A RETURN TO ONE'S HOLY LAND
It is said that at Florence there is a circular hall, faced with
separate mirrors. In the center is a statue of exquisite beauty. Each of
these mirrors reflects the image of the statue at different angles, and
consequently exhibits some particular point more prominently and
accurately than any of the others. Artists study the statue through
these mirrors, and thus can estimate the beauty of each separate part,
and form a better judgment of the perfection of the whole. Let me show
you, gentle reader, how you will get the truest conception of yourself.
If you please, stand for a moment in this hall. In each mirror you will
see yourself in the most impressionable period in your life. There is a
reflection at the moment your destiny beckoned you, when you were in the
act of getting hold of yourself and without ceremony began your career,
seeming to yourself to be like Saul, who "went to seek his father's
asses and found a kingdom."
As in water face answers to face so, in one angle of a mirror you
recognize a first-rate likeness of yourself as you sat for the first
time under your own vine and fig tree, remembering this long after as
though you had seen a great sight. Like St. John you turned to see the
voice that spake to you. Its last cadence may die in the air but it
leaves an impression that will never fade.
_Casting a Reflection Means Nothing Bad_
These looking-glasses show your figure, life-sized, standing on a
corner. Emergency met you. It really proved a providential
interposition, and now these fortunate interventions mark the period in
your life more than the days and months and years, and they were
accompanied by an interior guidance, more distinctly discerned now, than
it was felt at the time. There is none so homely but loves a
looking-glass; however little or much a man is favored in looks he
notices reflections made of himself, particularly if question is raised
touching his appearance as viewed by his critics. In his autobiography
Mr. Seward records that no matter what care and diligence we exercise
and whatever be a man's ability or inclination, the mysterious factor is
a vital force in the world and has to be reckoned with. Judicial
preferment was the aim of his ambition. He meant to be a lawyer, and he
wished to be a judge. His early bias in this direction was caused by his
observation of the deference paid to his father as a justice of the
peace.
"One day," said President Lincoln, "an emigrant stopped at my store, and
asked me to buy a barrel of odds and ends, of little value, for which he
had no room in his wagon. I found in it a two-volume copy of
Blackstone's Commentaries. I devoured them. I never read anything which
so interested and thrilled me. Soon after I began the study of law, and
that is how I came to be a lawyer."
_The Glory of Supremacy_
Old soldiers cannot be made to keep their seats as an excursion train
pulls into Gettysburg. "There is where I was wounded. There is where we
met the charge." It is touching to witness the comraderie, their
sympathy. As they from the car windows come into sight of their
struggles and victories they cannot avoid exclaiming "There we made our
stand. There we advanced."
"There a man with forty-eight wounds was left for dead, and yet revived
and lived beyond all expectations." One thing would be Spangler Springs
from which, one night both sides drank. There the First Maryland, a
Confederate regiment, clashed with the Second Maryland and two brothers,
named Clark, were brought face to face, one being in each regiment and
hence on each side of the fight. The Bloody Angle is a sort of Holy of
Holies. You stand and read from an open book "The High Water Mark." Up
to this point of ground, thus indicated, things seemed outwardly to be
going one way. Turning points in history have a location on the earth.
On a spot so exactly known as to bear the legend, cut in stone, "High
Water Mark," the fortunes of war so abruptly turn that General Lee
himself said, "This is the beginning of the end." Napoleon wanted
Hougoumont, for as Hugo says, "This bit of earth, could he have taken
it, would perhaps have given him the earth." On a piece of very common
ground near Luz Jacob received an uninvited angel visitation. The stone
on which he rested his head was only one of thousands. But with the
morning what a change! It came like a beautiful vision
"That loves to come at night,
To make you wonder in the morn,
What made the earth so bright."
His pillow became a pillar and he said, "This is the gate of heaven. The
heart sanctifies the place." Like any boy, egged on by curiosity I have
stood just inside the door and seen the Israelites shuffling about with
their hats on and the Rabbi reading the evening service, all being in
motion, in imitation probably of the forty years' travel to Canaan. The
command of a prophet to the people was distinctly "Take off thy shoes
for this is holy ground." There was no command to take off the hat. They
were to respect their contact with the location. It is the spot set
apart by the deep experience that becomes hallowed. If a struggle, be it
physical or moral, is victorious the place is consecrated by it forever.
The entire planet is redeemed by such a dedication of the many revered
localities in it.
_Silent Sentinels of the Silent Years_
There is the rock of all rocks in the western world. It has done the
most for our ideals, for the tone and character of our institutions.
Poets, like Mrs. Hemans, and orators like Webster and Choate have
glorified it and cannot stay their praise. It is ever new, it is ever
old. Its hold is upon one's imagination. In its undivided influence, yet
in its already cloven form, ever perfect in its detached pieces it is
ever living in its broken body. Many representatives from many states
were once gathered at Plymouth Rock to put forth their Burial Hill
confession. "Standing by the ..." they say. The place is an inspiration.
It is tonic. It gives an uplift. It lends elevation. "We do now declare
our adherence ... we declare that the experience...." It has stood the
test. It has worked. All honor for well-located facts. They are well
grounded. In this is their solidity.
A visit is not required of us, yet most of us have taken part in so
pious a duty. America's foremost shrine is Mt. Vernon. With more
vividness than by any other method we can almost see the form of him
twice elected unanimously to the Presidency, whose character is
America's greatest gift to the world. Plymouth is a close second, as a
Mecca for willing pilgrim feet. Baptized into the Puritan spirit and
versed in Pilgrim lore, in no other way can a lover of their annals so
clearly discern the real Pilgrims as by inhabiting for a brief period
their haunts. One of the patriarchs built "there" an altar because
"there" he had an affecting experience. In all statements of the deeper
life specific use is made of the adverb of place, making the plain
implication that the location is immortalized. It has entered for keeps
into his life.
_Sunny Silent Homes_
Each of us stands in a peculiar relation to a holy land. It includes a
shrine. "We have just the right morning light in which to see it. Well,
now look, my dear, the curtain is up. Before us are the white houses set
in emerald green. Is not that a pretty picture?" There is a sepulchre in
this garden. Adjacent to the town, in the burial ground, where the
esteemed forefathers of the hamlets sleep, is the early grave of my
angel mother. Our hearts glow with a burning gratitude to the local
authorities for their affectionate, guardian care over that sacred
enclosure. What varied pages have been written in history and in the
book of life by the sleepers here. It is a spot further removed from
perdition and nearer to paradise than any other in all the world. "My
mother, mother, mother." The meaning of the word deepens just in
proportion as one's nature is developed. Repetition is a form of
emphasis. And such a mother! Her affection was her diadem. In her excess
of tenderness she caused her hand to rest upon my head in blessing as
she taught me to say after her, sentence by sentence, the Lord's prayer,
the most precious item of instruction in the religious history of our
race.
"Oh for the touch of a vanished hand
And the sound of a voice that is still."
I stand in life's Holy of Holies. There are hours which the heart would
still leave in silence. They have given me an emotion of indescribable
tenderness towards her. I will tell you a tale of tears. Before the iron
had entered into my soul, before my memory had a tomb in it, before it
became the cemetery, the Greenwood, the Mt. Auburn of the soul, my first
grief here set me out alone, like one set apart by sorrow. The scene one
can no more leave behind him than he can leave his own soul. My spirit
is joined with her spirit. Feeling that I had visited the place to honor
her and do reverence to the spot I felt like speaking, "Mother, we are
here." The incense from her dear heart has perfumed my existence. The
odor of the ointment that once filled the house now fills the little
world in which she moved. Is this praising my mother? I do not wish to
praise her but to describe her.
_Heart Histories Laid Open_
I give a deep interpretation to a custom used in many countries at
funerals where a violin is played at the head of the coffin, and
questions are addressed to the deceased in the course of which it is
customary to ask pardon for having injured or offended the departed one
during life. My questions are all framed and have been, lo these many
years. The dead past has not buried its dead. Memory makes the present
sacred with a light, like that of the stars which has been many years on
its way. Nothing that ever enters into the field of experience is left
unrecorded. There the record lies and I am testifying touching the place
and the hour at which it is blazoned forth. It is at the spot where you
point and say "There the mortal put on immortality." Her spirit hovers
near us, to awaken in us, a motive to reflect back certain qualities in
a remote degree upon her, in respect and blessing. In pictures we often
see a pilgrim, home from his wanderings, leaning upon a staff, at such a
grave. As I write of it and think of the occasion my heart swells in
gratitude for receiving the impulse to revisit the earth. It is
well-worthwhile for one to travel far to sit for a few moments in his
early home with only God and his mother. An appeal is made to reverence,
which is a very much needed address. I wish we could learn from Europe
the noble and beautiful use it makes of those who have gone down to
their windowless homes by keeping their graves and memories green and
imperishable and particularly by transferring their virtues into the
daily life of the community. The ancient Egyptians blended with the
actual present, current, daily life a galaxy of characters whose
influence they would not willingly let die. The ancient Romans made
their daily paths, near just such memorial places, as we can show with
pride, in a garden of graves. So many monuments are scattered through
these busy years of a laborious life, that I cannot enter each sanctuary
of sorrow nor pause to read each inscription. The statues, those calm
and majestic intelligences, make up an impressive congregation of the
silent, and exert a magic influence upon the soul.
_A Legacy of Pleasant Memories_
A mother in heaven can be brought to view and a heavenly childhood
reinstated when visiting the spot where sacred dust is buried. This is
the place that faithful fantasy most frequently portrays.
"Oft, in the stilly night,
Ere Slumber's chain has bound me,
Fond Memory brings the light
Of other days around me;
The smiles, the tears,
Of boyhood's years,
The words of love then spoken;
The eyes that shone,
Now dimmed and gone,
The cheerful hearts now broken!"
I hold the sentiment of him who said, "My heart melts with compassion
for the motherless affectionate lonesome boy who suffers for the want of
intelligent sympathy, for someone who marks his little sorrows, binds up
his wounds, wipes off his tears, and kisses him as he goes to bed." Our
deepest feelings require a foothold on the earth. Like Antaeus they get
strength by touching the soil. There must be certain spots around which
patriotic feeling and family feeling and religious feeling can rally,
like Bunker Hill and Lexington and Concord and Appomattox and Yorktown
and Independence Hall and the old home and the old church. Where feeling
is wide-spread it needs certain locations and community centers to give
it points of contact with the solid, visible, tangible earth. The
influence of a family would be deplorably weakened if once for all it
should be detached from any specific habitation that it could claim as a
home. Home, home, there is no place like it. "A charm from the skies
seems to hallow us there."
At Torwood two ministers met and spent a day in high spiritual
communion. Later one of them, Mr. Kidd, of Queen's Ferry parish, having
sore trial and depression of spirits, sent a note to his friend, the
minister at Culross, informing him of his troubles and dejection of
spirits and desiring a visit. "I cannot go," was the reply, "but tell
Mr. Kidd to remember Torwood." The answer was effective. That was a
place. It had its atmosphere that could be recalled. The Pilgrim in his
progress believes in what he sees from the mountain. When on low ground
he cannot quite discern the celestial city, he keeps his course, staking
everything upon the experience at an earlier well-remembered place.
_The World Teaches an Attentive Mind_
When revisiting the earth surprise was expressed that we carried so much
feeling into the pilgrimage. Said a business man, "You have very many
old residenters where you live. They have some beautiful graveyards in
Boston. When any one dies here, why he's dead. He's just dead. We
mustn't expect anything more from him because the man is dead. We try to
get someone to take his place. That poor fellow is dead." Marshall Field
is dead in Chicago; Phillips Brooks, in Boston; Edward Payson, in
Portland; and Johns Hopkins, in Baltimore; Peter Cooper, in New York,
yet in their cities they are an active force and even in their ashes
live their wonted fires. Meade and Howard and Sickles and Pickett and
Longstreet and Lee live evermore. A visit to the best marked monumental
field in the world makes you feel afresh the grandeur of their
achievement.
"Death may rob us of the painter
But his works to us belong,
He may steal from us the singer,
But he cannot seize the song.
And, though he may take the lives that
Mean our share of joy, yet he
May not rob us of the treasure
Of a single memory!"
"If you wound the tree in its youth," we read in the story of an African
farm, "the bark will cover over the gash, but when the tree is very old,
peeling the bark off and looking carefully you will see the scar there
still. All that is buried is not dead." And that is a fact too. I bow my
head now and grieve over certain acts or rebukes or injustices or
humiliations or wounds. They all come in review, they are all there; I
come upon them on occasion. Someone has told us that the pearls of life
and of home, like the pearls of the deep sea, grow around wounds and are
the costly burials of pain.
_Where New Chapters Begin_
Returning from voluntary exile, to my father's house, not as a prodigal
son, to make confession of sins, or of wasted patrimony or of wasted
life, but to gain impressions from early places, where any boy gets the
most important part of his education, seeing that it is in our youth
that we lay the foundation of whatever character, position, or
usefulness we later attain, I was most deeply stirred at those places
that directly touch my interior life. "There is a story lodged in a room
here," said Bushnell in speaking of Yale College, "that I pray God his
recording angel may never suffer to be effaced." I removed my hat and
bowed alone in silence standing before a place hallowed by a neighbor.
He had everybody's sympathy on account of his bereavements. Adjacent to
our garden was his barn, which he used as a devotional closet and like
Daniel, as we infer, prayed aloud. When his voice broke the silence with
spontaneous, vital prayer and grew tremulous with emotion and
earnestness, there was a power and pathos in it, that penetrated the
center of my soul and woke to life all the slumbering feeling of my
better nature. A sense of awe took entire possession of me. My deference
would have been less if I had been bowed, and with him, hearing the
several petitions. But as it was I was conscious only of his communion
and thought all the time of the two persons concerned in it.
_Nothing Insignificant, Nothing_
It is the early life that makes the after life. As every little brook,
rivulet, and stream give depth and volume to the broad after current so
in sailing up a river. As we make a journey to a birthplace we keep
meeting the rills and tributaries to which we are so much indebted. One
of them is named Example, a gentle effective teacher, who, it is said,
lays his hand on your shoulder and remarks, This is the way to do it. In
revisiting the earth by a singular discovery we find we are closely
drawn where we took the hard lessons taught by Experience. This is the
teacher that is said to throw us into the deep pool, exclaiming briskly:
Now, swim. Human existence is rarely a great prairie stretching
monotonously onward to the great river. Blessings and misfortunes meet
us in disguise. Just as in the world's history, and in the history of
invention, and in our political annals, we have our great days so we do
in our personal experience, when destiny turns on a pivot. If one will
give a recital of the ten most memorable days of his life the rest of it
would be a matter of easy inference by his hearers. The time between
them, and all its events, seem compressed into the narrowest space,
verily a hand's breadth. Hidden forces have been at work, progress has
been made with painstaking, untold influences meanwhile have not been
idle, and upon a day all unforeseen springs of action are touched,
concentrated power is let loose and a resistless energy awakes to
action.
_Halcyon Days_
Our great days are the fruit of past toil. To count time only by
sunrises and sunsets omits, in the reckoning, the human equation. Where
daily wages and yearly dividends are concerned, it is a very convenient
system, but it is no measure of our real life. Noah's ark answered to
float lazily and safely on the old flood, but steam and electricity are
internal powers. These forces enable a navigator to steer right out into
the teeth of a storm.
Distinguished natural historians have given us a fine classification of
the animal kingdom. But to put men in rows, and to put days into the
orders shown in the calendars does not make them tally with what we know
of them by observation and experience. Even a plant is a distinct
individual. No other one is just like it. Yet it reveals its type.
Species cannot be confounded, a briar will clasp a solid trunk of a tree
and weave its tendrils and leaves through the branches of the pine to
its top, but the briar was briar in every thorn and leaf and the pine
was itself in all its green needles of which Nature makes her sweetest
wind harp in the world. We are alike in the general features and
attributes of body and soul. We are under similar laws, have similar
wants, have a similar origin, common sympathies, and a common destiny,
yet no two of us are alike. Nature never repeats itself. It has been
shown that there is little difference in man's bodily stature. A fathom,
or thereabouts, a little more or a little less is the ordinary elevation
of the human family. Should a man add a cubit to his stature, he is
followed along the streets as a prodigy; should he fall very far short
of it, people pay money for a sight of him as a great curiosity. But
were there any exact measurements of mental statures, we should be
struck by an amazing diversity. It is obvious also that on certain days
we are more alive and capable than on others, yet we are the same
persons with the same education, with the same capabilities, and
antecedents. On occasion, from causes of which at the time we were
somewhat unconscious, our ideas and resolves were awaked and become
effective. Some new energies, we did not know we had, were unlocked and
came into play, and life was transfigured, on that spot, and that is the
locality we long to revisit.
"_I am a Part of All that I have Seen_"
The place where any event in our history has occurred becomes a memorial
of the feelings which that event excited in us. When one comes back to
those places, it is as when one reads old letters or meets old friends.
Byron affirms that after the most careful recollection of his
experience, he could recall only eleven days of happiness, which he
could wish to live over again. Memory hits the high places. Only
relatively do the others come up into recognition. Mr. James Russell
Lowell, standing upon the Alps, turned toward Italy, and raising his
hat, exclaimed, "Glories of the past, I salute you." We express a like
salutation. Grave ideas, movements, and reforms have their birthplace
and their cradle, and we cannot fail to be interested in them. Long
afterward, tender recollections come back to us like the murmurs of a
distant hymn, and it is a great pleasure to listen to such voices.
One day we have full view of the delectable mountains, on another day we
are mired in the slough of despond. There is a joyful holiday for the
human intellect, which it will not soon forget, when the light blazes on
us, and then come days of drudgery,--who cannot respond to this!--when
our powers are shut up and will not come forth. Some of our best days
seem reserved for celestial visitants. In others we "grunt and sweat
under a weary life." There are many toilsome days of monotonous travel
that we would gladly exchange for the single spectacle of Vesuvius in
the plenitude of its eruptive power.
Those ideal days, in which we visited Mt. Washington, the loftiest
object in our Atlantic country, made more grand with our greatest name,
or in which we saw Niagara, the most remarkable waterfall in the world's
scenery, or in which we heard the Messiah, or Beethoven's Ninth
Symphony, perhaps the grandest piece of music ever composed by man,
would stand in a succession of days and yet stand apart from them in our
memory. So in the pulpit. Robert Hall was for fifty years the Prince of
Preachers. His first three efforts had been failures. One day
distinguished him. He did not know that the Princess Charlotte was dead
till he entered his church and the sermon he preached then was the
richest and most eloquent of all the hundreds delivered in the realm.
_There's a Reason_
Dole out to a person six minutes and tell him to take them and go back
and use them simply for what they would be worth, at different times, in
his career and he could probably revolutionize his whole life. Many men
could thus easily have made themselves rich, others could have made
themselves happy. Sleeping crimes, that awake at unexpected times and
produce an awkward situation, could have been omitted. Many a man has
become little in a trice. The rudder of principle was caught by a swift
current from his grasp, and he became ship-wrecked when near a safe
port, where sails might have been furled in peace, and golden opinions
won. All things would be a matter of only six minutes. The issue of a
single day may change all the schemes of the most ambitious. A family of
aristocrats may be prominent in government for seven centuries and in a
specified day an armistice is signed wherein their kind of a world comes
to its end. We are cleansed as by fire. We undergo a regeneration. We
find a new world. Former things are past away. The slate is wiped clean.
A leaf is turned. The pen is dipped for the rewriting of history. We
have new lines of thought; we have a new map of Europe. To put that
country back into its former dismal environment would be like attempting
to force an eagle back into its long discarded shell. Men have dreamed
of a brighter day approaching and lo, the dream comes true. Events were
once showing a new trend when Dr. Charles Hodge and Dr. Musgrave were
walking out together--both old men--when Dr. Musgrave said: "Charley,
this train is moving, and if you are going to get aboard you had better
hurry." A new spirit has now gone abroad which no walls can bound or
circumscribe. The unforgettable picture, drawn by Mary Antin, of the
immigrant Jew, leading the procession of his children into the
schoolroom with reverence, as though it were the Lord's temple, bowing
before the teacher, as the high Priestess of the one true God, and
offering his homage, in impossible English, exhibits the act of one
morning, for which an unseen agency had prepared the way. Yet it is the
event that signalizes the place and makes the day so impressive.