THERE are days which occur in this climate, at almost any season of
the year, wherein the world reaches its perfection; when the air,
the heavenly bodies and the earth, make a harmony, as if nature would
indulge her offspring; when, in these bleak upper sides of the planet,
nothing is to desire that we have heard of the happiest latitudes, and
we bask in the shining hours of Florida and Cuba; when everything that
has life gives sign of satisfaction, and the cattle that lie on the
ground seem to have great and tranquil thoughts. These halcyons may be
looked for with a little more assurance in that pure October weather
which we distinguish by the name of the Indian summer. The day,
immeasurably long, sleeps over the broad hills and warm wide fields.
To have lived through all its sunny hours, seems longevity enough. The
solitary places do not seem quite lonely. At the gates of the forest,
the surprised man of the world is forced to leave his city estimates of
great and small, wise and foolish. The knapsack of custom falls off his
back with the first step he makes into these precincts. Here is sanctity
which shames our religions, and reality which discredits our heroes.
Here we find Nature to be the circumstance which dwarfs every other
circumstance, and judges like a god all men that come to her. We have
crept out of our close and crowded houses into the night and morning,
and we see what majestic beauties daily wrap us in their bosom. How
willingly we would escape the barriers which render them comparatively
impotent, escape the sophistication and second thought, and suffer
nature to intrance us. The tempered light of the woods is like a
perpetual morning, and is stimulating and heroic. The anciently reported
spells of these places creep on us. The stems of pines, hemlocks, and
oaks almost gleam like iron on the excited eye. The incommunicable trees
begin to persuade us to live with them, and quit our life of solemn
trifles. Here no history, or church, or state, is interpolated on the
divine sky and the immortal year. How easily we might walk onward into
the opening landscape, absorbed by new pictures and by thoughts fast
succeeding each other, until by degrees the recollection of home was
crowded out of the mind, all memory obliterated by the tyranny of the
present, and we were led in triumph by nature.
These enchantments are medicinal, they sober and heal us. These are
plain pleasures, kindly and native to us. We come to our own, and make
friends with matter, which the ambitious chatter of the schools would
persuade us to despise. We never can part with it; the mind loves its
old home: as water to our thirst, so is the rock, the ground, to our
eyes and hands and feet. It is firm water; it is cold flame; what
health, what affinity! Ever an old friend, ever like a dear friend and
brother when we chat affectedly with strangers, comes in this honest
face, and takes a grave liberty with us, and shames us out of our
nonsense. Cities give not the human senses room enough. We go out daily
and nightly to feed the eyes on the horizon, and require so much scope,
just as we need water for our bath. There are all degrees of natural
influence, from these quarantine powers of nature, up to her dearest
and gravest ministrations to the imagination and the soul. There is the
bucket of cold water from the spring, the wood-fire to which the chilled
traveller rushes for safety,--and there is the sublime moral of autumn
and of noon. We nestle in nature, and draw our living as parasites from
her roots and grains, and we receive glances from the heavenly bodies,
which call us to solitude and foretell the remotest future. The blue
zenith is the point in which romance and reality meet. I think if
we should be rapt away into all that we dream of heaven, and should
converse with Gabriel and Uriel, the upper sky would be all that would
remain of our furniture.
It seems as if the day was not wholly profane in which we have given
heed to some natural object. The fall of snowflakes in a still air,
preserving to each crystal its perfect form; the blowing of sleet over
a wide sheet of water, and over plains; the waving ryefield; the mimic
waving of acres of houstonia, whose innumerable florets whiten and
ripple before the eye; the reflections of trees and flowers in glassy
lakes; the musical steaming odorous south wind, which converts all trees
to windharps; the crackling and spurting of hemlock in the flames, or
of pine logs, which yield glory to the walls and faces in the
sittingroom,--these are the music and pictures of the most ancient
religion. My house stands in low land, with limited outlook, and on the
skirt of the village. But I go with my friend to the shore of our little
river, and with one stroke of the paddle I leave the village politics
and personalities, yes, and the world of villages and personalities
behind, and pass into a delicate realm of sunset and moonlight, too
bright almost for spotted man to enter without novitiate and probation.
We penetrate bodily this incredible beauty; we dip our hands in this
painted element; our eyes are bathed in these lights and forms.
A holiday, a villeggiatura, a royal revel, the proudest, most
heart-rejoicing festival that valor and beauty, power and taste, ever
decked and enjoyed, establishes itself on the instant. These sunset
clouds, these delicately emerging stars, with their private and
ineffable glances, signify it and proffer it. I am taught the poorness
of our invention, the ugliness of towns and palaces. Art and luxury
have early learned that they must work as enhancement and sequel to this
original beauty. I am overinstructed for my return. Henceforth I shall
be hard to please. I cannot go back to toys. I am grown expensive and
sophisticated. I can no longer live without elegance, but a countryman
shall be my master of revels. He who knows the most; he who knows
what sweets and virtues are in the ground, the waters, the plants, the
heavens, and how to come at these enchantments,--is the rich and royal
man. Only as far as the masters of the world have called in nature
to their aid, can they reach the height of magnificence. This is the
meaning of their hanging-gardens, villas, garden-houses, islands,
parks and preserves, to back their faulty personality with these
strong accessories. I do not wonder that the landed interest should be
invincible in the State with these dangerous auxiliaries. These bribe
and invite; not kings, not palaces, not men, not women, but these tender
and poetic stars, eloquent of secret promises. We heard what the rich
man said, we knew of his villa, his grove, his wine and his company, but
the provocation and point of the invitation came out of these beguiling
stars. In their soft glances I see what men strove to realize in some
Versailles, or Paphos, or Ctesiphon. Indeed, it is the magical lights of
the horizon and the blue sky for the background which save all our works
of art, which were otherwise bawbles. When the rich tax the poor with
servility and obsequiousness, they should consider the effect of men
reputed to be the possessors of nature, on imaginative minds. Ah! if
the rich were rich as the poor fancy riches! A boy hears a military
band play on the field at night, and he has kings and queens and famous
chivalry palpably before him. He hears the echoes of a horn in a
hill country, in the Notch Mountains, for example, which converts the
mountains into an Aeolian harp,--and this supernatural tiralira restores
to him the Dorian mythology, Apollo, Diana, and all divine hunters and
huntresses. Can a musical note be so lofty, so haughtily beautiful!
To the poor young poet, thus fabulous is his picture of society; he
is loyal; he respects the rich; they are rich for the sake of his
imagination; how poor his fancy would be, if they were not rich! That
they have some high-fenced grove which they call a park; that they live
in larger and better-garnished saloons than he has visited, and go in
coaches, keeping only the society of the elegant, to watering-places
and to distant cities,--these make the groundwork from which he
has delineated estates of romance, compared with which their actual
possessions are shanties and paddocks. The muse herself betrays her son,
and enhances the gifts of wealth and well-born beauty by a radiation
out of the air, and clouds, and forests that skirt the road,--a certain
haughty favor, as if from patrician genii to patricians, a kind of
aristocracy in nature, a prince of the power of the air.
The moral sensibility which makes Edens and Tempes so easily, may not be
always found, but the material landscape is never far off. We can
find these enchantments without visiting the Como Lake, or the Madeira
Islands. We exaggerate the praises of local scenery. In every landscape
the point of astonishment is the meeting of the sky and the earth,
and that is seen from the first hillock as well as from the top of the
Alleghanies. The stars at night stoop down over the brownest, homeliest
common with all the spiritual magnificence which they shed on the
Campagna, or on the marble deserts of Egypt. The uprolled clouds and the
colors of morning and evening will transfigure maples and alders. The
difference between landscape and landscape is small, but there is
great difference in the beholders. There is nothing so wonderful in any
particular landscape as the necessity of being beautiful under which
every landscape lies. Nature cannot be surprised in undress. Beauty
breaks in everywhere.
But it is very easy to outrun the sympathy of readers on this topic,
which schoolmen called natura naturata, or nature passive. One can
hardly speak directly of it without excess. It is as easy to broach in
mixed companies what is called "the subject of religion." A susceptible
person does not like to indulge his tastes in this kind without the
apology of some trivial necessity: he goes to see a wood-lot, or to look
at the crops, or to fetch a plant or a mineral from a remote locality,
or he carries a fowling-piece or a fishing-rod. I suppose this shame
must have a good reason. A dilettantism in nature is barren and
unworthy. The fop of fields is no better than his brother of Broadway.
Men are naturally hunters and inquisitive of wood-craft, and I suppose
that such a gazetteer as wood-cutters and Indians should furnish facts
for, would take place in the most sumptuous drawing-rooms of all the
"Wreaths" and "Flora's chaplets" of the bookshops; yet ordinarily,
whether we are too clumsy for so subtle a topic, or from whatever
cause, as soon as men begin to write on nature, they fall into euphuism.
Frivolity is a most unfit tribute to Pan, who ought to be represented
in the mythology as the most continent of gods. I would not be frivolous
before the admirable reserve and prudence of time, yet I cannot renounce
the right of returning often to this old topic. The multitude of false
churches accredits the true religion. Literature, poetry, science are
the homage of man to this unfathomed secret, concerning which no sane
man can affect an indifference or incuriosity. Nature is loved by what
is best in us. It is loved as the city of God, although, or rather
because there is no citizen. The sunset is unlike anything that is
underneath it: it wants men. And the beauty of nature must always seem
unreal and mocking, until the landscape has human figures that are
as good as itself. If there were good men, there would never be this
rapture in nature. If the king is in the palace, nobody looks at the
walls. It is when he is gone, and the house is filled with grooms and
gazers, that we turn from the people to find relief in the majestic men
that are suggested by the pictures and the architecture. The critics who
complain of the sickly separation of the beauty of nature from the
thing to be done, must consider that our hunting of the picturesque
is inseparable from our protest against false society. Man is fallen;
nature is erect, and serves as a differential thermometer, detecting
the presence or absence of the divine sentiment in man. By fault of our
dulness and selfishness we are looking up to nature, but when we are
convalescent, nature will look up to us. We see the foaming brook with
compunction: if our own life flowed with the right energy, we should
shame the brook. The stream of zeal sparkles with real fire, and not
with reflex rays of sun and moon. Nature may be as selfishly studied as
trade. Astronomy to the selfish becomes astrology; psychology, mesmerism
(with intent to show where our spoons are gone); and anatomy and
physiology become phrenology and palmistry.
But taking timely warning, and leaving many things unsaid on this
topic, let us not longer omit our homage to the Efficient Nature, natura
naturans, the quick cause before which all forms flee as the driven
snows; itself secret, its works driven before it in flocks and
multitudes, (as the ancient represented nature by Proteus, a shepherd,)
and in undescribable variety. It publishes itself in creatures, reaching
from particles and spiculae through transformation on transformation to
the highest symmetries, arriving at consummate results without a
shock or a leap. A little heat, that is a little motion, is all that
differences the bald, dazzling white and deadly cold poles of the earth
from the prolific tropical climates. All changes pass without violence,
by reason of the two cardinal conditions of boundless space and
boundless time. Geology has initiated us into the secularity of nature,
and taught us to disuse our dame-school measures, and exchange our
Mosaic and Ptolemaic schemes for her large style. We knew nothing
rightly, for want of perspective. Now we learn what patient periods
must round themselves before the rock is formed; then before the rock
is broken, and the first lichen race has disintegrated the thinnest
external plate into soil, and opened the door for the remote Flora,
Fauna, Ceres, and Pomona to come in. How far off yet is the trilobite!
how far the quadruped! how inconceivably remote is man! All duly arrive,
and then race after race of men. It is a long way from granite to the
oyster; farther yet to Plato and the preaching of the immortality of the
soul. Yet all must come, as surely as the first atom has two sides.
Motion or change and identity or rest are the first and second secrets
of nature:--Motion and Rest. The whole code of her laws may be written
on the thumbnail, or the signet of a ring. The whirling bubble on the
surface of a brook admits us to the secret of the mechanics of the sky.
Every shell on the beach is a key to it. A little water made to rotate
in a cup explains the formation of the simpler shells; the addition of
matter from year to year, arrives at last at the most complex forms; and
yet so poor is nature with all her craft, that from the beginning to the
end of the universe she has but one stuff,--but one stuff with its two
ends, to serve up all her dream-like variety. Compound it how she will,
star, sand, fire, water, tree, man, it is still one stuff, and betrays
the same properties.
Nature is always consistent, though she feigns to contravene her own
laws. She keeps her laws, and seems to transcend them. She arms and
equips an animal to find its place and living in the earth, and at the
same time she arms and equips another animal to destroy it. Space exists
to divide creatures; but by clothing the sides of a bird with a few
feathers she gives him a petty omnipresence. The direction is forever
onward, but the artist still goes back for materials and begins again
with the first elements on the most advanced stage: otherwise all goes
to ruin. If we look at her work, we seem to catch a glance of a system
in transition. Plants are the young of the world, vessels of health and
vigor; but they grope ever upward towards consciousness; the trees are
imperfect men, and seem to bemoan their imprisonment, rooted in the
ground. The animal is the novice and probationer of a more advanced
order. The men, though young, having tasted the first drop from the
cup of thought, are already dissipated: the maples and ferns are still
uncorrupt; yet no doubt when they come to consciousness they too will
curse and swear. Flowers so strictly belong to youth that we adult men
soon come to feel that their beautiful generations concern not us: we
have had our day; now let the children have theirs. The flowers jilt us,
and we are old bachelors with our ridiculous tenderness.
Things are so strictly related, that according to the skill of the
eye, from any one object the parts and properties of any other may be
predicted. If we had eyes to see it, a bit of stone from the city wall
would certify us of the necessity that man must exist, as readily as
the city. That identity makes us all one, and reduces to nothing great
intervals on our customary scale. We talk of deviations from natural
life, as if artificial life were not also natural. The smoothest curled
courtier in the boudoirs of a palace has an animal nature, rude and
aboriginal as a white bear, omnipotent to its own ends, and is
directly related, there amid essences and billetsdoux, to Himmaleh
mountain-chains and the axis of the globe. If we consider how much
we are nature's, we need not be superstitious about towns, as if that
terrific or benefic force did not find us there also, and fashion
cities. Nature, who made the mason, made the house. We may easily hear
too much of rural influences. The cool disengaged air of natural objects
makes them enviable to us, chafed and irritable creatures with red
faces, and we think we shall be as grand as they if we camp out and eat
roots; but let us be men instead of woodchucks and the oak and the elm
shall gladly serve us, though we sit in chairs of ivory on carpets of
silk.
This guiding identity runs through all the surprises and contrasts of
the piece, and characterizes every law. Man carries the world in his
head, the whole astronomy and chemistry suspended in a thought. Because
the history of nature is charactered in his brain, therefore is he
the prophet and discoverer of her secrets. Every known fact in natural
science was divined by the presentiment of somebody, before it was
actually verified. A man does not tie his shoe without recognizing laws
which bind the farthest regions of nature: moon, plant, gas, crystal,
are concrete geometry and numbers. Common sense knows its own, and
recognizes the fact at first sight in chemical experiment. The common
sense of Franklin, Dalton, Davy and Black, is the same common sense
which made the arrangements which now it discovers.
If the identity expresses organized rest, the counter action runs also
into organization. The astronomers said, 'Give us matter and a little
motion and we will construct the universe. It is not enough that we
should have matter, we must also have a single impulse, one shove
to launch the mass and generate the harmony of the centrifugal and
centripetal forces. Once heave the ball from the hand, and we can show
how all this mighty order grew.'--'A very unreasonable postulate,' said
the metaphysicians, 'and a plain begging of the question. Could you not
prevail to know the genesis of projection, as well as the continuation
of it?' Nature, meanwhile, had not waited for the discussion, but, right
or wrong, bestowed the impulse, and the balls rolled. It was no great
affair, a mere push, but the astronomers were right in making much of
it, for there is no end to the consequences of the act. That famous
aboriginal push propagates itself through all the balls of the
system, and through every atom of every ball; through all the races of
creatures, and through the history and performances of every individual.
Exaggeration is in the course of things. Nature sends no creature, no
man into the world without adding a small excess of his proper quality.
Given the planet, it is still necessary to add the impulse; so to every
creature nature added a little violence of direction in its proper path,
a shove to put it on its way; in every instance a slight generosity, a
drop too much. Without electricity the air would rot, and without this
violence of direction which men and women have, without a spice of bigot
and fanatic, no excitement, no efficiency. We aim above the mark to hit
the mark. Every act hath some falsehood of exaggeration in it. And when
now and then comes along some sad, sharp-eyed man, who sees how paltry a
game is played, and refuses to play, but blabs the secret;--how then? Is
the bird flown? O no, the wary Nature sends a new troop of fairer forms,
of lordlier youths, with a little more excess of direction to hold
them fast to their several aim; makes them a little wrongheaded in that
direction in which they are rightest, and on goes the game again with
new whirl, for a generation or two more. The child with his sweet
pranks, the fool of his senses, commanded by every sight and sound,
without any power to compare and rank his sensations, abandoned to
a whistle or a painted chip, to a lead dragoon or a gingerbread-dog,
individualizing everything, generalizing nothing, delighted with every
new thing, lies down at night overpowered by the fatigue which this day
of continual pretty madness has incurred. But Nature has answered her
purpose with the curly, dimpled lunatic. She has tasked every faculty,
and has secured the symmetrical growth of the bodily frame by all these
attitudes and exertions,--an end of the first importance, which could
not be trusted to any care less perfect than her own. This glitter, this
opaline lustre plays round the top of every toy to his eye to insure
his fidelity, and he is deceived to his good. We are made alive and kept
alive by the same arts. Let the stoics say what they please, we do
not eat for the good of living, but because the meat is savory and
the appetite is keen. The vegetable life does not content itself with
casting from the flower or the tree a single seed, but it fills the
air and earth with a prodigality of seeds, that, if thousands perish,
thousands may plant themselves; that hundreds may come up, that tens may
live to maturity; that at least one may replace the parent. All things
betray the same calculated profusion. The excess of fear with which the
animal frame is hedged round, shrinking from cold, starting at sight
of a snake, or at a sudden noise, protects us, through a multitude of
groundless alarms, from some one real danger at last. The lover seeks in
marriage his private felicity and perfection, with no prospective end;
and nature hides in his happiness her own end, namely, progeny, or the
perpetuity of the race.
But the craft with which the world is made, runs also into the mind and
character of men. No man is quite sane; each has a vein of folly in his
composition, a slight determination of blood to the head, to make sure
of holding him hard to some one point which nature had taken to heart.
Great causes are never tried on their merits; but the cause is reduced
to particulars to suit the size of the partisans, and the contention is
ever hottest on minor matters. Not less remarkable is the overfaith of
each man in the importance of what he has to do or say. The poet, the
prophet, has a higher value for what he utters than any hearer, and
therefore it gets spoken. The strong, self-complacent Luther declares
with an emphasis not to be mistaken, that "God himself cannot do without
wise men." Jacob Behmen and George Fox betray their egotism in the
pertinacity of their controversial tracts, and James Naylor once
suffered himself to be worshipped as the Christ. Each prophet comes
presently to identify himself with his thought, and to esteem his hat
and shoes sacred. However this may discredit such persons with the
judicious, it helps them with the people, as it gives heat, pungency,
and publicity to their words. A similar experience is not infrequent
in private life. Each young and ardent person writes a diary, in which,
when the hours of prayer and penitence arrive, he inscribes his soul.
The pages thus written are to him burning and fragrant; he reads them
on his knees by midnight and by the morning star; he wets them with his
tears; they are sacred; too good for the world, and hardly yet to be
shown to the dearest friend. This is the man-child that is born to the
soul, and her life still circulates in the babe. The umbilical cord
has not yet been cut. After some time has elapsed, he begins to wish to
admit his friend to this hallowed experience, and with hesitation, yet
with firmness, exposes the pages to his eye. Will they not burn his
eyes? The friend coldly turns them over, and passes from the writing to
conversation, with easy transition, which strikes the other party with
astonishment and vexation. He cannot suspect the writing itself. Days
and nights of fervid life, of communion with angels of darkness and of
light have engraved their shadowy characters on that tear-stained book.
He suspects the intelligence or the heart of his friend. Is there then
no friend? He cannot yet credit that one may have impressive experience
and yet may not know how to put his private fact into literature; and
perhaps the discovery that wisdom has other tongues and ministers than
we, that though we should hold our peace the truth would not the less be
spoken, might check injuriously the flames of our zeal. A man can
only speak so long as he does not feel his speech to be partial and
inadequate. It is partial, but he does not see it to be so whilst he
utters it. As soon as he is released from the instinctive and particular
and sees its partiality, he shuts his mouth in disgust. For no man can
write anything who does not think that what he writes is for the time
the history of the world; or do anything well who does not esteem his
work to be of importance. My work may be of none, but I must not think
it of none, or I shall not do it with impunity.
In like manner, there is throughout nature something mocking, something
that leads us on and on, but arrives nowhere; keeps no faith with
us. All promise outruns the performance. We live in a system of
approximations. Every end is prospective of some other end, which is
also temporary; a round and final success nowhere. We are encamped in
nature, not domesticated. Hunger and thirst lead us on to eat and to
drink; but bread and wine, mix and cook them how you will, leave us
hungry and thirsty, after the stomach is full. It is the same with all
our arts and performances. Our music, our poetry, our language itself
are not satisfactions, but suggestions. The hunger for wealth, which
reduces the planet to a garden, fools the eager pursuer. What is the end
sought? Plainly to secure the ends of good sense and beauty, from the
intrusion of deformity or vulgarity of any kind. But what an operose
method! What a train of means to secure a little conversation! This
palace of brick and stone, these servants, this kitchen, these stables,
horses and equipage, this bank-stock and file of mortgages; trade to all
the world, country-house and cottage by the waterside, all for a little
conversation, high, clear, and spiritual! Could it not be had as well
by beggars on the highway? No, all these things came from successive
efforts of these beggars to remove friction from the wheels of life, and
give opportunity. Conversation, character, were the avowed ends; wealth
was good as it appeased the animal cravings, cured the smoky chimney,
silenced the creaking door, brought friends together in a warm and
quiet room, and kept the children and the dinner-table in a different
apartment. Thought, virtue, beauty, were the ends; but it was known that
men of thought and virtue sometimes had the headache, or wet feet, or
could lose good time whilst the room was getting warm in winter days.
Unluckily, in the exertions necessary to remove these inconveniences,
the main attention has been diverted to this object; the old aims have
been lost sight of, and to remove friction has come to be the end. That
is the ridicule of rich men, and Boston, London, Vienna, and now the
governments generally of the world are cities and governments of the
rich; and the masses are not men, but poor men, that is, men who would
be rich; this is the ridicule of the class, that they arrive with pains
and sweat and fury nowhere; when all is done, it is for nothing. They
are like one who has interrupted the conversation of a company to make
his speech, and now has forgotten what he went to say. The appearance
strikes the eye everywhere of an aimless society, of aimless nations.
Were the ends of nature so great and cogent as to exact this immense
sacrifice of men?
Quite analogous to the deceits in life, there is, as might be expected,
a similar effect on the eye from the face of external nature. There is
in woods and waters a certain enticement and flattery, together with a
failure to yield a present satisfaction. This disappointment is felt
in every landscape. I have seen the softness and beauty of the summer
clouds floating feathery overhead, enjoying, as it seemed, their height
and privilege of motion, whilst yet they appeared not so much the
drapery of this place and hour, as forelooking to some pavilions and
gardens of festivity beyond. It is an odd jealousy, but the poet finds
himself not near enough to his object. The pine-tree, the river, the
bank of flowers before him, does not seem to be nature. Nature is still
elsewhere. This or this is but outskirt and far-off reflection and echo
of the triumph that has passed by and is now at its glancing splendor
and heyday, perchance in the neighboring fields, or, if you stand in
the field, then in the adjacent woods. The present object shall give you
this sense of stillness that follows a pageant which has just gone by.
What splendid distance, what recesses of ineffable pomp and loveliness
in the sunset! But who can go where they are, or lay his hand or plant
his foot thereon? Off they fall from the round world forever and ever.
It is the same among the men and women as among the silent trees; always
a referred existence, an absence, never a presence and satisfaction.
Is it that beauty can never be grasped? in persons and in landscape
is equally inaccessible? The accepted and betrothed lover has lost the
wildest charm of his maiden in her acceptance of him. She was heaven
whilst he pursued her as a star: she cannot be heaven if she stoops to
such a one as he.
What shall we say of this omnipresent appearance of that first
projectile impulse, of this flattery and balking of so many well-meaning
creatures? Must we not suppose somewhere in the universe a slight
treachery and derision? Are we not engaged to a serious resentment of
this use that is made of us? Are we tickled trout, and fools of nature?
One look at the face of heaven and earth lays all petulance at rest,
and soothes us to wiser convictions. To the intelligent, nature converts
itself into a vast promise, and will not be rashly explained. Her secret
is untold. Many and many an Oedipus arrives; he has the whole mystery
teeming in his brain. Alas! the same sorcery has spoiled his skill;
no syllable can he shape on his lips. Her mighty orbit vaults like the
fresh rainbow into the deep, but no archangel's wing was yet strong
enough to follow it and report of the return of the curve. But it
also appears that our actions are seconded and disposed to greater
conclusions than we designed. We are escorted on every hand through life
by spiritual agents, and a beneficent purpose lies in wait for us.
We cannot bandy words with Nature, or deal with her as we deal with
persons. If we measure our individual forces against hers we may easily
feel as if we were the sport of an insuperable destiny. But if, instead
of identifying ourselves with the work, we feel that the soul of the
workman streams through us, we shall find the peace of the morning
dwelling first in our hearts, and the fathomless powers of gravity
and chemistry, and, over them, of life, preexisting within us in their
highest form.
The uneasiness which the thought of our helplessness in the chain of
causes occasions us, results from looking too much at one condition
of nature, namely, Motion. But the drag is never taken from the wheel.
Wherever the impulse exceeds, the Rest or Identity insinuates its
compensation. All over the wide fields of earth grows the prunella or
self-heal. After every foolish day we sleep off the fumes and furies of
its hours; and though we are always engaged with particulars, and
often enslaved to them, we bring with us to every experiment the innate
universal laws. These, while they exist in the mind as ideas, stand
around us in nature forever embodied, a present sanity to expose and
cure the insanity of men. Our servitude to particulars betrays into a
hundred foolish expectations. We anticipate a new era from the invention
of a locomotive, or a balloon; the new engine brings with it the old
checks. They say that by electro-magnetism your salad shall be grown
from the seed whilst your fowl is roasting for dinner; it is a symbol of
our modern aims and endeavors, of our condensation and acceleration of
objects;--but nothing is gained; nature cannot be cheated; man's life
is but seventy salads long, grow they swift or grow they slow. In these
checks and impossibilities however we find our advantage, not less than
in the impulses. Let the victory fall where it will, we are on that
side. And the knowledge that we traverse the whole scale of being,
from the centre to the poles of nature, and have some stake in every
possibility, lends that sublime lustre to death, which philosophy and
religion have too outwardly and literally striven to express in the
popular doctrine of the immortality of the soul. The reality is more
excellent than the report. Here is no ruin, no discontinuity, no spent
ball. The divine circulations never rest nor linger. Nature is the
incarnation of a thought, and turns to a thought again, as ice becomes
water and gas. The world is mind precipitated, and the volatile essence
is forever escaping again into the state of free thought. Hence the
virtue and pungency of the influence on the mind of natural objects,
whether inorganic or organized. Man imprisoned, man crystallized,
man vegetative, speaks to man impersonated. That power which does not
respect quantity, which makes the whole and the particle its equal
channel, delegates its smile to the morning, and distils its essence
into every drop of rain. Every moment instructs, and every object: for
wisdom is infused into every form. It has been poured into us as blood;
it convulsed us as pain; it slid into us as pleasure; it enveloped us
in dull, melancholy days, or in days of cheerful labor; we did not guess
its essence until after a long time.
*****