written. Itself must be
its own end, or it is nothing. The difference between poetry and
stock-poetry is this, that in the latter the rhythm is given, and the
sense adapted to it; while in the former the sense dictates the rhythm.
I might even say that the rhyme is there in the theme, thought, and
image themselves. Ask the fact for the form. For a verse is not a
vehicle to carry a sentence as a jewel is carried in a case: the verse
must be alive, and inseparable from its contents, as the soul of man
inspires and directs the body; and we measure the inspiration by the
music. In reading prose, I am sensitive as soon as a sentence drags; but
in poetry, as soon as one word drags. Ever as the thought mounts, the
expression mounts. 'Tis cumulative also; the poem is made up of lines
each of which filled the ear of the poet in its turn, so that mere
synthesis produces a work quite superhuman.

Indeed, the masters sometimes rise above themselves to strains which
charm their readers, and which neither any competitor could outdo, nor
the bard himself again equal. Try this strain of Beaumont and
Fletcher:--

    "Hence, all ye vain delights,
    As short as are the nights
    In which you spend your folly!
    There's naught in this life sweet,
    If men were wise to see't,
    But only melancholy.
    Oh! sweetest melancholy!
    Welcome, folded arms and fixed eyes,
    A sigh that piercing mortifies,
    A look that's fastened to the ground,
    A tongue chained up, without a sound;
    Fountain-heads and pathless groves,
    Places which pale Passion loves,
    Midnight walks, when all the fowls
    Are warmly housed, save bats and owls;
    A midnight bell, a passing groan,
    These are the sounds we feed upon,
    Then stretch our bones in a still, gloomy valley.
    Nothing's so dainty sweet as lovely melancholy."

Keats disclosed by certain lines in his "Hyperion" this inward skill;
and Coleridge showed at least his love and appetency for it. It appears
in Ben Jonson's songs, including certainly "The faery beam upon you,"
etc., Waller's "Go, lovely rose!," Herbert's "Virtue" and "Easter," and
Lovelace's lines "To Althea" and "To Lucasta," and Collins's "Ode, to
Evening," all but the last verse, which is academical. Perhaps this
dainty style of poetry is not producible to-day, any more than a right
Gothic cathedral. It belonged to a time and taste which is not in the
world.

As the imagination is not a talent of some men, but is the health of
every man, so also is this joy of musical expression. I know the pride
of mathematicians and materialists, but they cannot conceal from me
their capital want. The critic, the philosopher, is a failed poet. Gray
avows "that he thinks even a bad verse as good a thing or better than
the best observation that was ever made on it." I honor the naturalist;
I honor the geometer, but he has before him higher power and happiness
than he knows. Yet we will leave to the masters their own forms. Newton
may be permitted to call Terence a play-book, and to wonder at the
frivolous taste for rhymers; he only predicts, one would say, a grander
poetry: he only shows that he is not yet reached; that the poetry which
satisfies more youthful souls is not such to a mind like his, accustomed
to grander harmonies;--this being a child's whistle to his ear; that the
music must rise to a loftier strain, up to Handel, up to Beethoven, up
to the thorough-bass of the sea-shore, up to the largeness of astronomy:
at last that great heart will hear in the music beats like its own: the
waves of melody will wash and float him also, and set him into concert
and harmony.


_Bards and Trouveurs._--The metallic force of primitive words makes the
superiority of the remains of the rude ages. It costs the early bard
little talent to chant more impressively than the later, more cultivated
poets. His advantage is that his words are things, each the lucky sound
which described the fact, and we listen to him as we do to the Indian,
or the hunter, or miner, each of whom represents his facts as accurately
as the cry of the wolf or the eagle tells of the forest or the air they
inhabit. The original force, the direct smell of the earth or the sea,
is in these ancient poems, the Sagas of the North, the Niebelungen Lied,
the songs and ballads of the English and Scotch.

I find or fancy more true poetry, the love of the vast and the ideal, in
the Welsh and bardic fragments of Taliessin and his successors than in
many volumes of British Classics. An intrepid magniloquence appears in
all the bards, as:--

    "The whole ocean flamed as one wound."
                             _King Regner Lodbook._

    "God himself cannot procure good for the wicked."
                                           _Welsh Triad._

A favorable specimen is Taliessin's "Invocation of the Wind" at the door
of Castle Teganwy.

    "Discover thou what it is,--
    The strong creature from before the flood,
    Without flesh, without bone, without head, without feet,
    It will neither be younger nor older than at the beginning;
    It has no fear, nor the rude wants of created things.
    Great God! how the sea whitens when it comes!
    It is in the field, it is in the wood,
    Without hand, without foot,
    Without age, without season,
    It is always of the same age with the ages of ages,
    And of equal breadth with the surface of the earth.
    It was not born, it sees not,
    And is not seen; it does not come when desired;
    It has no form, it bears no burden,
    For it is void of sin.
    It makes no perturbation in the place where God wills it,
    On the sea, on the land."

In one of his poems he asks:--

    "Is there but one course to the wind?
    But one to the water of the sea?
    Is there but one spark in the fire of boundless energy?"

He says of his hero, Cunedda,--

  "He will assimilate, he will agree with the deep and the shallow."

To another,--

    "When I lapse to a sinful word,
    May neither you, nor others hear."

Of an enemy,--

  "The caldron of the sea was bordered round by his land, but it would not
  boil the food of a coward."

To an exile on an island he says,--

  "The heavy blue chain of the sea didst thou, O just man, endure."

Another bard in like tone says,--

  "I am possessed of songs such as no son of man can repeat; one of them
  is called the 'Helper'; it will help thee at thy need in sickness,
  grief, and all adversities. I know a song which I need only to sing when
  men have loaded me with bonds: when I sing it, my chains fall in pieces
  and I walk forth at liberty."

The Norsemen have no less faith in poetry and its power, when they
describe it thus:--

  "Odin spoke everything in rhyme. He and his temple-gods were called
  song-smiths. He could make his enemies in battle blind or deaf, and
  their weapons so blunt that they could no more cut than a willow-twig.
  Odin taught these arts in runes or songs, which are called
  incantations."[2]

The Crusades brought out the genius of France, in the twelfth century,
when Pierre d'Auvergne said,--

  "I will sing a new song which resounds in my breast: never was a song
  good or beautiful which resembled any other."

And Pons de Capdeuil declares,--

  "Since the air renews itself and softens, so must my heart renew itself,
  and what buds in it buds and grows outside of it."

There is in every poem a height which attracts more than other parts,
and is best remembered. Thus, in "Morte d'Arthur," I remember nothing so
well as Sir Gawain's parley with Merlin in his wonderful prison:--

  "After the disappearance of Merlin from King Arthur's court he was
  seriously missed, and many knights set out in search of him. Among
  others was Sir Gawain, who pursued his search till it was time to return
  to the court. He came into the forest of Broceliande, lamenting as he
  went along. Presently, he heard the voice of one groaning on his right
  hand; looking that way, he could see nothing save a kind of smoke which
  seemed like air, and through which he could not pass; and this
  impediment made him so wrathful that it deprived him of speech.
  Presently he heard a voice which said, 'Gawain, Gawain, be not out of
  heart, for everything which must happen will come to pass.' And when he
  heard the voice which thus called him by his right name, he replied,
  'Who can this be who hath spoken to me?' 'How,' said the voice, 'Sir
  Gawain, know you me not? You were wont to know me well, but thus things
  are interwoven and thus the proverb says true, "Leave the court and the
  court will leave you." So is it with me. Whilst I served King Arthur, I
  was well known by you and by other barons, but because I have left the
  court, I am known no longer, and put in forgetfulness, which I ought not
  to be if faith reigned in the world.' When Sir Gawain heard the voice
  which spoke to him thus, he thought it was Merlin, and he answered,
  'Sir, certes I ought to know you well, for many times I have heard your
  words. I pray you appear before me so that I may be able to recognize
  you.' 'Ah, sir,' said Merlin, 'you will never see me more, and that
  grieves me, but I cannot remedy it, and when you shall have departed
  from this place, I shall nevermore speak to you nor to any other person,
  save only my mistress; for never other person will be able to discover
  this place for anything which may befall; neither shall I ever go out
  from hence, for in the world there is no such strong tower as this
  wherein I am confined; and it is neither of wood, nor of iron, nor of
  stone, but of air, without anything else; and made by enchantment so
  strong, that it can never be demolished while the world lasts, neither
  can I go out, nor can any one come in, save she who hath enclosed me
  here, and who keeps me company when it pleaseth her: she cometh when she
  listeth, for her will is here.' 'How, Merlin, my good friend,' said Sir
  Gawain, 'are you restrained so strongly that you cannot deliver yourself
  nor make yourself visible unto me; how can this happen, seeing that you
  are the wisest man in the world?' 'Rather,' said Merlin, 'the greatest
  fool; for I well knew that all this would befall me, and I have been
  fool enough to love another more than myself, for I taught my mistress
  that whereby she hath imprisoned me in such manner that none can set me
  free.' 'Certes, Merlin,' replied Sir Gawain, 'of that I am right
  sorrowful, and so will King Arthur, my uncle, be, when he shall know it,
  as one who is making search after you throughout all countries.' 'Well,'
  said Merlin, 'it must be borne, for never will he see me, nor I him;
  neither will any one speak with me again after you, it would be vain to
  attempt it; for you yourself, when you have turned away, will never be
  able to find the place: but salute for me the king and the queen, and
  all the barons, and tell them of my condition. You will find the king at
  Carduel in Wales; and when you arrive there you will find there all the
  companions who departed with you, and who at this day will return. Now
  then go in the name of God, who will protect and save the King Arthur,
  and the realm of Logres, and you also, as the best knights who are in
  the world.' With that Sir Gawain departed joyful and sorrowful; joyful
  because of what Merlin had assured him should happen to him, and
  sorrowful that Merlin had thus been lost."


_Morals._--We are sometimes apprised that there is a mental power and
creation more excellent than anything which is commonly called
philosophy and literature; that the high poets,--that Homer, Milton,
Shakspeare, do not fully content us. How rarely they offer us the
heavenly bread! The most they have done is to intoxicate us once and
again with its taste. They have touched this heaven and retain
afterwards some sparkle of it: they betray their belief that such
discourse is possible. There is something--our brothers on this or that
side of the sea do not know it or own it; the eminent scholars of
England, historians and reviewers, romancers and poets included, might
deny and blaspheme it--which is setting us and them aside and the whole
world also, and planting itself. To true poetry we shall sit down as the
result and justification of the age in which it appears, and think
lightly of histories and statutes. None of your parlor or piano
verse,--none of your carpet poets, who are content to amuse, will
satisfy us. Power, new power, is the good which the soul seeks. The
poetic gift we want, as the health and supremacy of man,--not rhymes and
sonneteering, not bookmaking and bookselling; surely not cold spying and
authorship.

Is not poetry the little chamber in the brain where is generated the
explosive force which, by gentle shocks, sets in action the intellectual
world? Bring us the bards who shall sing all our old ideas out of our
heads, and new ones in; men-making poets; poetry which, like the verses
inscribed on Balder's columns in Breidablik, is capable of restoring the
dead to life;--poetry like that verse of Saadi, which the angels
testified "met the approbation of Allah in Heaven";--poetry which finds
its rhymes and cadences in the rhymes and iterations of nature, and is
the gift to men of new images and symbols, each the ensign and oracle of
an age; that shall assimilate men to it, mould itself into religions and
mythologies, and impart its quality to centuries;--poetry which tastes
the world and reports of it, upbuilding the world again in the thought;

    "Not with tickling rhymes,
    But high and noble matter, such as flies
    From brains entranced, and filled with ecstasies."

Poetry must be affirmative. It is the piety of the intellect. "Thus
saith the Lord," should begin the song. The poet who shall use nature as
his hieroglyphic must have an adequate message to convey thereby.
Therefore, when we speak of the Poet in any high sense, we are driven to
such examples as Zoroaster and Plato, St. John and Menu, with their
moral burdens. The Muse shall be the counterpart of Nature, and equally
rich. I find her not often in books. We know Nature, and figure her
exuberant, tranquil, magnificent in her fertility, coherent; so that
every creation is omen of every other. She is not proud of the sea, of
the stars, of space or time, or man or woman. All her kinds share the
attributes of the selectest extremes. But in current literature I do not
find her. Literature warps away from life, though at first it seems to
bind it. In the world of letters how few commanding oracles! Homer did
what he could,--Pindar, Æschylus, and the Greek Gnomic poets and the
tragedians. Dante was faithful when not carried away by his fierce
hatreds. But in so many alcoves of English poetry I can count only nine
or ten authors who are still inspirers and lawgivers to their race.

The supreme value of poetry is to educate us to a height beyond itself,
or which it rarely reaches;--the subduing mankind to order and virtue.
He is the true Orpheus who writes his ode, not with syllables, but men.
"In poetry," said Goethe, "only the really great and pure advances us,
and this exists as a second nature, either elevating us to itself, or
rejecting us." The poet must let Humanity sit with the Muse in his head,
as the charioteer sits with the hero in the Iliad. "Show me," said
Sarona in the novel, "one wicked man who has written poetry, and I will
show you where his poetry is not poetry; or rather, I will show you in
his poetry no poetry at all."[3]

I have heard that there is a hope which precedes and must precede all
science of the visible or the invisible world; and that science is the
realization of that hope in either region. I count the genius of
Swedenborg and Wordsworth as the agents of a reform in philosophy, the
bringing poetry back to nature,--to the marrying of nature and mind,
undoing the old divorce in which poetry had been famished and false, and
nature had been suspected and pagan. The philosophy which a nation
receives, rules its religion, poetry, politics, arts, trades, and whole
history. A good poem--say Shakspeare's "Macbeth," or "Hamlet," or the
"Tempest"--goes about the world offering itself to reasonable men, who
read it with joy and carry it to their reasonable neighbors. Thus it
draws to it the wise and generous souls, confirming their secret
thoughts, and, through their sympathy, really publishing itself. It
affects the characters of its readers by formulating their opinions and
feelings, and inevitably prompting their daily action. If they build
ships, they write "Ariel" or "Prospero" or "Ophelia" on the ship's
stern, and impart a tenderness and mystery to matters of fact. The
ballad and romance work on the hearts of boys, who recite the rhymes to
their hoops or their skates if alone, and these heroic songs or lines
are remembered and determine many practical choices which they make
later. Do you think Burns has had no influence on the life of men and
women in Scotland,--has opened no eyes and ears to the face of nature
and the dignity of man and the charm and excellence of woman?

We are a little civil, it must be owned, to Homer and Æschylus, to
Dante and Shakspeare, and give them the benefit of the largest
interpretation. We must be a little strict also, and ask whether, if we
sit down at home, and do not go to Hamlet, Hamlet will come to us?
whether we shall find our tragedy written in his,--our hopes, wants,
pains, disgraces, described to the life,--and the way opened to the
paradise which ever in the best hour beckons us? But our overpraise and
idealization of famous masters is not in its origin a poor Boswellism,
but an impatience of mediocrity. The praise we now give to our heroes we
shall unsay when we make larger demands. How fast we outgrow the books
of the nursery,--then those that satisfied our youth. What we once
admired as poetry has long since come to be a sound of tin pans; and
many of our later books we have outgrown. Perhaps Homer and Milton will
be tin pans yet. Better not to be easily pleased. The poet should
rejoice if he has taught us to despise his song; if he has so moved us
as to lift us,--to open the eye of the intellect to see farther and
better.

In proportion as a man's life comes into union with truth, his thoughts
approach to a parallelism with the currents of natural laws, so that he
easily expresses his meaning by natural symbols, or uses the ecstatic or
poetic speech. By successive states of mind all the facts of nature are
for the first time interpreted. In proportion as his life departs from
this simplicity, he uses circumlocution,--by many words hoping to
suggest what he cannot say. Vexatious to find poets, who are by
excellence the thinking and feeling of the world, deficient in truth of
intellect and of affection. Then is conscience unfaithful, and thought
unwise. To know the merit of Shakspeare, read "Faust." I find "Faust" a
little too modern and intelligible. We can find such a fabric at several
mills, though a little inferior. "Faust" abounds in the disagreeable.
The vice is prurient, learned, Parisian. In the presence of Jove,
Priapus may be allowed as an offset, but here he is an equal hero. The
egotism, the wit, is calculated. The book is undeniably written by a
master, and stands unhappily related to the whole modern world; but it
is a very disagreeable chapter of literature, and accuses the author as
well as the times. Shakspeare could, no doubt, have been disagreeable,
had he less genius, and if ugliness had attracted him. In short, our
English nature and genius has made us the worst critics of Goethe,

    "We, who speak the tongue
    That Shakspeare spake, the faith and manners hold
    Which Milton held."

It is not style or rhymes, or a new image more or less, that imports,
but sanity; that life should not be mean; that life should be an image
in every part beautiful; that the old forgotten splendors of the
universe should glow again for us;--that we should lose our wit, but
gain our reason. And when life is true to the poles of nature, the
streams of truth will roll through us in song.


_Transcendency._--In a cotillon some persons dance and others await
their turn when the music and the figure come to them. In the dance of
God there is not one of the chorus but can and will begin to spin,
monumental as he now looks, whenever the music and figure reach his
place and duty. O celestial Bacchus! drive them mad,--this multitude of
vagabonds, hungry for eloquence, hungry for poetry, starving for
symbols, perishing for want of electricity to vitalize this too much
pasture, and in the long delay indemnifying themselves with the false
wine of alcohol, of politics, or of money.

Every man may be, and at some time a man is, lifted to a platform whence
he looks beyond sense to moral and spiritual truth; and in that mood
deals sovereignly with matter, and strings worlds like beads upon his
thought. The success with which this is done can alone determine how
genuine is the inspiration. The poet is rare because he must be
exquisitely vital and sympathetic, and, at the same time, immovably
centred. In good society, nay, among the angels in heaven, is not
everything spoken in fine parable, and not so servilely as it befell to
the sense? All is symbolized. Facts are not foreign, as they seem, but
related. Wait a little and we see the return of the remote hyperbolic
curve. The solid men complain that the idealist leaves out the
fundamental facts; the poet complains that the solid men leave out the
sky. To every plant there are two powers; one shoots down as rootlet,
and one upward as tree. You must have eyes of science to see in the seed
its nodes; you must have the vivacity of the poet to perceive in the
thought its futurities. The poet is representative,--whole man,
diamond-merchant, symbolizer, emancipator; in him the world projects a
scribe's hand and writes the adequate genesis. The nature of things is
flowing, a metamorphosis. The free spirit sympathizes not only with the
actual form, but with the power or possible forms; but for obvious
municipal or parietal uses, God has given us a bias or a rest on
to-day's forms. Hence the shudder of joy with which in each clear moment
we recognize the metamorphosis, because it is always a conquest, a
surprise from the heart of things. One would say of the force in the
works of nature, all depends on the battery. If it give one shock, we
shall get to the fish form, and stop; if two shocks, to the bird; if
three, to the quadruped; if four, to the man. Power of generalizing
differences men. The number of successive saltations the nimble thought
can make, measures the difference between the highest and lowest of
mankind. The habit of saliency, of not pausing but going on, is a sort
of importation or domestication of the Divine effort in a man. After the
largest circle has been drawn, a larger can be drawn around it. The
problem of the poet is to unite freedom with precision; to give the
pleasure of color, and be not less the most powerful of sculptors. Music
seems to you sufficient, or the subtle and delicate scent of lavender;
but Dante was free imagination,--all wings,--yet he wrote like Euclid.
And mark the equality of Shakspeare to the comic, the tender and sweet,
and to the grand and terrible. A little more or less skill in whistling
is of no account. See those weary pentameter tales of Dryden and others.
Turnpike is one thing and blue sky another. Let the poet, of all men,
stop with his inspiration. The inexorable rule in the muses' court,
_either inspiration or silence_, compels the bard to report only his
supreme moments. It teaches the enormous force of a few words and in
proportion to the inspiration checks loquacity. Much that we call poetry
is but polite verse. The high poetry which shall thrill and agitate
mankind, restore youth and health, dissipate the dreams under which men
reel and stagger, and bring in the new thoughts, the sanity and heroic
aims of nations, is deeper hid and longer postponed than was America or
Australia, or the finding of steam or of the galvanic battery. We must
not conclude against poetry from the defects of poets. They are, in our
experience, men of every degree of skill,--some of them only once or
twice receivers of an inspiration, and presently falling back on a low
life. The drop of _ichor_ that tingles in their veins has not yet
refined their blood, and cannot lift the whole man to the digestion and
function of ichor,--that is, to godlike nature. Time will be when ichor
shall be their blood, when what are now glimpses and aspirations shall
be the routine of the day. Yet even partial ascents to poetry and ideas
are forerunners, and announce the dawn. In the mire of the sensual life,
their religion, their poets, their admiration of heroes and benefactors,
even their novel and newspaper, nay, their superstitions also, are hosts
of ideals,--a cordage of ropes that hold them up out of the slough.
Poetry is inestimable as a lonely faith, a lonely protest in the uproar
of atheism.

But so many men are ill-born or ill-bred,--the brains are so marred, so
imperfectly formed, unheroically,--brains of the sons of fallen
men,--that the doctrine is imperfectly received. One man sees a spark or
shimmer of the truth, and reports it, and his saying becomes a legend or
golden proverb for ages, and other men report as much, but none wholly
and well. Poems,--we have no poem. Whenever that angel shall be
organized and appear on earth, the Iliad will be reckoned a poor
ballad-grinding. I doubt never the riches of nature, the gifts of the
future, the immense wealth of the mind. O yes, poets we shall have,
mythology, symbols, religion, of our own. We, too, shall know how to
take up all this industry and empire, this Western civilization, into
thought, as easily as men did when arts were few; but not by holding it
high, but by holding it low. The intellect uses and is not used,--uses
London and Paris and Berlin, east and west, to its end. The only heart
that can help us is one that draws, not from our society, but from
itself, a counterpoise to society. What if we find partiality and
meanness in us? The grandeur of our life exists in spite of us,--all
over and under and within us, in what of us is inevitable and above our
control. Men are facts as well as persons, and the involuntary part of
their life so much as to fill the mind and leave them no countenance to
say aught of what is so trivial as their selfish thinking and doing.
Sooner or later that which is now life shall be poetry, and every fair
and manly trait shall add a richer strain to the song.

[Footnote 1: Niebuhr, Letters, etc., Vol. III. p. 196.]

[Footnote 2: Heimskringla, Vol. I. p. 221.]

[Footnote 3: Miss Shepard's "Counterparts," Vol. I. p. 67.]




                        SOCIAL AIMS.




                        SOCIAL AIMS.


MUCH ill-natured criticism has been directed on American manners. I do
not think it is to be resented. Rather, if we are wise, we shall listen
and mend. Our critics will then be our best friends, though they did not
mean it. But in every sense the subject of manners has a constant
interest to thoughtful persons. Who does not delight in fine manners?
Their charm cannot be predicted or overstated. 'Tis perpetual promise of
more than can be fulfilled. It is music and sculpture and picture to
many who do not pretend to appreciation of those arts. It is even true
that grace is more beautiful than beauty. Yet how impossible to overcome
the obstacle of an unlucky temperament, and acquire good manners, unless
by living with the well-bred from the start; and this makes the value of
wise forethought to give ourselves and our children as much as possible
the habit of cultivated society.

'Tis an inestimable hint that I owe to a few persons of fine manners,
that they make behavior the very first sign of force,--behavior, and not
performance, or talent, or, much less, wealth. Whilst almost everybody
has a supplicating eye turned on events and things and other persons, a
few natures are central and forever unfold, and these alone charm us. He
whose word or deed you cannot predict, who answers you without any
supplication in his eye, who draws his determination from within, and
draws it instantly,--that man rules.

The staple figure in novels is the man of _aplomb_, who sits, among the
young aspirants and desperates, quite sure and compact, and, never
sharing their affections or debilities, hurls his word like a bullet
when occasion requires, knows his way, and carries his points. They may
scream or applaud, he is never engaged or heated. Napoleon is the type
of this class in modern history; Byron's heroes in poetry. But we, for
the most part, are all drawn into the _charivari_; we chide, lament,
cavil, and recriminate.

I think Hans Andersen's story of the cobweb cloth woven so fine that it
was invisible,--woven for the king's garment,--must mean manners, which
do really clothe a princely nature. Such a one can well go in a blanket,
if he would. In the gymnasium or on the sea-beach his superiority does
not leave him. But he who has not this fine garment of behavior is
studious of dress, and then not less of house and furniture and pictures
and gardens, in all which he hopes to lie _perdu_, and not be exposed.

"Manners are stronger than laws." Their vast convenience I must always
admire. The perfect defence and isolation which they effect makes an
insuperable protection. Though the person so clothed wrestle with you,
or swim with you, lodge in the same chamber, eat at the same table, he
is yet a thousand miles off, and can at any moment finish with you.
Manners seem to say, _You are you, and I am I_. In the most delicate
natures, fine temperament and culture build this impassable wall. Balzac
finely said: "Kings themselves cannot force the exquisite politeness of
distance to capitulate, hid behind its shield of bronze."

Nature values manners. See how she has prepared for them. Who teaches
manners of majesty, of frankness, of grace, of humility,--who but the
adoring aunts and cousins that surround a young child? The babe meets
such courting and flattery as only kings receive when adult; and, trying
experiments, and at perfect leisure with these posture-masters and
flatterers all day, he throws himself into all the attitudes that
correspond to theirs. Are they humble? he is composed. Are they eager?
he is nonchalant. Are they encroaching? he is dignified and inexorable.
And this scene is daily repeated in hovels as well as in high houses.

Nature is the best posture-master. An awkward man is graceful when
asleep, or when hard at work, or agreeably amused. The attitudes of
children are gentle, persuasive, royal, in their games and in their
house-talk and in the street, before they have learned to cringe. 'Tis
impossible but thought disposes the limbs and the walk, and is masterly
or secondary. No art can contravene it, or conceal it. Give me a
thought, and my hands and legs and voice and face will all go right. And
we are awkward for want of thought. The inspiration is scanty, and does
not arrive at the extremities.

It is a commonplace of romances to show the ungainly manners of the
pedant who has lived too long in college. Intellectual men pass for
vulgar, and are timid and heavy with the elegant. But, if the elegant
are also intellectual, instantly the hesitating scholar is inspired,
transformed, and exhibits the best style of manners. An intellectual
man, though of feeble spirit, is instantly reinforced by being put into
the company of scholars, and, to the surprise of everybody, becomes a
lawgiver. We think a man unable and desponding. It is only that he is
misplaced. Put him with new companions, and they will find in him
excellent qualities, unsuspected accomplishments, and the joy of life.
'Tis a great point in a gallery, how you hang pictures; and not less in
society, how you seat your party. The circumstance of circumstance is
timing and placing. When a man meets his accurate mate, society begins,
and life is delicious.

What happiness they give,--what ties they form! Whilst one man by his
manners pins me to the wall, with another I walk among the stars. One
man can, by his voice, lead the cheer of a regiment; another will have
no following. Nature made us all intelligent of these signs, for our
safety and our happiness. Whilst certain faces are illumined with
intelligence, decorated with invitation, others are marked with
warnings: certain voices are hoarse and truculent; sometimes they even
bark. There is the same difference between heavy and genial manners as
between the perceptions of octogenarians and those of young girls who
see everything in the twinkling of an eye.

Manners are the revealers of secrets, the betrayers of any disproportion
or want of symmetry in mind and character. It is the law of our
constitution that every change in our experience instantly indicates
itself on our countenance and carriage, as the lapse of time tells
itself on the face of a clock. We may be too obtuse to read it, but the
record is there. Some men may be obtuse to read it, but some men are not
obtuse and do read it. In Borrow's "Lavengro," the gypsy instantly
detects, by his companion's face and behavior, that some good fortune
has befallen him, and that he has money. We say, in these days, that
credit is to be abolished in trade: is it? When a stranger comes to buy
goods of you, do you not look in his face and answer according to what
you read there? Credit is to be abolished? Can't you abolish faces and
character, of which credit is the reflection? As long as men are born
babes they will live on credit for the first fourteen or eighteen years
of their life. Every innocent man has in his countenance a promise to
pay, and hence credit. Less credit will there be? You are mistaken.
There will always be more and more. Character _must_ be trusted; and,
just in proportion to the morality of a people, will be the expansion of
the credit system.

There is even a little rule of prudence for the young experimenter which
Dr. Franklin omitted to set down, yet which the youth may find
useful,--Do not go to ask your debtor the payment of a debt on the day
when you have no other resource. He will learn by your air and tone how
it is with you, and will treat you as a beggar. But work and starve a
little longer. Wait till your affairs go better, and you have other
means at hand; you will then ask in a different tone, and he will treat
your claim with entire respect.

Now, we all wish to be graceful, and do justice to ourselves by our
manners; but youth in America is wont to be poor and hurried, not at
ease, or not in society where high behavior could be taught. But the
sentiment of honor and the wish to serve make all our pains superfluous.
Life is not so short but that there is always time enough for courtesy.
Self-command is the main elegance. "Keep cool, and you command
everybody," said St. Just; and the wily old Talleyrand would still say,
_Surtout, messieurs, pas de zêle_,--"Above all, gentlemen, no heat."

Why have you statues in your hall, but to teach you that, when the
door-bell rings, you shall sit like them. "Eat at your table as you
would eat at the table of the king," said Confucius. It is an excellent
custom of the Quakers, if only for a school of manners,--the silent
prayer before meals. It has the effect to stop mirth, and introduce a
moment of reflection. After the pause, all resume their usual
intercourse from a vantage-ground. What a check to the violent manners
which sometimes come to the table,--of wrath, and whining, and heat in
trifles!

'Tis a rule of manners to avoid exaggeration. A lady loses as soon as
she admires too easily and too much. In man or woman, the face and the
person lose power when they are on the strain to express admiration. A
man makes his inferiors his superiors by heat. Why need you, who are not
a gossip, talk as a gossip, and tell eagerly what the neighbors or the
journals say? State your opinion without apology. The attitude is the
main point, assuring your companion that, come good news or come bad,
you remain in good heart and good mind, which is the best news you can
possibly communicate. Self-control is the rule. You have in you there a
noisy, sensual savage which you are to keep down, and turn all his
strength to beauty. For example, what a seneschal and detective is
laughter! It seems to require several generations of education to train
a squeaking or a shouting habit out of a man. Sometimes, when in almost
all expressions the Choctaw and the slave have been worked out of him, a
coarse nature still betrays itself in his contemptible squeals of joy.
It is necessary for the purification of drawing-rooms, that these
entertaining explosions should be under strict control. Lord
Chesterfield had early made this discovery, for he says, "I am sure that
since I had the use of my reason, no human being has ever heard me
laugh." I know that there go two to this game, and, in the presence of
certain formidable wits, savage nature must sometimes rush out in some
disorder.

To pass to an allied topic, one word or two in regard to dress, in which
our civilization instantly shows itself. No nation is dressed with more
good sense than ours. And everybody sees certain moral benefit in it.
When the young European emigrant, after a summer's labor, puts on for
the first time a new coat, he puts on much more. His good and becoming
clothes put him on thinking that he must behave like people who are so
dressed; and silently and steadily his behavior mends. But quite another
class of our own youth, I should remind, of dress in general, that some
people need it, and others need it not. Thus a king or a general does
not need a fine coat, and a commanding person may save himself all
solicitude on that point. There are always slovens in State Street or
Wall Street, who are not less considered. If a man have manners and
talent he may dress roughly and carelessly. It is only when mind and
character slumber that the dress can be seen. If the intellect were
always awake, and every noble sentiment, the man might go in huckaback
or mats, and his dress would be admired and imitated. Remember George
Herbert's maxim, "This coat with my discretion will be brave." If,
however, a man has not firm nerves, and has keen sensibility, it is
perhaps a wise economy to go to a good shop and dress himself
irreproachably. He can then dismiss all care from his mind, and may
easily find that performance an addition of confidence, a fortification
that turns the scale in social encounters, and allows him to go gayly
into conversations where else he had been dry and embarrassed. I am not
ignorant,--I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the
lady who declared "that the sense of being perfectly well-dressed gives
a feeling of inward tranquillity which religion is powerless to bestow."

Thus much for manners: but we are not content with pantomime; we say,
this is only for the eyes. We want real relations of the mind and the
heart; we want friendship; we want knowledge; we want virtue; a more
inward existence to read the history of each other. Welfare requires one
or two companions of intelligence, probity, and grace, to wear out life
with,--persons with whom we can speak a few reasonable words every day,
by whom we can measure ourselves, and who shall hold us fast to good
sense and virtue; and these we are always in search of. He must be
inestimable to us to whom we can say what we cannot say to ourselves.
Yet now and then we say things to our mates, or hear things from them,
which seem to put it out of the power of the parties to be strangers
again. "Either death or a friend," is a Persian proverb. I suppose I
give the experience of many when I give my own. A few times in my life
it has happened to me to meet persons of so good a nature and so good
breeding, that every topic was open and discussed without possibility of
offence,--persons who could not be shocked. One of my friends said in
speaking of certain associates, "There is not one of them but I can
offend at any moment." But to the company I am now considering, were no
terrors, no vulgarity. All topics were broached,--life, love, marriage,
sex, hatred, suicide, magic, theism, art, poetry, religion, myself,
thyself, all selves, and whatever else, with a security and vivacity
which belonged to the nobility of the parties and to their brave truth.
The life of these persons was conducted in the same calm and affirmative
manner as their discourse. Life with them was an experiment continually
varied, full of results, full of grandeur, and by no means the hot and
hurried business which passes in the world. The delight in good company,
in pure, brilliant, social atmosphere; the incomparable satisfaction of
a society in which everything can be safely said, in which every member
returns a true echo, in which a wise freedom, an ideal republic of
sense, simplicity, knowledge, and thorough good-meaning abide,--doubles
the value of life. It is this that justifies to each the jealousy with
which the doors are kept. Do not look sourly at the set or the club
which does not choose you. Every highly organized person knows the value
of the social barriers, since the best society has often been spoiled to
him by the intrusion of bad companions. He of all men would keep the
right of choice sacred, and feel that the exclusions are in the interest
of the admissions, though they happen at this moment to thwart his
wishes.

The hunger for company is keen, but it must be discriminating, and must
be economized. 'Tis a defect in our manners that they have not yet
reached the prescribing a limit to visits. That every well-dressed lady
or gentleman should be at liberty to exceed ten minutes in his or her
call on serious people, shows a civilization still rude. A universal
etiquette should fix an iron limit after which a moment should not be
allowed without explicit leave granted on request of either the giver or
receiver of the visit. There is inconvenience in such strictness, but
vast inconvenience in the want of it. To trespass on a public servant is
to trespass on a nation's time. Yet presidents of the United States are
afflicted by rude Western and Southern gossips (I hope it is only by
them) until the gossip's immeasurable legs are tired of sitting; then he
strides out and the nation is relieved.

It is very certain that sincere and happy conversation doubles our
powers; that, in the effort to unfold our thought to a friend, we make
it clearer to ourselves, and surround it with illustrations that help
and delight us. It may happen that each hears from the other a better
wisdom than any one else will ever hear from either. But these ties are
taken care of by Providence to each of us. A wise man once said to me
that "all whom he knew, met":--meaning that he need not take pains to
introduce the persons whom he valued to each other: they were sure to be
drawn together as by gravitation. The soul of a man must be the servant
of another. The true friend must have an attraction to whatever virtue
is in us. Our chief want in life,--is it not somebody who can make us do
what we can? And we are easily great with the loved and honored
associate. We come out of our eggshell existence and see the great dome
arching over us; see the zenith above and the nadir under us.

Speech is power: speech is to persuade, to convert, to compel. It is to
bring another out of his bad sense into your good sense. You are to be
missionary and carrier of all that is good and noble. Virtues speak to
virtues, vices to vices,--each to their own kind in the people with whom
we deal. If you are suspiciously and dryly on your guard, so is he or
she. If you rise to frankness and generosity, they will respect it now
or later.

In this art of conversation, Woman, if not the queen and victor, is the
lawgiver. If every one recalled his experiences, he might find the best
in the speech of superior women,--which was better than song, and
carried ingenuity, character, wise counsel, and affection, as easily as
the wit with which it was adorned. They are not only wise themselves,
they make us wise. No one can be a master in conversation who has not
learned much from women; their presence and inspiration are essential to
its success. Steele said of his mistress, that "to have loved her was a
liberal education." Shenstone gave no bad account of this influence in
his description of the French woman: "There is a quality in which no
woman in the world can compete with her,--it is the power of
intellectual irritation. She will draw wit out of a fool. She strikes
with such address the chords of self-love, that she gives unexpected
vigor and agility to fancy, and electrifies a body that appeared
non-electric." Coleridge esteems cultivated women as the depositaries
and guardians of "English undefiled"; and Luther commends that
accomplishment of "pure German speech" of his wife.

Madame de Staël, by the unanimous consent of all who knew her, was the
most extraordinary converser that was known in her time, and it was a
time full of eminent men and women; she knew all distinguished persons
in letters or society, in England, Germany, and Italy, as well as in
France, though she said, with characteristic nationality, "Conversation,
like talent, exists only in France." Madame de Staël valued nothing but
conversation. When they showed her the beautiful Lake Leman, she
exclaimed, "O for the gutter of the Rue de Bac!" the street in Paris in
which her house stood. And she said one day, seriously, to M. Molé, "If
it were not for respect to human opinions, I would not open my window to
see the Bay of Naples for the first time, whilst I would go five hundred
leagues to talk with a man of genius whom I had not seen." Ste. Beuve
tells us of the privileged circle at Coppet, that, after making an
excursion one day, the party returned in two coaches from Chambéry to
Aix, on the way to Coppet. The first coach had many rueful accidents to
relate,--a terrific thunder-storm, shocking roads, and danger and gloom
to the whole company. The party in the second coach, on arriving, heard
this story with surprise;--of thunder-storm, of steeps, of mud, of
danger, they knew nothing; no, they had forgotten earth, and breathed a
purer air: such a conversation between Madame de Staël and Madame
Récamier and Benjamin Constant and Schlegel! they were all in a state
of delight. The intoxication of the conversation had made them
insensible to all notice of weather or rough roads. Madame de Tessé
said, "If I were Queen, I should command Madame de Staël to talk to me
every day." Conversation fills all gaps, supplies all deficiencies. What
a good trait is that recorded of Madame de Maintenon, that, during
dinner, the servant slipped to her side, "Please, madame, one anecdote
more, for there is no roast to-day."

Politics, war, party, luxury, avarice, fashion, are all asses with
loaded panniers to serve the kitchen of Intellect, the king. There is
nothing that does not pass into lever or weapon.

And yet there are trials enough of nerve and character, brave choices
enough of taking the part of truth and of the oppressed against the
oppressor, in privatest circles. A right speech is not well to be
distinguished from action. Courage to ask questions; courage to expose
our ignorance. The great gain is, not to shine, not to conquer your
companion,--then you learn nothing but conceit,--but to find a companion
who knows what you do not; to tilt with him and be overthrown, horse and
foot, with utter destruction of all your logic and learning. There is a
defeat that is useful. Then you can see the real and the counterfeit,
and will never accept the counterfeit again. You will adopt the art of
war that has defeated you. You will ride to battle horsed on the very
logic which you found irresistible. You will accept the fertile truth,
instead of the solemn customary lie.

Let nature bear the expense. The attitude, the tone, is all. Let our
eyes not look away, but meet. Let us not look east and west for
materials of conversation, but rest in presence and unity. A just
feeling will fast enough supply fuel for discourse, if speaking be more
grateful than silence. When people come to see us, we foolishly prattle,
lest we be inhospitable. But things said for conversation are chalk
eggs. Don't _say_ things. What you _are_ stands over you the while, and
thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary. A lady of
my acquaintance said, "I don't care so much for what they say as I do
for what makes them say it."

The main point is to throw yourself on the truth, and say with Newton,
"There's no contending against facts." When Molyneux fancied that the
observations of the nutation of the earth's axis destroyed Newton's
theory of gravitation, he tried to break it softly to Sir Isaac, who
only answered, "It may be so; there's no arguing against facts and
experiments."

But there are people who cannot be cultivated,--people on whom speech
makes no impression,--swainish, morose people, who must be kept down and
quieted as you would those who are a little tipsy; others, who are not
only swainish, but are prompt to take oath that swainishness is the only
culture; and though their odd wit may have some salt for you, your
friends would not relish it. Bolt these out. And I have seen a man of
genius who made me think that if other men were like him co-operation
were impossible. Must we always talk for victory, and never once for
truth, for comfort, and joy? Here is centrality and penetration, strong
understanding, and the higher gifts, the insight of the real, or from
the real, and the moral rectitude which belongs to it: but all this and
all his resources of wit and invention are lost to me in every
experiment that I make to hold intercourse with his mind; always some
weary, captious paradox to fight you with, and the time and temper
wasted. And beware of jokes; too much temperance cannot be used:
inestimable for sauce, but corrupting for food: we go away, hollow and
ashamed. As soon as the company give in to this enjoyment, we shall have
no Olympus. True wit never made us laugh. Mahomet seems to have borrowed
by anticipation of several centuries a leaf from the mind of Swedenborg,
when he wrote in the Koran:--

  "On the day of resurrection, those who have indulged in ridicule will be
  called to the door of Paradise, and have it shut in their faces when
  they reach it. Again, on their turning back, they will be called to
  another door, and again, on reaching it, will see it closed against
  them; and so on, _ad infinitum_, without end."

Shun the negative side. Never worry people with your contritions, nor
with dismal views of politics or society. Never name sickness; even if
you could trust yourself on that perilous topic, beware of unmuzzling a
valetudinarian, who will soon give you your fill of it.

The law of the table is Beauty,--a respect to the common soul of all the
guests. Everything is unseasonable which is private to two or three or
any portion of the company. Tact never violates for a moment this law;
never intrudes the orders of the house, the vices of the absent, or a
tariff of expenses, or professional privacies; as we say, we never "talk
shop" before company. Lovers abstain from caresses, and haters from
insults, whilst they sit in one parlor with common friends.

Stay at home in your mind. Don't recite other people's opinions. See how
it lies there in you; and if there is no counsel, offer none. What we
want is, not your activity or interference with your mind, but your
content to be a vehicle of the simple truth. The way to have large
occasional views, as in a political or social crisis, is to have large
habitual views. When men consult you, it is not that they wish you to
stand tiptoe, and pump your brains, but to apply your habitual view,
your wisdom, to the present question, forbearing all pedantries, and the
very name of argument; for in good conversation parties don't speak to
the words, but to the meanings of each other.

Manners first, then conversation. Later, we see that, as life was not in
manners, so it is not in talk. Manners are external; talk is occasional:
these require certain material conditions, human labor for food,
clothes, house, tools, and, in short, plenty and ease,--since only so
can certain finer and finest powers appear and expand. In a whole nation
of Hottentots there shall not be one valuable man,--valuable out of his
tribe. In every million of Europeans or of Americans there shall be
thousands who would be valuable on any spot on the globe.

The consideration the rich possess in all societies is not without
meaning or right. It is the approval given by the human understanding to
the act of creating value by knowledge and labor. It is the sense of
every human being, that man should have this dominion of nature, should
arm himself with tools, and force the elements to drudge for him and
give him power. Every one must seek to secure his independence; but he
need not be rich. The old Confucius in China admitted the benefit, but
stated the limitation: "If the search for riches were sure to be
successful, though I should become a groom with whip in hand to get
them, I will do so. As the search may not be successful, I will follow
after that which I love." There is in America a general conviction in
the minds of all mature men, that every young man of good faculty and
good habits can by perseverance attain to an adequate estate; if he have
a turn for business, and a quick eye for the opportunities which are
always offering for investment, he can come to wealth, and in such good
season as to enjoy as well as transmit it.

Every human society wants to be officered by a best class, who shall be
masters instructed in all the great arts of life; shall be wise,
temperate, brave, public men, adorned with dignity and accomplishments.
Every country wishes this, and each has taken its own method to secure
such service to the state. In Europe, ancient and modern, it has been
attempted to secure the existence of a superior class by hereditary
nobility, with estates transmitted by primogeniture and entail. But in
the last age, this system has been on its trial and the verdict of
mankind is pretty nearly pronounced. That method secured permanence of
families, firmness of customs, a certain external culture and good
taste; gratified the ear with preserving historic names: but the heroic
father did not surely have heroic sons, and still less surely heroic
grandsons; wealth and ease corrupted the race.

In America, the necessity of clearing the forest, laying out town and
street, and building every house and barn and fence, then church and
town-house, exhausted such means as the Pilgrims brought, and made the
whole population poor; and the like necessity is still found in each new
settlement in the Territories. These needs gave their character to the
public debates in every village and State. I have been often impressed
at our country town meetings with the accumulated virility, in each
village, of five or six or eight or ten men, who speak so well, and so
easily handle the affairs of the town. I often hear the business of a
little town (with which I am most familiar) discussed with a clearness
and thoroughness, and with a generosity, too, that would have satisfied
me had it been in one of the larger capitals. I am sure each one of my
readers has a parallel experience. And every one knows that in every
town or city is always to be found a certain number of public-spirited
men, who perform, unpaid, a great amount of hard work in the interest of
the churches, of schools, of public grounds, works of taste and
refinement. And as in civil duties, so in social power and duties. Our
gentlemen of the old school, that is, of the school of Washington,
Adams, and Hamilton, were bred after English types, and that style of
breeding furnished fine examples in the last generation; but, though
some of us have seen such, I doubt they are all gone. But nature is not
poorer to-day. With all our haste, and slipshod ways, and flippant
self-assertion, I have seen examples of new grace and power in address
that honor the country. It was my fortune not long ago, with my eyes
directed on this subject, to fall in with an American to be proud of. I
said never was such force, good meaning, good sense, good action,
combined with such domestic lovely behavior, such modesty and persistent
preference for others. Wherever he moved he was the benefactor. It is of
course that he should ride well, shoot well, sail well, keep house well,
administer affairs well, but he was the best talker, also, in the
company: what with a perpetual practical wisdom, with an eye always to
the working of the thing, what with the multitude and distinction of his
facts (and one detected continually that he had a hand in everything
that has been done), and in the temperance with which he parried all
offence, and opened the eyes of the person he talked with without
contradicting him. Yet I said to myself, How little this man suspects,
with his sympathy for men and his respect for lettered and scientific
people, that he is not likely, in any company, to meet a man superior to
himself. And I think this is a good country, that can bear such a
creature as he is.

The young men in America at this moment take little thought of what men
in England are thinking or doing. That is the point which decides the
welfare of a people; _which way does it look_? If to any other people,
it is not well with them. If occupied in its own affairs and thoughts
and men, with a heat which excludes almost the notice of any other
people,--as the Jews, the Greeks, the Persians, the Romans, the
Arabians, the French, the English, at their best times have done,--they
are sublime; and we know that in this abstraction they are executing
excellent work. Amidst the calamities which war has brought on our
country this one benefit has accrued,--that our eyes are withdrawn from
England, withdrawn from France, and look homeward. We have come to feel
that "by ourselves our safety must be bought"; to know the vast
resources of the continent, the good-will that is in the people, their
conviction of the great moral advantages of freedom, social equality,
education, and religious culture, and their determination to hold these
fast, and, by them, to hold fast the country and penetrate every square
mile of it with this American civilization.

The consolation and happy moment of life, atoning for all short-comings,
is sentiment; a flame of affection or delight in the heart, burning up
suddenly for its object,--as the love of the mother for her child; of
the child for its mate; of the youth for his friend; of the scholar for
his pursuit; of the boy for sea-life, or for painting, or in the passion
for his country; or in the tender-hearted philanthropist to spend and be
spent for some romantic charity, as Howard for the prisoner, or John
Brown for the slave. No matter what the object is, so it be good, this
flame of desire makes life sweet and tolerable. It reinforces the heart
that feels it, makes all its acts and words gracious and interesting.
Now society in towns is infested by persons who, seeing that the
sentiments please, counterfeit the expression of them. These we call
sentimentalists,--talkers who mistake the description for the thing,
saying for having. They have, they tell you, an intense love of nature;
poetry,--O, they adore poetry, and roses, and the moon, and the cavalry
regiment, and the governor; they love liberty, "dear liberty!" they
worship virtue, "dear virtue!" Yes, they adopt whatever merit is in good
repute, and almost make it hateful with their praise. The warmer their
expressions, the colder we feel; we shiver with cold. A little
experience acquaints us with the unconvertibility of the sentimentalist,
the soul that is lost by mimicking soul. Cure the drunkard, heal the
insane, mollify the homicide, civilize the Pawnee, but what lessons can
be devised for the debauchee of sentiment? Was ever one converted? The
innocence and ignorance of the patient is the first difficulty: he
believes his disease is blooming health. A rough realist, or a phalanx
of realists, would be prescribed; but that is like proposing to mend
your bad road with diamonds. Then poverty, famine, war, imprisonment,
might be tried. Another cure would be to fight fire with fire, to match
a sentimentalist with a sentimentalist. I think each might begin to
suspect that something was wrong.

Would we codify the laws that should reign in households, and whose
daily transgression annoys and mortifies us, and degrades our household
life--we must learn to adorn every day with sacrifices. Good manners are
made up of petty sacrifices. Temperance, courage, love, are made up of
the same jewels. Listen to every prompting of honor. "As soon as
sacrifice becomes a duty and necessity to the man, I see no limit to the
horizon which opens before me."[4]

Of course those people, and no others, interest us who believe in their
thought, who are absorbed, if you please to say so, in their own dream.
They only can give the key and leading to better society: those who
delight in each other only because both delight in the eternal laws; who
forgive nothing to each other; who, by their joy and homage to these,
are made incapable of conceit, which destroys almost all the fine wits.
Any other affection between men than this geometric one of relation to
the same thing, is a mere mush of materialism.

These are the bases of civil and polite society; namely, manners,
conversation, lucrative labor, and public action, whether political, or
in the leading of social institutions. We have much to regret, much to
mend, in our society; but I believe that with all liberal and hopeful
men there is a firm faith in the beneficent results which we really
enjoy; that intelligence, manly enterprise, good education, virtuous
life, and elegant manners have been and are found here, and, we hope, in
the next generation will still more abound.


[Footnote 4: Ernest Renan.]




                        ELOQUENCE.




                        ELOQUENCE.


I DO not know any kind of history, except the event of a battle, to
which people listen with more interest than to any anecdote of
eloquence; and the wise think it better than a battle. It is a triumph
of pure power, and it has a beautiful and prodigious surprise in it. For
all can see and understand the means by which a battle is gained: they
count the armies, they see the cannon, the musketry, the cavalry, and
the character and advantages of the ground, so that the result is often
predicted by the observer with great certainty before the charge is
sounded. Not so in a court of law, or in a legislature. Who knows before
the debate begins what the preparation, or what the means are of the
combatants? The facts, the reasons, the logic,--above all, the flame of
passion and the continuous energy of will which is presently to be let
loose on this bench of judges, or on this miscellaneous assembly
gathered from the streets,--are all invisible and unknown. Indeed, much
power is to be exhibited which is not yet called into existence, but is
to be suggested on the spot by the unexpected turn things may take,--at
the appearance of new evidence, or by the exhibition of an unlooked-for
bias in the judges, or in the audience. It is eminently the art which
only flourishes in free countries. It is an old proverb, that "Every
people has its prophet"; and every class of the people has. Our
community runs through a long scale of mental power, from the highest
refinement to the borders of savage ignorance and rudeness. There are
not only the wants of the intellectual and learned and poetic men and
women to be met, but also the vast interests of property, public and
private, of mining, of manufactures, of trade, of railroads, etc. These
must have their advocates of each improvement and each interest. Then
the political questions, which agitate millions, find or form a class of
men by nature and habit fit to discuss and deal with these measures, and
make them intelligible and acceptable to the electors. So of education,
of art, of philanthropy.

Eloquence shows the power and possibility of man. There is one of whom
we took no note, but on a certain occasion it appears that he has a
secret virtue never suspected,--that he can paint what has occurred, and
what must occur, with such clearness to a company, as if they saw it
done before their eyes. By leading their thought he leads their will,
and can make them do gladly what an hour ago they would not believe that
they could be led to do at all: he makes them glad or angry or penitent
at his pleasure; of enemies makes friends, and fills desponding men with
hope and joy. After Sheridan's speech in the trial of Warren Hastings,
Mr. Pitt moved an adjournment, that the House might recover from the
overpowering effect of Sheridan's oratory. Then recall the delight that
sudden eloquence gives,--the surprise that the moment is so rich. The
orator is the physician. Whether he speaks in the Capitol or on a cart,
he is the benefactor that lifts men above themselves, and creates a
higher appetite than he satisfies. The orator is he whom every man is
seeking when he goes into the courts, into the conventions, into any
popular assembly,--though often disappointed, yet never giving over the
hope. He finds himself perhaps in the Senate, when the forest has cast
out some wild, black-browed bantling to show the same energy in the
crowd of officials which he had learned in driving cattle to the hills,
or in scrambling through thickets in a winter forest, or through the
swamp and river for his game. In the folds of his brow, in the majesty
of his mien, Nature has marked her son; and in that artificial and
perhaps unworthy place and company shall remind you of the lessons
taught him in earlier days by the torrent in the gloom of the
pine-woods, when he was the companion of the mountain cattle, of jays
and foxes, and a hunter of the bear. Or you may find him in some lowly
Bethel, by the seaside, where a hard-featured, scarred, and wrinkled
Methodist becomes the poet of the sailor and the fisherman, whilst he
pours out the abundant streams of his thought through a language all
glittering and fiery with imagination,--a man who never knew the
looking-glass or the critic,--a man whom college drill or patronage
never made, and whom praise cannot spoil,--a man who conquers his
audience by infusing his soul into them, and speaks by the right of
being the person in the assembly who has the most to say, and so makes
all other speakers appear little and cowardly before his face. For the
time, his exceeding life throws all other gifts into shade,--philosophy
speculating on its own breath, taste, learning, and all,--and yet how
every listener gladly consents to be nothing in his presence, and to
share this surprising emanation, and be steeped and ennobled in the new
wine of this eloquence! It instructs in the power of man over men; that
a man is a mover; to the extent of his being, a power; and, in contrast
with the efficiency he suggests, our actual life and society appears a
dormitory. Who can wonder at its influence on young and ardent minds?
Uncommon boys follow uncommon men; and I think every one of us can
remember when our first experiences made us for a time the victim and
worshipper of the first master of this art whom we happened to hear in
the court-house or in the caucus. We reckon the bar, the senate,
journalism, and the pulpit, peaceful professions; but you cannot escape
the demand for courage in these, and certainly there is no true orator
who is not a hero. His attitude in the rostrum, on the platform,
requires that he counterbalance his auditory. He is challenger, and must
answer all comers. The orator must ever stand with forward foot, in the
attitude of advancing. His speech must be just ahead of the
assembly,--ahead of the whole human race,--or it is superfluous. His
speech is not to be distinguished from action. It is the electricity of
action. It is action, as the general's word of command, or chart of
battle, is action. I must feel that the speaker compromises himself to
his auditory, comes for something,--it is a cry on the perilous edge of
the fight,--or let him be silent. You go to a town-meeting where the
people are called to some disagreeable duty,--such as, for example,
often occurred during the war, at the occasion of a new draft. They come
unwillingly: they have spent their money once or twice very freely. They
have sent their best men: the young and ardent, those of a martial
temper, went at the first draft, or the second, and it is not easy to
see who else can be spared, or can be induced to go. The silence and
coldness after the meeting is opened, and the purpose of it stated, are
not encouraging. When a good man rises in the cold and malicious
assembly, you think, Well, sir, it would be more prudent to be silent;
why not rest, sir, on your good record? Nobody doubts your talent and
power; but for the present business, we know all about it, and are tired
of being pushed into patriotism by people who stay at home. But he,
taking no counsel of past things, but only of the inspiration of his
to-day's feeling, surprises them with his tidings, with his better
knowledge, his larger view, his steady gaze at the new and future event,
whereof they had not thought, and they are interested, like so many
children, and carried off out of all recollection of their malignant
considerations, and he gains his victory by prophecy, where they
expected repetition. He knew very well beforehand that they were looking
behind and that he was looking ahead, and therefore it was wise to
speak. Then the observer says, What a godsend is this manner of man to a
town! and he, what a faculty! He is put together like a Waltham watch,
or like a locomotive just finished at the Tredegar works.

No act indicates more universal health than eloquence. The special
ingredients of this force are: clear perceptions; memory; power of
statement; logic; imagination, or the skill to clothe your thought in
natural images; passion, which is the _heat_; and then a grand will,
which, when legitimate and abiding, we call _character_, the height of
manhood. As soon as a man shows rare power of expression, like Chatham,
Erskine, Patrick Henry, Webster, or Phillips, all the great interests,
whether of state or of property, crowd to him to be their spokesman, so
that he is at once a potentate, a ruler of men. A worthy gentleman, Mr.
Alexander, listening to the debates of the General Assembly of the
Scottish Kirk, in Edinburgh, and eager to speak to the questions, but
utterly failing in his endeavors,--delighted with the talent shown by
Dr. Hugh Blair, went to him, and offered him one thousand pounds
sterling if he would teach him to speak with propriety in public. If the
performance of the advocate reaches any high success, it is paid in
England with dignities in the professions, and in the state with seats
in the cabinet, earldoms, and woolsacks. And it is easy to see that the
great and daily growing interests at stake in this country must pay
proportional prices to their spokesmen and defenders. It does not
surprise us, then, to learn from Plutarch what great sums were paid at
Athens to the teachers of rhetoric; and if the pupils got what they paid
for, the lessons were cheap.

But this power which so fascinates and astonishes and commands is only
the exaggeration of a talent which is universal. All men are competitors
in this art. We have all attended meetings called for some object in
which no one had beforehand any warm interest. Every speaker rose
unwillingly, and even his speech was a bad excuse; but it is only the
first plunge which is formidable, and deep interest or sympathy thaws
the ice, loosens the tongue, and will carry the cold and fearful
presently into self-possession, and possession of the audience. Go into
an assembly well excited, some angry political meeting on the eve of a
crisis. Then it appears that eloquence is as natural as swimming,--an
art which all men might learn, though so few do. It only needs that they
should be once well pushed off into the water, overhead, without corks,
and, after a mad struggle or two, they find their poise and the use of
their arms, and henceforward they possess this new and wonderful
element.

The most hard-fisted, disagreeably restless, thought-paralyzing
companion sometimes turns out in a public assembly to be a fluent,
various, and effective orator. Now you find what all that excess of
power which so chafed and fretted you in a _tête-à-tête_ with him was
for. What is peculiar in it is a certain creative heat, which, a man
attains to perhaps only once in his life. Those whom we admire--the
great orators--have some _habit_ of heat, and, moreover, a certain
control of it, an art of husbanding it,--as if their hand was on the
organ-stop, and could now use it temperately, and now let out all the
length and breadth of the power. I remember that Jenny Lind, when in
this country, complained of concert-rooms and town-halls, that they did
not give her room enough to unroll her voice, and exulted in the
opportunity given her in the great halls she found sometimes built over
a railroad depot. And this is quite as true of the action of the mind
itself, that a man of this talent sometimes finds himself cold and slow
in private company, and perhaps a heavy companion; but give him a
commanding occasion, and the inspiration of a great multitude, and he
surprises by new and unlooked-for powers. Before, he was out of place,
and unfitted as a cannon in a parlor. To be sure there are physical
advantages,--some eminently leading to this art. I mentioned Jenny
Lind's voice. A good voice has a charm in speech as in song; sometimes
of itself enchains attention, and indicates a rare sensibility,
especially when trained to wield all its powers. The voice, like the
face, betrays the nature and disposition, and soon indicates what is the
range of the speaker's mind. Many people have no ear for music, but
every one has an ear for skilful reading. Every one of us has at some
time been the victim of a well-toned and cunning voice, and perhaps been
repelled once for all by a harsh, mechanical speaker. The voice, indeed,
is a delicate index of the state of mind. I have heard an eminent
preacher say, that he learns from the first tones of his voice on a
Sunday morning whether he is to have a successful day. A singer cares
little for the words of the song; he will make any words glorious. I
think the like rule holds of the good reader. In the church I call him
only a good reader who can read sense and poetry into any hymn in the
hymn-book. Plutarch, in his enumeration of the ten Greek orators, is
careful to mention their excellent voices, and the pains bestowed by
some of them in training these. What character, what infinite variety,
belong to the voice! sometimes it is a flute, sometimes a trip-hammer;
what range of force! In moments of clearer thought or deeper sympathy,
the voice will attain a music and penetration which surprises the
speaker as much as the auditor; he also is a sharer of the higher wind
that blows over his strings. I believe that some orators go to the
assembly as to a closet where to find their best thoughts. The Persian
poet Saadi tells us that a person with a disagreeable voice was reading
the Koran aloud, when a holy man, passing by, asked what was his monthly
stipend. He answered, "Nothing at all." "But why then do you take so
much trouble?" He replied, "I read for the sake of God." The other
rejoined, "For God's sake, do not read; for if you read the Koran in
this manner you will destroy the splendor of Islamism." Then there are
persons of natural fascination, with certain frankness, winning manners,
almost endearments in their style; like Bouillon, who could almost
persuade you that a quartan ague was wholesome; like Louis XI. of
France, whom Commines praises for "the gift of managing all minds by his
accent and the caresses of his speech"; like Galiani, Voltaire, Robert
Burns, Barclay, Fox, and Henry Clay. What must have been the discourse
of St. Bernard, when mothers hid their sons, wives their husbands,
companions their friends, lest they should be led by his eloquence to
join the monastery.

It is said that one of the best readers in his time was the late
President John Quincy Adams. I have heard that no man could read the
Bible with such powerful effect. I can easily believe it, though I never
heard him speak in public until his fine voice was much broken by age.
But the wonders he could achieve with that cracked and disobedient organ
showed what power might have belonged to it in early manhood. If
"indignation makes good verses," as Horace says, it is not less true
that a good indignation makes an excellent speech. In the early years of
this century, Mr. Adams, at that time a member of the United States
Senate at Washington, was elected Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory in
Harvard College. When he read his first lectures in 1806, not only the
students heard him with delight, but the hall was crowded by the
Professors and by unusual visitors. I remember when, long after, I
entered college, hearing the story of the numbers of coaches in which
his friends came from Boston to hear him. On his return in the winter to
the Senate at Washington, he took such ground in the debates of the
following session as to lose the sympathy of many of his constituents in
Boston. When, on his return from Washington, he resumed his lectures in
Cambridge, his class attended, but the coaches from Boston did not come,
and, indeed, many of his political friends deserted him. In 1809 he was
appointed Minister to Russia, and resigned his chair in the University.
His last lecture, in taking leave of his class, contained some nervous
allusions to the treatment he had received from his old friends, which
showed how much it had stung him, and which made a profound impression
on the class. Here is the concluding paragraph, which long resounded in
Cambridge:--

  "At no hour of your life will the love of letters ever oppress you as a
  burden, or fail you as a resource. In the vain and foolish exultation of
  the heart, which the brighter prospects of life will sometimes excite,
  the pensive portress of Science shall call you to the sober pleasures of
  her holy cell. In the mortifications of disappointment, her soothing
  voice shall whisper serenity and peace. In social converse with the
  mighty dead of ancient days, you will never smart under the galling
  sense of dependence upon the mighty living of the present age. And in
  your struggles with the world, should a crisis ever occur, when even
  friendship may deem it prudent to desert you, when even your country may
  seem ready to abandon herself and you, when priest and Levite shall come
  and look on you and pass by on the other side, seek refuge, my
  _un_failing friends, and be assured you shall find it, in the friendship
  of Lælius and Scipio, in the patriotism of Cicero, Demosthenes, and
  Burke, as well as in the precepts and example of Him whose law is love,
  and who taught us to remember injuries only to forgive them."

The orator must command the whole scale of the language, from the most
elegant to the most low and vile. Every one has felt how superior in
force is the language of the street to that of the academy. The street
must be one of his schools. Ought not the scholar to be able to convey
his meaning in terms as short and strong as the porter or truckman uses
to convey his? And Lord Chesterfield thought "that without being
instructed in the dialect of the _Halles_ no man could be a complete
master of French." The speech of the man in the street is invariably
strong, nor can you mend it by making it what you call parliamentary.
You say, "if he could only express himself"; but he does already better
than any one can for him,--can always get the ear of an audience to the
exclusion of everybody else. Well, this is an example in point. That
something which each man was created to say and do, he only or he best
can tell you, and has a right to supreme attention so far. The power of
their speech is, that it is perfectly understood by all; and I believe
it to be true, that when any orator at the bar or in the Senate rises in
his thought, he descends in his language,--that is, when he rises to any
height of thought or of passion he comes down to a language level with
the ear of all his audience. It is the merit of John Brown and of
Abraham Lincoln--one at Charlestown, one at Gettysburg--in the two best
specimens of eloquence we have had in this country. And observe that all
poetry is written in the oldest and simplest English words. Dr. Johnson
said, "There is in every nation a style which never becomes obsolete, a
certain mode of phraseology so consonant to the analogy and principles
of its respective language as to remain settled and unaltered. This
style is to be sought in the common intercourse of life among those who
speak only to be understood, without ambition of elegance. The polite
are always catching modish innovations, and the learned forsake the
vulgar, when the vulgar is right; but there is a conversation above
grossness and below refinement, where propriety resides."

But all these are the gymnastics, the education of eloquence, and not
itself. They cannot be too much considered and practised as preparation,
but the powers are those I first named. If I should make the shortest
list of the qualifications of the orator, I should begin with
_manliness_; and perhaps it means here presence of mind. Men differ so
much in control of their faculties! You can find in many, and indeed in
all, a certain fundamental equality. Fundamentally all feel alike and
think alike, and at a great heat they can all express themselves with an
almost equal force. But it costs a great heat to enable a heavy man to
come up with those who have a quick sensibility. Thus we have all of us
known men who lose their talents, their wit, their fancy, at any sudden
call. Some men, on such pressure, collapse, and cannot rally. If they
are to put a thing in proper shape, fit for the occasion and the
audience, their mind is a blank. Something which any boy would tell with
color and vivacity they can only stammer out with hard literalness,--say
it in the very words they heard, and no other. This fault is very
incident to men of study,--as if the more they had read the less they
knew. Dr. Charles Chauncy was, a hundred years ago, a man of marked
ability among the clergy of New England. But when once going to preach
the Thursday lecture in Boston (which in those days people walked from
Salem to hear), on going up the pulpit stairs he was informed that a
little boy had fallen into Frog Pond on the Common, and was drowned, and
the doctor was requested to improve the sad occasion. The doctor was
much distressed, and in his prayer he hesitated,--he tried to make soft
approaches,--he prayed for Harvard College, he prayed for the schools,
he implored the Divine Being "to-to-to bless to them all the boy that
was this morning drowned in Frog Pond." Now this is not want of talent
or learning, but of manliness. The doctor, no doubt, shut up in his
closet and his theology, had lost some natural relation to men, and
quick application of his thought to the course of events. I should add
what is told of him,--that he so disliked the "sensation" preaching of
his time that he had once prayed that "he might never be eloquent"; and,
it appears, his prayer was granted. On the other hand, it would be easy
to point to many masters whose readiness is sure; as the French say of
Guizot, that "what Guizot learned this morning he has the air of having
known from all eternity." This unmanliness is so common a result of our
half-education,--teaching a youth Latin and metaphysics and history, and
neglecting to give him the rough training of a boy,--allowing him to
skulk from the games of ball and skates and coasting down the hills on
his sled, and whatever else would lead him and keep him on even terms
with boys, so that he can meet them as an equal, and lead in his
turn,--that I wish his guardians to consider that they are thus
preparing him to play a contemptible part when he is full-grown. In
England they send the most delicate and protected child from his
luxurious home to learn to rough it with boys in the public schools. A
few bruises and scratches will do him no harm if he has thereby learned
not to be afraid. It is this wise mixture of good drill in Latin grammar
with good drill in cricket, boating, and wrestling, that is the boast of
English education, and of high importance to the matter in hand.

Lord Ashley, in 1606, while the bill for regulating trials in cases of
high treason was pending, attempting to utter a premeditated speech in
Parliament in favor of that clause of the bill which allowed the
prisoner the benefit of counsel, fell into such a disorder that he was
not able to proceed; but, having recovered his spirits and the command
of his faculties, he drew such an argument from his own confusion as
more advantaged his cause than all the powers of eloquence could have
done. "For," said he, "if I, who had no personal concern in the
question, was so overpowered with my own apprehensions that I could not
find words to express myself, what must be the case of one whose life
depended on his own abilities to defend it?" This happy turn did great
service in promoting that excellent bill.

These are ascending stairs,--a good voice, winning manners, plain
speech, chastened, however, by the schools into correctness; but we must
come to the main matter, of power of statement,--know your fact; hug
your fact. For the essential thing is heat, and heat comes of sincerity.
Speak what you do know and believe, and are personally in it, and are
answerable for every word. Eloquence is _the power to translate a truth
into language perfectly intelligible to the person to whom you speak_.
He who would convince the worthy Mr. Dunderhead of any truth which
Dunderhead does not see, must be a master of his art. Declamation is
common; but such possession of thought as is here required, such
practical chemistry as the conversion of a truth written in God's
language into a truth in Dunderhead's language, is one of the most
beautiful and cogent weapons that is forged in the shop of the Divine
Artificer.

It was said of Robespierre's audience, that though they understood not
the words, they understood a fury in the words, and caught the
contagion.

This leads us to the high class, the men of character who bring an
overpowering personality into court, and the cause they maintain borrows
importance from an illustrious advocate. Absoluteness is required, and
he must have it or simulate it. If the cause be unfashionable, he will
make it fashionable. 'Tis the best man in the best training. If he does
not know your fact, he will show that it is not worth the knowing.
Indeed, as great generals do not fight many battles, but conquer by
tactics, so all eloquence is a war of posts. What is said is the least
part of the oration. It is the attitude taken, the unmistakable sign,
never so casually given, in tone of voice, or manner, or word, that a
greater spirit speaks from you than is spoken to in him.

But I say, _provided your cause is really honest_. There is always the
previous question: How came you on that side? Your argument is
ingenious, your language copious, your illustrations brilliant, but your
major proposition palpably absurd. Will you establish a lie? You are a
very elegant writer, but you can't write up what gravitates down.

An ingenious metaphysical writer, Dr. Stirling of Edinburgh, has noted
that intellectual works in any department breed each other by what he
calls _zymosis_, i.e. fermentation; thus in the Elizabethan Age there
was a dramatic _zymosis_, when all the genius ran in that direction,
until it culminated in Shakspeare; so in Germany we have seen a
metaphysical _zymosis_ culminating in Kant, Schelling, Schleiermacher,
Schopenhauer, Hegel, and so ending. To this we might add the great eras
not only of painters but of orators. The historian Paterculus says of
Cicero, that only in Cicero's lifetime was any great eloquence in Rome;
so it was said that no member of either house of the British Parliament
will be ranked among the orators whom Lord North did not see, or who did
not see Lord North. But I should rather say that when a great sentiment,
as religion or liberty, makes itself deeply felt in any age or country,
then great orators appear. As the Andes and Alleghanies indicate the
line of the fissure in the crust of the earth along which they were
lifted, so the great ideas that suddenly expand at some moment the mind
of mankind indicate themselves by orators.

If there ever was a country where eloquence was a power, it is in the
United States. Here is room for every degree of it, on every one of its
ascending stages,--that of useful speech, in our commercial,
manufacturing, railroad, and educational conventions; that of political
advice and persuasion on the grandest theatre, reaching, as all good men
trust, into a vast future, and so compelling the best thought and
noblest administrative ability that the citizen can offer. And here are
the service of science, the demands of art, and the lessons of religion
to be brought home to the instant practice of thirty millions of people.
Is it not worth the ambition of every generous youth to train and arm
his mind with all the resources of knowledge, of method, of grace, and
of character, to serve such a constituency?




                        RESOURCES.




                        RESOURCES.


MEN are made up of potences. We are magnets in an iron globe. We have
keys to all doors. We are all inventors, each sailing out on a voyage of
discovery, guided each by a private chart, of which there is no
duplicate. The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension
waiting to be struck; the earth sensitive as iodine to light; the most
plastic and impressionable medium, alive to every touch, and, whether
searched by the plough of Adam, the sword of Cæsar, the boat of
Columbus, the telescope of Galileo, or the surveyor's chain of Picard,
or the submarine telegraph, to every one of these experiments it makes a
gracious response. I am benefited by every observation of a victory of
man over nature,--by seeing that wisdom is better than strength; by
seeing that every healthy and resolute man is an organizer, a method
coming into a confusion and drawing order out of it. We are touched and
cheered by every such example. We like to see the inexhaustible riches
of Nature, and the access of every soul to her magazines. These examples
wake an infinite hope, and call every man to emulation. A low, hopeless
spirit puts out the eyes; scepticism is slow suicide. A philosophy which
sees only the worst; believes neither in virtue nor in genius; which
says 'tis all of no use, life is eating us up, 'tis only question who
shall be last devoured,--dispirits us; the sky shuts down before us. A
Schopenhauer, with logic and learning and wit, teaching
pessimism,--teaching that this is the worst of all possible worlds, and
inferring that sleep is better than waking, and death than sleep,--all
the talent in the world cannot save him from being odious. But if,
instead of these negatives, you give me affirmatives,--if you tell me
that there is always life for the living; that what man has done man can
do; that this world belongs to the energetic; that there is always a way
to everything desirable; that every man is provided, in the new bias of
his faculty, with a key to nature, and that man only rightly knows
himself as far as he has experimented on things,--I am invigorated, put
into genial and working temper; the horizon opens, and we are full of
good-will and gratitude to the Cause of Causes. I like the sentiment of
the poor woman who, coming from a wretched garret in an inland
manufacturing town for the first time to the sea-shore, gazing at the
ocean, said "she was glad for once in her life to see something which
there was enough of."

Our Copernican globe is a great factory or shop of power, with its
rotating constellations, times, and tides. The machine is of colossal
size; the diameter of the water-wheel, the arms of the levers, and the
volley of the battery, out of all mechanic measure; and it takes long to
understand its parts and its workings. This pump never sucks; these
screws are never loose; this machine is never out of gear. The vat, the
piston, the wheels and tires, never wear out, but are self-repairing. Is
there any load which water cannot lift? If there be, try steam; or if
not that, try electricity. Is there any exhausting of these means?
Measure by barrels the spending of the brook that runs through your
field. Nothing is great but the inexhaustible wealth of Nature. She
shows us only surfaces, but she is million fathoms deep. What spaces!
what durations! dealing with races as merely preparations of somewhat to
follow; or, in humanity, millions of lives of men to collect the first
observations on which our astronomy is built; millions of lives to add
only sentiments and guesses, which at last, gathered in by an ear of
sensibility, make the furniture of the poet. See how children build up a
language; how every traveller, every laborer, every impatient boss, who
sharply shortens the phrase or the word to give his order quicker,
reducing it to the lowest possible terms,--and there it must
stay,--improves the national tongue. What power does Nature not owe to
her duration of amassing infinitesimals into cosmical forces!

The marked events in history, as the emigration of a colony to a new and
more delightful coast; the building of a large ship; the discovery of
the mariner's compass, which perhaps the Phœnicians made; the arrival
among an old stationary nation of a more instructed race, with new arts:
each of these events electrifies the tribe to which it befalls; supples
the tough barbarous sinew, and brings it into that state of sensibility
which makes the transition to civilization possible and sure. By his
machines man can dive and remain under water like a shark; can fly like
a hawk in the air; can see atoms like a gnat; can see the system of the
universe like Uriel, the angel of the sun; can carry whatever loads a
ton of coal can lift; can knock down cities with his fist of gunpowder;
can recover the history of his race by the medals which the deluge, and
every creature, civil or savage or brute, has involuntarily dropped of
its existence; and divine the future possibility of the planet and its
inhabitants by his perception of laws of nature. Ah! what a plastic
little creature he is! so shifty, so adaptive! his body a chest of
tools, and he making himself comfortable in every climate, in every
condition.

Here in America are all the wealth of soil, of timber, of mines, and of
the sea, put into the possession of a people who wield all these
wonderful machines, have the secret of steam, of electricity, and have
the power and habit of invention in their brain. We Americans have got
suppled into the state of melioration. Life is always rapid here, but
what acceleration to its pulse in ten years,--what in the four years of
the war! We have seen the railroad and telegraph subdue our enormous
geography; we have seen the snowy deserts on the northwest, seats of
Esquimaux, become lands of promise. When our population, swarming west,
had reached the boundary of arable land, as if to stimulate our energy,
on the face of the sterile waste beyond, the land was suddenly in parts
found covered with gold and silver, floored with coal. It was thought a
fable, what Guthrie, a traveller in Persia, told us, that "in Taurida,
in any piece of ground where springs of naphtha (or petroleum) obtain,
by merely sticking an iron tube in the earth, and applying a light to
the upper end, the mineral oil will burn till the tube is decomposed, or
for a vast number of years." But we have found the Taurida in
Pennsylvania and Ohio. If they have not the lamp of Aladdin, they have
the Aladdin oil. Resources of America! why, one thinks of St. Simon's
saying, "The Golden Age is not behind, but before you." Here is man in
the Garden of Eden; here the Genesis and the Exodus. We have seen
slavery disappear like a painted scene in a theatre; we have seen the
most healthful revolution in the politics of the nation,--the
Constitution not only amended, but construed in a new spirit. We have
seen China opened to European and American ambassadors and commerce; the
like in Japan: our arts and productions begin to penetrate both. As the
walls of a modern house are perforated with water-pipes, sound-pipes,
gas-pipes, heat-pipes, so geography and geology are yielding to man's
convenience, and we begin to perforate and mould the old ball, as a
carpenter does with wood. All is ductile and plastic. We are working the
new Atlantic telegraph. American energy is overriding every venerable
maxim of political science. America is such a garden of plenty, such a
magazine of power, that at her shores all the common rules of political
economy utterly fail. Here is bread, and wealth, and power, and
education for every man who has the heart to use his opportunity. The
creation of power had never any parallel. It was thought that the
immense production of gold would make gold cheap as pewter. But the
immense expansion of trade has wanted every ounce of gold, and it has
not lost its value.

See how nations of customers are formed. The disgust of California has
not been able to drive nor kick the Chinaman back to his home; and now
it turns out that he has sent home to China American food and tools and
luxuries, until he has taught his people to use them, and a new market
has grown up for our commerce. The emancipation has brought a whole
nation of negroes as customers to buy all the articles which once their
few masters bought, and every manufacturer and producer in the North has
an interest in protecting the negro as the consumer of his wares.

The whole history of our civil war is rich in a thousand anecdotes
attesting the fertility of resource, the presence of mind, the skilled
labor of our people. At Annapolis a regiment, hastening to join the
army, found the locomotives broken, the railroad destroyed, and no
rails. The commander called for men in the ranks who could rebuild the
road. Many men stepped forward, searched in the water, found the hidden
rails, laid the track, put the disabled engine together, and continued
their journey. The world belongs to the energetic man. His will gives
him new eyes. He sees expedients and means where we saw none. The
invalid sits shivering in lamb's-wool and furs; the woodsman knows how
to make warm garments out of cold and wet themselves. The Indian, the
sailor, the hunter, only these know the power of the hands, feet, teeth,
eyes, and ears. It is out of the obstacles to be encountered that they
make the means of destroying them. The sailor by his boat and sail makes
a ford out of deepest waters. The hunter, the soldier, rolls himself in
his blanket, and the falling snow, which he did not have to bring in his
knapsack, is his eider-down, in which he sleeps warm till the morning.
Nature herself gives the hint and the example, if we have wit to take
it. See how Nature keeps the lakes warm by tucking them up under a
blanket of ice, and the ground under a cloak of snow. The old forester
is never far from shelter; no matter how remote from camp or city, he
carries Bangor with him. A sudden shower cannot wet him, if he cares to
be dry; he draws his boat ashore, turns it over in a twinkling against
a clump of alders, with cat-briers, which keep up the lee-side, crawls
under it, with his comrade, and lies there till the shower is over,
happy in his stout roof. The boat is full of water, and resists all your
strength to drag it ashore and empty it. The fisherman looks about him,
puts a round stick of wood underneath, and it rolls as on wheels at
once. Napoleon says, the Corsicans at the battle of Golo, not having had
time to cut down the bridge, which was of stone, made use of the bodies
of their dead to form an intrenchment. Malus, known for his discoveries
in the polarization of light, was captain of a corps of engineers in
Bonaparte's Egyptian campaign, which was heinously unprovided and
exposed. "Wanting a picket to which to attach my horse," he says, "I
tied him to my leg. I slept, and dreamed peaceably of the pleasures of
Europe." M. Tissenet had learned among the Indians to understand their
language, and, coming among a wild party of Illinois, he overheard them
say that they would scalp him. He said to them, "Will you scalp me? Here
is my scalp," and confounded them by lifting a little periwig he wore.
He then explained to them that he was a great medicine-man, and that
they did great wrong in wishing to harm him, who carried them all in his
heart. So he opened his shirt a little and showed to each of the savages
in turn the reflection of his own eyeball in a small pocket-mirror which
he had hung next to his skin. He assured them that if they should
provoke him he would burn up their rivers and their forests; and, taking
from his portmanteau a small phial of white brandy, he poured it into a
cup, and, lighting a straw at the fire in the wigwam, he kindled the
brandy (which they believed to be water), and burned it up before their
eyes. Then taking up a chip of dry pine, he drew a burning-glass from
his pocket and set the chip on fire.

What a new face courage puts on everything! A determined man, by his
very attitude and the tone of his voice, puts a stop to defeat, and
begins to conquer. "For they can conquer who believe they can." Every
one hears gladly that cheerful voice. He reveals to us the enormous
power of one man over masses of men; that one man whose eye commands the
end in view, and the means by which it can be attained, is not only
better than ten men or a hundred men, but victor over all mankind who do
not see the issue and the means. "When a man is once possessed with
fear," said the old French Marshal Montluc, "and loses his judgment, as
all men in a fright do, he knows not what he does. And it is the
principal thing you are to beg at the hands of Almighty God, to preserve
your understanding entire; for what danger soever there may be, there is
still one way or other to get off, and perhaps to your honor. But when
fear has once possessed you, God ye good even! You think you are flying
towards the poop when you are running towards the prow, and for one
enemy think you have ten before your eyes, as drunkards who see a
thousand candles at once."

Against the terrors of the mob, which, intoxicated with passion, and
once suffered to gain the ascendant, is diabolic and chaos come again,
good sense has many arts of prevention and of relief. Disorganization it
confronts with organization, with police, with military force. But in
earlier stages of the disorder it applies milder and nobler remedies.
The natural offset of terror is ridicule. And we have noted examples
among our orators, who have on conspicuous occasions handled and
controlled, and, best of all, converted a malignant mob, by superior
manhood, and by a wit which disconcerted, and at last delighted the
ringleaders. What can a poor truckman who is hired to groan and to hiss
do, when the orator shakes him into convulsions of laughter so that he
cannot throw his egg? If a good story will not answer, still milder
remedies sometimes serve to disperse a mob. Try sending round the
contribution-box. Mr. Marshall, the eminent manufacturer at Leeds, was
to preside at a Free-Trade festival in that city; it was threatened that
the operatives, who were in bad humor, would break up the meeting by a
mob. Mr. Marshall was a man of peace; he had the pipes laid from the
waterworks of his mill, with a stopcock by his chair from which he could
discharge a stream that would knock down an ox, and sat down very
peacefully to his dinner, which was not disturbed.

See the dexterity of the good aunt in keeping the young people all the
weary holiday busy and diverted without knowing it: the story, the
pictures, the ballad, the game, the cuckoo-clock, the stereoscope, the
rabbits, the mino bird, the pop-corn, and Christmas hemlock spurting in
the fire. The children never suspect how much design goes to it, and
that this unfailing fertility has been rehearsed a hundred times, when
the necessity came of finding for the little Asmodeus a rope of sand to
twist. She relies on the same principle that makes the strength of
Newton,--alternation of employment. See how he refreshed himself,
resting from the profound researches of the calculus by astronomy; from
astronomy by optics; from optics by chronology. 'Tis a law of chemistry
that every gas is a vacuum to every other gas; and when the mind has
exhausted its energies for one employment, it is still fresh and capable
of a different task. We have not a toy or trinket for idle amusement,
but somewhere it is the one thing needful for solid instruction or to
save the ship or army. In the Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, the torches
which each traveller carries make a dismal funeral procession, and serve
no purpose but to see the ground. When now and then the vaulted roof
rises high overhead, and hides all its possibilities in lofty depths,
'tis but gloom on gloom. But the guide kindled a Roman candle, and held
it here and there shooting its fireballs successively into each crypt of
the groined roof, disclosing its starry splendor, and showing for the
first time what that plaything was good for.

Whether larger or less, these strokes and all exploits rest at last on
the wonderful structure of the mind. And we learn that our doctrine of
resources must be carried into higher application, namely, to the
intellectual sphere. But every power in energy speedily arrives at its
limits, and requires to be husbanded; the law of light, which Newton
said proceeded by "fits of easy reflection and transmission"; the
come-and-go of the pendulum is the law of mind; alternation of labors is
its rest. I should like to have the statistics of bold experimenting on
the husbandry of mental power.

In England men of letters drink wine; in Scotland, whiskey; in France,
light wines; in Germany, beer. In England everybody rides in the saddle;
in France the theatre and the ball occupy the night. In this country we
have not learned how to repair the exhaustions of our climate. Is not
the seaside necessary in summer? Games, fishing, bowling, hunting,
gymnastics, dancing,--are not these needful to you? The chapter of
pastimes is very long. There are better games than billiards and whist.
'Twas a pleasing trait in Goethe's romance, that Makaria retires from
society "to astronomy and her correspondence."

I do not know that the treatise of Brillat Savarin on the Physiology of
Taste deserves its fame. I know its repute, and I have heard it called
the France of France. But the subject is so large and exigent that a few
particulars, and those the pleasures of the epicure, cannot satisfy. I
know many men of taste whose single opinions and practice would interest
much more. It should be extended to gardens and grounds, and mainly one
thing should be illustrated: that life in the country wants all things
on a low tone,--wants coarse clothes, old shoes, no fleet horse that a
man cannot hold, but an old horse that will stand tied in a pasture half
a day without risk, so allowing the picnic-party the full freedom of the
woods. Natural history is, in the country, most attractive; at once
elegant, immortal, always opening new resorts. The first care of a man
settling in the country should be to open the face of the earth to
himself, by a little knowledge of nature, or a great deal, if he can, of
birds, plants, rocks, astronomy; in short, the art of taking a walk.
This will draw the sting out of frost, dreariness out of November and
March, and the drowsiness out of August. To know the trees is, as
Spenser says of "the ash, for nothing ill." Shells, too; how hungry I
found myself, the other day, at Agassiz's Museum, for their names! But
the uses of the woods are many, and some of them for the scholar high
and peremptory. When his task requires the wiping out from memory

                "all trivial fond records
    That youth and observation copied there,"

he must leave the house, the streets, and the club, and go to wooded
uplands, to the clearing and the brook. Well for him if he can say with
the old minstrel, "I know where to find a new song."

If I go into the woods in winter, and am shown the thirteen or fourteen
species of willow that grow in Massachusetts, I learn that they quietly
expand in the warmer days, or when nobody is looking at them, and,
though insignificant enough in the general bareness of the forest, yet a
great change takes place in them between fall and spring; in the first
relentings of March they hasten, and long before anything else is ready,
these osiers hang out their joyful flowers in contrast to all the woods.
You cannot tell when they do bud and blossom, these vivacious trees, so
ancient, for they are almost the oldest of all. Among fossil remains,
the willow and the pine appear with the ferns. They bend all day to
every wind; the cart-wheel in the road may crush them; every passenger
may strike off a twig with his cane; every boy cuts them for a whistle;
the cow, the rabbit, the insect, bite the sweet and tender bark; yet, in
spite of accident and enemy, their gentle persistency lives when the oak
is shattered by storm, and grows in the night and snow and cold. When I
see in these brave plants this vigor and immortality in weakness, I find
a sudden relief and pleasure in observing the mighty law of vegetation,
and I think it more grateful and health-giving than any news I am likely
to find of man in the journals, and better than Washington politics.


It is easy to see that there is no limit to the chapter of Resources. I
have not, in all these rambling sketches, gone beyond the beginning of
my list. Resources of Man,--it is the inventory of the world, the roll
of arts and sciences; it is the whole of memory, the whole of invention;
it is all the power of passion, the majesty of virtue, and the
omnipotence of will.

But the one fact that shines through all this plenitude of powers is,
that, as is the receiver, so is the gift; that all these acquisitions
are victories of the good brain and brave heart; that the world belongs
to the energetic, belongs to the wise. It is in vain to make a paradise
but for good men. The tropics are one vast garden; yet man is more
miserably fed and conditioned there than in the cold and stingy zones.
The healthy, the civil, the industrious, the learned, the moral
race,--Nature herself only yields her secret to these. And the resources
of America and its future will be immense only to wise and virtuous men.




                        THE COMIC.




                        THE COMIC.


A TASTE for fun is all but universal in our species, which is the only
joker in nature. The rocks, the plants, the beasts, the birds, neither
do anything ridiculous, nor betray a perception of anything absurd done
in their presence. And as the lower nature does not jest, neither does
the highest. The Reason pronounces its omniscient yea and nay, but
meddles never with degrees or fractions; and it is in comparing
fractions with essential integers or wholes that laughter begins.

Aristotle's definition of the ridiculous is, "what is out of time and
place, without danger." If there be pain and danger, it becomes tragic;
if not, comic. I confess, this definition, though by an admirable
definer, does not satisfy me, does not say all we know.

The essence of all jokes, of all comedy, seems to be an honest or
well-intended halfness; a non-performance of what is pretended to be
performed, at the same time that one is giving loud pledges of
performance. The balking of the intellect, the frustrated expectation,
the break of continuity in the intellect, is comedy; and it announces
itself physically in the pleasant spasms we call laughter.

With the trifling exception of the stratagems of a few beasts and birds,
there is no seeming, no halfness in nature, until the appearance of man.
Unconscious creatures do the whole will of wisdom. An oak or a chestnut
undertakes no function it cannot execute; or if there be phenomena in
botany which we call abortions, the abortion is also a function of
nature, and assumes to the intellect the like completeness with the
further function, to which in different circumstances it had attained.
The same rule holds true of the animals. Their activity is marked by
unerring good-sense. But man, through his access to Reason, is capable
of the perception of a whole and a part. Reason is the whole, and
whatsoever is not that is a part. The whole of nature is agreeable to
the whole of thought, or to the Reason; but separate any part of nature,
and attempt to look at it as a whole by itself, and the feeling of the
ridiculous begins. The perpetual game of humor is to look with
considerate good-nature at every object in existence _aloof_, as a man
might look at a mouse, comparing it with the eternal Whole; enjoying the
figure which each self-satisfied particular creature cuts in the
unrespecting All, and dismissing it with a benison. Separate any object,
as a particular bodily man, a horse, a turnip, a flour-barrel, an
umbrella, from the connection of things, and contemplate it alone,
standing there in absolute nature, it becomes at once comic; no useful,
no respectable qualities can rescue it from the ludicrous.

In virtue of man's access to Reason or the Whole, the human form is a
pledge of wholeness, suggests to our imagination the perfection of truth
or goodness, and exposes by contrast any halfness or imperfection. We
have a primary association between perfectness and this form. But the
facts that occur when actual men enter do not make good this
anticipation; a discrepancy which is at once detected by the intellect,
and the outward sign is the muscular irritation of laughter.

Reason does not joke, and men of reason do not; a prophet, in whom the
moral sentiment predominates, or a philosopher, in whom the love of
truth predominates, these do not joke, but they bring the standard, the
ideal whole, exposing all actual defect; and hence, the best of all
jokes is the sympathetic contemplation of things by the understanding
from the philosopher's point of view. There is no joke so true and deep
in actual life, as when some pure idealist goes up and down among the
institutions of society, attended by a man who knows the world, and who,
sympathizing with the philosopher's scrutiny, sympathizes also with the
confusion and indignation of the detected skulking institutions. His
perception of disparity, his eye wandering perpetually from the rule to
the crooked, lying, thieving fact, makes the eyes run over with
laughter.

This is the radical joke of life and then of literature. The presence of
the ideal of right and of truth in all action makes the yawning
delinquencies of practice remorseful to the conscience, tragic to the
interest, but droll to the intellect. The activity of our sympathies may
for a time hinder our perceiving the fact intellectually, and so
deriving mirth from it; but all falsehoods, all vices seen at sufficient
distance, seen from the point where our moral sympathies do not
interfere, become ludicrous. The comedy is in the intellect's perception
of discrepancy. And whilst the presence of the ideal discovers the
difference, the comedy is enhanced whenever that ideal is embodied
visibly in a man. Thus Falstaff, in Shakspeare, is a character of the
broadest comedy, giving himself unreservedly to his senses, coolly
ignoring the Reason, whilst he invokes its name, pretending to
patriotism and to parental virtues, not with any intent to deceive, but
only to make the fun perfect by enjoying the confusion betwixt reason
and the negation of reason,--in other words, the rank rascaldom he is
calling by its name. Prince Hal stands by, as the acute understanding,
who sees the Right and sympathizes with it, and in the heyday of youth
feels also the full attractions of pleasure, and is thus eminently
qualified to enjoy the joke. At the same time he is to that degree under
the Reason, that it does not amuse him as much as it amuses another
spectator.

If the essence of the comic be the contrast in the intellect between the
idea and the false performance, there is good reason why we should be
affected by the exposure. We have no deeper interest than our integrity,
and that we should be made aware by joke and by stroke, of any lie we
entertain. Besides, a perception of the comic seems to be a
balance-wheel in our metaphysical structure. It appears to be an
essential element in a fine character. Wherever the intellect is
constructive, it will be found. We feel the absence of it as a defect in
the noblest and most oracular soul. The perception of the comic is a tie
of sympathy with other men, a pledge of sanity, and a protection from
those perverse tendencies and gloomy insanities in which fine intellects
sometimes lose themselves. A rogue alive to the ludicrous is still
convertible. If that sense is lost, his fellow-men can do little for
him.

It is true the sensibility to the ludicrous may run into excess. Men
celebrate their perception of halfness and a latent lie by the peculiar
explosions of laughter. So painfully susceptible are some men to these
impressions, that if a man of wit come into the room where they are, it
seems to take them out of themselves with violent convulsions of the
face and sides, and obstreperous roarings of the throat. How often and
with what unfeigned compassion we have seen such a person receiving like
a willing martyr the whispers into his ear of a man of wit. The victim
who has just received the discharge, if in a solemn company, has the air
very much of a stout vessel which has just shipped a heavy sea; and
though it does not split it, the poor bark is for the moment critically
staggered. The peace of society and the decorum of tables seem to
require that next to a notable wit should always be posted a phlegmatic
bolt-upright man, able to stand without movement of muscle whole
broadsides of this Greek fire. It is a true shaft of Apollo, and
traverses the universe, and unless it encounter a mystic or a dumpish
soul, goes everywhere heralded and harbingered by smiles and greetings.
Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions. No dignity, no
learning, no force of character, can make any stand against good wit. It
is like ice, on which no beauty of form, no majesty of carriage, can
plead any immunity,--they must walk gingerly, according to the laws of
ice, or down they must go, dignity and all. "Dost thou think, because
thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?" Plutarch
happily expresses the value of the jest as a legitimate weapon of the
philosopher. "Men cannot exercise their rhetoric unless they speak, but
their philosophy even whilst they are silent or jest merrily; for as it
is the highest degree of injustice not to be just and yet seem so, so it
is the top of wisdom to philosophize yet not appear to do it, and in
mirth to do the same with those that are serious and seem in earnest;
for as in Euripides, the Bacchæ, though unprovided of iron weapons and
unarmed, wounded their invaders with the boughs of trees, which they
carried, thus the very jests and merry talk of true philosophers move
those that are not altogether insensible, and unusually reform."

In all the parts of life, the occasion of laughter is some seeming, some
keeping of the word to the ear and eye, whilst it is broken to the soul.
Thus, as the religious sentiment is the most vital and sublime of all
our sentiments, and capable of the most prodigious effects, so is it
abhorrent to our whole nature, when, in the absence of the sentiment,
the act or word or officer volunteers to stand in its stead. To the
sympathies this is shocking, and occasions grief. But to the intellect
the lack of the sentiment gives no pain; it compares incessantly the
sublime idea with the bloated nothing which pretends to be it, and the
sense of the disproportion is comedy. And as the religious sentiment is
the most real and earnest thing in nature, being a mere rapture, and
excluding, when it appears, all other considerations, the vitiating this
is the greatest lie. Therefore, the oldest gibe of literature is the
ridicule of false religion. This is the joke of jokes. In religion, the
sentiment is all; the ritual or ceremony indifferent. But the inertia of
men inclines them, when the sentiment sleeps, to imitate that thing it
did; it goes through the ceremony omitting only the will, makes the
mistake of the wig for the head, the clothes for the man. The older the
mistake and the more overgrown the particular form is, the more
ridiculous to the intellect. Captain John Smith, the discoverer of New
England, was not wanting in humor. The Society in London which had
contributed their means to convert the savages, hoping doubtless to see
the Keokuks, Black Hawks, Roaring Thunders, and Tustanuggees of that day
converted into church-wardens and deacons at least, pestered the gallant
rover with frequent solicitations out of England touching the conversion
of the Indians, and the enlargement of the Church. Smith, in his
perplexity how to satisfy the Society, sent out a party into the swamp,
caught an Indian, and sent him home in the first ship to London, telling
the Society they might convert one themselves.

The satire reaches its climax when the actual Church is set in direct
contradiction to the dictates of the religious sentiment, as in the
sketch of our Puritan politics in Hudibras:--

    "Our brethren of New England use
    Choice malefactors to excuse,
    And hang the guiltless in their stead,
    Of whom the churches have less need;
    As lately happened, in a town
    Where lived a cobbler, and but one,
    That out of doctrine could cut use,
    And mend men's lives as well as shoes.
    This precious brother having slain,
    In times of peace, an Indian,
    Not out of malice, but mere zeal
    (Because he was an infidel),
    The mighty Tottipottymoy
    Sent to our elders an envoy,
    Complaining loudly of the breach
    Of league held forth by Brother Patch,
    Against the articles in force
    Between both churches, his and ours,
    For which he craved the saints to render
    Into his hands, or hang the offender;
    But they, maturely having weighed
    They had no more but him o' th' trade
    (A man that served them in the double
    Capacity to teach and cobble),
    Resolved to spare him; yet to do
    The Indian Hoghan Moghan too
    Impartial justice, in his stead did
    Hang an old weaver that was bedrid."

In science the jest at pedantry is analogous to that in religion which
lies against superstition. A classification or nomenclature used by the
scholar only as a memorandum of his last lesson in the laws of nature,
and confessedly a makeshift, a bivouac for a night, and implying a march
and a conquest to-morrow, becomes through indolence a barrack and a
prison, in which the man sits down immovably, and wishes to detain
others. The physiologist Camper, humorously confesses the effect of his
studies in dislocating his ordinary associations. "I have been
employed," he says, "six months on the _Cetacea_; I understand the
osteology of the head of all these monsters, and have made the
combination with the human head so well, that everybody now appears to
me narwhale, porpoise, or marsouins. Women, the prettiest in society,
and those whom I find less comely, they are all either narwhales or
porpoises to my eyes." I chanced the other day to fall in with an odd
illustration of the remark I had heard, that the laws of disease are as
beautiful as the laws of health; I was hastening to visit an old and
honored friend, who, I was informed, was in a dying condition, when I
met his physician, who accosted me in great spirits, with joy sparkling
in his eyes. "And how is my friend, the reverend Doctor?" I inquired.
"O, I saw him this morning; it is the most correct apoplexy I have ever
seen: face and hands livid, breathing stertorous, all the symptoms
perfect." And he rubbed his hands with delight, for in the country we
cannot find every day a case that agrees with the diagnosis of the
books. I think there is malice in a very trifling story which goes
about, and which I should not take any notice of, did I not suspect it
to contain some satire upon my brothers of the Natural History Society.
It is of a boy who was learning his alphabet. "That letter is A," said
the teacher; "A," drawled the boy. "That is B," said the teacher; "B,"
drawled the boy, and so on. "That is W," said the teacher. "The devil!"
exclaimed the boy, "is that W?"

The pedantry of literature belongs to the same category. In both cases
there is a lie, when the mind, seizing a classification to help it to a
sincerer knowledge of the fact, stops in the classification; or learning
languages, and reading books, to the end of a better acquaintance with
man, stops in the languages and books: in both the learner seems to be
wise, and is not.

The same falsehood, the same confusion of the sympathies because a
pretension is not made good, points the perpetual satire against
poverty, since, according to Latin poetry and English doggerel,

    Poverty does nothing worse
    Than to make man ridiculous.

In this instance the halfness lies in the pretension of the parties to
some consideration on account of their condition. If the man is not
ashamed of his poverty, there is no joke. The poorest man who stands on
his manhood destroys the jest. The poverty of the saint, of the rapt
philosopher, of the naked Indian, is not comic. The lie is in the
surrender of the man to his appearance; as if a man should neglect
himself, and treat his shadow on the wall with marks of infinite
respect. It affects us oddly, as to see things turned upside down, or to
see a man in a high wind run after his hat, which is always droll. The
relation of the parties is inverted,--hat being for the moment master,
the by-standers cheering the hat. The multiplication of artificial wants
and expenses in civilized life, and the exaggeration of all trifling
forms, present innumerable occasions for this discrepancy to expose
itself. Such is the story told of the painter Astley, who, going out of
Rome one day with a party for a ramble in the Campagna, and the weather
proving hot, refused to take off his coat when his companions threw off
theirs, but sweltered on; which, exciting remark, his comrades playfully
forced off his coat, and behold on the back of his waistcoat a gay
cascade was thundering down the rocks with foam and rainbow, very
refreshing in so sultry a day,--a picture of his own, with which the
poor painter had been fain to repair the shortcomings of his wardrobe.
The same astonishment of the intellect at the disappearance of the man
out of nature, through some superstition of his house or equipage, as if
truth and virtue should be bowed out of creation by the clothes they
wore, is the secret of all the fun that circulates concerning eminent
fops and fashionists, and, in like manner, of the gay Rameau of Diderot,
who believes in nothing but hunger, and that the sole end of art,
virtue, and poetry is to put something for mastication between the upper
and lower mandibles.

Alike in all these cases and in the instance of cowardice or fear of any
sort, from the loss of life to the loss of spoons, the majesty of man is
violated. He, whom all things should serve, serves some one of his own
tools. In fine pictures the head sheds on the limbs the expression of
the face. In Raphael's Angel driving Heliodorus from the Temple, the
crest of the helmet is so remarkable, that but for the extraordinary
energy of the face, it would draw the eye too much; but the countenance
of the celestial messenger subordinates it, and we see it not. In poor
pictures the limbs and trunk degrade the face. So among the women in the
street: you shall see one whose bonnet and dress are one thing, and the
lady herself quite another, wearing withal an expression of meek
submission to her bonnet and dress; and another whose dress obeys and
heightens the expression of her form.

More food for the comic is afforded whenever the personal appearance,
the face, form, and manners, are subjects of thought with the man
himself. No fashion is the best fashion for those matters which will
take care of themselves. This is the butt of those jokes of the Paris
drawing-rooms, which Napoleon reckoned so formidable, and which are
copiously recounted in the French Mémoires. A lady of high rank, but of
lean figure, had given the Countess Dulauloy the nickname of "Le
Grenadier tricolore," in allusion to her tall figure, as well as to her
republican opinions; the Countess retaliated by calling Madame "the
Venus of the Père-la-Chaise," a compliment to her skeleton which did
not fail to circulate. "Lord C.," said the Countess of Gordon, "O, he is
a perfect comb, all teeth and back." The Persians have a pleasant story
of Tamerlane which relates to the same particulars: "Timur was an ugly
man; he had a blind eye and a lame foot. One day when Chodscha was with
him, Timur scratched his head, since the hour of the barber was come,
and commanded that the barber should be called. Whilst he was shaven,
the barber gave him a looking-glass in his hand. Timur saw himself in
the mirror and found his face quite too ugly. Therefore he began to
weep; Chodscha also set himself to weep, and so they wept for two hours.
On this, some courtiers began to comfort Timur, and entertained him with
strange stories in order to make him forget all about it. Timur ceased
weeping, but Chodscha ceased not, but began now first to weep amain, and
in good earnest. At last said Timur to Chodscha, 'Hearken! I have looked
in the mirror, and seen myself ugly. Thereat I grieved, because,
although I am Caliph, and have also much wealth, and many wives, yet
still I am so ugly; therefore have I wept. But thou, why weepest thou
without ceasing?' Chodscha answered, 'If thou hast only seen thy face
once, and at once seeing hast not been able to contain thyself, but hast
wept, what should we do,--we who see thy face every day and night? If we
weep not, who should weep? Therefore have I wept.' Timur almost split
his sides with laughing."

Politics also furnish the same mark for satire. What is nobler than the
expansive sentiment of patriotism, which would find brothers in a whole
nation? But when this enthusiasm is perceived to end in the very
intelligible maxims of trade, so much for so much, the intellect feels
again the half-man. Or what is fitter than that we should espouse and
carry a principle against all opposition? But when the men appear who
ask our votes as representatives of this ideal, we are sadly out of
countenance.

But there is no end to this analysis. We do nothing that is not
laughable whenever we quit our spontaneous sentiment. All our plans,
managements, houses, poems, if compared with the wisdom and love which
man represents, are equally imperfect and ridiculous. But we cannot
afford to part with any advantages. We must learn by laughter, as well
as by tears and terrors; explore the whole of nature,--the farce and
buffoonery in the yard below, as well as the lessons of poets and
philosophers upstairs, in the hall,--and get the rest and refreshment of
the shaking of the sides. But the comic also has its own speedy limits.
Mirth quickly becomes intemperate, and the man would soon die of
inanition, as some persons have been tickled to death. The same scourge
whips the joker and the enjoyer of the joke. When Carlini was convulsing
Naples with laughter, a patient waited on a physician in that city, to
obtain some remedy for excessive melancholy, which was rapidly consuming
his life. The physician endeavored to cheer his spirits, and advised him
to go to the theatre and see Carlini. He replied, "I am Carlini."




                        QUOTATION AND ORIGINALITY.




                        QUOTATION AND ORIGINALITY.


WHOEVER looks at the insect world, at flies, aphides, gnats, and
innumerable parasites, and even at the infant mammals, must have
remarked the extreme content they take in suction, which constitutes the
main business of their life. If we go into a library or news-room, we
see the same function on a higher plane, performed with like ardor, with
equal impatience of interruption, indicating the sweetness of the act.
In the highest civilization the book is still the highest delight. He
who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against
calamity. Like Plato's disciple who has perceived a truth, "he is
preserved from harm until another period." In every man's memory, with
the hours when life culminated are usually associated certain books
which met his views. Of a large and powerful class we might ask with
confidence, What is the event they most desire? what gift? What but the
book that shall come, which they have sought through all libraries,
through all languages, that shall be to their mature eyes what many a
tinsel-covered toy pamphlet was to their childhood, and shall speak to
the imagination? Our high respect for a well-read man is praise enough
of literature. If we encountered a man of rare intellect, we should ask
him what books he read. We expect a great man to be a good reader; or in
proportion to the spontaneous power should be the assimilating power.
And though such are a more difficult and exacting class, they are not
less eager. "He that borrows the aid of an equal understanding," said
Burke, "doubles his own; he that uses that of a superior elevates his
own to the stature of that he contemplates."

We prize books, and they prize them most who are themselves wise. Our
debt to tradition through reading and conversation is so massive, our
protest or private addition so rare and insignificant,--and this
commonly on the ground of other reading or hearing,--that, in a large
sense, one would say there is no pure originality. All minds quote. Old
and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that
is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by
delight, we all quote. We quote not only books and proverbs, but arts,
sciences, religion, customs, and laws; nay, we quote temples and houses,
tables and chairs by imitation. The Patent-Office Commissioner knows
that all machines in use have been invented and re-invented over and
over; that the mariner's compass, the boat, the pendulum, glass, movable
types, the kaleidoscope, the railway, the power-loom, etc., have been
many times found and lost, from Egypt, China, and Pompeii down; and if
we have arts which Rome wanted, so also Rome had arts which we have
lost; that the invention of yesterday of making wood indestructible by
means of vapor of coal-oil or paraffine was suggested by the Egyptian
method which has preserved its mummy-cases four thousand years.

The highest statement of new philosophy complacently caps itself with
some prophetic maxim from the oldest learning. There is something
mortifying in this perpetual circle. This extreme economy argues a very
small capital of invention. The stream of affection flows broad and
strong; the practical activity is a river of supply; but the dearth of
design accuses the penury of intellect. How few thoughts! In a hundred
years, millions of men, and not a hundred lines of poetry, not a theory
of philosophy that offers a solution of the great problems, not an art
of education that fulfils the conditions. In this delay and vacancy of
thought we must make the best amends we can by seeking the wisdom of
others to fill the time.

If we confine ourselves to literature, 'tis easy to see that the debt is
immense to past thought. None escapes it. The originals are not
original. There is imitation, model, and suggestion, to the very
archangels, if we knew their history. The first book tyrannizes over the
second. Read Tasso, and you think of Virgil; read Virgil, and you think
of Homer; and Milton forces you to reflect how narrow are the limits of
human invention. The "Paradise Lost" had never existed but for these
precursors; and if we find in India or Arabia a book out of our horizon
of thought and tradition, we are soon taught by new researches in its
native country to discover its foregoers, and its latent, but real
connection with our own Bibles.

Read in Plato, and you shall find Christian dogmas, and not only so, but
stumble on our evangelical phrases. Hegel pre-exists in Proclus, and,
long before, in Heraclitus and Parmenides. Whoso knows Plutarch, Lucian,
Rabelais, Montaigne, and Bayle will have a key to many supposed
originalities. Rabelais is the source of many a proverb, story, and
jest, derived from him into all modern languages; and if we knew
Rabelais's reading, we should see the rill of the Rabelais river.
Swedenborg, Behmen, Spinoza, will appear original to uninstructed and to
thoughtless persons: their originality will disappear to such as are
either well-read or thoughtful; for scholars will recognize their dogmas
as reappearing in men of a similar intellectual elevation throughout
history. Albert, the "wonderful doctor," St. Buonaventura, the "seraphic
doctor," Thomas Aquinas, the "angelic doctor" of the thirteenth century,
whose books made the sufficient culture of these ages, Dante absorbed
and he survives for us. "Renard the Fox," a German poem of the
thirteenth century, was long supposed to be the original work, until
Grimm found fragments of another original a century older. M. Le Grand
showed that in the old Fabliaux were the originals of the tales of
Molière, La Fontaine, Boccaccio, and of Voltaire.

Mythology is no man's work; but, what we daily observe in regard to the
_bon-mots_ that circulate in society,--that every talker helps a story
in repeating it, until, at last, from the slenderest filament of fact a
good fable is constructed,--the same growth befalls mythology: the
legend is tossed from believer to poet, from poet to believer, everybody
adding a grace or dropping a fault or rounding the form, until it gets
an ideal truth.

Religious literature, the psalms and liturgies of churches, are of
course of this slow growth,--a fagot of selections gathered through
ages, leaving the worse, and saving the better, until it is at last the
work of the whole communion of worshippers. The Bible itself is like an
old Cremona; it has been played upon by the devotion of thousands of
years, until every word and particle is public and tunable. And whatever
undue reverence may have been claimed for it by the prestige of philonic
inspiration, the stronger tendency we are describing is likely to undo.
What divines had assumed as the distinctive revelations of Christianity,
theologic criticism has matched by exact parallelisms from the Stoics
and poets of Greece and Rome. Later, when Confucius and the Indian
scriptures were made known, no claim to monopoly of ethical wisdom could
be thought of; and the surprising results of the new researches into the
history of Egypt have opened to us the deep debt of the churches of Rome
and England to the Egyptian hierology.

The borrowing is often honest enough, and comes of magnanimity and
stoutness. A great man quotes bravely and will not draw on his invention
when his memory serves him with a word as good. What he quotes, he fills
with his own voice and humor, and the whole cyclopædia of his
table-talk is presently believed to be his own. Thirty years ago, when
Mr. Webster at the bar or in the Senate filled the eyes and minds of
young men, you might often hear cited as Mr. Webster's three rules:
first, never to do to-day what he could defer till to-morrow; secondly,
never to do himself what he could make another do for him; and, thirdly,
never to pay any debt to-day. Well, they are none the worse for being
already told, in the last generation, of Sheridan; and we find in
Grimm's _Mémoires_ that Sheridan got them from the witty D'Argenson;
who, no doubt, if we could consult him, could tell of whom he first
heard them told. In our own college days we remember hearing other
pieces of Mr. Webster's advice to students,--among others, this: that,
when he opened a new book, he turned to the table of contents, took a
pen, and sketched a sheet of matters and topics,--what he knew and what
he thought,--before he read the book. But we find in Southey's
"Commonplace Book" this said of the Earl of Strafford: "I learned one
rule of him," says Sir G. Radcliffe, "which I think worthy to be
remembered. When he met with a well-penned oration or tract upon any
subject, he framed a speech upon the same argument, inventing and
disposing what seemed fit to be said upon that subject, before he read
the book; then, reading, compared his own with the author's, and noted
his own defects and the author's art and fulness; whereby he drew all
that ran in the author more strictly, and might better judge of his own
wants to supply them." I remember to have heard Mr. Samuel Rogers, in
London, relate, among other anecdotes of the Duke of Wellington, that a
lady having expressed in his presence a passionate wish to witness a
great victory, he replied: "Madam, there is nothing so dreadful as a
great victory,--excepting a great defeat." But this speech is also
D'Argenson's, and is reported by Grimm. So the sarcasm attributed to
Lord Eldon upon Brougham, his predecessor on the woolsack, "What a
wonderful versatile mind has Brougham! he knows politics, Greek,
history, science; if he only knew a little of law, he would know a
little of everything." You may find the original of this gibe in Grimm,
who says that Louis XVI., going out of chapel after hearing a sermon
from the Abbé Maury, said, "_Si l'Abbé nous avait parlé un peu de
religion, il nous aurait parlé de tout_." A pleasantry which ran
through all the newspapers a few years since, taxing the eccentricities
of a gifted family connection in New England, was only a theft of Lady
Mary Wortley Montagu's _mot_ of a hundred years ago, that "the world was
made up of men and women and Herveys."

Many of the historical proverbs have a doubtful paternity. Columbus's
egg is claimed for Brunelleschi. Rabelais's dying words, "I am going to
see the great Perhaps" (_le grand Peut-être_), only repeats the "IF"
inscribed on the portal of the temple at Delphi. Goethe's favorite
phrase, "the open secret," translates Aristotle's answer to Alexander,
"These books are published and not published." Madame de Staël's
"Architecture is frozen music" is borrowed from Goethe's "dumb music,"
which is Vitruvius's rule, that "the architect must not only understand
drawing, but music." Wordsworth's hero acting "on the plan which pleased
his childish thought," is Schiller's "Tell him to reverence the dreams
of his youth," and earlier, Bacon's "_Consilia juventutis plus
divinitatis habent_."

In romantic literature examples of this vamping abound. The fine verse
in the old Scotch ballad of "The Drowned Lovers,"

    "Thou art roaring ower loud, Clyde water,
      Thy streams are ower strang;
    Make me thy wrack when I come back,
      But spare me when I gang,"

is a translation of Martial's epigram on Hero and Leander, where the
prayer of Leander is the same:--

    "Parcite dum propero, mergite dum redeo."

Hafiz furnished Burns with the song of "John Barleycorn," and furnished
Moore with the original of the piece,

    "When in death I shall calm recline,
    Oh, bear my heart to my mistress dear," etc.

There are many fables which, as they are found in every language, and
betray no sign of being borrowed, are said to be agreeable to the human
mind. Such are "The Seven Sleepers," "Gyges's Ring," "The Travelling
Cloak," "The Wandering Jew," "The Pied Piper," "Jack and his Beanstalk,"
the "Lady Diving in the Lake and Rising in the Cave,"--whose
omnipresence only indicates how easily a good story crosses all
frontiers. The popular incident of Baron Munchausen, who hung his bugle
up by the kitchen fire, and the frozen tune thawed out, is found in
Greece in Plato's time. Antiphanes, one of Plato's friends, laughingly
compared his writings to a city where the words froze in the air as soon
as they were pronounced, and the next summer, when they were warmed and
melted by the sun, the people heard what had been spoken in the winter.
It is only within this century that England and America discovered that
their nursery-tales were old German and Scandinavian stories; and now it
appears that they came from India, and are the property of all the
nations descended from the Aryan race, and have been warbled and babbled
between nurses and children for unknown thousands of years.

If we observe the tenacity with which nations cling to their first types
of costume, of architecture, of tools and methods in tillage, and of
decoration,--if we learn how old are the patterns of our shawls, the
capitals of our columns, the fret, the beads, and other ornaments on our
walls, the alternate lotus-bud and leaf-stem of our iron fences,--we
shall think very well of the first men, or ill of the latest.

Now shall we say that only the first men were well alive, and the
existing generation is invalided and degenerate? Is all literature
eavesdropping, and all art Chinese imitation? our life a custom, and our
body borrowed, like a beggar's dinner, from a hundred charities? A more
subtle and severe criticism might suggest that some dislocation has
befallen the race; that men are off their centre; that multitudes of men
do not live with Nature, but behold it as exiles. People go out to look
at sunrises and sunsets who do not recognize their own quietly and
happily, but know that it is foreign to them. As they do by books, so
they _quote_ the sunset and the star, and do not make them theirs. Worse
yet, they live as foreigners in the world of truth, and quote thoughts,
and thus disown them. Quotation confesses inferiority. In opening a new
book we often discover, from the unguarded devotion with which the
writer gives his motto or text, all we have to expect from him. If Lord
Bacon appears already in the preface, I go and read the "Instauration"
instead of the new book.

The mischief is quickly punished in general and in particular. Admirable
mimics have nothing of their own. In every kind of parasite, when Nature
has finished an aphis, a teredo, or a vampire bat,--an excellent
sucking-pipe to tap another animal, or a mistletoe or dodder among
plants,--the self-supplying organs wither and dwindle, as being
superfluous. In common prudence there is an early limit to this leaning
on an original. In literature quotation is good only when the writer
whom I follow goes my way, and, being better mounted than I, gives me a
cast, as we say; but if I like the gay equipage so well as to go out of
my road, I had better have gone afoot.

But it is necessary to remember there are certain considerations which
go far to qualify a reproach too grave. This vast mental indebtedness
has every variety that pecuniary debt has,--every variety of merit. The
capitalist of either kind is as hungry to lend as the consumer to
borrow; and the transaction no more indicates intellectual turpitude in
the borrower than the simple fact of debt involves bankruptcy. On the
contrary, in far the greater number of cases the transaction is
honorable to both. Can we not help ourselves as discreetly by the force
of two in literature? Certainly it only needs two well placed and well
tempered for co-operation, to get somewhat far transcending any private
enterprise! Shall we converse as spies? Our very abstaining to repeat
and credit the fine remark of our friend is thievish. Each man of
thought is surrounded by wiser men than he, if they cannot write as
well. Cannot he and they combine? Cannot they sink their jealousies in
God's love, and call their poem Beaumont and Fletcher, or the Theban
Phalanx's? The city will for nine days or nine years make differences
and sinister comparisons: there is a new and more excellent public that
will bless the friends. Nay, it is an inevitable fruit of our social
nature. The child quotes his father, and the man quotes his friend. Each
man is a hero and an oracle to somebody, and to that person whatever he
says has an enhanced value. Whatever we think and say is wonderfully
better for our spirits and trust in another mouth. There is none so
eminent and wise but he knows minds whose opinion confirms or qualifies
his own: and men of extraordinary genius acquire an almost absolute
ascendant over their nearest companions. The Comte de Crillon said one
day to M. d'Allonville, with French vivacity, "If the universe and I
professed one opinion, and M. Necker expressed a contrary one, I should
be at once convinced that the universe and I were mistaken."

Original power is usually accompanied with assimilating power, and we
value in Coleridge his excellent knowledge and quotations perhaps as
much, possibly more, than his original suggestions. If an author give us
just distinctions, inspiring lessons, or imaginative poetry, it is not
so important to us whose they are. If we are fired and guided by these,
we know him as a benefactor, and shall return to him as long as he
serves us so well. We may like well to know what is Plato's and what is
Montesquieu's or Goethe's part, and what thought was always dear to the
writer himself; but the worth of the sentences consists in their
radiancy and equal aptitude to all intelligence. They fit all our facts
like a charm. We respect ourselves the more that we know them.

Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it.
Many will read the book before one thinks of quoting a passage. As soon
as he has done this, that line will be quoted east and west. Then there
are great ways of borrowing. Genius borrows nobly. When Shakspeare is
charged with debts to his authors, Landor replies: "Yet he was more
original than his originals. He breathed upon dead bodies and brought
them into life." And we must thank Karl Ottfried Müller for the just
remark, "Poesy, drawing within its circle all that is glorious and
inspiring, gave itself but little concern as to where its flowers
originally grew." So Voltaire usually imitated, but with such
superiority that Dubuc said: "He is like the false Amphitryon; although
the stranger, it is always he who has the air of being master of the
house." Wordsworth, as soon as he heard a good thing, caught it up,
meditated upon it, and very soon reproduced it in his conversation and
writing. If De Quincey said, "That is what I told you," he replied, "No:
that is mine,--mine, and not yours." On the whole, we like the valor of
it. 'Tis on Marmontel's principle, "I pounce on what is mine, wherever I
find it"; and on Bacon's broader rule, "I take all knowledge to be my
province." It betrays the consciousness that truth is the property of no
individual, but is the treasure of all men. And inasmuch as any writer
has ascended to a just view of man's condition, he has adopted this
tone. In so far as the receiver's aim is on life, and not on literature,
will be his indifference to the source. The nobler the truth or
sentiment, the less imports the question of authorship. It never
troubles the simple seeker from whom he derived such or such a
sentiment. Whoever expresses to us a just thought makes ridiculous the
pains of the critic who should tell him where such a word had been said
before. "It is no more according to Plato than according to me." Truth
is always present: it only needs to lift the iron lids of the mind's eye
to read its oracles. But the moment there is the purpose of display, the
fraud is exposed. In fact, it is as difficult to appropriate the
thoughts of others, as it is to invent. Always some steep transition,
some sudden alteration of temperature, of point or of view, betrays the
foreign interpolation.

There is, besides, a new charm in such intellectual works as, passing
through long time, have had a multitude of authors and improvers. We
admire that poetry which no man wrote,--no poet less than the genius of
humanity itself,--which is to be read in a mythology, in the effect of a
fixed or national style of pictures, of sculptures, or drama, or cities,
or sciences, on us. Such a poem also is language. Every word in the
language has once been used happily. The ear, caught by that felicity,
retains it, and it is used again and again, as if the charm belonged to
the word, and not to the life of thought which so enforced it. These
profane uses, of course, kill it, and it is avoided. But a quick wit can
at any time reinforce it, and it comes into vogue again. Then people
quote so differently: one finding only what is gaudy and popular;
another, the heart of the author, the report of his select and happiest
hour: and the reader sometimes giving more to the citation than he owes
to it. Most of the classical citations you shall hear or read in the
current journals or speeches were not drawn from the originals, but from
previous quotations in English books; and you can easily pronounce, from
the use and relevancy of the sentence, whether it had not done duty many
times before,--whether your jewel was got from the mine or from an
auctioneer. We are as much informed of a writer's genius by what he
selects as by what he originates. We read the quotation with his eyes,
and find a new and fervent sense; as a passage from one of the poets,
well recited, borrows new interest from the rendering. As the journals
say, "the italics are ours." The profit of books is according to the
sensibility of the reader. The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as
in a mine, until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it. The
passages of Shakspeare that we most prize were never quoted until within
this century; and Milton's prose, and Burke, even, have their best fame
within it. Every one, too, remembers his friends by their favorite
poetry or other reading.

Observe, also, that a writer appears to more advantage in the pages of
another book than in his own. In his own, he waits as a candidate for
your approbation; in another's, he is a lawgiver.

Then another's thoughts have a certain advantage with us simply because
they are another's. There is an illusion in a new phrase. A man hears a
fine sentence out of Swedenborg, and wonders at the wisdom, and is very
merry at heart that he has now got so fine a thing. Translate it out of
the new words into his own usual phrase, and he will wonder again at his
own simplicity, such tricks do fine words play with us.

'Tis curious what new interest an old author acquires by official
canonization in Tiraboschi, or Dr. Johnson, or Von Hammer-Purgstall, or
Hallam, or other historian of literature. Their registration of his
book, or citation of a passage, carries the sentimental value of a
college diploma. Hallam, though never profound, is a fair mind, able to
appreciate poetry, unless it becomes deep, being always blind and deaf
to imaginative and analogy-loving souls, like the Platonists, like
Giordano Bruno, like Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, and Vaughan; and Hallam
cites a sentence from Bacon or Sidney, and distinguishes a lyric of
Edwards or Vaux, and straightway it commends itself to us as if it had
received the Isthmian crown.

It is a familiar expedient of brilliant writers, and not less of witty
talkers, the device of ascribing their own sentence to an imaginary
person, in order to give it weight,--as Cicero, Cowley, Swift, Landor,
and Carlyle have done. And Cardinal de Retz, at a critical moment in the
Parliament of Paris, described himself in an extemporary Latin sentence,
which he pretended to quote from a classic author, and which told
admirably well. It is a curious reflex effect of this enhancement of our
thought by citing it from another, that many men can write better under
a mask than for themselves,--as Chatterton in archaic ballad, Le Sage in
Spanish costume, Macpherson as "Ossian,"--and, I doubt not, many a young
barrister in chambers in London, who forges good thunder for the
"Times," but never works as well under his own name. This is a sort of
dramatizing talent; as it is not rare to find great powers of
recitation, without the least original eloquence,--or people who copy
drawings with admirable skill, but are incapable of any design.

In hours of high mental activity we sometimes do the book too much
honor, reading out of it better things than the author wrote,--reading,
as we say, between the lines. You have had the like experience in
conversation: the wit was in what you heard, not in what the speakers
said. Our best thought came from others. We heard in their words a
deeper sense than the speakers put into them, and could express
ourselves in other people's phrases to finer purpose than they knew. In
Moore's Diary, Mr. Hallam is reported as mentioning at dinner one of his
friends who had said, "I don't know how it is, a thing that falls flat
from me seems quite an excellent joke when given at second-hand by
Sheridan. I never like my own _bon-mots_ until he adopts them." Dumont
was exalted by being used by Mirabeau, by Bentham, and by Sir Philip
Francis, who, again, was less than his own "Junius"; and James Hogg
(except in his poems "Kilmeny" and "The Witch of Fife") is but a
third-rate author, owing his fame to his effigy colossalized through the
lens of John Wilson,--who, again, writes better under the domino of
"Christopher North" than in his proper clothes. The bold theory of Delia
Bacon, that Shakspeare's plays were written by a society of wits,--by
Sir Walter Raleigh, Lord Bacon, and others around the Earl of
Southampton,--had plainly for her the charm of the superior meaning they
would acquire when read under this light; this idea of the authorship
controlling our appreciation of the works themselves. We once knew a man
overjoyed at the notice of his pamphlet in a leading newspaper. What
range he gave his imagination! Who could have written it? Was it not
Colonel Carbine, or Senator Tonitrus, or, at the least, Professor
Maximilian? Yes, he could detect in the style that fine Roman hand. How
it seemed the very voice of the refined and discerning public, inviting
merit at last to consent to fame, and come up and take place in the
reserved and authentic chairs! He carried the journal with haste to the
sympathizing Cousin Matilda, who is so proud of all we do. But what
dismay, when the good Matilda, pleased with his pleasure, confessed she
had written the criticism, and carried it with her own hands to the
post-office! "Mr. Wordsworth," said Charles Lamb, "allow me to introduce
to you my only admirer."

Swedenborg threw a formidable theory into the world, that every soul
existed in a society of souls, from which all its thoughts passed into
it, as the blood of the mother circulates in her unborn child; and he
noticed that, when in his bed,--alternately sleeping and
waking,--sleeping, he was surrounded by persons disputing and offering
opinions on the one side and on the other side of a proposition; waking,
the like suggestions occurred for and against the proposition as his own
thoughts; sleeping again, he saw and heard the speakers as before: and
this as often as he slept or waked. And if we expand the image, does it
not look as if we men were thinking and talking out of an enormous
antiquity, as if we stood, not in a coterie of prompters that filled a
sitting-room, but in a circle of intelligences that reached through all
thinkers, poets, inventors, and wits, men and women, English, German,
Celt, Aryan, Ninevite, Copt,--back to the first geometer, bard, mason,
carpenter, planter, shepherd,--back to the first negro, who, with more
health or better perception, gave a shriller sound or name for the thing
he saw and dealt with? Our benefactors are as many as the children who
invented speech, word by word. Language is a city, to the building of
which every human being brought a stone; yet he is no more to be
credited with the grand result than the acaleph which adds a cell to the
coral reef which is the basis of the continent.

Πάντα ῥεῖ: all things are in flux. It is inevitable that you
are indebted to the past. You are fed and formed by it. The old forest
is decomposed for the composition of the new forest. The old animals
have given their bodies to the earth to furnish through chemistry the
forming race, and every individual is only a momentary fixation of what
was yesterday another's, is to-day his, and will belong to a third
to-morrow. So it is in thought. Our knowledge is the amassed thought and
experience of innumerable minds: our language, our science, our
religion, our opinions, our fancies we inherited. Our country, customs,
laws, our ambitions, and our notions of fit and fair,--all these we
never made; we found them ready-made; we but quote them. Goethe frankly
said, "What would remain to me if this art of appropriation were
derogatory to genius? Every one of my writings has been furnished to me
by a thousand different persons, a thousand things: wise and foolish
have brought me, without suspecting it, the offering of their thoughts,
faculties, and experience. My work is an aggregation of beings taken
from the whole of nature; it bears the name of Goethe."

But there remains the indefeasible persistency of the individual to be
himself. One leaf, one blade of grass, one meridian, does not resemble
another. Every mind is different; and the more it is unfolded, the more
pronounced is that difference. He must draw the elements into him for
food, and, if they be granite and silex, will prefer them cooked by sun
and rain, by time and art, to his hand. But, however received, these
elements pass into the substance of his constitution, will be
assimilated, and tend always to form, not a partisan, but a possessor of
truth. To all that can be said of the preponderance of the Past, the
single word Genius is a sufficient reply. The divine resides in the new.
The divine never quotes, but is, and creates. The profound apprehension
of the Present is Genius, which makes the Past forgotten. Genius
believes its faintest presentiment against the testimony of all history;
for it knows that facts are not ultimates, but that a state of mind is
the ancestor of everything. And what is Originality? It is being, being
one's self, and reporting accurately what we see and are. Genius is, in
the first instance, sensibility, the capacity of receiving just
impressions from the external world, and the power of co-ordinating
these after the laws of thought. It implies Will, or original force, for
their right distribution and expression. If to this the sentiment of
piety be added, if the thinker feels that the thought most strictly his
own is not his own, and recognizes the perpetual suggestion of the
Supreme Intellect, the oldest thoughts become new and fertile whilst he
speaks them.

Originals never lose their value. There is always in them a style and
weight of speech, which the immanence of the oracle bestowed, and which
cannot be counterfeited. Hence the permanence of the high poets. Plato,
Cicero, and Plutarch cite the poets in the manner in which Scripture is
quoted in our churches. A phrase or a single word is adduced, with
honoring emphasis, from Pindar, Hesiod, or Euripides, as precluding all
argument, because thus had they said: importing that the bard spoke not
his own, but the words of some god. True poets have always ascended to
this lofty platform, and met this expectation. Shakspeare, Milton,
Wordsworth, were very conscious of their responsibilities. When a man
thinks happily, he finds no foot-track in the field he traverses. All
spontaneous thought is irrespective of all else. Pindar uses this
haughty defiance, as if it were impossible to find his sources: "There
are many swift darts within my quiver, which have a voice for those with
understanding; but to the crowd they need interpreters. He is gifted
with genius who knoweth much by natural talent."

Our pleasure in seeing each mind take the subject to which it has a
proper right is seen in mere fitness in time. He that comes second must
needs quote him that comes first. The earliest describers of savage
life, as Captain Cook's account of the Society Islands, or Alexander
Henry's travels among our Indian tribes, have a charm of truth and just
point of view. Landsmen and sailors freshly come from the most civilized
countries, and with no false expectation, no sentimentality yet about
wild life, healthily receive and report what they saw,--seeing what they
must, and using no choice; and no man suspects the superior merit of the
description, until Chateaubriand, or Moore, or Campbell, or Byron, or
the artists arrive, and mix so much art with their picture that the
incomparable advantage of the first narrative appears. For the same
reason we dislike that the poet should choose an antique or far-fetched
subject for his muse, as if he avowed want of insight. The great deal
always with the nearest. Only as braveries of too prodigal power can we
pardon it, when the life of genius is so redundant that out of petulance
it flings its fire into some old mummy, and, lo! it walks and blushes
again here in the street.

We cannot overstate our debt to the Past, but the moment has the supreme
claim. The Past is for us; but the sole terms on which it can become
ours are its subordination to the Present. Only an inventor knows how to
borrow, and every man is or should be an inventor. We must not tamper
with the organic motion of the soul. 'Tis certain that thought has its
own proper motion, and the hints which flash from it, the words
overheard at unawares by the free mind, are trustworthy and fertile,
when obeyed, and not perverted to low and selfish account. This vast
memory is only raw material. The divine gift is ever the instant life,
which receives and uses and creates, and can well bury the old in the
omnipotency with which Nature decomposes all her harvest for
recomposition.




                        PROGRESS OF CULTURE.




                        PROGRESS OF CULTURE.


    ADDRESS READ BEFORE THE Φ Β Κ SOCIETY AT CAMBRIDGE,
                        JULY 18, 1867.


WE meet to-day under happy omens to our ancient society, to the
commonwealth of letters, to the country, and to mankind. No good citizen
but shares the wonderful prosperity of the Federal Union. The heart
still beats with the public pulse of joy, that the country has withstood
the rude trial which threatened its existence, and thrills with the vast
augmentation of strength which it draws from this proof. The storm which
has been resisted is a crown of honor and a pledge of strength to the
ship. We may be well contented with our fair inheritance. Was ever such
coincidence of advantages in time and place as in America to-day?--the
fusion of races and religions; the hungry cry for men which goes up from
the wide continent; the answering facility of immigration, permitting
every wanderer to choose his climate and government. Men come hither by
nations. Science surpasses the old miracles of mythology, to fly with
them over the sea, and to send their messages under it. They come from
crowded, antiquated kingdoms to the easy sharing of our simple forms.
Land without price is offered to the settler, cheap education to his
children. The temper of our people delights in this whirl of life. Who
would live in the stone age, or the bronze, or the iron, or the
lacustrine? Who does not prefer the age of steel, of gold, of coal,
petroleum, cotton, steam, electricity, and the spectroscope?

  "Prisca juvent alios, ego me nunc denique natum Gratulor."

All this activity has added to the value of life, and to the scope of
the intellect. I will not say that American institutions have given a
new enlargement to our idea of a finished man, but they have added
important features to the sketch.

Observe the marked ethical quality of the innovations urged or adopted.
The new claim of woman to a political status is itself an honorable
testimony to the civilization which has given her a civil status new in
history. Now that, by the increased humanity of law she controls her
property, she inevitably takes the next step to her share in power. The
war gave us the abolition of slavery, the success of the Sanitary
Commission and of the Freedmen's Bureau. Add to these the new scope of
social science; the abolition of capital punishment and of imprisonment
for debt; the improvement of prisons; the efforts for the suppression of
intemperance; the search for just rules affecting labor; the
co-operative societies; the insurance of life and limb; the free-trade
league; the improved alms-houses; the enlarged scale of charities to
relieve local famine, or burned towns, or the suffering Greeks; the
incipient series of international congresses,--all, one may say, in a
high degree revolutionary,--teaching nations the taking of government
into their own hands, and superseding kings.

The spirit is new. A silent revolution has impelled, step by step, all
this activity. A great many full-blown conceits have burst. The coxcomb
goes to the wall. To his astonishment he has found that this country and
this age belong to the most liberal persuasion; that the day of ruling
by scorn and sneers is past; that good sense is now in power, and _that_
resting on a vast constituency of intelligent labor, and, better yet, on
perceptions less and less dim of laws the most sublime. Men are now to
be astonished by seeing acts of good-nature, common civility, and
Christian charity proposed by statesmen, and executed by justices of the
peace,--by policemen and the constable. The fop is unable to cut the
patriot in the street; nay, he lies at his mercy in the ballot of the
club.

Mark, too, the large resources of a statesman, of a socialist, of a
scholar, in this age. When classes are exasperated against each other,
the peace of the world is always kept by striking a new note. Instantly
the units part, and form in a new order, and those who were opposed are
now side by side. In this country the prodigious mass of work that must
be done has either made new divisions of labor or created new
professions. Consider, at this time, what variety of issues, of
enterprises public and private, what genius of science, what of
administration, what of practical skill, what masters, each in his
several province, the railroad, the telegraph, the mines, the inland and
marine explorations, the novel and powerful philanthropies, as well as
agriculture, the foreign trade and the home trade (whose circuits in
this country are as spacious as the foreign), manufactures, the very
inventions, all on a national scale too, have evoked!--all implying the
appearance of gifted men, the rapid addition to our society of a class
of true nobles, by which the self-respect of each town and State is
enriched.

Take as a type the boundless freedom here in Massachusetts. People have
in all countries been burned and stoned for saying things which are
commonplaces at all our breakfast-tables. Every one who was in Italy
twenty-five years ago will remember the caution with which his host or
guest, in any house looked around him, if a political topic were
broached. Here the tongue is free, and the hand; and the freedom of
action goes to the brink, if not over the brink, of license.

A controlling influence of the times has been the wide and successful
study of Natural Science. Steffens said, "The religious opinions of men
rest on their views of nature." Great strides have been made within the
present century. Geology, astronomy, chemistry, optics, have yielded
grand results. The correlation of forces and the polarization of light
have carried us to sublime generalizations,--have affected an
imaginative race like poetic inspirations. We have been taught to tread
familiarly on giddy heights of thought, and to wont ourselves to daring
conjectures. The narrow sectarian cannot read astronomy with impunity.
The creeds of his church shrivel like dried leaves at the door of the
observatory, and a new and healthful air regenerates the human mind, and
imparts a sympathetic enlargement to its inventions and method. That
cosmical west-wind which, meteorologists tell us, constitutes, by the
revolution of the globe, the upper current, is alone broad enough to
carry to every city and suburb--to the farmer's house, the miner's
shanty, and the fisher's boat--the inspirations of this new hope of
mankind. Now, if any one say we have had enough of these boastful
recitals, then I say, Happy is the land wherein benefits like these have
grown trite and commonplace.

We confess that in America everything looks new and recent. Our towns
are still rude,--the make-shifts of emigrants,--and the whole
architecture tent-like, when compared with the monumental solidity of
mediæval and primeval remains in Europe and Asia. But geology has
effaced these distinctions. Geology, a science of forty or fifty
summers, has had the effect to throw an air of novelty and mushroom
speed over entire history. The oldest empires,--what we called venerable
antiquity,--now that we have true measures of duration, show like
creations of yesterday. 'Tis yet quite too early to draw sound
conclusions. The old six thousand years of chronology become a kitchen
clock,--no more a measure of time than an hour-glass or an
egg-glass,--since the duration of geologic periods has come into view.
Geology itself is only chemistry with the element of time added; and the
rocks of Nahant or the dikes of the White Hills disclose that the world
is a crystal, and the soil of the valleys and plains a continual
decomposition and recomposition. Nothing is old but the mind.

But I find not only this equality between new and old countries, as seen
by the eye of science, but also a certain equivalence of the ages of
history; and as the child is in his playthings working incessantly at
problems of natural philosophy,--working as hard and as successfully as
Newton,--so it were ignorance not to see that each nation and period has
done its full part to make up the result of existing civility. We are
all agreed that we have not on the instant better men to show than
Plutarch's heroes. The world is always equal to itself. We cannot yet
afford to drop Homer, nor Æschylus, nor Plato, nor Aristotle, nor
Archimedes. Later, each European nation, after the breaking up of the
Roman Empire, had its romantic era, and the productions of that era in
each rose to about the same height. Take for an example in literature
the _Romance of Arthur_, in Britain, or in the opposite province of
Brittany; the _Chansons de Roland_, in France; the Chronicle of the Cid,
in Spain; the _Niebelungen Lied_, in Germany; the Norse Sagas, in
Scandinavia; and, I may add, the Arabian Nights, on the African coast.
But if these works still survive and multiply, what shall we say of
names more distant, or hidden through their very superiority to their
coevals,--names of men who have left remains that certify a height of
genius in their several directions not since surpassed, and which men in
proportion to their wisdom still cherish,--as Zoroaster, Confucius, and
the grand scriptures, only recently known to Western nations, of the
Indian Vedas, the Institutes of Menu, the Puranas, the poems of the
Mahabarat and the Ramayana?

In modern Europe, the Middle Ages were called the Dark Ages. Who dares
to call them so now? They are seen to be the feet on which we walk, the
eyes with which we see. 'Tis one of our triumphs to have reinstated
them. Their Dante and Alfred and Wickliffe and Abelard and Bacon; their
Magna Charta, decimal numbers, mariner's compass, gunpowder, glass,
paper, and clocks; chemistry, algebra, astronomy; their Gothic
architecture, their painting,--are the delight and tuition of ours. Six
hundred years ago Roger Bacon explained the precession of the equinoxes,
and the necessity of reform in the calendar; looking over how many
horizons as far as into Liverpool and New York, he announced that
machines can be constructed to drive ships more rapidly than a whole
galley of rowers could do, nor would they need anything but a pilot to
steer; carriages, to move with incredible speed, without aid of animals;
and machines to fly into the air like birds. Even the races that we
still call savage or semi-savage, and which preserve their arts from
immemorial traditions, vindicate their faculty by the skill with which
they make their yam-cloths, pipes, bows, boats, and carved war-clubs.
The war-proa of the Malays in the Japanese waters struck Commodore Perry
by its close resemblance to the yacht "America."

As we find thus a certain equivalence in the ages, there is also an
equipollence of individual genius to the nation which it represents. It
is a curious fact, that a certain enormity of culture makes a man
invisible to his contemporaries. 'Tis always hard to go beyond your
public. If they are satisfied with cheap performance, you will not
easily arrive at better. If they know what is good, and require it, you
will aspire and burn until you achieve it. But, from time to time, in
history, men are born a whole age too soon. The founders of nations, the
wise men and inventors, who shine afterwards as their gods, were
probably martyrs in their own time. All the transcendent writers and
artists of the world,--'tis doubtful who they were,--they are lifted so
fast into mythology,--Homer, Menu, Viasa, Dædalus, Hermes, Zoroaster,
even Swedenborg and Shakspeare. The early names are too typical,--Homer,
or _blind man_; Menu, or _man_; Viasa, _compiler_; Dædalus, _cunning_;
Hermes, _interpreter_; and so on. Probably, the men were so great, so
self-fed, that the recognition of them by others was not necessary to
them. And every one has heard the remark (too often, I fear, politely
made), that the philosopher was above his audience. I think I have seen
two or three great men who, for that reason, were of no account among
scholars.

But Jove is in his reserves. The truth, the hope of any time, must
always be sought in the minorities. Michel Angelo was the conscience of
Italy. We grow free with his name, and find it ornamental now; but in
his own days, his friends were few; and you would need to hunt him in a
conventicle with the Methodists of the era, namely, Savonarola, Vittoria
Colonna, Contarini, Pole, Occhino,--superior souls, the religious of
that day, drawn to each other, and under some cloud with the rest of the
world,--reformers, the radicals of the hour, banded against the
corruptions of Rome, and as lonely and as hated as Dante before them.

I find the single mind equipollent to a multitude of minds, say to a
nation of minds, as a drop of water balances the sea; and under this
view the problem of culture assumes wonderful interest. Culture implies
all which gives the mind possession of its own powers; as languages to
the critic, telescope to the astronomer. Culture alters the political
status of an individual. It raises a rival royalty in a monarchy. 'Tis
king against king. It is ever the romance of history in all
dynasties,--the co-presence of the revolutionary force in intellect. It
creates a personal independence which the monarch cannot look down, and
to which he must often succumb. If a man know the laws of nature better
than other men, his nation cannot spare him; nor if he know the power of
numbers, the secret of geometry, of algebra, on which the computations
of astronomy, of navigation, of machinery, rest. If he can converse
better than any other, he rules the minds of men wherever he goes; if he
has imagination, he intoxicates men. If he has wit, he tempers despotism
by epigrams: a song, a satire, a sentence, has played its part in great
events. Eloquence a hundred times has turned the scale of war and peace
at will. The history of Greece is at one time reduced to two
persons,--Philip, or the successor of Philip, on one side, and
Demosthenes, a private citizen, on the other. If he has a military
genius, like Belisarius, or administrative faculty, like Chatham or
Bismarck, he is the king's king. If a theologian of deep convictions and
strong understanding carries his country with him, like Luther, the
state becomes Lutheran, in spite of the Emperor, as Thomas à Becket
overpowered the English Henry. Wit has a great charter. Popes and kings
and Councils of Ten are very sharp with their censorships and
inquisitions, but it is on dull people. Some Dante or Angelo, Rabelais,
Hafiz, Cervantes, Erasmus, Béranger, Bettine von Arnim, or whatever
genuine wit of the old inimitable class, is always allowed. Kings feel
that this is that which they themselves represent; this is no
red-kerchiefed, red-shirted rebel, but loyalty, kingship. This is real
kingship, and their own only titular. Even manners are a distinction,
which, we sometimes see, are not to be overborne by rank or official
power, or even by other eminent talents, since they too proceed from a
certain deep innate perception of fit and fair.

It is too plain that a cultivated laborer is worth many untaught
laborers; that a scientific engineer, with instruments and steam, is
worth many hundred men, many thousands; that Archimedes or Napoleon is
worth for labor a thousand thousands; and that in every wise and genial
soul we have England, Greece, Italy, walking, and can dispense with
populations of _navvies_.

Literary history and all history is a record of the power of minorities,
and of minorities of one. Every book is written with a constant secret
reference to the few intelligent persons whom the writer believes to
exist in the million. The artist has always the masters in his eye,
though he affect to flout them. Michel Angelo is thinking of Da Vinci,
and Raffaele is thinking of Michel Angelo. Tennyson would give his fame
for a verdict in his favor from Wordsworth. Agassiz and Owen and Huxley
affect to address the American and English people, but are really
writing to each other. Everett dreamed of Webster. McKay, the
shipbuilder, thinks of George Steers; and Steers, of Pook, the naval
constructor. The names of the masters at the head of each department of
science, art, or function are often little known to the world, but are
always known to the adepts; as Robert Brown in botany, and Gauss in
mathematics. Often the master is a hidden man, but not to the true
student; invisible to all the rest, resplendent to him. All his own work
and culture form the eye to see the master. In politics, mark the
importance of minorities of one, as of Phocion, Cato, Lafayette, Arago.
The importance of the one person who has the truth over nations who have
it not, is because power obeys reality, and not appearance; according to
quality, and not quantity. How much more are men than nations! the wise
and good souls, the stoics in Greece and Rome, Socrates in Athens, the
saints in Judæa, Alfred the king, Shakspeare the poet, Newton the
philosopher, the perceiver, and obeyer of truth,--than the foolish and
sensual millions around them! so that, wherever a true man appears,
everything usually reckoned great dwarfs itself; he is the only great
event, and it is easy to lift him into a mythological personage.

Then the next step in the series is the equivalence of the soul to
nature. I said that one of the distinctions of our century has been the
devotion of cultivated men to natural science. The benefits thence
derived to the arts and to civilization are signal and immense. They are
felt in navigation, in agriculture, in manufactures, in astronomy, in
mining, and in war. But over all their utilities, I must hold their
chief value to be metaphysical. The chief value is not the useful powers
he obtained, but the test it has been of the scholar. He has accosted
this immeasurable nature, and got clear answers. He understood what he
read. He found agreement with himself. It taught him anew the reach of
the human mind, and that it was citizen of the universe.

The first quality we know in matter is centrality,--we call it
gravity,--which holds the universe together, which remains pure and
indestructible in each mote, as in masses and planets, and from each
atom rays out illimitable influence. To this material essence answers
Truth, in the intellectual world,--Truth, whose centre is everywhere,
and its circumference nowhere, whose existence we cannot
disimagine,--the soundness and health of things, against which no blow
can be struck but it recoils on the striker,--Truth, on whose side we
always heartily are. And the first measure of a mind is its centrality,
its capacity of truth, and its adhesion to it.

When the correlation of the sciences was announced by Oersted and his
colleagues, it was no surprise; we were found already prepared for it.
The fact stated accorded with the auguries or divinations of the human
mind. Thus, if we should analyze Newton's discovery, we should say that
if it had not been anticipated by him, it would not have been found. We
are told that, in posting his books, after the French had measured on
the earth a degree of the meridian, when he saw that his theoretic
results were approximating that empirical one, his hand shook, the
figures danced, and he was so agitated that he was forced to call in an
assistant to finish the computation. Why agitated?--but because, when he
saw, in the fall of an apple to the ground, the fall of the earth to the
sun, of the sun and of all suns to the centre, that perception was
accompanied by the spasm of delight by which the intellect greets a fact
more immense still, a fact really universal,--holding in intellect as in
matter, in morals as in intellect,--that atom draws to atom throughout
nature, and truth to truth throughout spirit? His law was only a
particular of the more universal law of centrality. Every law in nature,
as gravity, centripetence, repulsion, polarity, undulation, has a
counterpart in the intellect. The laws above are sisters of the laws
below. Shall we study the mathematics of the sphere, and not its causal
essence also? Nature is a fable, whose moral blazes through it. There is
no use in Copernicus, if the robust periodicity of the solar system does
not show its equal perfection in the mental sphere,--the periodicity,
the compensatory errors, the grand reactions. I shall never believe that
centrifugence and centripetence balance, unless mind heats and
meliorates, as well as the surface and soil of the globe.

On this power, this all-dissolving unity, the emphasis of heaven and
earth is laid. Nature is brute but as this soul quickens it; Nature
always the effect, mind the flowing cause. Nature, we find, is ever as
is our sensibility; it is hostile to ignorance;--plastic, transparent,
delightful, to knowledge. Mind carries the law; history is the slow and
atomic unfolding. All things admit of this extended sense, and the
universe at last is only prophetic, or, shall we say, symptomatic, of
vaster interpretation and results. Nature an enormous system, but in
mass and in particle curiously available to the humblest need of the
little creature that walks on the earth! The immeasurableness of Nature
is not more astounding than his power to gather all her omnipotence into
a manageable rod or wedge, bringing it to a hair-point for the eye and
hand of the philosopher.

Here stretches out of sight, out of conception even, this vast Nature,
daunting, bewildering, but all penetrable, all self-similar,--an
unbroken unity,--and the mind of man is a key to the whole. He finds
that the universe, as Newton said, "was made at one cast"; the mass is
like the atom,--the same chemistry, gravity, and conditions. The
asteroids are the chips of an old star, and a meteoric stone is a chip
of an asteroid. As language is in the alphabet, so is entire Nature--the
play of all its laws--in one atom. The good wit finds the law from a
single observation,--the law, and its limitations, and its
correspondences,--as the farmer finds his cattle by a footprint. "State
the sun, and you state the planets, and conversely."

Whilst its power is offered to his hand, its laws to his science, not
less its beauty speaks to his taste, imagination, and sentiment. Nature
is sanative, refining, elevating. How cunningly she hides every wrinkle
of her inconceivable antiquity under roses, and violets, and morning
dew! Every inch of the mountains is scarred by unimaginable convulsions,
yet the new day is purple with the bloom of youth and love. Look out
into the July night, and see the broad belt of silver flame which
flashes up the half of heaven, fresh and delicate as the bonfires of the
meadow-flies. Yet the powers of numbers cannot compute its enormous
age,--lasting as space and time,--embosomed in time and space. And time
and space,--what are they? Our first problems, which we ponder all our
lives through, and leave where we found them; whose outrunning
immensity, the old Greeks believed, astonished the gods themselves; of
whose dizzy vastitudes all the worlds of God are a mere dot on the
margin; impossible to deny, impossible to believe. Yet the moral element
in man counterpoises this dismaying immensity, and bereaves it of
terror. The highest flight to which the muse of Horace ascended was in
that triplet of lines in which he described the souls which can calmly
confront the sublimity of nature:--

    "Hunc solem, et stellas, et decedentia certis
    Tempora momentis, sunt qui formidine nulla
    Imbuti spectant."

The sublime point of experience is the value of a sufficient man. Cube
this value by the meeting of two such,--of two or more such,--who
understand and support each other, and you have organized victory. At
any time, it only needs the contemporaneous appearance of a few superior
and attractive men to give a new and noble turn to the public mind.

The benefactors we have indicated were exceptional men, and great
because exceptional. The question which the present age urges with
increasing emphasis, day by day, is, whether the high qualities which
distinguished them can be imparted? The poet Wordsworth asked, "What one
is, why may not millions be?" Why not? Knowledge exists to be imparted.
Curiosity is lying in wait for every secret. The inquisitiveness of the
child to hear runs to meet the eagerness of the parent to explain. The
air does not rush to fill a vacuum with such speed as the mind to catch
the expected fact. Every artist was first an amateur. The ear outgrows
the tongue, is sooner ripe and perfect; but the tongue is always
learning to say what the ear has taught it, and the hand obeys the same
lesson.

There is anything but humiliation in the homage men pay to a great man;
it is sympathy, love of the same things, effort to reach them,--the
expression of their hope of what they shall become, when the
obstructions of their mal-formation and mal-education shall be trained
away. Great men shall not impoverish, but enrich us. Great men,--the age
goes on their credit; but all the rest, when their wires are continued,
and not cut, can do as signal things, and in new parts of nature. "No
angel in his heart acknowledges any one superior to himself but the Lord
alone." There is not a person here present to whom omens that should
astonish have not predicted his future, have not uncovered his past. The
dreams of the night supplement by their divination the imperfect
experiments of the day. Every soliciting instinct is only a hint of a
coming fact, as the air and water that hang invisibly around us hasten
to become solid in the oak and the animal. But the recurrence to high
sources is rare. In our daily intercourse, we go with the crowd, lend
ourselves to low fears and hopes, become the victims of our own arts and
implements, and disuse our resort to the Divine oracle. It is only in
the sleep of the soul that we help ourselves by so many ingenious
crutches and machineries. What is the use of telegraphs? What of
newspapers? To know in each social crisis how men feel in Kansas, in
California, the wise man waits for no mails, reads no telegrams. He asks
his own heart. If they are made as he is, if they breathe the like air,
eat of the same wheat, have wives and children, he knows that their joy
or resentment rises to the same point as his own. The inviolate soul is
in perpetual telegraphic communication with the Source of events, has
earlier information, a private despatch, which relieves him of the
terror which presses on the rest of the community.

The foundation of culture, as of character, is at last the moral
sentiment. This is the fountain of power, preserves its eternal newness,
draws its own rent out of every novelty in science. Science corrects the
old creeds; sweeps away, with every new perception, our infantile
catechisms; and necessitates a faith commensurate with the grander
orbits and universal laws which it discloses. Yet it does not surprise
the moral sentiment. That was older, and awaited expectant these larger
insights.

The affections are the wings by which the intellect launches on the
void, and is borne across it. Great love is the inventor and expander of
the frozen powers, the feathers frozen to our sides. It was the
conviction of Plato, of Van Helmont, of Pascal, of Swedenborg, that
piety is an essential condition of science, that great thoughts come
from the heart. It happens sometimes that poets do not believe their own
poetry; they are so much the less poets. But great men are sincere.
Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material
force, that thoughts rule the world. No hope so bright but is the
beginning of its own fulfilment. Every generalization shows the way to a
larger. Men say, Ah! if a man could impart his talent, instead of his
performance, what mountains of guineas would be paid! Yes, but in the
measure of his absolute veracity he does impart it. When he does not
play a part, does not wish to shine, when he talks to men with the
unrestrained frankness which children use with each other, he
communicates himself, and not his vanity. All vigor is contagious, and
when we see creation we also begin to create. Depth of character, height
of genius, can only find nourishment in this soil. The miracles of
genius always rest on profound convictions which refuse to be analyzed.
Enthusiasm is the leaping lightning, not to be measured by the
horse-power of the understanding. Hope never spreads her golden wings
but on unfathomable seas. The same law holds for the intellect as for
the will. When the will is absolutely surrendered to the moral
sentiment, that is virtue; when the wit is surrendered to intellectual
truth, that is genius. Talent for talent's sake is a bauble and a show.
Talent working with joy in the cause of universal truth lifts the
possessor to new power as a benefactor. I know well to what assembly of
educated, reflecting, successful, and powerful persons I speak. Yours is
the part of those who have received much. It is an old legend of just
men, _Noblesse oblige_; or, superior advantages bind you to larger
generosity. Now I conceive that, in this economical world, where every
drop and every crumb is husbanded, the transcendent powers of mind were
not meant to be misused. The Divine Nature carries on its administration
by good men. Here you are set down, scholars and idealists, as in a
barbarous age; amidst insanity, to calm and guide it; amidst fools and
blind, to see the right done; among violent proprietors, to check
self-interest, stone-blind and stone-deaf, by considerations of humanity
to the workman and to his child; amongst angry politicians swelling with
self-esteem, pledged to parties, pledged to clients, you are to make
valid the large considerations of equity and good sense; under bad
governments, to force on them, by your persistence, good laws. Around
that immovable persistency of yours, statesmen, legislatures, must
revolve, denying you, but not less forced to obey.

We wish to put the ideal rules into practice, to offer liberty instead
of chains, and see whether liberty will not disclose its proper checks;
believing that a free press will prove safer than the censorship; to
ordain free trade, and believe that it will not bankrupt us; universal
suffrage, believing that it will not carry us to mobs, or back to kings
again. I believe that the checks are as sure as the springs. It is
thereby that men are great, and have great allies. And who are the
allies? Rude opposition, apathy, slander,--even these. Difficulties
exist to be surmounted. The great heart will no more complain of the
obstructions that make success hard, than of the iron walls of the gun
which hinder the shot from scattering. It was walled round with iron
tube with that purpose, to give it irresistible force in one direction.
A strenuous soul hates cheap successes. It is the ardor of the assailant
that makes the vigor of the defender. The great are not tender at being
obscure, despised, insulted. Such only feel themselves in adverse
fortune. Strong men greet war, tempest, hard times, which search till
they find resistance and bottom. They wish, as Pindar said, "to tread
the floors of hell, with necessities as hard as iron." Periodicity,
reaction, are laws of mind as well as of matter. Bad kings and governors
help us, if only they are bad enough. In England, it was the game laws
which exasperated the farmers to carry the Reform Bill. It was what we
call _plantation manners_ which drove peaceable, forgiving New England
to emancipation without phrase. In the Rebellion, who were our best
allies? Always the enemy. The community of scholars do not know their
own power, and dishearten each other by tolerating political baseness in
their members. Now, nobody doubts the power of manners, or that wherever
high society exists, it is very well able to exclude pretenders. The
intruder finds himself uncomfortable, and quickly departs to his own
gang. It has been our misfortune that the politics of America have been
often immoral. It has had the worst effect on character. We are a
complaisant, forgiving people, presuming, perhaps, on a feeling of
strength. But it is not by easy virtue, where the public is concerned,
that heroic results are obtained. We have suffered our young men of
ambition to play the game of politics and take the immoral side without
loss of caste,--to come and go without rebuke. But that kind of loose
association does not leave a man his own master. He cannot go from the
good to the evil at pleasure, and then back again to the good. There is
a text in Swedenborg, which tells in figure the plain truth. He saw in
vision the angels and the devils; but these two companies stood not face
to face and hand in hand, but foot to foot,--these perpendicular up, and
those perpendicular down.

Brothers, I draw new hope from the atmosphere we breathe to-day, from
the healthy sentiment of the American people, and from the avowed aims
and tendencies of the educated class. The age has new convictions. We
know that in certain historic periods there have been times of
negation,--a decay of thought, and a consequent national decline; that
in France, at one time, there was almost a repudiation of the moral
sentiment, in what is called, by distinction, society,--not a believer
within the Church, and almost not a theist out of it. In England, the
like spiritual disease affected the upper class in the time of Charles
II., and down into the reign of the Georges. But it honorably
distinguishes the educated class here, that they believe in the succor
which the heart yields to the intellect, and draw greatness from its
inspirations. And when I say the educated class, I know what a benignant
breadth that word has,--new in the world,--reaching millions instead of
hundreds. And more, when I look around me, and consider the sound
material of which the cultivated class here is made up,--what high
personal worth, what love of men, what hope, is joined with rich
information and practical power, and that the most distinguished by
genius and culture are in this class of benefactors,--I cannot distrust
this great knighthood of virtue, or doubt that the interests of science,
of letters, of politics and humanity, are safe. I think their hands are
strong enough to hold up the Republic. I read the promise of better
times and of greater men.




                        PERSIAN POETRY.




                        PERSIAN POETRY.


TO Baron von Hammer Purgstall, who died in Vienna in 1856, we owe our
best knowledge of the Persians. He has translated into German, besides
the "Divan" of Hafiz, specimens of two hundred poets, who wrote during a
period of five and a half centuries, from A. D. 1050 to 1600. The seven
masters of the Persian Parnassus--Firdousi, Enweri, Nisami,
Dschelaleddin, Saadi, Hafiz, and Dschami--have ceased to be empty names;
and others, like Ferideddin Attar and Omar Chiam, promise to rise in
Western estimation. That for which mainly books exist is communicated in
these rich extracts. Many qualities go to make a good telescope,--as the
largeness of the field, facility of sweeping the meridian, achromatic
purity of lenses, and so forth,--but the one eminent value is the
space-penetrating power; and there are many virtues in books,--but the
essential value is the adding of knowledge to our stock, by the record
of new facts, and, better, by the record of intuitions, which distribute
facts, and are the formulas which supersede all histories.

Oriental life and society, especially in the Southern nations, stand in
violent contrast with the multitudinous detail, the secular stability,
and the vast average of comfort of the Western nations. Life in the East
is fierce, short, hazardous, and in extremes. Its elements are few and
simple, not exhibiting the long range and undulation of European
existence, but rapidly reaching the best and the worst. The rich feed on
fruits and game,--the poor, on a watermelon's peel. All or nothing is
the genius of Oriental life. Favor of the Sultan, or his displeasure, is
a question of Fate. A war is undertaken for an epigram or a distich, as
in Europe for a duchy. The prolific sun, and the sudden and rank plenty
which his heat engenders, make subsistence easy. On the other side, the
desert, the simoom, the mirage, the lion, and the plague endanger it,
and life hangs on the contingency of a skin of water more or less. The
very geography of old Persia showed these contrasts. "My father's
empire," said Cyrus to Xenophon, "is so large, that people perish with
cold, at one extremity, whilst they are suffocated with heat, at the
other." The temperament of the people agrees with this life in extremes.
Religion and poetry are all their civilization. The religion teaches an
inexorable Destiny. It distinguishes only two days in each man's
history,--his birthday, called _the Day of the Lot_, and the Day of
Judgment. Courage and absolute submission to what is appointed him are
his virtues.

The favor of the climate, making subsistence easy, and encouraging an
outdoor life, allows to the Eastern nations a highly intellectual
organization,--leaving out of view, at present, the genius of the
Hindoos (more Oriental in every sense), whom no people have surpassed in
the grandeur of their ethical statement. The Persians and the Arabs,
with great leisure and few books, are exquisitely sensible to the
pleasures of poetry. Layard has given some details of the effect which
the _improvvisatori_ produced on the children of the desert. "When the
bard improvised an amatory ditty, the young chief's excitement was
almost beyond control. The other Bedouins were scarcely less moved by
these rude measures, which have the same kind of effect on the wild
tribes of the Persian mountains. Such verses, chanted by their
self-taught poets, or by the girls of their encampment, will drive
warriors to the combat, fearless of death, or prove an ample reward, on
their return from the dangers of the _ghazon_, or the fight. The
excitement they produce exceeds that of the grape. He who would
understand the influence of the Homeric ballads in the heroic ages
should witness the effect which similar compositions have upon the wild
nomads of the East." Elsewhere he adds, "Poetry and flowers are the wine
and spirits of the Arab; a couplet is equal to a bottle, and a rose to a
dram, without the evil effect of either."

The Persian poetry rests on a mythology whose few legends are connected
with the Jewish history, and the anterior traditions of the Pentateuch.
The principal figure in the allusions of Eastern poetry is Solomon.
Solomon had three talismans: first, the signet-ring, by which he
commanded the spirits, on the stone of which was engraven the name of
God; second, the glass, in which he saw the secrets of his enemies, and
the causes of all things, figured; the third, the east-wind, which was
his horse. His counsellor was Simorg, king of birds, the all-wise fowl,
who had lived ever since the beginning of the world, and now lives alone
on the highest summit of Mount Kaf. No fowler has taken him, and none
now living has seen him. By him Solomon was taught the language of
birds, so that he heard secrets whenever he went into his gardens. When
Solomon travelled, his throne was placed on a carpet of green silk, of a
length and breadth sufficient for all his army to stand upon,--men
placing themselves on his right hand, and the spirits on his left. When
all were in order, the east-wind, at his command, took up the carpet and
transported it, with all that were upon it, whither he pleased,--the
army of birds at the same time flying overhead, and forming a canopy to
shade them from the sun. It is related, that, when the Queen of Sheba
came to visit Solomon, he had built, against her arrival, a palace, of
which the floor or pavement was of glass, laid over running water, in
which fish were swimming. The Queen of Sheba was deceived thereby, and
raised her robes, thinking she was to pass through the water. On the
occasion of Solomon's marriage, all the beasts, laden with presents,
appeared before his throne. Behind them all came the ant with a blade of
grass: Solomon did not despise the gift of the ant. Asaph, the vizier,
at a certain time, lost the seal of Solomon, which one of the Dews, or
evil spirits, found, and, governing in the name of Solomon, deceived the
people.

Firdousi, the Persian Homer, has written in the _Shah Nameh_ the annals
of the fabulous and heroic kings of the country: of Karun (the Persian
Crœsus), the immeasurably rich gold-maker, who, with all his treasures,
lies buried not far from the Pyramids, in the sea which bears his name;
of Jamschid, the binder of demons, whose reign lasted seven hundred
years; of Kai Kaus, in whose palace, built by demons on Alberz, gold and
silver and precious stones were used so lavishly, that in the brilliancy
produced by their combined effect, night and day appeared the same; of
Afrasiyab, strong as an elephant, whose shadow extended for miles, whose
heart was bounteous as the ocean, and his hands like the clouds when
rain falls to gladden the earth. The crocodile in the rolling stream had
no safety from Afrasiyab. Yet when he came to fight against the generals
of Kaus, he was but an insect in the grasp of Rustem, who seized him by
the girdle, and dragged him from his horse. Rustem felt such anger at
the arrogance of the King of Mazinderan, that every hair on his body
started up like a spear. The gripe of his hand cracked the sinews of an
enemy.

These legends,--with Chiser, the fountain of life, Tuba, the tree of
life,--the romances of the loves of Leila and Medschun, of Chosru and
Schirin, and those of the nightingale for the rose,--pearl-diving, and
the virtues of gems,--the cohol, a cosmetic by which pearls and eyebrows
are indelibly stained black,--the bladder in which musk is brought,--the
down of the lip, the mole on the cheek, the eyelash,--lilies, roses,
tulips, and jasmines,--make the staple imagery of Persian odes.

The Persians have epics and tales, but, for the most part, they affect
short poems and epigrams. Gnomic verses, rules of life conveyed in a
lively image, especially in an image addressed to the eye, and contained
in a single stanza, were always current in the East; and if the poem is
long, it is only a string of unconnected verses. They use an
inconsecutiveness quite alarming to Western logic, and the connection
between the stanzas of their longer odes is much like that between the
refrain of our old English ballads,

    "The sun shines fair on Carlisle wall,"

or

    "The rain it raineth every day,"

and the main story.

Take, as specimens of these gnomic verses, the following:--

   "The secret that should not be blown
      Not one of thy nation must know;
    You may padlock the gate of a town,
      But never the mouth of a foe."

Or this of Omar Chiam:--

    "On earth's wide thoroughfares below
    Two only men contented go:
    Who knows what's right and what's forbid,
    And he from whom is knowledge hid."

Here is a poem on a melon, by Adsched of Meru:--

    "Color, taste, and smell, smaragdus, sugar, and musk,--
    Amber for the tongue, for the eye a picture rare,--
    If you cut the fruit in slices, every slice a crescent fair,--
    If you leave it whole, the full harvest moon is there."

Hafiz is the prince of Persian poets, and in his extraordinary gifts
adds to some of the attributes of Pindar, Anacreon, Horace, and Burns
the insight of a mystic, that sometimes affords a deeper glance at
Nature than belongs to either of these bards. He accosts all topics with
an easy audacity. "He only," he says, "is fit for company, who knows how
to prize earthly happiness at the value of a night-cap. Our father Adam
sold Paradise for two kernels of wheat; then blame me not, if I hold it
dear at one grapestone." He says to the Shah, "Thou who rulest after
words and thoughts which no ear has heard and no mind has thought, abide
firm until thy young destiny tears off his blue coat from the old
graybeard of the sky." He says,--

   "I batter the wheel of heaven
      When it rolls not rightly by;
    I am not one of the snivellers
      Who fall thereon and die."

The rapidity of his turns is always surprising us:--

    "See how the roses burn!
      Bring wine to quench the fire!
    Alas! the flames come up with us,--
      We perish with desire."

After the manner of his nation, he abounds in pregnant sentences which
might be engraved on a sword-blade and almost on a ring.

  "In honor dies he to whom the great seems ever wonderful."

  "Here is the sum, that, when one door opens, another shuts."

  "On every side is an ambush laid by the robber-troops of circumstance;
  hence it is that the horseman of life urges on his courser at headlong
  speed."

  "The earth is a host who murders his guests."

  "Good is what goes on the road of Nature. On the straight way the
  traveller never misses."

    "Alas! till now I had not known
    My guide and Fortune's guide are one."

    "The understanding's copper coin
    Counts not with the gold of love."

    "'Tis writ on Paradise's gate,
    'Woe to the dupe that yields to Fate!'"

    "The world is a bride superbly dressed;--
    Who weds her for dowry must pay his soul."

    "Loose the knots of the heart; never think on thy fate:
    No Euclid has yet disentangled that snarl."

    "There resides in the grieving
      A poison to kill;
    Beware to go near them
      'Tis pestilent still."

Harems and wine-shops only give him a new ground of observation, whence
to draw sometimes a deeper moral than regulated sober life affords,--and
this is foreseen:--

    "I will be drunk and down with wine;
    Treasures we find in a ruined house."

Riot, he thinks, can snatch from the deeply hidden lot the veil that
covers it:--

    "To be wise the dull brain so earnestly throbs,
    Bring bands of wine for the stupid head."

    "The Builder of heaven
      Hath sundered the earth,
    So that no footway
      Leads out of it forth.

    "On turnpikes of wonder
      Wine leads the mind forth,
    Straight, sidewise, and upward,
      West, southward, and north.

    "Stands the vault adamantine
      Until the Doomsday;
    The wine-cup shall ferry
      Thee o'er it away."

That hardihood and self-equality of every sound nature, which result
from the feeling that the spirit in him is entire and as good as the
world, which entitle the poet to speak with authority, and make him an
object of interest, and his every phrase and syllable significant, are
in Hafiz, and abundantly fortify and ennoble his tone.

His was the fluent mind in which every thought and feeling came readily
to the lips. "Loose the knots of the heart," he says. We absorb elements
enough, but have not leaves and lungs for healthy perspiration and
growth. An air of sterility, of incompetence to their proper aims,
belongs to many who have both experience and wisdom. But a large
utterance, a river that makes its own shores, quick perception and
corresponding expression, a constitution to which every morrow is a new
day, which is equal to the needs of life, at once tender and bold, with
great arteries,--this generosity of ebb and flow satisfies, and we
should be willing to die when our time comes, having had our swing and
gratification. The difference is not so much in the quality of men's
thoughts as in the power of uttering them. What is pent and smouldered
in the dumb actor is not pent in the poet, but passes over into new
form, at once relief and creation.

The other merit of Hafiz is his intellectual liberty, which is a
certificate of profound thought. We accept the religions and politics
into which we fall; and it is only a few delicate spirits who are
sufficient to see that the whole web of convention is the imbecility of
those whom it entangles,--that the mind suffers no religion and no
empire but its own. It indicates this respect to absolute truth by the
use it makes of the symbols that are most stable and reverend, and
therefore is always provoking the accusation of irreligion.

Hypocrisy is the perpetual butt of his arrows.

    "Let us draw the cowl through the brook of wine."

He tells his mistress, that not the dervis, or the monk, but the lover,
has in his heart the spirit which makes the ascetic and the saint; and
certainly not their cowls and mummeries, but her glances, can impart to
him the fire and virtue needful for such self-denial. Wrong shall not be
wrong to Hafiz, for the name's sake. A law or statute is to him what a
fence is to a nimble school-boy,--a temptation for a jump. "We would do
nothing but good, else would shame come to us on the day when the soul
must hie hence; and should they then deny us Paradise, the Houris
themselves would forsake that, and come out to us."

His complete intellectual emancipation he communicates to the reader.
There is no example of such facility of allusion, such use of all
materials. Nothing is too high, nothing too low, for his occasion. He
fears nothing, he stops for nothing. Love is a leveller, and Allah
becomes a groom, and heaven a closet, in his daring hymns to his
mistress or to his cupbearer. This boundless charter is the right of
genius.

We do not wish to strew sugar on bottled spiders, or try to make
mystical divinity out of the Song of Solomon, much less out of the
erotic and bacchanalian songs of Hafiz. Hafiz himself is determined to
defy all such hypocritical interpretation, and tears off his turban and
throws it at the head of the meddling dervis, and throws his glass after
the turban. But the love or the wine of Hafiz is not to be confounded
with vulgar debauch. It is the spirit in which the song is written that
imports, and not the topics. Hafiz praises wine, roses, maidens, boys,
birds, mornings, and music, to give vent to his immense hilarity and
sympathy with every form of beauty and joy; and lays the emphasis on
these to mark his scorn of sanctimony and base prudence. These are the
natural topics and language of his wit and perception. But it is the
play of wit and the joy of song that he loves; and if you mistake him
for a low rioter, he turns short on you with verses which express the
poverty of sensual joys, and to ejaculate with equal fire the most
unpalatable affirmations of heroic sentiment and contempt for the world.
Sometimes it is a glance from the height of thought, as thus:--

  "Bring wine; for, in the audience-hall of the soul's independence, what
  is sentinel or Sultan? what is the wise man or the intoxicated?"

And sometimes his feast, feasters, and world are only one pebble more in
the eternal vortex and revolution of Fate:--

    "I am: what I am
    My dust will be again."

A saint might lend an ear to the riotous fun of Falstaff; for it is not
created to excite the animal appetites, but to vent the joy of a
supernal intelligence. In all poetry, Pindar's rule
holds,--συνετοῖς φωνεί it speaks to the intelligent; and
Hafiz is a poet for poets, whether he write, as sometimes, with a
parrot's, or, as at other times, with an eagle's quill.

Every song of Hafiz affords new proof of the unimportance of your
subject to success, provided only the treatment be cordial. In general,
what is more tedious than dedications or panegyrics addressed to
grandees? Yet in the "Divan" you would not skip them, since his muse
seldom supports him better.

    "What lovelier forms things wear,
    Now that the Shah comes back!"

And again:--

    "Thy foes to hunt, thy enviers to strike down,
    Poises Arcturus aloft morning and evening his spear."

It is told of Hafiz, that, when he had written a compliment to a
handsome youth,--

    "Take my heart in thy hand, O beautiful boy of Shiraz!
    I would give for the mole on thy cheek Samarcand and
           Buchara!"--

the verses came to the ears of Timour in his palace. Timour taxed Hafiz
with treating disrespectfully his two cities, to raise and adorn which
he had conquered nations. Hafiz replied, "Alas, my lord, if I had not
been so prodigal, I had not been so poor!"

The Persians had a mode of establishing copyright the most secure of any
contrivance with which we are acquainted. The law of the _ghaselle_, or
shorter ode, requires that the poet insert his name in the last stanza.
Almost every one of several hundreds of poems of Hafiz contains his name
thus interwoven more or less closely with the subject of the piece. It
is itself a test of skill, as this self-naming is not quite easy. We
remember but two or three examples in English poetry: that of Chaucer,
in the "House of Fame"; Jonson's epitaph on his son,--

    "Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry";

and Cowley's,--

    "The melancholy Cowley lay."

But it is easy to Hafiz. It gives him the opportunity of the most
playful self-assertion, always gracefully, sometimes almost in the fun
of Falstaff, sometimes with feminine delicacy. He tells us, "The angels
in heaven were lately learning his last pieces." He says, "The fishes
shed their pearls, out of desire and longing as soon as the ship of
Hafiz swims the deep."

    "Out of the East, and out of the West, no man understands me;
    O, the happier I, who confide to none but the wind!
    This morning heard I how the lyre of the stars resounded,
   'Sweeter tones have we heard from Hafiz!'"

Again,--

  "I heard the harp of the planet Venus, and it said in the early morning,
  'I am the disciple of the sweet-voiced Hafiz!'"

And again,--

  "When Hafiz sings, the angels hearken, and Anaitis, the leader of the
  starry host, calls even the Messiah in heaven out to the dance."

  "No one has unvailed thoughts like Hafiz, since the locks of the
  Word-bride were first curled."

  "Only he despises the verse of Hafiz who is not himself by nature
  noble."

But we must try to give some of these poetic flourishes the metrical
form which they seem to require:--

    "Fit for the Pleiads' azure chord
    The songs I sung, the pearls I bored."

Another:--

    "I have no hoarded treasure,
      Yet have I rich content;
    The first from Allah to the Shah,
      The last to Hafiz went."

Another:--

    "High heart, O Hafiz! though not thine
      Fine gold and silver ore;
    More worth to thee the gift of song,
      And the clear insight more."

Again:--

    "O Hafiz! speak not of thy need;
      Are not these verses thine?
    Then all the poets are agreed,
      No man can less repine."

He asserts his dignity as bard and inspired man of his people. To the
vizier returning from Mecca he says,--

  "Boast not rashly, prince of pilgrims, of thy fortune. Thou hast indeed
  seen the temple; but I, the Lord of the temple. Nor has any man inhaled
  from the musk-bladder of the merchant, or from the musky morning-wind,
  that sweet air which I am permitted to breathe every hour of the day."

And with still more vigor in the following lines:--

    "Oft have I said, I say it once more,
    I, a wanderer, do not stray from myself.
    I am a kind of parrot; the mirror is holden to me;
    What the Eternal says, I stammering say again.
    Give me what you will; I eat thistles as roses,
    And according to my food I grow and I give.
    Scorn me not, but know I have the pearl,
    And am only seeking one to receive it."

And his claim has been admitted from the first. The muleteers and
camel-drivers, on their way through the desert, sing snatches of his
songs, not so much for the thought, as for their joyful temper and tone;
and the cultivated Persians know his poems by heart. Yet Hafiz does not
appear to have set any great value on his songs, since his scholars
collected them for the first time after his death.

In the following poem the soul is figured as the Phœnix alighting on
Tuba, the Tree of Life:--

    "My phœnix long ago secured
      His nest in the sky-vault's cope;
    In the body's cage immured,
      He was weary of life's hope.

    "Round and round this heap of ashes
      Now flies the bird amain,
    But in that odorous niche of heaven
      Nestles the bird again.

    "Once flies he upward, he will perch
      On Tuba's golden bough;
    His home is on that fruited arch
      Which cools the blest below.

    "If over this world of ours
      His wings my phœnix spread,
    How gracious falls on land and sea
      The soul-refreshing shade!

    "Either world inhabits he,
      Sees oft below him planets roll;
    His body is all of air compact,
      Of Allah's love his soul."

Here is an ode which is said to be a favorite with all educated
Persians:--

    "Come!--the palace of heaven rests on aëry pillars,--
    Come, and bring me wine; our days are wind.
    I declare myself the slave of that masculine soul
    Which ties and alliance on earth once forever renounces.
    Told I thee yester-morn how the Iris of heaven
    Brought to me in my cup a gospel of joy?
    O high-flying falcon! the Tree of Life is thy perch;
    This nook of grief fits thee ill for a nest.
    Hearken! they call to thee down from the ramparts of heaven;
    I cannot divine what holds thee here in a net.
    I, too, have a counsel for thee; O, mark it and keep it,
    Since I received the same from the Master above:
    Seek not for faith or for truth in a world of light-minded girls;
    A thousand suitors reckons this dangerous bride.
    Cumber thee not for the world, and this my precept forget not,
    'Tis but a toy that a vagabond sweetheart has left us.
    Accept whatever befalls; uncover thy brow from thy locks;
    Never to me nor to thee was option imparted;
    Neither endurance nor truth belongs to the laugh of the rose.
    The loving nightingale mourns;--cause enow for mourning;--
    Why envies the bird the streaming verses of Hafiz?
    Know that a god bestowed on him eloquent speech."

The cedar, the cypress, the palm, the olive, and fig-tree, the birds
that inhabit them, and the garden flowers, are never wanting in these
musky verses, and are always named with effect. "The willows," he says,
"bow themselves to every wind, out of shame for their unfruitfulness."
We may open anywhere on a floral catalogue.

    "By breath of beds of roses drawn,
      I found the grove in the morning pure,
    In the concert of the nightingales
      My drunken brain to cure.

    "With unrelated glance
      I looked the rose in the eye:
    The rose in the hour of gloaming
      Flamed like a lamp hard-by.

    "She was of her beauty proud,
      And prouder of her youth,
    The while unto her flaming heart
      The bulbul gave his truth.

    "The sweet narcissus closed
      Its eye, with passion pressed;
    The tulips out of envy burned
      Moles in their scarlet breast.

    "The lilies white prolonged
      Their sworded tongue to the smell;
    The clustering anemones
      Their pretty secrets tell."

Presently we have,--

             "All day the rain
    Bathed the dark hyacinths in vain,
    The flood may pour from morn till night
    Nor wash the pretty Indians white."

And so onward, through many a page.

This picture of the first days of Spring, from Enweri, seems to belong
to Hafiz:--

    "O'er the garden water goes the wind alone
      To rasp and to polish the cheek of the wave;
    The fire is quenched on the dear hearthstone,
      But it burns again on the tulips brave."

Friendship is a favorite topic of the Eastern poets, and they have
matched on this head the absoluteness of Montaigne.

Hafiz says,--

  "Thou learnest no secret until thou knowest friendship; since to the
  unsound no heavenly knowledge enters."

Ibn Jemin writes thus:--

    "Whilst I disdain the populace,
    I find no peer in higher place.
    Friend is a word of royal tone,
    Friend is a poem all alone.
    Wisdom is like the elephant,
    Lofty and rare inhabitant:
    He dwells in deserts or in courts;
    With hucksters he has no resorts."

Dschami says,--

    "A friend is he, who, hunted as a foe,
      So much the kindlier shows him than before;
    Throw stones at him, or ruder javelins throw,
      He builds with stone and steel a firmer floor."

Of the amatory poetry of Hafiz we must be very sparing in our citations,
though it forms the staple of the "Divan." He has run through the whole
gamut of passion,--from the sacred to the borders, and over the borders,
of the profane. The same confusion of high and low, the celerity of
flight and allusion which our colder muses forbid, is habitual to him.
From the plain text,--

    "The chemist of love
      Will this perishing mould,
    Were it made out of mire,
      Transmute into gold,"--

he proceeds to the celebration of his passion; and nothing in his
religious or in his scientific traditions is too sacred or too remote to
afford a token of his mistress. The Moon thought she knew her own orbit
well enough; but when she saw the curve on Zuleika's cheek, she was at a
loss:--

    "And since round lines are drawn
      My darling's lips about,
    The very Moon looks puzzled on,
      And hesitates in doubt
    If the sweet curve that rounds thy mouth
    Be not her true way to the South."

His ingenuity never sleeps:--

    "Ah, could I hide me in my song,
    To kiss thy lips from which it flows!"

and plays in a thousand pretty courtesies:--

    "Fair fall thy soft heart!
      A good work wilt thou do?
    O, pray for the dead
      Whom thine eyelashes slew!"

And what a nest has he found for his bonny bird to take up her abode
in!--

    "They strew in the path of kings and czars
      Jewels and gems of price:
    But for thy head I will pluck down stars,
      And pave thy way with eyes.

    "I have sought for thee a costlier dome
      Than Mahmoud's palace high,
    And thou, returning, find thy home
      In the apple of Love's eye."

Then we have all degrees of passionate abandonment:--

    "I know this perilous love-lane
      No whither the traveller leads,
    Yet my fancy the sweet scent of
      Thy tangled tresses feeds.

    "In the midnight of thy locks,
      I renounce the day;
    In the ring of thy rose-lips,
      My heart forgets to pray."

And sometimes his love rises to a religious sentiment:--

    "Plunge in yon angry waves,
      Renouncing doubt and care;
    The flowing of the seven broad seas
      Shall never wet thy hair.

    "Is Allah's face on thee
      Bending with love benign,
    And thou not less on Allah's eye
      O fairest! turnest thine."

We add to these fragments of Hafiz a few specimens from other poets.

              NISAMI.

   "While roses bloomed along the plain,
    The nightingale to the falcon said,
    'Why, of all birds, must thou be dumb?
    With closed mouth thou utterest,
    Though dying, no last word to man.
    Yet sitt'st thou on the hand of princes,
    And feedest on the grouse's breast,
    Whilst I, who hundred thousand jewels
    Squander in a single tone,
    Lo! I feed myself with worms,
    And my dwelling is the thorn.'--
    The falcon answered, 'Be all ear:
    I, experienced in affairs,
    See fifty things, say never one;
    But thee the people prizes not.
    Who, doing nothing, say'st a thousand.
    To me, appointed to the chase,
    The king's hand gives the grouse's breast;
    Whilst a chatterer like thee
    Must gnaw worms in the thorn. Farewell!'"

The following passages exhibit the strong tendency of the Persian poets
to contemplative and religious poetry and to allegory.

              ENWERI.

           BODY AND SOUL.

    "A painter in China once painted a hall;--
    Such a web never hung on an emperor's wall;--
    One half from his brush with rich colors did run,
    The other he touched with a beam of the sun;
    So that all which delighted the eye in one side,
    The same, point for point, in the other replied.

    "In thee, friend, that Tyrian chamber is found;
    Thine the star-pointing roof, and the base on the ground:
    Is one half depicted with colors less bright?
    Beware that the counterpart blazes with light!"

              IBN JEMIN.

    "I read on the porch of a palace bold
      In a purple tablet letters cast,--
    'A house though a million winters old,
      A house of earth comes down at last;
    Then quarry thy stones from the crystal All,
    And build the dome that shall not fall.'"


"What need," cries the mystic Feisi, "of palaces and tapestry? What need
even of a bed?"

    "The eternal Watcher, who doth wake
      All night in the body's earthen chest,
    Will of thine arms a pillow make,
      And a bolster of thy breast."

Ferideddin Attar wrote the "Bird Conversations," a mystical tale, in
which the birds, coming together to choose their king, resolve on a
pilgrimage to Mount Kaf, to pay their homage to the Simorg. From this
poem, written five hundred years ago, we cite the following passage, as
a proof of the identity of mysticism in all periods. The tone is quite
modern. In the fable, the birds were soon weary of the length and
difficulties of the way, and at last almost all gave out. Three only
persevered, and arrived before the throne of the Simorg.

    "The bird-soul was ashamed;
    Their body was quite annihilated;
    They had cleaned themselves from the dust,
    And were by the light ensouled.
    What was, and was not,--the Past,--
    Was wiped out from their breast.
    The sun from near-by beamed
    Clearest light into their soul;
    The resplendence of the Simorg beamed
    As one back from all three.
    They knew not, amazed, if they
    Were either this or that.
    They saw themselves all as Simorg,
    Themselves in the eternal Simorg.
    When to the Simorg up they looked,
    They beheld him among themselves;
    And when they looked on each other,
    They saw themselves in the Simorg.
    A single look grouped the two parties,
    The Simorg emerged, the Simorg vanished,
    This in that, and that in this,
    As the world has never heard.
    So remained they, sunk in wonder,
    Thoughtless in deepest thinking,
    And quite unconscious of themselves.
    Speechless prayed they to the Highest
    To open this secret,
    And to unlock _Thou_ and _We_.
    There came an answer without tongue.--
    'The Highest is a sun-mirror;
    Who comes to Him sees himself therein,
    Sees body and soul, and soul and body;
    When you came to the Simorg,
    Three therein appeared to you,
    And, had fifty of you come,
    So had you seen yourselves as many.
    Him has none of us yet seen.
    Ants see not the Pleiades.
    Can the gnat grasp with his teeth
    The body of the elephant?
    What you see is He not;
    What you hear is He not.
    The valleys which you traverse,
    The actions which you perform,
    They lie under our treatment
    And among our properties.
    You as three birds are amazed,
    Impatient, heartless, confused:
    Far over you am I raised,
    Since I am in act Simorg.
    Ye blot out my highest being,
    That ye may find yourselves on my throne;
    Forever ye blot out yourselves,
    As shadows in the sun. Farewell!'"




                        INSPIRATION.




                        INSPIRATION.


IT was Watt who told King George III. that he dealt in an article of
which kings were said to be fond,--Power. 'Tis certain that the one
thing we wish to know is, where power is to be bought. But we want a
finer kind than that of commerce; and every reasonable man would give
any price of house and land, and future provision, for condensation,
concentration, and the recalling at will of high mental energy. Our
money is only a second best. We would jump to buy power with it, that
is, intellectual perception moving the will. That is first best. But we
don't know where the shop is. If Watt knew, he forgot to tell us the
number of the street. There are times when the intellect is so active
that everything seems to run to meet it. Its supplies are found without
much thought as to studies. Knowledge runs to the man, and the man runs
to knowledge. In spring, when the snow melts, the maple-trees flow with
sugar, and you cannot get tubs fast enough; but it is only for a few
days. The hunter on the prairie, at the right season, has no need of
choosing his ground; east, west, by the river, by the timber, he is
everywhere near his game. But the favorable conditions are rather the
exception than the rule.

The aboriginal man in geology, and in the dim lights of Darwin's
microscope, is not an engaging figure. We are very glad that he ate his
fishes and snails and marrow-bones out of our sight and hearing, and
that his doleful experiences were got through with so very long ago.
They combed his mane, they pared his nails, cut off his tail, set him on
end, sent him to school, and made him pay taxes, before he could begin
to write his sad story for the compassion or the repudiation of his
descendants, who are all but unanimous to disown him. We must take him
as we find him,--pretty well on in his education, and, in all _our_
knowledge of him, an interesting creature, with a will, an invention, an
imagination, a conscience, and an inextinguishable hope.

The Hunterian law of _arrested development_ is not confined to vegetable
and animal structure, but reaches the human intellect also. In the
savage man, thought is infantile; and in the civilized, unequal, and
ranging up and down a long scale. In the best races it is rare and
imperfect. In happy moments it is reinforced, and carries out what were
rude suggestions to larger scope, and to clear and grand conclusions.
The poet cannot see a natural phenomenon which does not express to him a
correspondent fact in his mental experience; he is made aware of a power
to carry on and complete the metamorphosis of natural into spiritual
facts. Everything which we hear for the first time was expected by the
mind; the newest discovery was expected. In the mind we call this
enlarged power Inspiration. I believe that nothing great and lasting can
be done except by inspiration, by leaning on the secret augury. The
man's insight and power are interrupted and occasional; he can see and
do this or that cheap task at will, but it steads him not beyond. He is
fain to make the ulterior step by mechanical means. It cannot so be
done. That ulterior step is to be also by inspiration; if not through
him, then by another man. Every real step is by what a poet called
"lyrical glances," by lyrical facility, and never by main strength and
ignorance. Years of mechanic toil will only seem to do it; it will not
so be done.

Inspiration is like yeast. 'Tis no matter in which of half a dozen ways
you procure the infection; you can apply one or the other equally well
to your purpose, and get your loaf of bread. And every earnest workman,
in whatever kind, knows some favorable conditions for his task. When I
wish to write on any topic, 'tis of no consequence what kind of book or
man gives me a hint or a motion, nor how far off that is from my topic.

Power is the first good. Rarey can tame a wild horse; but if he could
give speed to a dull horse, were not that better? The toper finds,
without asking, the road to the tavern, but the poet does not know the
pitcher that holds his nectar. Every youth should know the way to
prophecy as surely as the miller understands how to let on the water or
the engineer the steam. A rush of thoughts is the only conceivable
prosperity that can come to us. Fine clothes, equipages, villa, park,
social consideration, cannot cover up real poverty and insignificance
from my own eyes, or from others like mine.

Thoughts let us into realities. Neither miracle, nor magic, nor any
religious tradition, not the immortality of the private soul, is
incredible, after we have experienced an insight, a thought. I think it
comes to some men but once in their life, sometimes a religious impulse,
sometimes an intellectual insight. But what we want is consecutiveness.
'Tis with us a flash of light, then a long darkness, then a flash again.
The separation of our days by sleep almost destroys identity. Could we
but turn these fugitive sparkles into an astronomy of Copernican worlds!
With most men, scarce a link of memory holds yesterday and to-day
together. Their house and trade and families serve them as ropes to give
a coarse continuity. But they have forgotten the thoughts of yesterday;
they say to-day what occurs to them, and something else to-morrow. This
insecurity of possession, this quick ebb of power,--as if life were a
thunder-storm wherein you can see by a flash the horizon, and then
cannot see your hand,--tantalizes us. We cannot make the inspiration
consecutive. A glimpse, a point of view that by its brightness excludes
the purview, is granted, but no panorama. A fuller inspiration should
cause the point to flow and become a line, should bend the line and
complete the circle. To-day the electric machine will not work, no spark
will pass; then presently the world is all a cat's back, all sparkle and
shock. Sometimes there is no sea-fire, and again the sea is aglow to the
horizon. Sometimes the Æolian harp is dumb all day in the window, and
again it is garrulous, and tells all the secrets of the world. In June
the morning is noisy with birds; in August they are already getting old
and silent.

Hence arises the question, Are these moods in any degree within control?
If we knew how to command them! But where is the Franklin with kite or
rod for this fluid?--a Franklin who can draw off electricity from Jove
himself, and convey it into the arts of life, inspire men, take them off
their feet, withdraw them from the life of trifles and gain and comfort,
and make the world transparent, so that they can read the symbols of
nature? What metaphysician has undertaken to enumerate the tonics of the
torpid mind, the rules for the recovery of inspiration? That is least
within control which is best in them. Of the _modus_ of inspiration we
have no knowledge. But in the experience of meditative men there is a
certain agreement as to the conditions of reception. Plato, in his
seventh Epistle, notes that the perception is only accomplished by long
familiarity with the objects of intellect, and a life according to the
things themselves. "Then a light, as if leaping from a fire, will on a
sudden be enkindled in the soul, and will then itself nourish itself."

He said again, "The man who is his own master knocks in vain at the
doors of poetry." The artists must be sacrificed to their art. Like the
bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give. What is a man
good for without enthusiasm? and what is enthusiasm but this daring of
ruin for its object? There are thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls;
we are not the less drawn to them. The moth flies into the flame of the
lamp; and Swedenborg must solve the problems that haunt him, though he
be crazed or killed.

There is genius as well in virtue as in intellect. 'Tis the doctrine of
faith over works. The raptures of goodness are as old as history and new
with this morning's sun. The legends of Arabia, Persia, and India are of
the same complexion as the Christian. Socrates, Menu, Confucius,
Zertusht,--we recognize in all of them this ardor to solve the hints of
thought.

I hold that ecstasy will be found normal, or only an example on a higher
plane of the same gentle gravitation by which stones fall and rivers
run. Experience identifies. Shakspeare seems to you miraculous; but the
wonderful juxtapositions, parallelisms, transfers, which his genius
effected were all to him locked together as links of a chain, and the
mode precisely as conceivable and familiar to higher intelligence as the
index-making of the literary hack. The result of the hack is
inconceivable to the type-setter who waits for it.

We must prize our own youth. Later, we want heat to execute our plans:
the good-will, the knowledge, the whole armory of means, are all
present; but a certain heat that once used not to fail refuses its
office, and all is vain until this capricious fuel is supplied. It seems
a semi-animal heat; as if tea, or wine, or sea-air, or mountains, or a
genial companion, or a new thought suggested in book or conversation,
could fire the train, wake the fancy, and the clear perception.
Pit-coal,--where to find it? 'Tis of no use that your engine is made
like a watch,--that you are a good workman, and know how to drive it, if
there is no coal. We are waiting until some tyrannous idea emerging out
of heaven shall seize and bereave us of this liberty with which we are
falling abroad. Well, we have the same hint or suggestion, day by day.
"I am not," says the man, "at the top of my condition to-day, but the
favorable hour will come when I can command all my powers, and when that
will be easy to do which is at this moment impossible." See how the
passions augment our force,--anger, love, ambition! sometimes sympathy,
and the expectation of men. Garrick said, that on the stage his great
paroxysms surprised himself as much as his audience. If this is true on
this low plane, it is true on the higher. Swedenborg's genius was the
perception of the doctrine "that the Lord flows into the spirits of
angels and of men"; and all poets have signalized their consciousness of
rare moments when they were superior to themselves,--when a light, a
freedom, a power came to them, which lifted them to performances far
better than they could reach at other times; so that a religious poet
once told me that "he valued his poems, not because they were his, but
because they were not." He thought the angels brought them to him.

Jacob Behmen said: "Art has not wrote here, nor was there any time to
consider how to set it punctually down according to the right
understanding of the letters, but all was ordered according to the
direction of the spirit, which often went on haste,--so that the
penman's hand, by reason he was not accustomed to it, did often shake.
And, though I could have written in a more accurate, fair, and plain
manner, the burning fire often forced forward with speed, and the hand
and pen must hasten directly after it, for it comes and goes as a sudden
shower. In one quarter of an hour I saw and knew more, than if I had
been many years together at an university."

The depth of the notes which we accidentally sound on the strings of
nature is out of all proportion to our taught and ascertained faculty,
and might teach us what strangers and novices we are, vagabond in this
universe of pure power, to which we have only the smallest key. Herrick
said:--

    "'Tis not every day that I
    Fitted am to prophesy;
    No, but when the spirit fills
    The fantastic panicles,
    Full of fire, then I write
    As the Goddess doth indite.
    Thus, enraged, my lines are hurled,
    Like the Sibyl's, through the world:
    Look how next the holy fire
    Either slakes, or doth retire;
    So the fancy cools,--till when
    That brave spirit comes again."

Bonaparte said: "There is no man more pusillanimous than I, when I make
a military plan. I magnify all the dangers, and all the possible
mischances. I am in an agitation utterly painful. That does not prevent
me from appearing quite serene to the persons who surround me. I am like
a woman with child, and when my resolution is taken, all is forgot,
except whatever can make it succeed."

There are, to be sure, certain risks in this presentiment of the
decisive perception, as in the use of ether or alcohol.

    "Great wits to madness nearly are allied;
    Both serve to make our poverty our pride."

Aristotle said: "No great genius was ever without some mixture of
madness, nor can anything grand or superior to the voice of common
mortals be spoken except by the agitated soul." We might say of these
memorable moments of life, that we were in them, not they in us. We
found ourselves by happy fortune in an illuminated portion or meteorous
zone, and passed out of it again, so aloof was it from any will of ours.
"'Tis a principle of war," said Napoleon, "that when you can use the
lightning, 'tis better than cannon."

How many sources of inspiration can we count? As many as our affinities.
But to a practical purpose we may reckon a few of these.

1. Health is the first muse, comprising the magical benefits of air,
landscape, and bodily exercise on the mind. The Arabs say that "Allah
does not count from life the days spent in the chase," that is, those
are thrown in. Plato thought "exercise would almost cure a guilty
conscience." Sydney Smith said: "You will never break down in a speech
on the day when you have walked twelve miles."

I honor health as the first muse, and sleep as the condition of health.
Sleep benefits mainly by the sound health it produces; incidentally also
by dreams, into whose farrago a divine lesson is sometimes slipped. Life
is in short cycles or periods; we are quickly tired, but we have rapid
rallies. A man is spent by his work, starved, prostrate; he will not
lift his hand to save his life; he can never think more. He sinks into
deep sleep and wakes with renewed youth, with hope, courage, fertile in
resources, and keen for daring adventure.

    "Sleep is like death, and after sleep
      The world seems new begun;
    White thoughts stand luminous and firm,
      Like statues in the sun;
    Refreshed from supersensuous founts,
    The soul to clearer vision mounts."[5]

A man must be able to escape from his cares and fears, as well as from
hunger and want of sleep; so that another Arabian proverb has its coarse
truth: "When the belly is full, it says to the head, Sing, fellow!" The
perfection of writing is when mind and body are both in key; when the
mind finds perfect obedience in the body. And wine, no doubt, and all
fine food, as of delicate fruits, furnish some elemental wisdom. And the
fire, too, as it burns in the chimney; for I fancy that my logs, which
have grown so long in sun and wind by Walden, are a kind of muses. So of
all the particulars of health and exercise, and fit nutriment, and
tonics. Some people will tell you there is a great deal of poetry and
fine sentiment in a chest of tea.

2. The experience of writing letters is one of the keys to the _modus_
of inspiration. When we have ceased for a long time to have any fulness
of thoughts that once made a diary a joy as well as a necessity, and
have come to believe that an image or a happy turn of expression is no
longer at our command, in writing a letter to a friend we may find that
we rise to thought and to a cordial power of expression that costs no
effort, and it seems to us that this facility may be indefinitely
applied and resumed. The wealth of the mind in this respect of seeing is
like that of a looking-glass, which is never tired or worn by any
multitude of objects which it reflects. You may carry it all round the
world, it is ready and perfect as ever for new millions.

3. Another consideration, though it will not so much interest young men,
will cheer the heart of older scholars, namely, that there is diurnal
and secular rest. As there is this daily renovation of sensibility, so
it sometimes, if rarely, happens that after a season of decay or
eclipse, darkening months or years, the faculties revive to their
fullest force. One of the best facts I know in metaphysical science is
Niebuhr's joyful record that, after his genius for interpreting history
had failed him for several years, this divination returned to him. As
this rejoiced me, so does Herbert's poem "The Flower." His health had
broken down early, he had lost his muse, and in this poem he says:--

    "And now in age I bud again,
    After so many deaths I live and write;
    I once more smell the dew and rain,
    And relish versing: O my only light,
          It cannot be
          That I am he
    On whom thy tempests fell all night."

His poem called "The Forerunners" also has supreme interest. I
understand "The Harbingers" to refer to the signs of age and decay which
he detects in himself, not only in his constitution, but in his fancy
and his facility and grace in writing verse; and he signalizes his
delight in this skill, and his pain that the Herricks, Lovelaces, and
Marlows, or whoever else, should use the like genius in language to
sensual purpose, and consoles himself that his own faith and the divine
life in him remain to him unchanged, unharmed.

4. The power of the will is sometimes sublime; and what is will for, if
it cannot help us in emergencies? Seneca says of an almost fatal
sickness that befell him, "The thought of my father, who could not have
sustained such a blow as my death, restrained me; I commanded myself to
live." Goethe said to Eckermann, "I work more easily when the barometer
is high than when it is low. Since I know this, I endeavor, when the
barometer is low, to counteract the injurious effect by greater
exertion, and my attempt is successful."

"To the persevering mortal the blessed immortals are swift." Yes, for
they know how to give you in one moment the solution of the riddle you
have pondered for months. "Had I not lived with Mirabeau," says Dumont,
"I never should have known all that can be done in one day, or, rather,
in an interval of twelve hours. A day to him was of more value than a
week or a month to others. To-morrow to him was not the same impostor as
to most others."

5. Plutarch affirms that "souls are naturally endowed with the faculty
of prediction, and the chief cause that excites this faculty and virtue
is a certain temperature of air and winds." My anchorite thought it "sad
that atmospheric influences should bring to our dust the communion of
the soul with the Infinite." But I am glad that the atmosphere should be
an excitant, glad to find the dull rock itself to be deluged with
Deity,--to be theist, Christian, poetic. The fine influences of the
morning few can explain, but all will admit. Goethe acknowledges them in
the poem in which he dislodges the nightingale from her place as Leader
of the Muses.


              MUSAGETES.

    "Often in deep midnights
    I called on the sweet muses.
    No dawn shines,
    And no day will appear:
    But at the right hour
    The lamp brings me pious light,
    That it, instead of Aurora or Phœbus,
    May enliven my quiet industry.
    But they left me lying in sleep
    Dull, and not to be enlivened,
    And after every late morning
    Followed unprofitable days.

    "When now the Spring stirred,
    I said to the nightingales:
    'Dear nightingales, trill
    Early, O, early before my lattice,
    Wake me out of the deep sleep
    Which mightily chains the young man.'
    But the love-filled singers
    Poured by night before my window
    Their sweet melodies,--
    Kept awake my dear soul,
    Roused tender new longings
    In my lately touched bosom,
    And so the night passed,
    And Aurora found me sleeping;
    Yea, hardly did the sun wake me.
    At last it has become summer,
    And at the first glimpse of morning
    The busy early fly stings me
    Out of my sweet slumber.
    Unmerciful she returns again:
    When often the half-awake victim
    Impatiently drives her off,
    She calls hither the unscrupulous sisters.
    And from my eyelids
    Sweet sleep must depart.
    Vigorous, I spring from my couch,
    Seek the beloved Muses,
    Find them in the beech grove,
    Pleased to receive me;
    And I thank the annoying insect
    For many a golden hour.
    Stand, then, for me, ye tormenting creatures,
    Highly praised by the poet
    As the true Musagetes."

The French have a proverb to the effect that not the day only, but all
things have their morning,--"_Il n'y a que le matin en toutes choses_."
And it is a primal rule to defend your morning, to keep all its dews on,
and with fine foresight to relieve it from any jangle of affairs, even
from the question, Which task? I remember a capital prudence of old
President Quincy, who told me that he never went to bed at night until
he had laid out the studies for the next morning. I believe that in our
good days a well-ordered mind has a new thought awaiting it every
morning. And hence, eminently thoughtful men, from the time of
Pythagoras down, have insisted on an hour of solitude every day to meet
their own mind, and learn what oracle it has to impart. If a new view of
life or mind gives us joy, so does new arrangement. I don't know but we
take as much delight in finding the right place for an old observation,
as in a new thought.

6. Solitary converse with nature; for thence are ejaculated sweet and
dreadful words never uttered in libraries. Ah! the spring days, the
summer dawns, the October woods! I confide that my reader knows these
delicious secrets, has perhaps

                       "Slighted Minerva's learned tongue,
    But leaped with joy when on the wind the shell of Clio rung."

Are you poetical, impatient of trade, tired of labor and affairs? Do you
want Monadnoc, Agiocochook,--or Helvellyn, or Plinlimmon, dear to
English song, in your closet? Caerleon, Provence, Ossian, and Cadwallon?
Tie a couple of strings across a board and set it in your window, and
you have an instrument which no artist's harp can rival. It needs no
instructed ear; if you have sensibility, it admits you to sacred
interiors; it has the sadness of nature, yet, at the changes, tones of
triumph and festal notes ringing out all measures of loftiness. "Did you
never observe," says Gray, "'while rocking winds are piping loud,' that
pause, as the gust is recollecting itself, and rising upon the ear in a
shrill and plaintive note, like the swell of an Æolian harp? I do
assure you there is nothing in the world so like the voice of a spirit."
Perhaps you can recall a delight like it, which spoke to the eye, when
you have stood by a lake in the woods, in summer, and saw where little
flaws of wind whip spots or patches of still water into fleets of
ripples, so sudden, so slight, so spiritual, that it was more like the
rippling of the Aurora Borealis, at night, than any spectacle of day.

7. But the solitude of nature is not so essential as solitude of habit.
I have found my advantage in going in summer to a country inn, in winter
to a city hotel, with a task which would not prosper at home. I thus
secured a more absolute seclusion; for it is almost impossible for a
housekeeper, who is in the country a small farmer, to exclude
interruptions, and even necessary orders, though I bar out by system all
I can, and resolutely omit, to my constant damage, all that can be
omitted. At home, the day is cut into short strips. In the hotel, I have
no hours to keep, no visits to make or receive, and I command an
astronomic leisure. I forget rain, wind, cold, and heat. At home, I
remember in my library the wants of the farm, and have all too much
sympathy. I envy the abstraction of some scholars I have known, who
could sit on a curbstone in State Street, put up their back, and solve
their problem. I have more womanly eyes. All the conditions must be
right for my success, slight as that is. What untunes is as bad as what
cripples or stuns me. Novelty, surprise, change of scene, refresh the
artist,--"break up the tiresome old roof of heaven into new forms," as
Hafiz said. The sea-shore, and the taste of two metals in contact, and
our enlarged powers in the presence, or rather at the approach and at
the departure of a friend, and the mixture of lie in truth, and the
experience of poetic creativeness which is not found in staying at home,
nor yet in travelling, but in transitions from one to the other, which
must therefore be adroitly managed to present as much transitional
surface as possible,--these are the types or conditions of this power.
"A ride near the sea, a sail near the shore," said the ancient. So
Montaigne travelled with his books, but did not read in them. "_La
Nature aime les croisements_," says Fourier.

I know there is room for whims here; but in regard to some apparent
trifles there is great agreement as to their annoyance. And the machine
with which we are dealing is of such an inconceivable delicacy that
whims also must be respected. Fire must lend its aid. We not only want
time, but warm time. George Sand says, "I have no enthusiasm for nature
which the slightest chill will not instantly destroy." And I remember
that Thoreau, with his robust will, yet found certain trifles disturbing
the delicacy of that health which composition exacted,--namely, the
slightest irregularity, even to the drinking too much water on the
preceding day. Even a steel pen is a nuisance to some writers. Some of
us may remember, years ago, in the English journals, the petition,
signed by Carlyle, Browning, Tennyson, Dickens, and other writers in
London, against the license of the organ-grinders, who infested the
streets near their houses, to levy on them blackmail.

Certain localities, as mountain-tops, the sea-side, the shores of rivers
and rapid brooks, natural parks of oak and pine, where the ground is
smooth and unencumbered, are excitants of the muse. Every artist knows
well some favorite retirement. And yet the experience of some good
artists has taught them to prefer the smallest and plainest chamber,
with one chair and table, and with no outlook, to these picturesque
liberties. William Blake said, "Natural objects always did and do
weaken, deaden, and obliterate imagination in me." And Sir Joshua
Reynolds had no pleasure in Richmond; he used to say "the human face was
his landscape." These indulgences are to be used with great caution.
Allston rarely left his studio by day. An old friend took him, one fine
afternoon, a spacious circuit into the country, and he painted two or
three pictures as the fruits of that drive. But he made it a rule not to
go to the city on two consecutive days. One was rest; more was lost
time. The times of force must be well husbanded, and the wise student
will remember the prudence of Sir Tristram in _Morte d'Arthur_, who,
having received from the fairy an enchantment of six hours of growing
strength every day, took care to fight in the hours when his strength
increased; since from noon to night his strength abated. What prudence,
again, does every artist, every scholar, need in the security of his
easel or his desk! These must be remote from the work of the house, and
from all knowledge of the feet that come and go therein. Allston, it is
said, had two or three rooms in different parts of Boston, where he
could not be found. For the delicate muses lose their head, if their
attention is once diverted. Perhaps if you were successful abroad in
talking and dealing with men, you would not come back to your book-shelf
and your task. When the spirit chooses you for its scribe to publish
some commandment, it makes you odious to men, and men odious to you, and
you shall accept that loathsomeness with joy. The moth must fly to the
lamp, and you must solve those questions though you die.

8. Conversation, which, when it is best, is a series of intoxications.
Not Aristotle, not Kant or Hegel, but conversation, is the right
metaphysical professor. This is the true school of philosophy,--this the
college where you learn what thoughts are, what powers lurk in those
fugitive gleams, and what becomes of them; how they make history. A wise
man goes to this game to play upon others, and to be played upon, and at
least as curious to know what can be drawn from himself as what can be
drawn from them. For, in discourse with a friend, our thought, hitherto
wrapped in our consciousness, detaches itself, and allows itself to be
seen as a thought, in a manner as new and entertaining to us as to our
companions. For provocation of thought, we use ourselves and use each
other. Some perceptions--I think the best--are granted to the single
soul; they come from the depth, and go to the depth, and are the
permanent and controlling ones. Others it takes two to find. We must be
warmed by the fire of sympathy to be brought into the right conditions
and angles of vision. Conversation; for intellectual activity is
contagious. We are emulous. If the tone of the companion is higher than
ours, we delight in rising to it. 'Tis a historic observation that a
writer must find an audience up to his thought, or he will no longer
care to impart it, but will sink to their level, or be silent. Homer
said, "When two come together, one apprehends before the other"; but it
is because one thought well that the other thinks better: and two men of
good mind will excite each other's activity, each attempting still to
cap the other's thought. In enlarged conversation we have suggestions
that require new ways of living, new books, new men, new arts and
sciences. By sympathy, each opens to the eloquence, and begins to see
with the eyes of his mind. We were all lonely, thoughtless; and now a
principle appears to all: we see new relations, many truths; every mind
seizes them as they pass; each catches by the mane one of these strong
coursers like horses of the prairie, and rides up and down in the world
of the intellect. We live day by day under the illusion that it is the
fact or event that imports, whilst really it is not that which
signifies, but the use we put it to, or what we think of it. We esteem
nations important, until we discover that a few individuals much more
concern us; then, later, that it is not at last a few individuals, or
any sacred heroes, but the lowliness, the outpouring, the large equality
to truth, of a single mind,--as if in the narrow walls of a human heart
the whole realm of truth, the world of morals, the tribunal by which the
universe is judged, found room to exist.

9. New poetry; by which I mean chiefly, old poetry that is new to the
reader. I have heard from persons who had practice in rhyming, that it
was sufficient to set them on writing verses, to read any original
poetry. What is best in literature is the affirming, prophesying,
spermatic words of men-making poets. Only that is poetry which cleanses
and mans me.

Words used in a new sense, and figuratively, dart a delightful lustre;
and _every_ word admits a new use, and hints ulterior meanings. We have
not learned the law of the mind,--cannot control and domesticate at will
the high states of contemplation and continuous thought. "Neither by sea
nor by land," said Pindar, "canst thou find the way to the
Hyperboreans"; neither by idle wishing, nor by rule of three or rule of
thumb. Yet I find a mitigation or solace by providing always a good book
for my journeys, as Horace or Martial or Goethe,--some book which lifts
me quite out of prosaic surroundings, and from which I draw some lasting
knowledge. A Greek epigram out of the anthology, a verse of Herrick or
Lovelace, are in harmony both with sense and spirit.

You shall not read newspapers, nor politics, nor novels, nor Montaigne,
nor the newest French book. You may read Plutarch, Plato, Plotinus,
Hindoo mythology, and ethics. You may read Chaucer, Shakspeare, Ben
Jonson, Milton,--and Milton's prose as his verse; read Collins and Gray;
read Hafiz and the Trouveurs; nay, Welsh and British mythology of
Arthur, and (in your ear) Ossian; fact-books, which all geniuses prize
as raw material, and as antidote to verbiage and false poetry.
Fact-books, if the facts be well and thoroughly told, are much more
nearly allied to poetry than many books are that are written in rhyme.
Only our newest knowledge works as a source of inspiration and thought,
as only the outmost layer of _liber_ on the tree. Books of natural
science, especially those written by the ancients,--geography, botany,
agriculture, explorations of the sea, of meteors, of astronomy,--all the
better if written without literary aim or ambition. Every book is good
to read which sets the reader in a working mood. The deep book, no
matter how remote the subject, helps us best.

Neither are these all the sources, nor can I name all. The receptivity
is rare. The occasions or predisposing circumstances I could never
tabulate; but now one, now another landscape, form, color, or companion,
or perhaps one kind of sounding word or syllable, "strikes the electric
chain with which we are darkly bound," and it is impossible to detect
and wilfully repeat the fine conditions to which we have owed our
happiest frames of mind. The day is good in which we have had the most
perceptions. The analysis is the more difficult, because poppy-leaves
are strewn when a generalization is made; for I can never remember the
circumstances to which I owe it, so as to repeat the experiment or put
myself in the conditions.

    "'Tis the most difficult of tasks to keep
    Heights which the soul is competent to gain."

I value literary biography for the hints it furnishes from so many
scholars, in so many countries, of what hygiene, what ascetic, what
gymnastic, what social practices their experience suggested and
approved. They are, for the most part, men who needed only a little
wealth. Large estates, political relations, great hospitalities, would
have been impediments to them. They are men whom a book could entertain,
a new thought intoxicate, and hold them prisoners for years perhaps.
Aubrey and Burton and Wood tell me incidents which I find not
insignificant.

These are some hints towards what is in all education a chief necessity,
the right government, or, shall I not say, the right obedience to the
powers of the human soul. Itself is the dictator; the mind itself the
awful oracle. All our power, all our happiness, consists in our
reception of its hints, which ever become clearer and grander as they
are obeyed.

[Footnote 5: Allingham.]




                        GREATNESS.




                        GREATNESS.


THERE is a prize which we are all aiming at, and the more power and
goodness we have, so much more the energy of that aim. Every human being
has a right to it, and in the pursuit we do not stand in each other's
way. For it has a long scale of degrees, a wide variety of views, and
every aspirant, by his success in the pursuit, does not hinder but helps
his competitors. I might call it completeness, but that is
later,--perhaps adjourned for ages. I prefer to call it Greatness. It is
the fulfilment of a natural tendency in each man. It is a fruitful
study. It is the best tonic to the young soul. And no man is unrelated;
therefore we admire eminent men, not for themselves, but as
representatives. It is very certain that we ought not to be, and shall
not be contented with any goal we have reached. Our aim is no less than
greatness; that which invites all, belongs to us all,--to which we are
all sometimes untrue, cowardly, faithless, but of which we never quite
despair, and which, in every sane moment, we resolve to make our own. It
is also the only platform on which all men can meet. What anecdotes of
any man do we wish to hear or read? Only the best. Certainly not those
in which he was degraded to the level of dulness or vice, but those in
which he rose above all competition by obeying a light that shone to him
alone. This is the worthiest history of the world.

Greatness,--what is it? Is there not some injury to us, some insult in
the word? What we commonly call greatness is only such in our barbarous
or infant experience. 'Tis not the soldier, not Alexander or Bonaparte
or Count Moltke surely, who represent the highest force of mankind; not
the strong hand, but wisdom and civility, the creation of laws,
institutions, letters, and art. These we call by distinction the
_humanities_; these, and not the strong arm and brave heart, which are
also indispensable to their defence. For the scholars represent the
intellect, by which man is man; the intellect and the moral
sentiment,--which in the last analysis can never be separated. Who can
doubt the potency of an individual mind, who sees the shock given to
torpid races--torpid for ages--by Mahomet; a vibration propagated over
Asia and Africa? What of Menu? what of Buddha? of Shakspeare? of Newton?
of Franklin?

There are certain points of identity in which these masters agree.
Self-respect is the early form in which greatness appears. The man in
the tavern maintains his opinion, though the whole crowd takes the other
side; we are at once drawn to him. The porter or truckman refuses a
reward for finding your purse, or for pulling you drowning out of the
river. Thereby, with the service, you have got a moral lift. You say of
some new person, That man will go far,--for you see in his manners that
the recognition of him by others is not necessary to him. And what a
bitter-sweet sensation when we have gone to pour out our acknowledgment
of a man's nobleness, and found him quite indifferent to our good
opinion! They may well fear Fate who have any infirmity of habit or aim;
but he who rests on what he is, has a destiny above destiny, and can
make mouths at Fortune. If a man's centrality is incomprehensible to us,
we may as well snub the sun. There is something in Archimedes or in
Luther or Samuel Johnson that needs no protection. There is somewhat in
the true scholar which he cannot be laughed out of, nor be terrified or
bought off from. Stick to your own; don't inculpate yourself in the
local, social, or national crime, but follow the path your genius traces
like the galaxy of heaven, for you to walk in.

A sensible person will soon see the folly and wickedness of thinking to
please. Sensible men are very rare. A sensible man does not brag, avoids
introducing the names of his creditable companions, omits himself as
habitually as another man obtrudes himself in the discourse, and is
content with putting his fact or theme simply on its ground. You shall
not tell me that your commercial house, your partners, or yourself are
of importance; you shall not tell me that you have learned to know men;
you shall make me feel that; your saying so unsays it. You shall not
enumerate your brilliant acquaintances, nor tell me by their titles what
books you have read. I am to infer that you keep good company by your
better information and manners, and to infer your reading from the
wealth and accuracy of your conversation.

Young men think that the manly character requires that they should go to
California, or to India, or into the army. When they have learned that
the parlor and the college and the counting-room demand as much courage
as the sea or the camp, they will be willing to consult their own
strength and education in their choice of place.

There are to each function and department of nature supplementary men:
to geology, sinewy, out-of-doors men, with a taste for mountains and
rocks, a quick eye for differences and for chemical changes. Give such,
first, a course in chemistry, and then a geological survey. Others find
a charm and a profession in the natural history of man and the mammalia,
or related animals; others in ornithology, or fishes, or insects; others
in plants; others in the elements of which the whole world is made.
These lately have stimulus to their study through the extraordinary
revelations of the spectroscope that the sun and the planets are made in
part or in whole of the same elements as the earth is. Then there is the
boy who is born with a taste for the sea, and must go thither if he has
to run away from his father's house to the forecastle; another longs for
travel in foreign lands; another will be a lawyer; another, an
astronomer; another, a painter, sculptor, architect, or engineer. Thus
there is not a piece of nature in any kind, but a man is born, who, as
his genius opens, aims slower or faster to dedicate himself to that.
Then there is the poet, the philosopher, the politician, the orator, the
clergyman, the physician. 'Tis gratifying to see this adaptation of man
to the world, and to every part and particle of it.

Many readers remember that Sir Humphry Davy said, when he was praised
for his important discoveries, "My best discovery was Michael Faraday."
In 1848 I had the privilege of hearing Professor Faraday deliver, in the
Royal Institution in London, a lecture on what he called
Diamagnetism,--by which he meant _cross-magnetism_; and he showed us
various experiments on certain gases, to prove that whilst, ordinarily,
magnetism of steel is from north to south, in other substances, gases,
it acts from east to west. And further experiments led him to the theory
that every chemical substance would be found to have its own, and a
different, polarity. I do not know how far his experiments and others
have been pushed in this matter, but one fact is clear to me, that
diamagnetism is a law of the _mind_, to the full extent of Faraday's
idea; namely, that every mind has a new compass, a new north, a new
direction of its own, differencing its genius and aim from every other
mind;--as every man, with whatever family resemblances, has a new
countenance, new manner, new voice, new thoughts, and new character.
Whilst he shares with all mankind the gift of reason, and the moral
sentiment, there is a teaching for him from within, which is leading him
in a new path, and, the more it is trusted, separates and signalizes
him, while it makes him more important and necessary to society. We call
this specialty the _bias_ of each individual. And none of us will ever
accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to
this whisper which is heard by him alone. Swedenborg called it the
_proprium_,--not a thought shared with others, but constitutional to the
man. A point of education that I can never too much insist upon is this
tenet, that every individual man has a bias which he must obey, and that
it is only as he feels and obeys this that he rightly develops and
attains his legitimate power in the world. It is his magnetic needle,
which points always in one direction to his proper path, with more or
less variation from any other man's. He is never happy nor strong until
he finds it, keeps it; learns to be at home with himself; learns to
watch the delicate hints and insights that come to him, and to have the
entire assurance of his own mind. And in this self-respect, or
hearkening to the privatest oracle, he consults his ease, I may say, or
need never be at a loss. In morals this is conscience; in intellect,
genius; in practice, talent;--not to imitate or surpass a particular man
in _his_ way, but to bring out your own new way; to each his own method,
style, wit, eloquence. 'Tis easy for a commander to command. Clinging to
Nature, or to that province of nature which he knows, he makes no
mistakes, but works after her laws and at her own pace, so that his
doing, which is perfectly natural, appears miraculous to dull people.
Montluc, the great Marshal of France, says of the Genoese admiral,
Andrew Doria, "It seemed as if the sea stood in awe of this man." And a
kindred genius, Nelson, said, "I feel that I am fitter to do the action
than to describe it." Therefore I will say that another trait of
greatness is facility.

This necessity of resting on the real, of speaking _your_ private
thought and experience, few young men apprehend. Set ten men to write
their journal for one day, and nine of them will leave out their
thought, or proper result,--that is, their net experience,--and lose
themselves in misreporting the supposed experience of other people.
Indeed, I think it an essential caution to young writers, that they
shall not in their discourse leave out the one thing which the discourse
was written to say. Let that belief which you hold alone, have free
course. I have observed that, in all public speaking, the rule of the
orator begins, not in the array of his facts, but when his deep
conviction, and the right and necessity he feels to convey that
conviction to his audience,--when these shine and burn in his address;
when the thought which he stands for gives its own authority to
him,--adds to him a grander personality, gives him valor, breadth, and
new intellectual power, so that not he, but mankind, seems to speak
through his lips. There is a certain transfiguration; all great orators
have it, and men who wish to be orators simulate it.

If we should ask ourselves what is this self-respect,--it would carry us
to the highest problems. It is our practical perception of the Deity in
man. It has its deep foundations in religion. If you have ever known a
good mind among the Quakers, you will have found _that_ is the element
of their faith. As they express it, it might be thus: "I do not pretend
to any commandment or large revelation, but if at any time I form some
plan, propose a journey, or a course of conduct, I perhaps find a silent
obstacle in my mind that I cannot account for. Very well,--I let it lie,
thinking it may pass away, but if it do not pass away, I yield to it,
obey it. You ask me to describe it. I cannot describe it. It is not an
oracle, nor an angel, nor a dream, nor a law; it is too simple to be
described, it is but a grain of mustard-seed, but such as it is, it is
something which the contradiction of all mankind could not shake, and
which the consent of all mankind could not confirm."

You are rightly fond of certain books or men that you have found to
excite your reverence and emulation. But none of these can compare with
the greatness of that counsel which is open to you in happy solitude. I
mean that there is for you the following of an inward leader,--a slow
discrimination that there is for each a Best Counsel which enjoins the
fit word and the fit act for every moment. And the path of each pursued
leads to greatness. How grateful to find in man or woman a new emphasis
of their own.

But if the first rule is to obey your native bias, to accept that work
for which you were inwardly formed, the second rule is concentration,
which doubles its force. Thus if you are a scholar, be that. The same
laws hold for you as for the laborer. The shoemaker makes a good shoe
because he makes nothing else. Let the student mind his own charge;
sedulously wait every morning for the news concerning the structure of
the world which the spirit will give him.

No way has been found for making heroism easy, even for the scholar.
Labor, iron labor, is for him. The world was created as an audience for
him; the atoms of which it is made are opportunities. Read the
performance of Bentley, of Gibbon, of Cuvier, Geoffroy St. Hilaire,
Laplace. "He can toil terribly," said Cecil of Sir Walter Raleigh. These
few words sting and bite and lash us when we are frivolous. Let us get
out of the way of their blows, by making them true of ourselves. There
is so much to be done that we ought to begin quickly to bestir
ourselves. This day-labor of ours, we confess, has hitherto a certain
emblematic air, like the annual ploughing and sowing of the Emperor of
China. Let us make it an honest sweat. Let the scholar measure his valor
by his power to cope with intellectual giants. Leave others to count
votes and calculate stocks. His courage is to weigh Plato, judge
Laplace, know Newton, Faraday, judge of Darwin, criticise Kant and
Swedenborg, and on all these arouse the central courage of insight. The
scholar's courage should be as terrible as the Cid's, though it grow out
of spiritual nature, not out of brawn. Nature, when she adds difficulty,
adds brain.

With this respect to the bias of the individual mind, add, what is
consistent with it, the most catholic receptivity for the genius of
others. The day will come when no badge, uniform, or medal will be worn;
when the eye, which carries in it planetary influences from all the
stars, will indicate rank fast enough by exerting power. For it is true
that the stratification of crusts in geology is not more precise than
the degrees of rank in minds. A man will say: 'I am born to this
position; I must take it, and neither you nor I can help or hinder me.
Surely, then, I need not fret myself to guard my own dignity.' The great
man loves the conversation or the book that convicts him, not that which
soothes or flatters him. He makes himself of no reputation; he conceals
his learning, conceals his charity. For the highest wisdom does not
concern itself with particular men, but with man enamored with the law
and the Eternal Source. Say with Antoninus, "If the picture is good, who
cares who made it? What matters it by whom the good is done, by yourself
or another?" If it is the truth, what matters who said it? If it was
right, what signifies who did it? All greatness is in degree, and there
is more above than below. Where were your own intellect, if greater had
not lived? And do you know what the right meaning of Fame is? 'Tis that
sympathy, rather that fine element by which the good become partners of
the greatness of their superiors.

Extremes meet, and there is no better example than the haughtiness of
humility. No aristocrat, no prince born to the purple, can begin to
compare with the self-respect of the saint. Why is he so lowly, but that
he knows that he can well afford it, resting on the largeness of God in
him? I have read in an old book that Barcena, the Jesuit, confessed to
another of his order that when the Devil appeared to him in his cell,
one night, out of his profound humility he rose up to meet him, and
prayed him to sit down in his chair, for he was more worthy to sit there
than himself.

Shall I tell you the secret of the true scholar? It is this: Every man I
meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him. The
populace will say, with Horne Tooke, "If you would be powerful, pretend
to be powerful." I prefer to say, with the old Hebrew prophet, "Seekest
thou great things?--seek them not"; or, what was said of the Spanish
prince, "The more you took from him, the greater he appeared," _Plus on
lui ôte, plus il est grand_.

Scintillations of greatness appear here and there in men of unequal
character, and are by no means confined to the cultivated and so-called
moral class. 'Tis easy to draw traits from Napoleon, who was not
generous nor just, but was intellectual, and knew the law of things.
Napoleon commands our respect by his enormous self-trust,--the habit of
seeing with his own eyes, never the surface, but to the heart of the
matter, whether it was a road, a cannon, a character, an officer, or a
king,--and by the speed and security of his action in the premises,
always new. He has left a library of manuscripts, a multitude of
sayings, every one of widest application. He was a man who always fell
on his feet. When one of his favorite schemes missed, he had the faculty
of taking up his genius, as he said, and of carrying it somewhere else.
"Whatever they may tell you, believe that one fights with cannon as with
fists; when once the fire is begun, the least want of ammunition renders
what you have done already useless." I find it easy to translate all his
technics into all of mine, and his official advices are to me more
literary and philosophical than the memoirs of the Academy. His advice
to his brother, King Joseph of Spain, was: "I have only one counsel for
you,--_Be Master_." Depth of intellect relieves even the ink of crime
with a fringe of light. We perhaps look on its crimes as experiments of
a universal student; as he may read any book who reads all books, and as
the English judge in old times, when learning was rare, forgave a
culprit who could read and write. 'Tis difficult to find greatness pure.
Well, I please myself with its diffusion,--to find a spark of true fire
amid much corruption. It is some guaranty, I hope, for the health of the
soul which has this generous blood. How many men, detested in
contemporary hostile history, of whom, now that the mists have rolled
away, we have learned to correct our old estimates, and to see them as,
on the whole, instruments of great benefit. Diderot was no model, but
unclean as the society in which he lived; yet was he the best-natured
man in France, and would help any wretch at a pinch. His humanity knew
no bounds. A poor scribbler who had written a lampoon against him, and
wished to dedicate it to a pious Duc d'Orleans, came with it in his
poverty to Diderot, and Diderot, pitying the creature, wrote the
dedication for him, and so raised five-and-twenty louis to save his
famishing lampooner alive.

Meantime we hate snivelling. I do not wish you to surpass others in any
narrow or professional or monkish way. We like the natural greatness of
health and wild power. I confess that I am as much taken by it in boys,
and sometimes in people not normal, nor educated, nor presentable, nor
church-members,--even in persons open to the suspicion of irregular and
immoral living,--in Bohemians,--as in more orderly examples. For we must
remember that in the lives of soldiers, sailors, and men of large
adventure, many of the stays and guards of our household life are
wanting, and yet the opportunities and incentives to sublime daring and
performance are often close at hand. We must have some charity for the
sense of the people which admires natural power, and will elect it over
virtuous men who have less. It has this excuse, that natural is really
allied to moral power, and may always be expected to approach it by its
own instincts. Intellect at least is not stupid, and will see the force
of morals over men, if it does not itself obey. Henry VII. of England
was a wise king. When Gerald, Earl of Kildare, who was in rebellion
against him, was brought to London, and examined before the Privy
Council, one said, "All Ireland cannot govern this Earl." "Then let this
Earl govern all Ireland," replied the King.

'Tis noted of some scholars, like Swift, and Gibbon and Donne, that they
pretended to vices which they had not, so much did they hate hypocrisy.
William Blake, the artist, frankly says, "I never knew a bad man in whom
there was not something very good." Bret Harte has pleased himself with
noting and recording the sudden virtue blazing in the wild reprobates of
the ranches and mines of California.

Men are ennobled by morals and by intellect; but those two elements know
each other and always beckon to each other, until at last they meet in
the man, if he is to be truly great. The man who sells you a lamp shows
you that the flame of oil, which contented you before, casts a strong
shade in the path of the petroleum which he lights behind it; and this
again casts a shadow in the path of the electric light. So does
intellect when brought into the presence of character; character puts
out that light. Goethe, in his correspondence with his Grand Duke of
Weimar, does not shine. We can see that the Prince had the advantage of
the Olympian genius. It is more plainly seen in the correspondence
between Voltaire and Frederick of Prussia. Voltaire is brilliant,
nimble, and various, but Frederick has the superior tone. But it is
curious that Byron _writes down_ to Scott; Scott writes up to him. The
Greeks surpass all men till they face the Romans, when Roman character
prevails over Greek genius. Whilst degrees of intellect interest only
classes of men who pursue the same studies, as chemists or astronomers,
mathematicians or linguists, and have no attraction for the crowd, there
are always men who have a more catholic genius, are really great as men,
and inspire universal enthusiasm. A great style of hero draws equally
all classes, all the extremes of society, till we say the very dogs
believe in him. We have had such examples in this country, in Daniel
Webster, Henry Clay, and the seamen's preacher, Father Taylor; in
England, Charles James Fox; in Scotland, Robert Burns; and in France,
though it is less intelligible to us, Voltaire. Abraham Lincoln is
perhaps the most remarkable example of this class that we have seen,--a
man who was at home and welcome with the humblest, and with a spirit and
a practical vein in the times of terror that commanded the admiration of
the wisest. His heart was as great as the world, but there was no room
in it to hold the memory of a wrong.

These may serve as local examples to indicate a magnetism which is
probably known better and finer to each scholar in the little Olympus of
his own favorites, and which makes him require geniality and humanity in
his heroes. What are these but the promise and the preparation of a day
when the air of the world shall be purified by nobler society; when the
measure of greatness shall be usefulness in the highest
sense,--greatness consisting in truth, reverence, and good-will?

Life is made of illusions, and a very common one is the opinion you hear
expressed in every village: 'O yes, if I lived in New York or
Philadelphia, Cambridge or New Haven or Boston or Andover there might be
fit society; but it happens that there are no fine young men, no
superior women in my town.' You may hear this every day; but it is a
shallow remark. Ah! have you yet to learn that the eye altering alters
all; "that the world is an echo which returns to each of us what we
say"? 'Tis not examples of greatness, but sensibility to see them, that
is wanting. The good botanist will find flowers between the street
pavements, and any man filled with an idea or a purpose will find
examples and illustrations and coadjutors wherever he goes. Wit is a
magnet to find wit, and character to find character. Do you not know
that people are as those with whom they converse? And if all or any are
heavy to me, that fact accuses me. Why complain, as if a man's debt to
his inferiors were not at least equal to his debt to his superiors? If
men were equals, the waters would not move; but the difference of level
which makes Niagara a cataract, makes eloquence, indignation, poetry, in
him who finds there is much to communicate. With self-respect, then,
there must be in the aspirant the strong fellow-feeling, the humanity,
which makes men of all classes warm to him as their leader and
representative.

We are thus forced to express our instinct of the truth, by exposing the
failures of experience. The man whom we have not seen, in whom no regard
of self degraded the adorer of the laws,--who by governing himself
governed others; sportive in manner, but inexorable in act; who sees
longevity in his cause; whose aim is always distinct to him; who is
suffered to be himself in society; who carries fate in his eye;--he it
is whom we seek, encouraged in every good hour that here or hereafter he
shall be found.




                        IMMORTALITY.




                        IMMORTALITY.


IN the year 626 of our era, when Edwin, the Anglo-Saxon king, was
deliberating on receiving the Christian missionaries, one of his nobles
said to him: "The present life of man, O king, compared with that space
of time beyond, of which we have no certainty, reminds me of one of your
winter feasts, where you sit with your generals and ministers. The
hearth blazes in the middle and a grateful heat is spread around, while
storms of rain and snow are raging without. Driven by the chilling
tempest, a little sparrow enters at one door and flies delighted around
us till it departs through the other. Whilst it stays in our mansion it
feels not the winter storm; but when this short moment of happiness has
been enjoyed, it is forced again into the same dreary tempest from which
it had escaped, and we behold it no more. Such is the life of man, and
we are as ignorant of the state which preceded our present existence as
of that which will follow it. Things being so I feel that if this new
faith can give us more certainty, it deserves to be received."

In the first records of a nation in any degree thoughtful and
cultivated, some belief in the life beyond life would of course be
suggested. The Egyptian people furnish us the earliest details of an
established civilization, and I read, in the second book of Herodotus,
this memorable sentence: "The Egyptians are the first of mankind who
have affirmed the immortality of the soul." Nor do I read it with less
interest, that the historian connects it presently with the doctrine of
metempsychosis; for I know well that, where this belief once existed, it
would necessarily take a base form for the savage and a pure form for
the wise;--so that I only look on the counterfeit as a proof that the
genuine faith had been there. The credence of men, more than race or
climate, makes their manners and customs; and the history of religion
may be read in the forms of sepulture. There never was a time when the
doctrine of a future life was not held. Morals must be enjoined, but
among rude men moral judgments were rudely figured under the forms of
dogs and whips, or of an easier and more plentiful life after death. And
as the savage could not detach in his mind the life of the soul from the
body, he took great care for his body. Thus the whole life of man in the
first ages was ponderously determined on death; and, as we know, the
polity of the Egyptians, the by-laws of towns, of streets and houses,
respected burial. It made every man an undertaker, and the priesthood a
senate of sextons. Every palace was a door to a pyramid; a king or rich
man was a _pyramidaire_. The labor of races was spent on the excavation
of catacombs. The chief end of man being to be buried well, the arts
most in request were masonry and embalming, to give imperishability to
the corpse.

The Greek, with his perfect senses and perceptions, had quite another
philosophy. He loved life and delighted in beauty. He set his wit and
taste, like elastic gas, under these mountains of stone, and lifted
them. He drove away the embalmers; he built no more of those doleful
mountainous tombs. He adorned death, brought wreaths of parsley and
laurel; made it bright with games of strength and skill, and
chariot-races. He looked at death only as the distributor of
imperishable glory. Nothing can excel the beauty of his sarcophagus. He
carried his arts to Rome, and built his beautiful tombs at Pompeii. The
poet Shelley says of these delicately carved white marble cells, "they
seem not so much tombs, as voluptuous chambers for immortal spirits." In
the same spirit the modern Greeks, in their songs, ask that they may be
buried where the sun can see them, and that a little window may be cut
in the sepulchre, from which the swallow might be seen when it comes
back in the spring.

Christianity brought a new wisdom. But learning depends on the learner.
No more truth can be conveyed than the popular mind can bear; and the
barbarians who received the cross took the doctrine of the resurrection
as the Egyptians took it. It was an affair of the body, and narrowed
again by the fury of sect; so that grounds were sprinkled with holy
water to receive only orthodox dust; and to keep the body still more
sacredly safe for resurrection, it was put into the walls of the church:
and the churches of Europe are really sepulchres. I read at Melrose
Abbey the inscription on the ruined gate:--

    "The Earth goes on the Earth glittering with gold;
    The Earth goes to the Earth sooner than it should;
    The Earth builds on the Earth castles and towers;
    The Earth says to the Earth, All this is ours."

Meantime the true disciples saw through the letter the doctrine of
eternity which dissolved the poor corpse and nature also, and gave
grandeur to the passing hour. The most remarkable step in the religious
history of recent ages is that made by the genius of Swedenborg, who
described the moral faculties and affections of man, with the hard
realism of an astronomer describing the suns and planets of our system,
and explained his opinion of the history and destiny of souls in a
narrative form, as of one who had gone in a trance into the society of
other worlds. Swedenborg described an intelligible heaven, by continuing
the like employments in the like circumstances as those we know,--men in
societies, in houses, towns, trades, entertainments,--continuations of
our earthly experience. We shall pass to the future existence as we
enter into an agreeable dream. All nature will accompany us there.
Milton anticipated the leading thought of Swedenborg, when he wrote, in
"Paradise Lost,"--

                                    "What if Earth
    Be but the shadow of Heaven, and things therein
    Each to the other like more than on earth is thought?"

Swedenborg had a vast genius, and announced many things true and
admirable, though always clothed in somewhat sad and Stygian colors.
These truths, passing out of his system into general circulation, are
now met with every day, qualifying the views and creeds of all churches,
and of men of no church. And I think we are all aware of a revolution in
opinion. Sixty years ago, the books read, the sermons and prayers heard,
the habits of thought of religious persons, were all directed on death.
All were under the shadow of Calvinism and of the Roman Catholic
purgatory, and death was dreadful. The emphasis of all the good books
given to young people was on death. We were all taught that we were born
to die; and over that, all the terrors that theology could gather from
savage nations were added to increase the gloom. A great change has
occurred. Death is seen as a natural event, and is met with firmness. A
wise man in our time caused to be written on his tomb, "Think on
living." That inscription describes a progress in opinion. Cease from
this antedating of your experience. Sufficient to to-day are the duties
of to-day. Don't waste life in doubts and fears; spend yourself on the
work before you, well assured that the right performance of this hour's
duties will be the best preparation for the hours or ages that follow
it.

    "The name of death was never terrible
    To him that knew to live."

A man of thought is willing to die, willing to live; I suppose, because
he has seen the thread on which the beads are strung, and perceived that
it reaches up and down, existing quite independently of the present
illusions. A man of affairs is afraid to die, is pestered with terrors,
because he has not this vision, and is the victim of those who have
moulded the religious doctrines into some neat and plausible system, as
Calvinism, Romanism, or Swedenborgism, for household use. It is the fear
of the young bird to trust its wings. The experiences of the soul will
fast outgrow this alarm. The saying of Marcus Antoninus it were hard to
mend: "It were well to die if there be gods, and sad to live if there be
none." I think all sound minds rest on a certain preliminary conviction,
namely, that if it be best that conscious personal life shall continue,
it will continue; if not best, then it will not: and we, if we saw the
whole, should of course see that it was better so. Schiller said, "What
is so universal as death, must be benefit." A friend of Michel Angelo
saying to him that his constant labor for art must make him think of
death with regret, "By no means," he said; "for if life be a pleasure,
yet since death also is sent by the hand of the same Master, neither
should that displease us." Plutarch, in Greece, has a deep faith that
the doctrine of the Divine Providence and that of the immortality of the
soul rest on one and the same basis. Hear the opinion of Montesquieu:
"If the immortality of the soul were an error, I should be sorry not to
believe it. I avow that I am not so humble as the atheist; I know not
how they think, but for me, I do not wish to exchange the idea of
immortality against that of the beatitude of one day. I delight in
believing myself as immortal as God himself. Independently of revealed
ideas, metaphysical ideas give me a vigorous hope of my eternal
well-being, which I would never renounce."[6]

I was lately told of young children who feel a certain terror at the
assurance of life without end. "What! will it never stop?" the child
said; "what! never die? _never_, never? It makes me feel so tired." And
I have in mind the expression of an older believer, who once said to me,
"The thought that this frail being is never to end is so overwhelming
that my only shelter is God's presence." This disquietude only marks the
transition. The healthy state of mind is the love of life. What is so
good, let it endure.

I find that what is called great and powerful life,--the administration
of large affairs, in commerce, in the courts, in the state,--is prone to
develop narrow and special talent; but, unless combined with a certain
contemplative turn, a taste for abstract truth, for the moral
laws,--does not build up faith, or lead to content. There is a profound
melancholy at the base of men of active and powerful talent, seldom
suspected. Many years ago, there were two men in the United States
Senate, both of whom are now dead. I have seen them both; one of them I
personally knew. Both were men of distinction, and took an active part
in the politics of their day and generation. They were men of intellect,
and one of them, at a later period, gave to a friend this anecdote: He
said that when he entered the Senate he became in a short time intimate
with one of his colleagues, and, though attentive enough to the routine
of public duty, they daily returned to each other, and spent much time
in conversation on the immortality of the soul, and other intellectual
questions, and cared for little else. When my friend at last left
Congress, they parted, his colleague remaining there, and, as their
homes were widely distant from each other, it chanced that he never met
him again, until, twenty-five years afterwards, they saw each other,
through open doors, at a distance, in a crowded reception at the
President's house in Washington. Slowly they advanced towards each
other, as they could, through the brilliant company, and at last
met,--said nothing, but shook hands long and cordially. At last his
friend said, "Any light, Albert?" "None," replied Albert. "Any light,
Lewis?" "None," replied he. They looked in each other's eyes silently,
gave one more shake each to the hand he held, and thus parted for the
last time. Now I should say that the impulse which drew these minds to
this inquiry through so many years was a better affirmative evidence
than their failure to find a confirmation was negative. I ought to add
that, though men of good minds, they were both pretty strong
materialists in their daily aims and way of life. I admit that you shall
find a good deal of scepticism in the streets and hotels and places of
coarse amusement. But that is only to say that the practical faculties
are faster developed than the spiritual. Where there is depravity there
is a slaughter-house style of thinking. One argument of future life is
the recoil of the mind in such company,--our pain at every sceptical
statement. The sceptic affirms that the universe is a nest of boxes with
nothing in the last box. All laughter at man is bitter, and puts us out
of good activity. When Bonaparte insisted that the heart is one of the
entrails; that it is the pit of the stomach that moves the world;--do we
thank him for the gracious instruction? Our disgust is the protest of
human nature against a lie.

The ground of hope is in the infinity of the world, which infinity
reappears in every particle; the powers of all society in every
individual, and of all mind in every mind. I know against all
appearances that the universe can receive no detriment; that there is a
remedy for every wrong and a satisfaction for every soul. Here is this
wonderful thought. But whence came it? Who put it in the mind? It was
not I, it was not you; it is elemental,--belongs to thought and virtue,
and whenever we have either, we see the beams of this light. When the
Master of the universe has points to carry in his government he
impresses his will in the structure of minds.

But proceeding to the enumeration of the few simple elements of the
natural faith, the first fact that strikes us is our delight in
permanence. All great natures are lovers of stability and permanence, as
the type of the Eternal. After science begins, belief of permanence must
follow in a healthy mind. Things so attractive, designs so wise, the
secret workman so transcendently skilful that it tasks successive
generations of observers only to find out, part with part, the delicate
contrivance and adjustment of a weed, of a moss, to its wants, growth,
and perpetuation, all these adjustments becoming perfectly intelligible
to our study,--and the contriver of it all forever hidden! To breathe,
to sleep, is wonderful. But never to know the Cause, the Giver, and
infer his character and will! Of what import this vacant sky, these
puffing elements, these insignificant lives full of selfish loves and
quarrels and ennui? Everything is prospective, and man is to live
hereafter. That the world is for his education is the only sane solution
of the enigma. And I think that the naturalist works not for himself,
but for the believing mind, which turns his discoveries to revelations,
receives them as private tokens of the grand good-will of the Creator.

The mind delights in immense time; delights in rocks, in metals, in
mountain-chains, and in the evidence of vast geologic periods which
these give; in the age of trees, say of the Sequoias, a few of which
will span the whole history of mankind; in the noble toughness and
imperishableness of the palm-tree, which thrives under abuse; delights
in architecture, whose building lasts so long,--"a house," says Ruskin,
"is not in its prime until it is five hundred years old,"--and here are
the Pyramids, which have as many thousands, and cromlechs and
earth-mounds much older than these.

We delight in stability, and really are interested in nothing that ends.
What lasts a century pleases us in comparison with what lasts an hour.
But a century, when we have once made it familiar and compared it with a
true antiquity, looks dwarfish and recent; and it does not help the
matter adding numbers, if we see that it has an end, which it will reach
just as surely as the shortest. A candle a mile long or a hundred miles
long does not help the imagination; only a self-feeding fire, an
inextinguishable lamp, like the sun and the star, that we have not yet
found date and origin for. But the nebular theory threatens their
duration also, bereaves them of this glory, and will make a shift to eke
out a sort of eternity by succession, as plants and animals do.

And what are these delights in the vast and permanent and strong, but
approximations and resemblances of what is entire and sufficing,
creative and self-sustaining life? For the Creator keeps his word with
us. These long-lived or long-enduring objects are to us, as we see them,
only symbols of somewhat in us far longer-lived. Our passions, our
endeavors, have something ridiculous and mocking, if we come to so hasty
an end. If not to _be_, how like the bells of a fool is the trump of
fame! Nature does not, like the Empress Anne of Russia, call together
all the architectural genius of the Empire to build and finish and
furnish a palace of snow, to melt again to water in the first thaw. Will
you, with vast cost and pains, educate your children to be adepts in
their several arts, and, as soon as they are ready to produce a
masterpiece, call out a file of soldiers to shoot them down? We must
infer our destiny from the preparation. We are driven by instinct to
hive innumerable experiences, which are of no visible value, and which
we may revolve through many lives before we shall assimilate or exhaust
them. Now there is nothing in nature capricious, or whimsical, or
accidental, or unsupported. Nature never moves by jumps, but always in
steady and supported advances. The implanting of a desire indicates that
the gratification of that desire is in the constitution of the creature
that feels it; the wish for food, the wish for motion, the wish for
sleep, for society, for knowledge, are not random whims, but grounded in
the structure of the creature, and meant to be satisfied by food, by
motion, by sleep, by society, by knowledge. If there is the desire to
live, and in larger sphere, with more knowledge and power, it is because
life and knowledge and power are good for us, and we are the natural
depositaries of these gifts. The love of life is out of all proportion
to the value set on a single day, and seems to indicate, like all our
other experiences, a conviction of immense resources and possibilities
proper to us, on which we have never drawn.

All the comfort I have found teaches me to confide that I shall not have
less in times and places that I do not yet know. I have known admirable
persons, without feeling that they exhaust the possibilities of virtue
and talent. I have seen what glories of climate, of summer mornings and
evenings, of midnight sky,--I have enjoyed the benefits of all this
complex machinery of arts and civilization, and its results of comfort.
The good Power can easily provide me millions more as good. Shall I hold
on with both hands to every paltry possession? All I have seen teaches
me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen. Whatever it be which
the great Providence prepares for us, it must be something large and
generous, and in the great style of his works. The future must be up to
the style of our faculties,--of memory, of hope, of imagination, of
reason. I have a house, a closet which holds my books, a table, a
garden, a field: are these, any or all, a reason for refusing the angel
who beckons me away,--as if there were no room or skill elsewhere that
could reproduce for me as my like or my enlarging wants may require? We
wish to live for what is great, not for what is mean. I do not wish to
live for the sake of my warm house, my orchard, or my pictures. I do not
wish to live to wear out my boots.

As a hint of endless being, we may rank that novelty which perpetually
attends life. The soul does not age with the body. On the borders of the
grave, the wise man looks forward with equal elasticity of mind, or
hope; and why not, after millions of years, on the verge of still newer
existence?--for it is the nature of intelligent beings to be forever new
to life. Most men are insolvent, or promise by their countenance and
conversation and by their early endeavor much more than they ever
perform,--suggesting a design still to be carried out; the man must have
new motives, new companions, new condition, and another term. Franklin
said, "Life is rather a state of embryo, a preparation for life. A man
is not completely born until he has passed through death." Every really
able man, in whatever direction he work,--a man of large affairs, an
inventor, a statesman, an orator, a poet, a painter,--if you talk
sincerely with him, considers his work, however much admired, as far
short of what it should be. What is this Better, this flying Ideal, but
the perpetual promise of his Creator?

The fable of the Wandering Jew is agreeable to men, because they want
more time and land in which to execute their thoughts. But a higher
poetic use must be made of the legend. Take us as we are, with our
experience, and transfer us to a new planet, and let us digest for its
inhabitants what we could of the wisdom of this. After we have found our
depth there, and assimilated what we could of the new experience,
transfer us to a new scene. In each transfer we shall have acquired, by
seeing them at a distance, a new mastery of the old thoughts, in which
we were too much immersed. In short, all our intellectual action, not
promises, but bestows a feeling of absolute existence. We are taken out
of time and breathe a purer air. I know not whence we draw the assurance
of prolonged life, of a life which shoots that gulf we call death, and
takes hold of what is real and abiding, by so many claims as from our
intellectual history. Salt is a good preserver; cold is: but a truth
cures the taint of mortality better, and "preserves from harm until
another period." A sort of absoluteness attends all perception of
truth,--no smell of age, no hint of corruption. It is self-sufficing,
sound, entire.

Lord Bacon said: "Some of the philosophers who were least divine denied
generally the immortality of the soul, yet came to this point, that
whatsoever motions the spirit of man could act and perform without the
organs of the body might remain after death, which were only those of
the understanding, and not of the affections; so immortal and
incorruptible a thing did knowledge seem to them to be." And Van
Helmont, the philosopher of Holland, drew his sufficient proof purely
from the action of the intellect. "It is my greatest desire," he said,
"that it might be granted unto atheists to have tasted, at least but one
only moment, what it is intellectually to understand; whereby they may
feel the immortality of the mind, as it were, by touching." A farmer, a
laborer, a mechanic, is driven by his work all day, but it ends at
night; it has an end. But, as far as the mechanic or farmer is also a
scholar or thinker, his work has no end. That which he has learned is
that there is much more to be learned. The wiser he is, he feels only
the more his incompetence. "What we know is a point to what we do not
know." A thousand years,--tenfold, a hundred-fold his faculties, would
not suffice. The demands of his task are such that it becomes
omnipresent. He studies in his walking, at his meals, in his amusements,
even in his sleep. Montesquieu said, "The love of study is in us almost
the only eternal passion. All the others quit us in proportion as this
miserable machine which holds them approaches its ruin." "Art is long,"
says the thinker, "and life is short." He is but as a fly or a worm to
this mountain, this continent, which his thoughts inhabit. It is a
perception that comes by the activity of the intellect; never to the
lazy or rusty mind. Courage comes naturally to those who have the habit
of facing labor and danger, and who therefore know the power of their
arms and bodies; and courage or confidence in the mind comes to those
who know by use its wonderful forces and inspirations and returns.
Belief in its future is a reward kept only for those who use it. "To
me," said Goethe, "the eternal existence of my soul is proved from my
idea of activity. If I work incessantly till my death, nature is bound
to give me another form of existence, when the present can no longer
sustain my spirit."

It is a proverb of the world that good-will makes intelligence, that
goodness itself is an eye; and the one doctrine in which all religions
agree, is that new light is added to the mind in proportion as it uses
that which it has. "He that doeth the will of God abideth forever."

Ignorant people confound reverence for the intuitions with egotism.
There is no confusion in the things themselves. Health of mind consists
in the perception of law. Its dignity consists in being under the law.
Its goodness is the most generous extension of our private interests to
the dignity and generosity of ideas. Nothing seems to me so excellent as
a belief in the laws. It communicates nobleness, and, as it were, an
asylum in temples to the loyal soul.

I confess that everything connected with our personality fails. Nature
never spares the individual. We are always balked of a complete success.
No prosperity is promised to _that_. We have our indemnity only in the
success of that to which we belong. _That_ is immortal and we only
through that.

The soul stipulates for no private good. That which is private I see not
to be good. "If truth live, I live; if justice live, I live," said one
of the old saints, "and these by any man's suffering are enlarged and
enthroned."

The moral sentiment measures itself by sacrifice. It risks or ruins
property, health, life itself, without hesitation, for its thought, and
all men justify the man by their praise for this act. And Mahomet in the
same mind declared, "Not dead but living ye are to account all those who
are slain in the way of God."

On these grounds I think that wherever man ripens, this audacious belief
presently appears,--in the savage, savagely; in the good, purely. As
soon as thought is exercised, this belief is inevitable; as soon as
virtue glows, this belief confirms itself. It is a kind of summary or
completion of man. It cannot rest on a legend; it cannot be quoted from
one to another; it must have the assurance of a man's faculties that
they can fill a larger theatre and a longer term than nature here allows
him. Goethe said: "It is to a thinking being quite impossible to think
himself non-existent, ceasing to think and live; so far does every one
carry in himself the proof of immortality, and quite spontaneously. But
so soon as the man will be objective and go out of himself, so soon as
he dogmatically will grasp a personal duration to bolster up in cockney
fashion that inward assurance, he is lost in contradiction." The
doctrine is not sentimental, but is grounded in the necessities and
forces we possess. Nothing will hold but that which we must be and must
do.


    "Man's heart the Almighty to the Future set
    By secret but inviolate springs."


The revelation that is true is written on the palms of the hands, the
thought of our mind, the desire of our heart, or nowhere. My idea of
heaven is that there is no melodrama in it at all; that it is wholly
real. Here is the emphasis of conscience and experience; this is no
speculation, but the most practical of doctrines. Do you think that the
eternal chain of cause and effect which pervades nature, which threads
the globes as beads on a string, leaves this out of its circuit,--leaves
out this desire of God and men as a waif and a caprice, altogether cheap
and common, and falling without reason or merit?

We live by desire to live; we live by choices; by will, by thought, by
virtue, by the vivacity of the laws which we obey, and obeying share
their life,--or we die by sloth, by disobedience, by losing hold of
life, which ebbs out of us. But whilst I find the signatures, the hints
and suggestions, noble and wholesome,--whilst I find that all the ways
of virtuous living lead upward and not downward,--yet it is not my duty
to prove to myself the immortality of the soul. That knowledge is hidden
very cunningly. Perhaps the archangels cannot find the secret of their
existence, as the eye cannot see itself; but, ending or endless, to live
whilst I live.

There is a drawback to the value of all statements of the doctrine; and
I think that one abstains from writing or printing on the immortality of
the soul, because, when he comes to the end of his statement, the hungry
eyes that run through it will close disappointed; the listeners say,
That is not here which we desire,--and I shall be as much wronged by
their hasty conclusion, as they feel themselves wronged by my omissions.
I mean that I am a better believer, and all serious souls are better
believers, in the immortality than we can give grounds for. The real
evidence is too subtle, or is higher than we can write down in
propositions, and therefore Wordsworth's "Ode" is the best modern essay
on the subject.

We cannot prove our faith by syllogisms. The argument refuses to form in
the mind. A conclusion, an inference, a grand augury, is ever hovering;
but attempt to ground it, and the reasons are all vanishing and
inadequate. You cannot make a written theory or demonstration of this as
you can an orrery of the Copernican astronomy. It must be sacredly
treated. Speak of the mount in the mount. Not by literature or theology,
but only by rare integrity, by a man permeated and perfumed with airs of
heaven,--with manliest or womanliest enduring love,--can the vision be
clear to a use the most sublime. And hence the fact that in the minds of
men the testimony of a few inspired souls has had such weight and
penetration. You shall not say, "O my bishop, O my pastor, is there any
resurrection? What do you think? Did Dr. Channing believe that we should
know each other? did Wesley? did Butler? did Fenelon?" What questions
are these! Go read Milton, Shakspeare, or any truly ideal poet. Read
Plato, or any seer of the interior realities. Read St. Augustine,
Swedenborg, Immanuel Kant. Let any master simply recite to you the
substantial laws of the intellect, and in the presence of the laws
themselves you will never ask such primary-school questions.

Is immortality only an intellectual quality, or, shall I say, only an
energy, there being no passive? He has it, and he alone, who gives life
to all names, persons, things, where he comes. No religion, not the
wildest mythology, dies for him; no art is lost. He vivifies what he
touches. Future state is an illusion for the ever-present state. It is
not length of life, but depth of life. It is not duration, but a taking
of the soul out of time, as all high action of the mind does: when we
are living in the sentiments we ask no questions about time. The
spiritual world takes place;--that which is always the same. But see how
the sentiment is wise. Jesus explained nothing, but the influence of him
took people out of time, and they felt eternal. A great integrity makes
us immortal; an admiration, a deep love, a strong will, arms us above
fear. It makes a day memorable. We say we lived years in that hour. It
is strange that Jesus is esteemed by mankind the bringer of the doctrine
of immortality. He is never once weak or sentimental; he is very
abstemious of explanation, he never preaches the personal immortality;
whilst Plato and Cicero had both allowed themselves to overstep the
stern limits of the spirit, and gratify the people with that picture.

How ill agrees this majestical immortality of our religion with the
frivolous population! Will you build magnificently for mice? Will you
offer empires to such as cannot set a house or private affairs in order?
Here are people who cannot dispose of a day; an hour hangs heavy on
their hands; and will you offer them rolling ages without end? But this
is the way we rise. Within every man's thought is a higher
thought,--within the character he exhibits to-day, a higher character.
The youth puts off the illusions of the child, the man puts off the
ignorance and tumultuous passions of youth; proceeding thence puts off
the egotism of manhood, and becomes at last a public and universal soul.
He is rising to greater heights, but also rising to realities; the outer
relations and circumstances dying out, he entering deeper into God, God
into him, until the last garment of egotism falls, and he is with
God,--shares the will and the immensity of the First Cause.

It is curious to find the selfsame feeling, that it is not immortality,
but eternity,--not duration, but a state of abandonment to the Highest,
and so the sharing of His perfection,--appearing in the farthest east
and west. The human mind takes no account of geography, language, or
legends, but in all utters the same instinct.

Yama, the lord of Death, promised Nachiketas, the son of Gautama, to
grant him three boons at his own choice. Nachiketas, knowing that his
father Gautama was offended with him, said, "O Death! let Gautama be
appeased in mind, and forget his anger against me: this I choose for the
first boon." Yama said, "Through my favor, Gautama will remember thee
with love as before." For the second boon, Nachiketas asks that the fire
by which heaven is gained be made known to him; which also Yama allows,
and says, "Choose the third boon, O Nachiketas!" Nachiketas said, there
is this inquiry. Some say the soul exists after the death of man; others
say it does not exist. This I should like to know, instructed by thee.
Such is the third of the boons. Yama said, "For this question, it was
inquired of old, even by the gods; for it is not easy to understand it.
Subtle is its nature. Choose another boon, O Nachiketas! Do not compel
me to this." Nachiketas said, "Even by the gods was it inquired. And as
to what thou sayest, O Death, that it is not easy to understand it,
there is no other speaker to be found like thee. There is no other boon
like this." Yama said, "Choose sons and grandsons who may live a hundred
years; choose herds of cattle; choose elephants and gold and horses;
choose the wide expanded earth, and live thyself as many years as thou
listeth. Or, if thou knowest a boon like this, choose it, together with
wealth and far-extending life. Be a king, O Nachiketas! On the wide
earth I will make thee the enjoyer of all desires. All those desires
that are difficult to gain in the world of mortals, all those ask thou
at thy pleasure;--those fair nymphs of heaven with their chariots, with
their musical instruments; for the like of them are not to be gained by
men. I will give them to thee, but do not ask the question of the state
of the soul after death." Nachiketas said, "All those enjoyments are of
yesterday. With thee remain thy horses and elephants, with thee the
dance and song. If we should obtain wealth, we live only as long as thou
pleasest. The boon which I choose I have said." Yama said, "One thing is
good, another is pleasant. Blessed is he who takes the good, but he who
chooses the pleasant loses the object of man. But thou, considering the
objects of desire, hast abandoned them. These two, ignorance (whose
object is what is pleasant) and knowledge (whose object is what is
good), are known to be far asunder, and to lead to different goals.
Believing this world exists, and not the other, the careless youth is
subject to my sway. That knowledge for which thou hast asked is not to
be obtained by argument. I know worldly happiness is transient, for that
firm one is not to be obtained by what is not firm. The wise, by means
of the union of the intellect with the soul, thinking him whom it is
hard to behold, leaves both grief and joy. Thee, O Nachiketas! I believe
a house whose door is open to Brahma. Brahma the supreme, whoever knows
him, obtains whatever he wishes. The soul is not born; it does not die;
it was not produced from any one. Nor was any produced from it. Unborn,
eternal, it is not slain, though the body is slain; subtler than what is
subtle, greater than what is great, sitting it goes far, sleeping it
goes everywhere. Thinking the soul as unbodily among bodies, firm among
fleeting things, the wise man casts off all grief. The soul cannot be
gained by knowledge, not by understanding, not by manifold science. It
can be obtained by the soul by which it is desired. It reveals its own
truths."

[Footnote 6: Pensées Diverses, p. 223.]




                                 THE END.


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