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THE
ATLANTIC MONTHLY
A MAGAZINE OF
_Literature, Science, Art, and Politics._
VOLUME XVI.
[Illustration]
BOSTON:
TICKNOR AND FIELDS,
124 TREMONT STREET.
LONDON: TRUeBNER AND COMPANY.
1865.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1865, by TICKNOR AND
FIELDS, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the District of
Massachusetts.
PRINTED BY
S. Chism,--Franklin Printing House,
112 Congress Street, Boston.
ELECTROTYPED BY WELCH, BIGELOW, & CO.,
CAMBRIDGE.
CONTENTS.
Page
Assassination _C. C. Hazewell_ 85
Bentham, Jeremy _John Neal_ 575
Blackwood, William _John Neal_ 660
Books for our Children _Samuel Osgood_ 724
Bright, John, and the English Radicals _G. W. Towle_ 177
Candle-Ends, A Paper of _Charles J. Sprague_ 61
Chicago Conspiracy, The 108
Chimney-Corner, The _Mrs. H. B. Stowe_ 100, 232, 347,
419, 567, 672
Clemency and Common Sense _Charles Sumner_ 745
Coupon Bonds _J. T. Trowbridge_ 257, 399
Deep-Sea Damsels _G. W. Hosmer_ 77
Doctor Johns _Donald G. Mitchell_ 66, 211,
300, 457, 546, 713
Down the River _Harriet E. Prescott_ 468
Edgeworths, A Visit to the _Mrs. John Farrar_ 356
Electric Telegraph, The Progress of the _George B. Prescott_ 605
Ellen _Author of "Life in the Iron-Mills"_ 22
Forge, The 586, 684
Gettysburg, The Field of _J. T. Trowbridge_ 616
Griffith Gaunt: or, Jealousy _Charles Reade_ 641
Hamilton, Alexander _C. C. Hazewell_ 625
Honey-Makers, Among the _Harriet E. Prescott_ 129
Jelly-Fishes, Mode of Catching _A. Agassiz_ 736
Jordan, John _Edmund Kirke_ 434
King James the First _Gail Hamilton_ 701
Libraries, The Visible and Invisible in _Mrs. R. C. Waterston_ 525
Luck of Abel Steadman, The _Author of "Life in the Iron-Mills"_ 331
Militia System, Our Future _T. W. Higginson_ 371
Mull, Around _Maria S. Cummins_ 11, 167
Needle and Garden 47, 185, 283, 419
New Art Critic, A _Eugene Benson_ 325
Old Shoes, On a Pair of _Charles J. Sprague_ 360
Procter, Adelaide Anne _Charles Dickens_ 739
Reconstruction and Negro Suffrage _E. P. Whipple_ 238
"Running at the Heads" 342
St. John's River, Up the _T. W. Higginson_ 311
St. Petersburg, Winter Life in _Bayard Taylor_ 34
Saints who have had Bodies _G. Reynolds_ 385
"Saul," The Author of _Bayard Taylor_ 412
Scientific Farming _Gail Hamilton_ 290
Second Capture, My _W. W. Wiltbank_ 195
Silent Friend, Letter to a 221
Strategy at the Fireside _Epes Sargent_ 151
Toepffer, Rodolphe _Mrs. H. M. Fletcher_ 556
Why the Putkammer Castle was destroyed _Robert Dale Owen_ 513
Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship _D. A. Wasson_ 273, 448
Young Housekeeper, Letter to a _C. P. Hawes_ 535
Young Men in History _E. P. Whipple_ 1
POETRY.
Page
Accomplices _T. B. Aldrich_ 107
Agassiz, A Farewell to _O. W. Holmes_ 584
Bay Ridge, Long Island, At _T. B. Aldrich_ 341
Beyond _J. T. Trowbridge_ 744
Changeling, The _John G. Whittier_ 20
Countess Laura _George H. Boker_ 143
Dios Te De _C. C. Coxe_ 737
Lincoln, Abraham _H. H. Brownell_ 491
Master's Mate, The Rhyme of the 519
Noeel _H. W. Longfellow_ 446
No Time like the Old Time _O. W. Holmes_ 398
Ode recited at the Harvard Commemoration _James Russell Lowell_ 364
Parting of Hector and Andromache, The _William Cullen Bryant_ 657
Peace _Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney_ 237
Peace Autumn, The _John G. Whittier_ 545
Peacock, Natural History of the _T. W. Parsons_ 310
Skipper Ben _Lacy Larcom_ 84
Sleeper, The _Bayard Taylor_ 611
Twilight _Mrs. Celia Thaxter_ 282
Willow, The _Mrs. E. A. C. Akers_ 194
REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.
Arnold's Essays in Criticism 255
Raxley's What I saw on the West Coast of America 379
Brooks's Hesperus 510
Dall' Ongaro's La Rosa dell' Alpi 125
Forsyth's Life and Times of Cicero 380
Gentle Life, The 250
Greene's Historical View of the American Revolution 127
Hall's Arctic Researches 125
Hedge's Reason in Religion 383
Higginson's Epictetus 761
Holley's Treatise on Ordnance and Armor 126
Johnson, Andrew, Speeches of 763
Kingsley's Hillyars and Burtons 121
Le Fanu's Uncle Silas 121
Mann, Horace, Life of 247
Mill's Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy 762
Mueller's Lectures on the Science of Language 128
Muloch's Christian's Mistake 121
Nota's La Fiera 125
Parkman's France and England in North America 505
Spencer's Social Statics 381
Stevens's History of the Methodist Episcopal Church
in the United States 123
Stone's Life and Times of Sir William Johnson 121
Taylor's Holy Living and Holy Dying 122
Thoreau's Letters 504
White's Memoirs of Shakespeare 637
RECENT AMERICAN PUBLICATIONS 256, 384, 640
THE
ATLANTIC MONTHLY.
_A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics._
VOL. XVI.--JULY, 1865.--NO. XCIII.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1865, by TICKNOR AND
FIELDS, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of
Massachusetts.
YOUNG MEN IN HISTORY.
History is an imperfect record of nations and races, diverse in their
position and capacities, but identical in nature and one in destiny.
Viewed comprehensively, its individuals and events comprise the
incidents of an uncompleted biography of man, a biography long, obscure,
full of puzzling facts for thought to interpret, and more puzzling
breaks for thought to bridge, but, on the whole, exhibiting man as
moving and man as moving forward. If we scrutinize the character of this
progress, we shall find that the forces which propel society in the
direction of improvement, and the ideas we form of the nature of that
improvement, are the forces and the ideas of youth. The world, indeed,
moves under the impulses of youth to realize the ideals of youth. It has
youth for its beginning and youth for its end; for youth is alive, and
progress is but the movement of life to attain fuller, higher, and more
vivid life. Youth, too, is nearer to those celestial fountains of
existence whence inspiration pours into the heart and light streams into
the brain. Indeed, all the qualities which constitute the life of the
soul, and which preserve in vigor and health even the practical
faculties of the mind,--freshness, ardor, generosity, love, hope, faith,
courage, cheer,--all these youth feels stirring and burning in its own
breast, and aches to see fulfilled in the common experience of the race.
But in age these fine raptures are apt to be ridiculed as the amiable
follies of juvenile illusions. In parting, however, with what it derides
as illusions, does not age part with the whole of joy and by far the
most important element of wisdom? The world it so sagaciously aims to
inaugurate, what is it but a stationary and decrepit world,--a world
which would soon decay, and drop into the abyss of nothingness, were it
not for the rejuvenating vitality poured into it by the youth it
cynically despises? True wisdom, indeed, springs from the wide brain
which is fed from the deep heart; and it is only when age warms its
withering conceptions at the memory of its youthful fire, when it makes
experience serve aspiration, and knowledge illumine the difficult paths
through which thoughts thread their way into facts,--it is only then
that age becomes broadly and nobly wise.
If we thus discern in the sentiments and faculties of youth the
animating and impelling soul of historical events,--if, wherever in
history we mark a great movement of humanity, we commonly detect a young
man at its head or at its heart,--we must still, I admit, discriminate
between youth and young men, between the genial action of youthful
qualities and the imperfections and perversions of youthful character.
Youth we commonly represent under the image of morn,--clear, fresh,
cheerful, radiant, the green sward trembling and gleaming with ecstasy
as the rising sun transfigures its dew-drops into diamonds; but then
morn is sometimes black with clouds, and foul with vapors, and terrible
with tempests. In treating, therefore, of the position and influence of
young men in history, let us begin with those in whom the energies of
youth were early perverted from their appropriate objects, and fell
under the dominion of sensual appetites or malignant passions.
And first, it is important we should bear in mind, that, in this
misdirection of youth, all that constitutes the spirit, the power, the
charm of youth is extinguished. The young man becomes prematurely old.
We have all witnessed that saddest of spectacles, the petulant child
developing into the ruffian boy, and hurrying into the ruffian
man,--rude, hard-natured, swaggering, and self-willed, a darkness over
his conscience, a glare over his appetites, insensible to duty or
affection, and only tamed into decencies by the chains of restraint
which an outraged community binds on his impulses. Now give this young
savage arbitrary power, let him inherit the empire of the world, remove
all restraints on his will, and allow him to riot in the mad caprices of
sensuality and malevolence, and he makes his ominous appearance in
history as a Caligula, a Domitian, a Nero. More fit for a madhouse than
a throne, his advent is the signal of a despotism controlled by no
guiding principles, but given over to that spirit of freak and mischief
which springs from the union of the boy's brain with the man's
appetites; and his fate is to have that craze of the faculties and
delirium of the sensations which he calls his life abruptly closed by
suicide or assassination: by suicide, when he has become intolerable to
himself; by assassination, when, as is more common, he has become
intolerable to the world. Evil, however, as history shows him, it must
still be said that his career does not exhibit the consistent depravity
and systematic wickedness which characterize some of the Roman Emperors
of maturer years; and even the giddy ferocities of the youthful Nero can
be contemplated with less horror than the Satanic depth of malignity
which morosely brooded over shadowy plans of gigantic crime in the dark
spirit of the aged Tiberius.
This ruffian type of the young man is rarely exhibited on the historical
theatre in its full combination of animal fury with mental feebleness.
In most young men who acquire prominence in the history of the world
there is some genius, however dashed it may be with depravity; and
genius is itself an inlet of youth, checks the downward drag of the
spiritual into the animal nature, intensifies appetites into passions,
and lends impetus to daring ambition, if it does not always purify the
motives which prompt its exercise. This genius divorced from wisdom,
scornful of moral obligations, and ravenous for notoriety, is especially
marked by wilfulness, presumptuous self-assertion, the curse and
plague-spot of the perverted soul. Alcibiades in politics and Byron in
literature are among its most conspicuous examples. Their defiance of
rule was not the confident daring which comes from the vision of genius,
but the disdainful audacity which springs from its wilfulness.
Alcibiades, a name closely connected with those events which resulted in
the ruin of the Athenian empire, was perhaps the most variously
accomplished of all those young men of genius who have squandered their
genius in the attempt to make it insolently dominant over justice and
reason. Graceful, beautiful, brave, eloquent, and affluent, the pupil of
Socrates, the darling of the Athenian democracy, lavishly endowed by
Nature with the faculties of the great statesman and the great captain,
with every power and every opportunity to make himself the pride and
glory of his country, he was still so governed by an imp of boyish
perversity and presumption, that he renounced the ambition of being the
first statesman of Athens in order to show himself its most restless,
impudent and unscrupulous trickster; and, subjecting all public objects
to the freaks of his own vanity and selfishness, ever ready to resent
opposition to his whim with treason against the state, he stands in
history a curious spectacle of transcendent gifts belittled by
profligacy of character, the falsest, keenest, most mischievous, and
most magnificent demagogue the world has ever seen.
If we turn from Alcibiades the politician to Byron the poet, we have a
no less memorable instance of intellectual power early linked with moral
perversity and completely bewitched and bedevilled by presumptuous
egotism. What, in consequence, was his career? Petulant, passionate,
self-willed, impatient of all external direction, the slave and victim
of the moment's impulse, yet full of the energies and visions of genius,
this arrogant stripling passes by quick leaps from boyhood into the
vices of age, and, after a short experience of the worst side of life,
comes out a scoffer and a misanthrope, fills the world with his gospel
of desperation and despair, and, after preaching disgust of existence
and contempt of mankind as the wisdom gleaned from his excesses, he
dies, worn out and _old_, at thirty-six.
Now neither in Byron's works nor Byron's life do we recognize the spirit
of youth,--the spirit which elevates as well as stimulates, which cheers
as well as inflames. Compare him in this respect with a man of vaster
imagination and mightier nature,--compare him with Edmund Burke, in what
we call Burke's old age; and as you read one of Burke's immortal
pamphlets, composed just before his death, do you not feel your blood
kindle and your mind expand, as you come into communion with that bright
and broad intellect, competent to grapple with the most complicated
relations of European politics,--with that audacious will, whose
purposes glow with immortal life,--and especially with that large and
noble soul, rich in experience, rich in wisdom, but richer still in the
freshness, the ardor, the eloquence, the chivalrous daring of youth?
Byron is old at twenty-five; Burke is young at sixty-six.
The spirit of youth may thus, as in the case of Byron, be burnt out of
the young man by the egotism of passion; but it may also be frozen up in
his breast by the egotism of opinion. Woe to the young shoulders
afflicted with the conceit that they support old heads! When this mental
disease assumes the form of flippancy, it renders a young person happily
unconscious that Nature has any stores of wisdom which she has not
thought fit to deposit in his cranium, or that his mind can properly
assume any other attitude towards an opponent than that of placid and
pitying contempt.
But this intellectual presumption, ridiculous in its flippant or
pompous, becomes terrible in its malignant, expression. Thus, the
headstrong young men who pushed the French Revolution of 1789 into the
excesses of the Reign of Terror were well-intentioned reformers, driven
into crime by the fanaticism of mental conceit. This is especially true
of Robespierre and St. Just. Their hearts were hardened through their
heads. The abstract notions of freedom and philanthropy were imbedded in
their brains as truths, without being rooted in their characters as
sentiments; and into the form of these inexorable notions they aimed to
shape France. They were of course opposed by human nature. Opposition
made them personally cruel, because it made them intellectually
remorseless. With no instincts of humanity to guide their ideas of its
rights, it was but natural that offended pride of opinion should fester
into that malignant passion which puts relentlessness into the will.
Everything and everybody that opposed the onward movement of the great
cause ought, they conceived, to be removed. The readiest way to remove
them was by tyranny, terror, and murder; for the swiftest method of
answering objections is to knock out the brains that propound them. All
the instituted rights of men were accordingly violated in the fierce
desire to establish the abstract rights of man. A government founded on
reason was to be created by a preliminary and provisional government
founded on the guillotine. The ideals of Rousseau were to be realized by
practices learned in the school of Draco; and a celestial democracy of
thought was to spring from a demonized democracy of fact. Now we are
accustomed to call these wretches young men. But there was no youth in
them. Young in respect to age, their intellectually irritated egotism
made them as bigoted, as inhuman, as soulless as old familiars of the
Inquisition.
In truth, the real young man of that Revolution, as of our own
Revolution, was Lafayette. His convictions regarding the rights of man
were essentially the same as those held by Robespierre and St. Just; but
they were convictions that grew out of the inherent geniality,
benevolence, and rectitude of his nature, and were accordingly guided
and limited in their application by the sanity and sweetness of the
sentiments whence they drew their vitality. Whilst they made him capable
of any self-sacrifice for freedom and humanity, they made him incapable
of crime; and misfortune and failure never destroyed his faith in
freedom, because his faith in freedom had not been corrupted by
experience in blood.
In Nero and Caligula, in Alcibiades and Byron, in Robespierre and St.
Just, we have attempted to sketch the leading perversions of youthful
energy and intelligence. Let us now proceed to exhibit their more
wholesome, and, we trust, their more natural action. And first, in
respect to the emotions, these may all be included in the single word
enthusiasm, or that impulsive force which liberates the mental powers
from the ice of timidity as Spring unloosens the streams from the grasp
of Winter, and sends them forth in a rejoicing rush. The mind of youth,
when impelled by this original strength and enthusiasm of Nature, is
keen, eager, inquisitive, intense, audacious, rapidly assimilating facts
into faculties and knowledge into power, and above all teeming with that
joyous fulness of creative life which radiates thoughts as inspirations,
and magnetizes as well as informs. Now the limit of this youth of mind
observation decides to be commonly between thirty-five and forty; but
still it is not so properly marked by years as by the arrest of this
glad mental growth and development. In some men, like Bacon and Burke,
it is not arrested at sixty. The only sign of age, indeed, which is
specially worth considering, is the mental sign; and this is that
gradual disintegration of the mind's vital powers by which intelligence
is separated from force, and experience from ability. Experience
detached from active power is no longer faculty of doing, but mere
memory of what has been done; and principles accordingly subside into
precedents, intuitions into arguments, and alertness of will into
calculation of risks. The highest quality of mind, the quality which
stamps it as an immortal essence, namely, that power, the fused compound
of all other powers, which sends its eagle glance over a whole field of
particulars, penetrates and grasps all related objects in one devouring
conception, and flashes a vivid insight of the only right thing to be
done amid a thousand possible courses of action,--the power, in short,
which gives confidence to will because it gives certainty to vision, and
is as much removed from recklessness as from irresolution,--this power
fades in mental age into that pausing, comparing, generalizing,
indecisive intelligence, which, however wise and valuable it may be in
those matters where success is not the prize of speed, is imbecile in
those conjunctures of affairs where events match faster than the mind
can syllogize, and to think and act a moment too late is defeat and
ruin.
It is for this reason that the large portion of history which relates to
war is so much the history of the triumphs of young men. Thus, Scipio
was twenty-nine when he gained the Battle of Zana; Charles the Twelfth,
nineteen when he gained the Battle of Narva; Conde, twenty-two when he
gained the Battle of Rocroi. At thirty-six, Scipio the younger was the
conqueror of Carthage; at thirty-six, Cortes was the conqueror of
Mexico; at thirty, Charlemagne was master of France and Germany; at
thirty-two, Clive had established the British power in India. Hannibal,
the greatest of military commanders, was only thirty, when, at Cannae, he
dealt an almost annihilating blow at the republic of Rome; and Napoleon
was only twenty-seven, when, on the plains of Italy, he outgeneralled
and defeated, one after another, the veteran marshals of Austria. And in
respect to the wars which grew out of the French Revolution, what are
they but the record of old generals beaten by young generals? And it
will not do to say, that the young generals were victorious merely in
virtue of their superiority in courage, energy, and dash; for they
evinced a no less decisive superiority in commonsense and
judgment,--that is, in instantaneous command of all their resources in
the moment of peril, in quickness to detect the enemy's weak points,
and, above all, in resolute sagacity to send the full strength of the
arm to second at once the piercing glance of the eye. The old generals,
to be sure, boasted professional experience, but, having ossified their
experience into pedantic maxims, they had less professional skill. After
their armies had been ignominiously routed by the harebrained young
fellows opposed to them, they could easily prove, that, by the rules of
war, they had been most improperly beaten; but their young opponents,
whose eager minds had transmuted the rules of war into instincts of
intelligence, were indifferent to the scandal of violating the etiquette
of fighting, provided thereby they gained the object of fighting. They
had, in fact, the quality which the old generals absurdly claimed,
namely, practical sagacity, or, the Yankee phrased it, "the knack of
hitting it about right the first time."
We cannot, of course, leave the subject of young military commanders
without a reference to Alexander of Macedon, in many respects the
greatest young man that ever, as with the fury of the untamable forces
of Nature, broke into history. But even in the "Macedonian madman," as
he is called, it will be found that fury obeyed sagacity. A colossal
soul, in whom barbaric passions urged gigantic powers to the
accomplishment of insatiable desires, he seems, on the first view, to be
given over to the wildest ecstasies of imaginative pride; but we are
soon dazzled and confounded by the irresistible energy, the cool, clear,
fertile, forecasting intelligence, with which he pursues and realizes
his vast designs of glory and dominion. Strong and arrogant as the
fabled Achilles, with a military genius which allies him to Caesar and
Napoleon, he was tortured by aspirations more devouring than theirs;
for, exalted in his own conception above humanity by his constant
success in performing what other men declared impossible, he aimed to
conquer the world,--not merely to be obeyed as its ruler, but worshipped
as its god. But this self-deified genius, who could find nothing on our
planet capable of withstanding his power, was mortal, and died, by what
seemed mere accident, at the age of thirty-two,--died, the master of an
empire, conquered by himself, covering two millions and a half of square
miles,--died, in the full vigor of his faculties, at the time his brain
was teeming with magnificent schemes of assimilating the populations of
Europe and Asia, and of remaking man after his own image by stamping the
nature of Alexander on the mind and feelings of the world.
One incident, the type of his career, has passed into the most familiar
of proverbs. When, in his invasion of Asia, he arrived at Gordium, he
was arrested, not by an army, but by something mightier than an
army,--namely, a superstition. Here was the rude wagon of Gordius, the
yoke of which was fastened to the pole by a cord so entangled that no
human wit or patience could untwist it; yet the oracle had declared that
the empire of Asia was reserved to him alone by whom it should be
untied. After vainly attempting to overcome its difficulties with his
fingers, Alexander impatiently cut it with his sword. The multitude
applauded the solution; he soon made it good by deeds; and, in action,
youth has ever since shown its judgment, as well as its vigor, in thus
annihilating seemingly hopeless perplexities, by cutting Gordian knots.
In passing from the field of battle to the field of politics, from young
men as warriors to young men as statesmen, we must bear in mind that
high political station, unless a man is born to it, is rarely reached by
political genius, until political genius has been tried by years and
tested by events. At the time Mr. Calhoun's influence was greatest, at
the time it was said that "when he took snuff all South Carolina
sneezed," he was really not so great a man as when he was struggling for
eminence. Statesmen are thus forces long before they are leaders of
party, prime-ministers, and presidents; and are not the energies
employed in preparing the way for new laws and new policies of more
historic significance than the mere outward form of their enactment and
inauguration? Thus, it required thirty-five years of effort and
agitation before the old Earl Grey of 1832 could accomplish the scheme
of Parliamentary reform eagerly pressed by the young Mr. Grey of 1797.
The young Chatham, when he was merely "that terrible cornet of horse,"
whose rising to speak in the House of Commons was said to give Sir
Robert Walpole "a pain in the back,"--when, in his own sarcastic phrase,
he "was guilty of the atrocious crime of being a young man,"--was still
day by day building himself up in the heart and imagination of the
English people, and laboriously opening the path to power of the old
Chatham, whose vehement soul was all alive with the energies of youth,
though lodged in the shattered frame of age. And he so familiarly known
to the American people as old John Adams,--did he lose in mature life a
single racy or splenetic characteristic of the young statesman of the
Colonial period? Is there, indeed, any break in that unity of nature
which connects the second President of the United States with the child
John Adams, the boy John Adams, the tart, blunt, and bold, the sagacious
and self-reliant, young Mr. Adams, the plague and terror of the Tories
of Massachusetts? And his all-accomplished rival and adversary,
Alexander Hamilton,--is he not substantially the same at twenty-five as
at forty-five? Though he has not yet imprinted his mind on the
constitution and practical working of the government, the qualities are
still there:--the poised nature whose vigor is almost hidden in its
harmony; the power of infusing into other minds ideas which they seem to
originate; the wisdom, the moderation, the self-command, the deep
thought which explores principles, the comprehensive thought which
regards relations, the fertile thought which devises measures,--all are
there as unmistakably at twenty-five as on that miserable day, when, in
the tried completeness of his powers, the greatest of American statesmen
died by the hand of the greatest of American reprobates.
But there are also in history four examples of men who seem to have been
statesmen from the nursery,--who early took a leading part in great
designs which affected the whole course of human affairs,--and whom
octogenarians like Nesselrode and Palmerston would be compelled to call
statesmen of the first class. These are Octavius Caesar, more successful
in the arts of policy than even the great Julius, never guilty of
youthful indiscretion, or, we are sorry to say, of youthful virtue;
Maurice of Saxony, the preserver of the Reformed religion in Germany, in
that contest where his youthful sagacity proved more than a match for
the veteran craft of Charles the Fifth; the second William of Orange,
the preserver of the liberties of Europe against the ambition of Louis
XIV., and who, as a child, may be said to have prattled treaties and
lisped despatches; and William Pitt, Prime-Minister of England at the
age of twenty-four, and stereotyped on the French imagination as he
whose guineas were nearly as potent as Napoleon's guns.
But it is not so much by eminent examples of young statesmen as it is by
the general influence of young men in resisting the corrupting
tendencies of politics, that their influence in the social state is to
be measured. They oppose the tendency of political life to deprave
political character, to make it cold, false, selfish, distrustful,
abandoned to the greed of power and the greed of gain. They interfere
with the projects of those venerable politicians who are continually
appealing to the public to surrender, bit by bit, its humanity, its
morality, its Christianity, for what are ludicrously misnamed practical
advantages, and who slowly sap the moral vitality of a people through an
insinuating appeal to their temporary interests. The heart of a nation
may be eaten out by this process, without its losing any external signs
of prosperity and strength; but the process itself is resisted, and the
nation kept alive and impelled forward, by the purifying, though
disturbing forces, which come from the generous sentiments and fervid
aspirations of youth. Wise old heads may sneer as much as they please at
the idea of heart in politics; but if history teaches anything, it
teaches that human progress is possible only because the benevolent
instincts of the heart are permanent, while the reasonings of the head
are shifting. "When God," says Montesquieu, "endowed human beings with
brains, he did not intend to guaranty them." And the sarcasm of the
French philosopher is fully justified, when we reflect that nothing
mean, base, or cruel has ever been done in this world, which has not
been supported by arguments. To the mere head every historical event,
whether it be infamous or glorious, is like the case at law which
attracted the attention of the Irish barrister. "It was," he said, "a
very pretty case, and he should like a fee of a hundred pounds to argue
it either way." Who is there, indeed, who has not heard the most
atrocious measures recommended by the most convincing arguments? Why,
the persecutions of the early Christians, the Massacre of St.
Bartholomew, the Spanish Inquisition, the Reign of Terror, the
institution of Slavery, the _coup d' etat_ of Louis Napoleon, are under
the condemnation of history from no lack of arguments in their favor
which it might puzzle a plain man to answer. But opinion in such matters
is not determined by arguments, but by instincts. God, in his wrath, has
not left this world to the mercy of the subtlest dialectician; and all
arguments are happily transitory in their effect, when they contradict
the primal intuitions of conscience and the inborn sentiments of the
heart. And if wicked institutions, laboriously organized by dominant
tyranny and priestcraft, and strong with the might, not merely of bad
passions, but of perverted learning and prostituted logic,--if these
have been swept away in the world's advancing movement, it has been by
the gradual triumph of indestructible sentiments of freedom and
humanity, kept fresh and bright in the souls of the young.
And in the baptism of fire and blood through which our politics are
passing to their purification, who can fitly estimate our indebtedness
to the young men who are now making American history the history of so
much ardent patriotism and heroic achievement? When the civilization of
the country prepared to engage in a death-grapple with its
barbarism,--when the most beneficent of all governments was threatened
by the basest of all conspiracies, the most infamous of all treasons,
the most thievish of all rebellions,--and when that government was
sustained by the most glorious uprising that ever surged up from the
heart of a great people to defend the cause of liberty and honesty and
law,--did not the hot tide of that universal patriotism sparkle and
seethe and glow with special intensity in the breasts of our young men?
Did you ever hear from them that contented ignominy was Christian peace?
Did not meanness, falsehood, fraud, tyranny, treason, find in them, not
apologetic critics, but terrible and full-armed foes? Transient
defeat,--what did it but add new fiery stimulants to energies bent on an
ultimate triumph? To hint to them that Davis would succeed was not only
recreancy to freedom, but blasphemy against God. Better, to their
impassioned patriotism, that their blood should be poured forth in an
unstinted stream,--better that they, and all of us, should be pushed
into that ocean whose astonished waves first felt the keel of the
Mayflower, as she bore her precious freight to Plymouth Rock,--than that
America should consent to be under the insolent domination of a perjured
horde of slave-holders and liberticides. But that consent should never
be given, and that consent could never be extorted. Minds, like theirs,
which had been nurtured on the principles of constitutional
freedom,--hearts, like theirs, which had caught inspiration from the
heroes and martyrs of liberty,--good right arms, like theirs, which
wielded the implements of war as readily as the implements of labor, all
scouted the very thought of such unutterable abasement. By the
patriotism which abhors treason, by the fortitude which endures
privation, by the intrepidity which faces death, they proved themselves
worthy of the great continent they inhabit by showing themselves capable
of upholding the principles it represents.
In passing from the sphere of politics to the serener region of
literature, art, science, and philosophy, there is an increasing
difficulty in estimating youth by years and an increasing necessity to
estimate it by qualities. One thing, however, is certain,--that the
invention of new methods, the discovery of new truth, and the creation
of new beauty,--intellectual acts which are among the most-important of
historical events,--all belong to that thoroughly _live_ condition of
mind which we have called young. In this sense of youth, it may be said
that Raphael, the greatest painter of moral beauty, and Titian, the
greatest painter of sensuous beauty, were both almost equally young,
though Raphael died at thirty-seven, while Titian was prematurely cut
off by the plague when he was only a hundred. These, of course, are the
extreme cases. But, it maybe asked, were not the greatest poems of the
world, the "Iliad" of Homer, the "Divina Commedia" of Dante, the
"Paradise Lost" of Milton, the creations of comparative old age? The
answer to this question is, that each was probably organized round a
youthful conception, and all were coextensive with the whole growth and
development of their creators. Thus, we do not call Milton old when he
produced "Paradise Lost," but when this mental growth was arrested; and
accordingly "Paradise Regained" and "Samson Agonistes," works produced
after his prime, are comparatively bleak and bare products of a
withering imagination and a shrunken personality.
But, confining the matter to the mere question of years, it may be said,
that, allowing for some individual exceptions, the whole history of the
human intellect will bear out the general assertion, that the power in
which great natures culminate, and which fixes fatal limits to their
loftiest aspirations, namely, that flashing conceptive and combining
genius which fuses force and insight in one executive intelligence,
which seizes salient points and central ideas, which darts in an instant
along the whole line of analogies and relations, which leaps with joyous
daring the vast mental spaces that separate huddled facts from
harmonizing laws,--that this power, to say the least, rarely grows after
thirty-five or forty. The mental stature is then reached, though it may
not dwindle and be dwarfed until long afterwards. Thus, Shakspeare
completed "Hamlet" when he was about thirty-six. Mozart, the Shakspeare
of composers, died at thirty-six. But why enumerate? Amid the scores of
instances which must crowd into every mind, let us select five men, of
especial historic significance, and who are commonly imaged to our minds
with heads silvered over with age,--let us take Goethe in poetry, Newton
in science, Bacon in philosophy, Columbus in discovery, Watt in
mechanics. Now, how stand the facts? The greatest works of Goethe were
conceived and partly executed when he was a young man; and if age found
him more widely and worldly wise, it found him weak in creative passion,
and, as a poet, living on the interest of his youthful conceptions.
Newton, in whose fertile and capacious intellect the dim, nebulous
elements of truth were condensed by patient thinking into the completed
star, discovered the most universal of all natural laws, the law of
gravitation, before he was twenty-five, though an error of observation,
not his own, prevented him from demonstrating it until he was forty.
Bacon had "vast contemplative ends," and had taken "all knowledge for
his province," had deeply meditated new methods and audaciously doubted
old ones, before the incipient beard had begun timidly to peep from his
youthful chin. The great conception of Columbus sprang from the thoughts
and studies of his youth; and it was the radiance shed from this
conception which gave him fortitude to bear the slow martyrdom of
poverty, contempt, and sickness of heart, which embittered the toiling
years preceding its late realization. The steam-engine was invented by
James Watt before he was thirty; but then Watt was a thinker from his
cradle. Everybody will recollect his grandmother's reproof of what she
called his idleness, at the time his boyish brain was busy with
meditations destined to ripen in the most marvellous and revolutionizing
of all industrial inventions,--an invention which, of itself alone, has
given Great Britain an additional productive power equal to ten millions
of workmen, at the cost of only a halfpenny a day,--an invention which
supplies the motive power by which a single county in England is enabled
to produce fabrics representing the labor of twenty-one millions of
men,--an invention which, combined with others, annually, in England,
weaves into cloth a length of cotton thread equal to fifty-one times the
distance between the earth and the sun, five thousand millions of
miles,--an invention which created the wealth by which England was
enabled to fight or subsidize the whole continent of Europe from 1793 to
1815, and which made that long war really a contest between the despotic
power of Napoleon Bonaparte and the productive genius of James Watt. All
this vast and teeming future was hidden from the good grandmother, as
she saw the boy idling over the teakettle. "James," she said, "I never
saw such an idle young fellow as you are. Do take a book and employ
yourself usefully. For the last half-hour you have not spoken a single
word. Do you know what you have been doing all this time? Why, you have
taken off, and replaced, and taken off again, the tea-pot lid, and you
have held alternately in the steam, first a saucer and then a spoon; and
you have busied yourself in examining and collecting together the little
drops formed by the condensation of the steam on the surface of the
china and the silver. Now are you not ashamed to waste your time in this
disgraceful manner?" Was ever idleness so productive before?
If we turn from intellectual powers to sentiments, which are the soul of
powers, we shall find renewed proofs that the spirit which animates the
kingdoms of mind is the youthful spirit of health and hope and energy
and cheer. In the regretful tenderness with which all great thinkers
have looked back upon their youth do not we detect the source of their
most kindling inspirations? Time may have impaired their energies,
clipped their aspirations, deadened their faith; but there, away off in
the past, is the gladdening vision of their youthful years; there the
joyous tumult of impulses and aims; there the grand and generous
affections; there the sweet surprise of swift-springing thoughts from
never-failing fountains; there the pure love of truth and beauty which
sent their minds speeding out beyond the limits of positive knowledge;
and there the thrills of ecstasy as new worlds opened on their view.
What, to them, is the assured possession of fame, compared with that
direct perception of truth and that immediate consciousness of power?
But the question arises, Cannot this youth be preserved, or, at least,
perpetually renewed? We have seen, in this rapid glance at history, that
it is preserved as long as the mind retains its hold on the life of
things; and we have seen, both in men of action and in men of
meditation, this hold weakened by age. But would it be weakened, if the
loftiest meditation issued in deeds instead of thoughts? Would youth
depart, if the will acted on the same high level that the mind
conceived? This, also, is a question which has been historically
answered. It has been answered by heroes, reformers, saints, and
martyrs,--by men who have demonstrated, that, the higher the life, the
more distant the approaches of age,--by men whose souls on earth have
glanced into that region of spiritual ideas and spiritual persons where
youth is perpetual, where ecstasy is no transient mood, but a permanent
condition, and where dwell the awful forces which radiate immortal life
into the will. In these men, contemplation, refusing to abide in the act
by which it mounts _above_ the world, reacts with tenfold force _on_ the
world. Using human _ends_ simply as divine _means_, they wield war,
statesmanship, literature, art, science, and philosophy with almost
superhuman energy in the service of supernatural ideas; and history
gleams with an imperfect passage, through human agents, of the life of
God into the life of man. The subject is too vast, the agents too
various and numerous, to be more than hinted here; and in the limitation
of our theme, not only to the young in years, but to the male in sex, we
are precluded from celebrating one who stands in history as perhaps the
loveliest human embodiment of all that is more winning and inspiring in
youth,--one whose celestial elevation of sentiment, ecstatic ardor of
imagination, and power at once to melt the heart and amaze the
understanding, will forever associate the saintliest heroic genius with
the name of Joan of Arc. But among the crowd of great men in this
exalted sphere of influence, let us select one who was the head and
heart of the most memorable movement of modern times,--the German
peasant, Martin Luther. With a nature originally rougher, more
earth-born, and of less genial goodness than that of Joan of Arc, but
with a shaping imagination of the same realizing intensity, the
beautiful myths of Romish superstition, which her innocent soul
transfigured into gracious ministering spirits of seraphic might and
seraphic tenderness, glared in upon his more morbid spiritual vision as
menacing angels, or grinning imps, or scoffing fiends. But still the
tortured soul toiled sturdily on through the anguish of its self-created
hells, the mind crazed and shattered, the heart hungry for peace, the
will resolute that it should have no peace until it found peace in
truth. Yet, our of this prodigious mental and moral anarchy, with its
devil's dance of dogmas and delusions, the young Luther organized,
before he was thirty, the broadest, raciest, and strongest character
that ever put on the armor and hurled the bolts of the Church Militant.
Casting doubt and fear under his feet, and growing more practically
efficient as he grew more morally exalted, at the age of thirty-seven he
had hooted out of Germany the knavish agent of a deistical Pope,--had
nailed to the Wittenberg Church his intellectual defiance of the theory
of Indulgences,--had cast the excommunication and decretals of the
Pontiff into the flames,--and, before the principalities and power of
the Empire, one German against all Germany, had simply and sublimely
indicated the identity of his doctrine with his nature, by declaring
that he not merely _would_ not, but _could_ not, recant.
And whom could he not abjure? Does not this question point to Him who is
the central Person and Power of the past eighteen hundred years of
history?--to Him who will be the central Person and Power of the whole
future of history?--to Him who came into the world in the form of a
young man, and whom a young man announced, crying in the wilderness?--to
Him who clasps in his thought and in his love the whole humanity whose
troubled annals history recounts, and who divinized the spirit of youth
when He assumed its form?
AROUND MULL.
PART I.
I.
We had come from Dumbarton, (my temporary home,) the Bailie, Christie,
and I, for a week's tour along the western coast and among the
Highlands. Sallying forth from Strathleven cottage one sunny morning in
August, we had footed it to the river-side, (I learned the full use of
my feet in Scotland.) had stepped on board a wee bonnie boat, just large
enough for us and our light baggage, exclusive of the space occupied by
a single oarsman,--and dropping down the Leven, and past the Castle, had
gained the broad Clyde, drifted into mid-stream, and there, lying on our
oars, had patiently waited until the great puffing steamer of the
Hutcheson line, from Glasgow, hove in sight. Then, raising one oar as a
signal, we had hailed the monster, which, condescendingly relaxing her
speed, had suffered our boat, tossing like a feather on the steamer's
mighty swell, to come in palpitating, timid fashion under the shadow of
her paddle-box, where the strong arms of men stationed on the portable
ladder let down from her side had caught our skiff by the prow and held
the inconstant thing for one instant firmly enough to suffer us to
spring to their precarious stairway and so secure our passage to
Ardrishalg. Thence, after two hours' sail by track-boat through the
Crinan Canal, and a second passage by steamer,--literally an ocean
passage, for it took us out into the deep Atlantic,--we had bent our
course awhile among the islands that lie nearer the rocky shore, and had
at length, just at nightfall, gained the little land-locked harbor of
Oban,--sweet, smiling Oban, nestling securely within her rocky bulwarks,
the glistening curve of her white sea-wall, her little fleet of safely
moored vessels, her clustering cottages, her neat tempting inns, all
challenging our wonder and delight, as, skirting the headland which had
hitherto jealously hidden the mimic seaport, the entire picture flashed
instantaneously on our view.
Nothing in this hospitable spot turns its back on the voyager who there
seeks refuge. The sea-wall curving like a half-moon round the bay, and
the pebbled esplanade above it, occupy all the foreground. The principal
street of Oban skirts this artificial quay, where the shipping of the
place lies at anchor, and on its farther side the buildings all front
the sea. Thus the whole place smiles a welcome; its white garniture--for
everything in Oban seems freshly whitewashed--reflects the last rays of
the western sunlight, or, if night has already clothed the neighboring
islands and headlands in gloom, the lights from the numerous windows of
the dwelling-houses, shops, and hotels, which face you as you make the
port, excite a glad surprise, and promise the weary traveller, what he
is sure to find, shelter, comfort, and good cheer in Oban.