“For it was not Zeus who proclaimed these to me, nor Justice who dwells
with the gods below; it was not they who established these laws among
men. Nor did I think that your proclamations were so strong, as, being
a mortal, to be able to transcend the unwritten and immovable laws of
the gods. For not something now and yesterday, but forever these live,
and no one knows from what time they appeared. I was not about to pay
the penalty of violating these to the gods, fearing the presumption of
any man. For I well knew that I should die, and why not? even if you
had not proclaimed it.”
This was concerning the burial of a dead body.
The wisest conservatism is that of the Hindoos. “Immemorial custom is
transcendent law,” says Menu. That is, it was the custom of the gods
before men used it. The fault of our New England custom is that it is
memorial. What is morality but immemorial custom? Conscience is the
chief of conservatives. “Perform the settled functions,” says Kreeshna
in the Bhagvat-Geeta; “action is preferable to inaction. The journey of
thy mortal frame may not succeed from inaction.”—“A man’s own calling
with all its faults, ought not to be forsaken. Every undertaking is
involved in its faults as the fire in its smoke.”—“The man who is
acquainted with the whole, should not drive those from their works who
are slow of comprehension, and less experienced than
himself.”—“Wherefore, O Arjoon, resolve to fight,” is the advice of the
God to the irresolute soldier who fears to slay his best friends. It is
a sublime conservatism; as wide as the world, and as unwearied as time;
preserving the universe with Asiatic anxiety, in that state in which it
appeared to their minds. These philosophers dwell on the inevitability
and unchangeableness of laws, on the power of temperament and
constitution, the three goon or qualities, and the circumstances of
birth and affinity. The end is an immense consolation; eternal
absorption in Brahma. Their speculations never venture beyond their own
table-lands, though they are high and vast as they. Buoyancy, freedom,
flexibility, variety, possibility, which also are qualities of the
Unnamed, they deal not with. The undeserved reward is to be earned by
an everlasting moral drudgery; the incalculable promise of the morrow
is, as it were, weighed. And who will say that their conservatism has
not been effectual? “Assuredly,” says a French translator, speaking of
the antiquity and durability of the Chinese and Indian nations, and of
the wisdom of their legislators, “there are there some vestiges of the
eternal laws which govern the world.”
Christianity, on the other hand, is humane, practical, and, in a large
sense, radical. So many years and ages of the gods those Eastern sages
sat contemplating Brahm, uttering in silence the mystic “Om,” being
absorbed into the essence of the Supreme Being, never going out of
themselves, but subsiding farther and deeper within; so infinitely
wise, yet infinitely stagnant; until, at last, in that same Asia, but
in the western part of it, appeared a youth, wholly unforetold by
them,—not being absorbed into Brahm, but bringing Brahm down to earth
and to mankind; in whom Brahm had awaked from his long sleep, and
exerted himself, and the day began,—a new avatar. The Brahman had never
thought to be a brother of mankind as well as a child of God. Christ is
the prince of Reformers and Radicals. Many expressions in the New
Testament come naturally to the lips of all Protestants, and it
furnishes the most pregnant and practical texts. There is no harmless
dreaming, no wise speculation in it, but everywhere a substratum of
good sense. It never _reflects_, but it _repents_. There is no poetry
in it, we may say nothing regarded in the light of beauty merely, but
moral truth is its object. All mortals are convicted by its conscience.
The New Testament is remarkable for its pure morality; the best of the
Hindo Scripture, for its pure intellectuality. The reader is nowhere
raised into and sustained in a higher, purer, or _rarer_ region of
thought than in the Bhagvat-Geeta. Warren Hastings, in his sensible
letter recommending the translation of this book to the Chairman of the
East India Company, declares the original to be “of a sublimity of
conception, reasoning, and diction almost unequalled,” and that the
writings of the Indian philosophers “will survive when the British
dominion in India shall have long ceased to exist, and when the sources
which it once yielded of wealth and power are lost to remembrance.” It
is unquestionably one of the noblest and most sacred scriptures which
have come down to us. Books are to be distinguished by the grandeur of
their topics, even more than by the manner in which they are treated.
The Oriental philosophy approaches, easily, loftier themes than the
modern aspires to; and no wonder if it sometimes prattle about them.
_It_ only assigns their due rank respectively to Action and
Contemplation, or rather does full justice to the latter. Western
philosophers have not conceived of the significance of Contemplation in
their sense. Speaking of the spiritual discipline to which the Brahmans
subjected themselves, and the wonderful power of abstraction to which
they attained, instances of which had come under his notice, Hastings
says:—
“To those who have never been accustomed to the separation of the mind
from the notices of the senses, it may not be easy to conceive by what
means such a power is to be attained; since even the most studious men
of our hemisphere will find it difficult so to restrain their
attention, but that it will wander to some object of present sense or
recollection; and even the buzzing of a fly will sometimes have the
power to disturb it. But if we are told that there have been men who
were successively, for ages past, in the daily habit of abstracted
contemplation, begun in the earliest period of youth, and continued in
many to the maturity of age, each adding some portion of knowledge to
the store accumulated by his predecessors; it is not assuming too much
to conclude, that as the mind ever gathers strength, like the body, by
exercise, so in such an exercise it may in each have acquired the
faculty to which they aspired, and that their collective studies may
have led them to the discovery of new tracts and combinations of
sentiment, totally different from the doctrines with which the learned
of other nations are acquainted; doctrines which, however speculative
and subtle, still as they possess the advantage of being derived from a
source so free from every adventitious mixture, may be equally founded
in truth with the most simple of our own.”
“The forsaking of works” was taught by Kreeshna to the most ancient of
men, and handed down from age to age,
“until at length, in the course of time, the mighty art was lost.
“In wisdom is to be found every work without exception,” says
Kreeshna.
“Although thou wert the greatest of all offenders, thou shalt
be able to cross the gulf of sin with the bark of wisdom.”
“There is not anything in this world to be compared with wisdom
for purity.”
“The action stands at a distance inferior to the application of
wisdom.”
The wisdom of a Moonee “is confirmed, when, like the tortoise, he can
draw in all his members, and restrain them from their wonted purposes.”
“Children only, and not the learned, speak of the speculative and the
practical doctrines as two. They are but one. For both obtain the
selfsame end, and the place which is gained by the followers of the one
is gained by the followers of the other.”
“The man enjoyeth not freedom from action, from the non-commencement of
that which he hath to do; nor doth he obtain happiness from a total
inactivity. No one ever resteth a moment inactive. Every man is
involuntarily urged to act by those principles which are inherent in
his nature. The man who restraineth his active faculties, and sitteth
down with his mind attentive to the objects of his senses, is called
one of an astrayed soul, and the practiser of deceit. So the man is
praised, who, having subdued all his passions, performeth with his
active faculties all the functions of life, unconcerned about the
event.”
“Let the motive be in the deed and not in the event. Be not one whose
motive for action is the hope of reward. Let not thy life be spent in
inaction.”
“For the man who doeth that which he hath to do, without affection,
obtaineth the Supreme.”
“He who may behold, as it were inaction in action, and action in
inaction, is wise amongst mankind. He is a perfect performer of all
duty.”
“Wise men call him a _Pandeet_, whose every undertaking is free from
the idea of desire, and whose actions are consumed by the fire of
wisdom. He abandoneth the desire of a reward of his actions; he is
always contented and independent; and although he may be engaged in a
work, he, as it were, doeth nothing.”
“He is both a Yogee and a Sannyasee who performeth that which he hath
to do independent of the fruit thereof; not he who liveth without the
sacrificial fire and without action.”
“He who enjoyeth but the Amreeta which is left of his offerings,
obtaineth the eternal spirit of Brahm, the Supreme.”
What, after all, does the practicalness of life amount to? The things
immediate to be done are very trivial. I could postpone them all to
hear this locust sing. The most glorious fact in my experience is not
anything that I have done or may hope to do, but a transient thought,
or vision, or dream, which I have had. I would give all the wealth of
the world, and all the deeds of all the heroes, for one true vision.
But how can I communicate with the gods who am a pencil-maker on the
earth, and not be insane?
“I am the same to all mankind,” says Kreeshna; “there is not one who is
worthy of my love or hatred.”
This teaching is not practical in the sense in which the New Testament
is. It is not always sound sense in practice. The Brahman never
proposes courageously to assault evil, but patiently to starve it out.
His active faculties are paralyzed by the idea of cast, of impassable
limits, of destiny and the tyranny of time. Kreeshna’s argument, it
must be allowed, is defective. No sufficient reason is given why Arjoon
should fight. Arjoon may be convinced, but the reader is not, for his
judgment is _not_ “formed upon the speculative doctrines of the
_Sankhya Sastra_.” “Seek an asylum in wisdom alone”; but what is wisdom
to a Western mind? The duty of which he speaks is an arbitrary one.
When was it established? The Brahman’s virtue consists in doing, not
right, but arbitrary things. What is that which a man “hath to do”?
What is “action”? What are the “settled functions”? What is “a man’s
own religion,” which is so much better than another’s? What is “a man’s
own particular calling”? What are the duties which are appointed by
one’s birth? It is a defence of the institution of casts, of what is
called the “natural duty” of the Kshetree, or soldier, “to attach
himself to the discipline,” “not to flee from the field,” and the like.
But they who are unconcerned about the consequences of their actions
are not therefore unconcerned about their actions.
Behold the difference between the Oriental and the Occidental. The
former has nothing to do in this world; the latter is full of activity.
The one looks in the sun till his eyes are put out; the other follows
him prone in his westward course. There is such a thing as caste, even
in the West; but it is comparatively faint; it is conservatism here. It
says, forsake not your calling, outrage no institution, use no
violence, rend no bonds; the State is thy parent. Its virtue or manhood
is wholly filial. There is a struggle between the Oriental and
Occidental in every nation; some who would be forever contemplating the
sun, and some who are hastening toward the sunset. The former class
says to the latter, When you have reached the sunset, you will be no
nearer to the sun. To which the latter replies, But we so prolong the
day. The former “walketh but in that night, when all things go to rest
the night of _time_. The contemplative Moonee sleepeth but in the day
of _time_, when all things wake.”
To conclude these extracts, I can say, in the words of Sanjay, “As, O
mighty Prince! I recollect again and again this holy and wonderful
dialogue of Kreeshna and Arjoon, I continue more and more to rejoice;
and as I recall to my memory the more than miraculous form of Haree, my
astonishment is great, and I marvel and rejoice again and again!
Wherever Kreeshna the God of devotion may be, wherever Arjoon the
mighty bowman may be, there too, without doubt, are fortune, riches,
victory, and good conduct. This is my firm belief.”
I would say to the readers of Scriptures, if they wish for a good book,
read the Bhagvat-Geeta, an episode to the Mahabharat, said to have been
written by Kreeshna Dwypayen Veias,—known to have been written by——,
more than four thousand years ago,—it matters not whether three or
four, or when,—translated by Charles Wilkins. It deserves to be read
with reverence even by Yankees, as a part of the sacred writings of a
devout people; and the intelligent Hebrew will rejoice to find in it a
moral grandeur and sublimity akin to those of his own Scriptures.
To an American reader, who, by the advantage of his position, can see
over that strip of Atlantic coast to Asia and the Pacific, who, as it
were, sees the shore slope upward over the Alps to the Himmaleh
Mountains, the comparatively recent literature of Europe often appears
partial and clannish, and, notwithstanding the limited range of his own
sympathies and studies, the European writer who presumes that he is
speaking for the world, is perceived by him to speak only for that
corner of it which he inhabits. One of the rarest of England’s scholars
and critics, in his classification of the worthies of the world,
betrays the narrowness of his European culture and the exclusiveness of
his reading. None of her children has done justice to the poets and
philosophers of Persia or of India. They have even been better known to
her merchant scholars than to her poets and thinkers by profession. You
may look in vain through English poetry for a single memorable verse
inspired by these themes. Nor is Germany to be excepted, though her
philological industry is indirectly serving the cause of philosophy and
poetry. Even Goethe wanted that universality of genius which could have
appreciated the philosophy of India, if he had more nearly approached
it. His genius was more practical, dwelling much more in the regions of
the understanding, and was less native to contemplation than the genius
of those sages. It is remarkable that Homer and a few Hebrews are the
most Oriental names which modern Europe, whose literature has taken its
rise since the decline of the Persian, has admitted into her list of
Worthies, and perhaps the _worthiest_ of mankind, and the fathers of
modern thinking,—for the contemplations of those Indian sages have
influenced, and still influence, the intellectual development of
mankind,—whose works even yet survive in wonderful completeness, are,
for the most part, not recognized as ever having existed. If the lions
had been the painters it would have been otherwise. In every one’s
youthful dreams philosophy is still vaguely but inseparably, and with
singular truth, associated with the East, nor do after years discover
its local habitation in the Western world. In comparison with the
philosophers of the East, we may say that modern Europe has yet given
birth to none. Beside the vast and cosmogonal philosophy of the
Bhagvat-Geeta, even our Shakespeare seems sometimes youthfully green
and practical merely. Some of these sublime sentences, as the Chaldaean
oracles of Zoroaster, still surviving after a thousand revolutions and
translations, alone make us doubt if the poetic form and dress are not
transitory, and not essential to the most effective and enduring
expression of thought. _Ex oriente lux_ may still be the motto of
scholars, for the Western world has not yet derived from the East all
the light which it is destined to receive thence.
It would be worthy of the age to print together the collected
Scriptures or Sacred Writings of the several nations, the Chinese, the
Hindoos, the Persians, the Hebrews, and others, as the Scripture of
mankind. The New Testament is still, perhaps, too much on the lips and
in the hearts of men to be called a Scripture in this sense. Such a
juxtaposition and comparison might help to liberalize the faith of men.
This is a work which Time will surely edit, reserved to crown the
labors of the printing-press. This would be the Bible, or Book of
Books, which let the missionaries carry to the uttermost parts of the
earth.
While engaged in these reflections, thinking ourselves the only
navigators of these waters, suddenly a canal-boat, with its sail set,
glided round a point before us, like some huge river beast, and changed
the scene in an instant; and then another and another glided into
sight, and we found ourselves in the current of commerce once more. So
we threw our rinds in the water for the fishes to nibble, and added our
breath to the life of living men. Little did we think, in the distant
garden in which we had planted the seed and reared this fruit, where it
would be eaten. Our melons lay at home on the sandy bottom of the
Merrimack, and our potatoes in the sun and water at the bottom of the
boat looked like a fruit of the country. Soon, however, we were
delivered from this fleet of junks, and possessed the river in
solitude, once more rowing steadily upward through the noon, between
the territories of Nashua on the one hand, and Hudson, once Nottingham,
on the other. From time to time we scared up a kingfisher or a summer
duck, the former flying rather by vigorous impulses than by steady and
patient steering with that short rudder of his, sounding his rattle
along the fluvial street.
Erelong another scow hove in sight, creeping down the river; and
hailing it, we attached ourselves to its side, and floated back in
company, chatting with the boatmen, and obtaining a draught of cooler
water from their jug. They appeared to be green hands from far among
the hills, who had taken this means to get to the seaboard, and see the
world; and would possibly visit the Falkland Isles, and the China seas,
before they again saw the waters of the Merrimack, or, perchance, they
would not return this way forever. They had already embarked the
private interests of the landsman in the larger venture of the race,
and were ready to mess with mankind, reserving only the till of a chest
to themselves. But they too were soon lost behind a point, and we went
croaking on our way alone. What grievance has its root among the New
Hampshire hills? we asked; what is wanting to human life here, that
these men should make such haste to the antipodes? We prayed that their
bright anticipations might not be rudely disappointed.
Though all the fates should prove unkind,
Leave not your native land behind.
The ship, becalmed, at length stands still;
The steed must rest beneath the hill;
But swiftly still our fortunes pace
To find us out in every place.
The vessel, though her masts be firm,
Beneath her copper bears a worm;
Around the cape, across the line,
Till fields of ice her course confine;
It matters not how smooth the breeze,
How shallow or how deep the seas,
Whether she bears Manilla twine,
Or in her hold Madeira wine,
Or China teas, or Spanish hides,
In port or quarantine she rides;
Far from New England’s blustering shore,
New England’s worm her hulk shall bore,
And sink her in the Indian seas,
Twine, wine, and hides, and China teas.
We passed a small desert here on the east bank, between Tyngsborough
and Hudson, which was interesting and even refreshing to our eyes in
the midst of the almost universal greenness. This sand was indeed
somewhat impressive and beautiful to us. A very old inhabitant, who was
at work in a field on the Nashua side, told us that he remembered when
corn and grain grew there, and it was a cultivated field. But at length
the fishermen, for this was a fishing place, pulled up the bushes on
the shore, for greater convenience in hauling their seines, and when
the bank was thus broken, the wind began to blow up the sand from the
shore, until at length it had covered about fifteen acres several feet
deep. We saw near the river, where the sand was blown off down to some
ancient surface, the foundation of an Indian wigwam exposed, a perfect
circle of burnt stones, four or five feet in diameter, mingled with
fine charcoal, and the bones of small animals which had been preserved
in the sand. The surrounding sand was sprinkled with other burnt stones
on which their fires had been built, as well as with flakes of
arrow-head stone, and we found one perfect arrow-head. In one place we
noticed where an Indian had sat to manufacture arrow-heads out of
quartz, and the sand was sprinkled with a quart of small glass-like
chips about as big as a fourpence, which he had broken off in his work.
Here, then, the Indians must have fished before the whites arrived.
There was another similar sandy tract about half a mile above this.
Still the noon prevailed, and we turned the prow aside to bathe, and
recline ourselves under some buttonwoods, by a ledge of rocks, in a
retired pasture sloping to the water’s edge, and skirted with pines and
hazels, in the town of Hudson. Still had India, and that old noontide
philosophy, the better part of our thoughts.
It is always singular, but encouraging, to meet with common sense in
very old books, as the Heetopades of Veeshnoo Sarma; a playful wisdom
which has eyes behind as well as before, and oversees itself. It
asserts their health and independence of the experience of later times.
This pledge of sanity cannot be spared in a book, that it sometimes
pleasantly reflect upon itself. The story and fabulous portion of this
book winds loosely from sentence to sentence as so many oases in a
desert, and is as indistinct as a camel’s track between Mourzouk and
Darfour. It is a comment on the flow and freshet of modern books. The
reader leaps from sentence to sentence, as from one stepping-stone to
another, while the stream of the story rushes past unregarded. The
Bhagvat-Geeta is less sententious and poetic, perhaps, but still more
wonderfully sustained and developed. Its sanity and sublimity have
impressed the minds even of soldiers and merchants. It is the
characteristic of great poems that they will yield of their sense in
due proportion to the hasty and the deliberate reader. To the practical
they will be common sense, and to the wise wisdom; as either the
traveller may wet his lips, or an army may fill its water-casks at a
full stream.
One of the most attractive of those ancient books that I have met with
is the Laws of Menu. According to Sir William Jones, “Vyasa, the son of
Parasara, has decided that the Veda, with its Angas, or the six
compositions deduced from it, the revealed system of medicine, the
Puranas or sacred histories, and the code of Menu, were four works of
supreme authority, which ought never to be shaken by arguments merely
human.” The last is believed by the Hindoos “to have been promulged in
the beginning of time, by Menu, son or grandson of Brahma,” and “first
of created beings”; and Brahma is said to have “taught his laws to Menu
in a hundred thousand verses, which Menu explained to the primitive
world in the very words of the book now translated.” Others affirm that
they have undergone successive abridgments for the convenience of
mortals, “while the gods of the lower heaven and the band of celestial
musicians are engaged in studying the primary code.”—“A number of
glosses or comments on Menu were composed by the Munis, or old
philosophers, whose treatises, together with that before us, constitute
the Dherma Sastra, in a collective sense, or Body of Law.” Culluca
Bhatta was one of the more modern of these.
Every sacred book, successively, has been accepted in the faith that it
was to be the final resting-place of the sojourning soul; but after
all, it was but a caravansary which supplied refreshment to the
traveller, and directed him farther on his way to Isphahan or Bagdat.
Thank God, no Hindoo tyranny prevailed at the framing of the world, but
we are freemen of the universe, and not sentenced to any caste.
I know of no book which has come down to us with grander pretensions
than this, and it is so impersonal and sincere that it is never
offensive nor ridiculous. Compare the modes in which modern literature
is advertised with the prospectus of this book, and think what a
reading public it addresses, what criticism it expects. It seems to
have been uttered from some eastern summit, with a sober morning
prescience in the dawn of time, and you cannot read a sentence without
being elevated as upon the table-land of the Ghauts. It has such a
rhythm as the winds of the desert, such a tide as the Ganges, and is as
superior to criticism as the Himmaleh Mountains. Its tone is of such
unrelaxed fibre, that even at this late day, unworn by time, it wears
the English and the Sanscrit dress indifferently; and its fixed
sentences keep up their distant fires still, like the stars, by whose
dissipated rays this lower world is illumined. The whole book by noble
gestures and inclinations renders many words unnecessary. English sense
has toiled, but Hindoo wisdom never perspired. Though the sentences
open as we read them, unexpensively, and at first almost unmeaningly,
as the petals of a flower, they sometimes startle us with that rare
kind of wisdom which could only have been learned from the most trivial
experience; but it comes to us as refined as the porcelain earth which
subsides to the bottom of the ocean. They are clean and dry as fossil
truths, which have been exposed to the elements for thousands of years,
so impersonally and scientifically true that they are the ornament of
the parlor and the cabinet. Any _moral_ philosophy is exceedingly rare.
This of Menu addresses our privacy more than most. It is a more private
and familiar, and, at the same time, a more public and universal word,
than is spoken in parlor or pulpit now-a-days. As our domestic fowls
are said to have their original in the wild pheasant of India, so our
domestic thoughts have their prototypes in the thoughts of her
philosophers. We are dabbling in the very elements of our present
conventional and actual life; as if it were the primeval conventicle
where how to eat, and to drink, and to sleep, and maintain life with
adequate dignity and sincerity, were the questions to be decided. It is
later and more intimate with us even than the advice of our nearest
friends. And yet it is true for the widest horizon, and read out of
doors has relation to the dim mountain line, and is native and
aboriginal there. Most books belong to the house and street only, and
in the fields their leaves feel very thin. They are bare and obvious,
and have no halo nor haze about them. Nature lies far and fair behind
them all. But this, as it proceeds from, so it addresses, what is
deepest and most abiding in man. It belongs to the noontide of the day,
the midsummer of the year, and after the snows have melted, and the
waters evaporated in the spring, still its truth speaks freshly to our
experience. It helps the sun to shine, and his rays fall on its page to
illustrate it. It spends the mornings and the evenings, and makes such
an impression on us overnight as to awaken us before dawn, and its
influence lingers around us like a fragrance late into the day. It
conveys a new gloss to the meadows and the depths of the wood, and its
spirit, like a more subtile ether, sweeps along with the prevailing
winds of a country. The very locusts and crickets of a summer day are
but later or earlier glosses on the Dherma Sastra of the Hindoos, a
continuation of the sacred code. As we have said, there is an
orientalism in the most restless pioneer, and the farthest west is but
the farthest east. While we are reading these sentences, this fair
modern world seems only a reprint of the Laws of Menu with the gloss of
Culluca. Tried by a New England eye, or the mere practical wisdom of
modern times, they are the oracles of a race already in its dotage, but
held up to the sky, which is the only impartial and incorruptible
ordeal, they are of a piece with its depth and serenity, and I am
assured that they will have a place and significance as long as there
is a sky to test them by.
Give me a sentence which no intelligence can understand. There must be
a kind of life and palpitation to it, and under its words a kind of
blood must circulate forever. It is wonderful that this sound should
have come down to us from so far, when the voice of man can be heard so
little way, and we are not now within ear-shot of any contemporary. The
woodcutters have here felled an ancient pine forest, and brought to
light to these distant hills a fair lake in the southwest; and now in
an instant it is distinctly shown to these woods as if its image had
travelled hither from eternity. Perhaps these old stumps upon the knoll
remember when anciently this lake gleamed in the horizon. One wonders
if the bare earth itself did not experience emotion at beholding again
so fair a prospect. That fair water lies there in the sun thus
revealed, so much the prouder and fairer because its beauty needed not
to be seen. It seems yet lonely, sufficient to itself, and superior to
observation.—So are these old sentences like serene lakes in the
southwest, at length revealed to us, which have so long been reflecting
our own sky in their bosom.
The great plain of India lies as in a cup between the Himmaleh and the
ocean on the north and south, and the Brahmapootra and Indus, on the
east and west, wherein the primeval race was received. We will not
dispute the story. We are pleased to read in the natural history of the
country, of the “pine, larch, spruce, and silver fir,” which cover the
southern face of the Himmaleh range; of the “gooseberry, raspberry,
strawberry,” which from an imminent temperate zone overlook the torrid
plains. So did this active modern life have even then a foothold and
lurking-place in the midst of the stateliness and contemplativeness of
those Eastern plains. In another era the “lily of the valley, cowslip,
dandelion,” were to work their way down into the plain, and bloom in a
level zone of their own reaching round the earth. Already has the era
of the temperate zone arrived, the era of the pine and the oak, for the
palm and the banian do not supply the wants of this age. The lichens on
the summits of the rocks will perchance find their level erelong.
As for the tenets of the Brahmans, we are not so much concerned to know
what doctrines they held, as that they were held by any. We can
tolerate all philosophies, Atomists, Pneumatologists, Atheists,
Theists,—Plato, Aristotle, Leucippus, Democritus, Pythagoras,
Zoroaster, and Confucius. It is the attitude of these men, more than
any communication which they make, that attracts us. Between them and
their commentators, it is true, there is an endless dispute. But if it
comes to this, that you compare notes, then you are all wrong. As it
is, each takes us up into the serene heavens, whither the smallest
bubble rises as surely as the largest, and paints earth and sky for us.
Any sincere thought is irresistible. The very austerity of the Brahmans
is tempting to the devotional soul, as a more refined and nobler
luxury. Wants so easily and gracefully satisfied seem like a more
refined pleasure. Their conception of creation is peaceful as a dream.
“When that power awakes, then has this world its full expansion; but
when he slumbers with a tranquil spirit, then the whole system fades
away.” In the very indistinctness of their theogony a sublime truth is
implied. It hardly allows the reader to rest in any supreme first
cause, but directly it hints at a supremer still which created the
last, and the Creator is still behind increate.
Nor will we disturb the antiquity of this Scripture; “From fire, from
air, and from the sun,” it was “milked out.” One might as well
investigate the chronology of light and heat. Let the sun shine. Menu
understood this matter best, when he said, “Those best know the
divisions of days and nights who understand that the day of Brahma,
which endures to the end of a thousand such ages, [infinite ages,
nevertheless, according to mortal reckoning,] gives rise to virtuous
exertions; and that his night endures as long as his day.” Indeed, the
Mussulman and Tartar dynasties are beyond all dating. Methinks I have
lived under them myself. In every man’s brain is the Sanscrit. The
Vedas and their Angas are not so ancient as serene contemplation. Why
will we be imposed on by antiquity? Is the babe young? When I behold
it, it seems more venerable than the oldest man; it is more ancient
than Nestor or the Sibyls, and bears the wrinkles of father Saturn
himself. And do we live but in the present? How broad a line is that? I
sit now on a stump whose rings number centuries of growth. If I look
around I see that the soil is composed of the remains of just such
stumps, ancestors to this. The earth is covered with mould. I thrust
this stick many æons deep into its surface, and with my heel make a
deeper furrow than the elements have ploughed here for a thousand
years. If I listen, I hear the peep of frogs which is older than the
slime of Egypt, and the distant drumming of a partridge on a log, as if
it were the pulse-beat of the summer air. I raise my fairest and
freshest flowers in the old mould. Why, what we would fain call new is
not skin deep; the earth is not yet stained by it. It is not the
fertile ground which we walk on, but the leaves which flutter over our
heads. The newest is but the oldest made visible to our senses. When we
dig up the soil from a thousand feet below the surface, we call it new,
and the plants which spring from it; and when our vision pierces deeper
into space, and detects a remoter star, we call that new also. The
place where we sit is called Hudson,—once it was Nottingham,—once —
We should read history as little critically as we consider the
landscape, and be more interested by the atmospheric tints and various
lights and shades which the intervening spaces create, than by its
groundwork and composition. It is the morning now turned evening and
seen in the west,—the same sun, but a new light and atmosphere. Its
beauty is like the sunset; not a fresco painting on a wall, flat and
bounded, but atmospheric and roving or free. In reality, history
fluctuates as the face of the landscape from morning to evening. What
is of moment is its hue and color. Time hides no treasures; we want not
its _then_, but its _now_. We do not complain that the mountains in the
horizon are blue and indistinct; they are the more like the heavens.
Of what moment are facts that can be lost,—which need to be
commemorated? The monument of death will outlast the memory of the
dead. The pyramids do not tell the tale which was confided to them; the
living fact commemorates itself. Why look in the dark for light?
Strictly speaking, the historical societies have not recovered one fact
from oblivion, but are themselves, instead of the fact, that is lost.
The researcher is more memorable than the researched. The crowd stood
admiring the mist and the dim outlines of the trees seen through it,
when one of their number advanced to explore the phenomenon, and with
fresh admiration all eyes were turned on his dimly retreating figure.
It is astonishing with how little co-operation of the societies the
past is remembered. Its story has indeed had another muse than has been
assigned it. There is a good instance of the manner in which all
history began, in Alwákidis’ Arabian Chronicle: “I was informed by
_Ahmed Almatin Aljorhami_, who had it from _Rephâa Ebn Kais Alámiri_,
who had it from _Saiph Ebn Fabalah Alchâtquarmi_, who had it from
_Thabet Ebn Alkamah_, who said he was present at the action.” These
fathers of history were not anxious to preserve, but to learn the fact;
and hence it was not forgotten. Critical acumen is exerted in vain to
uncover the past; the _past_ cannot be _presented_; we cannot know what
we are not. But one veil hangs over past, present, and future, and it
is the province of the historian to find out, not what was, but what
is. Where a battle has been fought, you will find nothing but the bones
of men and beasts; where a battle is being fought, there are hearts
beating. We will sit on a mound and muse, and not try to make these
skeletons stand on their legs again. Does Nature remember, think you,
that they _were_ men, or not rather that they _are_ bones?
Ancient history has an air of antiquity. It should be more modern. It
is written as if the spectator should be thinking of the backside of
the picture on the wall, or as if the author expected that the dead
would be his readers, and wished to detail to them their own
experience. Men seem anxious to accomplish an orderly retreat through
the centuries, earnestly rebuilding the works behind, as they are
battered down by the encroachments of time; but while they loiter, they
and their works both fall a prey to the arch enemy. History has neither
the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It
does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural
history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal
History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?
It has been so written for the most part, that the times it describes
are with remarkable propriety called _dark ages_. They are dark, as one
has observed, because we are so in the dark about them. The sun rarely
shines in history, what with the dust and confusion; and when we meet
with any cheering fact which implies the presence of this luminary, we
excerpt and modernize it. As when we read in the history of the Saxons
that Edwin of Northumbria “caused stakes to be fixed in the highways
where he had seen a clear spring,” and “brazen dishes were chained to
them to refresh the weary sojourner, whose fatigues Edwin had himself
experienced.” This is worth all Arthur’s twelve battles.
“Through the shadow of the world we sweep into the younger day:
Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.”
Than fifty years of Europe better one New England ray!
Biography, too, is liable to the same objection; it should be
autobiography. Let us not, as the Germans advise, endeavor to go abroad
and vex our bowels that we may be somebody else to explain him. If I am
not I, who will be?
But it is fit that the Past should be dark; though the darkness is not
so much a quality of the past as of tradition. It is not a distance of
time, but a distance of relation, which makes thus dusky its memorials.
What is near to the heart of this generation is fair and bright still.
Greece lies outspread fair and sunshiny in floods of light, for there
is the sun and daylight in her literature and art. Homer does not allow
us to forget that the sun shone,—nor Phidias, nor the Parthenon. Yet no
era has been wholly dark, nor will we too hastily submit to the
historian, and congratulate ourselves on a blaze of light. If we could
pierce the obscurity of those remote years, we should find it light
enough; only _there_ is not our day. Some creatures are made to see in
the dark. There has always been the same amount of light in the world.
The new and missing stars, the comets and eclipses, do not affect the
general illumination, for only our glasses appreciate them. The eyes of
the oldest fossil remains, they tell us, indicate that the same laws of
light prevailed then as now. Always the laws of light are the same, but
the modes and degrees of seeing vary. The gods are partial to no era,
but steadily shines their light in the heavens, while the eye of the
beholder is turned to stone. There was but the sun and the eye from the
first. The ages have not added a new ray to the one, nor altered a
fibre of the other.
If we will admit time into our thoughts at all, the mythologies, those
vestiges of ancient poems, wrecks of poems, so to speak, the world’s
inheritance, still reflecting some of their original splendor, like the
fragments of clouds tinted by the rays of the departed sun; reaching
into the latest summer day, and allying this hour to the morning of
creation; as the poet sings:—
“Fragments of the lofty strain
Float down the tide of years,
As buoyant on the stormy main
A parted wreck appears.”
These are the materials and hints for a history of the rise and
progress of the race; how, from the condition of ants, it arrived at
the condition of men, and arts were gradually invented. Let a thousand
surmises shed some light on this story. We will not be confined by
historical, even geological periods which would allow us to doubt of a
progress in human affairs. If we rise above this wisdom for the day, we
shall expect that this morning of the race, in which it has been
supplied with the simplest necessaries, with corn, and wine, and honey,
and oil, and fire, and articulate speech, and agricultural and other
arts, reared up by degrees from the condition of ants to men, will be
succeeded by a day of equally progressive splendor; that, in the lapse
of the divine periods, other divine agents and godlike men will assist
to elevate the race as much above its present condition. But we do not
know much about it.
Thus did one voyageur waking dream, while his companion slumbered on
the bank. Suddenly a boatman’s horn was heard echoing from shore to
shore, to give notice of his approach to the farmer’s wife with whom he
was to take his dinner, though in that place only muskrats and
kingfishers seemed to hear. The current of our reflections and our
slumbers being thus disturbed, we weighed anchor once more.
As we proceeded on our way in the afternoon, the western bank became
lower, or receded farther from the channel in some places, leaving a
few trees only to fringe the water’s edge; while the eastern rose
abruptly here and there into wooded hills fifty or sixty feet high. The
bass, _Tilia Americana_, also called the lime or linden, which was a
new tree to us, overhung the water with its broad and rounded leaf,
interspersed with clusters of small hard berries now nearly ripe, and
made an agreeable shade for us sailors. The inner bark of this genus is
the bast, the material of the fisherman’s matting, and the ropes and
peasant’s shoes of which the Russians make so much use, and also of
nets and a coarse cloth in some places. According to poets, this was
once Philyra, one of the Oceanides. The ancients are said to have used
its bark for the roofs of cottages, for baskets, and for a kind of
paper called Philyra. They also made bucklers of its wood, “on account
of its flexibility, lightness, and resiliency.” It was once much used
for carving, and is still in demand for sounding-boards of piano-fortes
and panels of carriages, and for various uses for which toughness and
flexibility are required. Baskets and cradles are made of the twigs.
Its sap affords sugar, and the honey made from its flowers is said to
be preferred to any other. Its leaves are in some countries given to
cattle, a kind of chocolate has been made of its fruit, a medicine has
been prepared from an infusion of its flowers, and finally, the
charcoal made of its wood is greatly valued for gunpowder.
The sight of this tree reminded us that we had reached a strange land
to us. As we sailed under this canopy of leaves we saw the sky through
its chinks, and, as it were, the meaning and idea of the tree stamped
in a thousand hieroglyphics on the heavens. The universe is so aptly
fitted to our organization that the eye wanders and reposes at the same
time. On every side there is something to soothe and refresh this
sense. Look up at the tree-tops and see how finely Nature finishes off
her work there. See how the pines spire without end higher and higher,
and make a graceful fringe to the earth. And who shall count the finer
cobwebs that soar and float away from their utmost tops, and the myriad
insects that dodge between them. Leaves are of more various forms than
the alphabets of all languages put together; of the oaks alone there
are hardly two alike, and each expresses its own character.
In all her products Nature only develops her simplest germs. One would
say that it was no great stretch of invention to create birds. The
hawk, which now takes his flight over the top of the wood, was at
first, perchance, only a leaf which fluttered in its aisles. From
rustling leaves she came in the course of ages to the loftier flight
and clear carol of the bird.
Salmon Brook comes in from the west under the railroad, a mile and a
half below the village of Nashua. We rowed up far enough into the
meadows which border it to learn its piscatorial history from a
haymaker on its banks. He told us that the silver eel was formerly
abundant here, and pointed to some sunken creels at its mouth. This
man’s memory and imagination were fertile in fishermen’s tales of
floating isles in bottomless ponds, and of lakes mysteriously stocked
with fishes, and would have kept us till nightfall to listen, but we
could not afford to loiter in this roadstead, and so stood out to our
sea again. Though we never trod in those meadows, but only touched
their margin with our hands, we still retain a pleasant memory of them.
Salmon Brook, whose name is said to be a translation from the Indian,
was a favorite haunt of the aborigines. Here, too, the first white
settlers of Nashua planted, and some dents in the earth where their
houses stood and the wrecks of ancient apple-trees are still visible.
About one mile up this stream stood the house of old John Lovewell, who
was an ensign in the army of Oliver Cromwell, and the father of “famous
Captain Lovewell.” He settled here before 1690, and died about 1754, at
the age of one hundred and twenty years. He is thought to have been
engaged in the famous Narragansett swamp fight, which took place in
1675, before he came here. The Indians are said to have spared him in
succeeding wars on account of his kindness to them. Even in 1700 he was
so old and gray-headed that his scalp was worth nothing, since the
French Governor offered no bounty for such. I have stood in the dent of
his cellar on the bank of the brook, and talked there with one whose
grandfather had, whose father might have, talked with Lovewell. Here
also he had a mill in his old age, and kept a small store. He was
remembered by some who were recently living, as a hale old man who
drove the boys out of his orchard with his cane. Consider the triumphs
of the mortal man, and what poor trophies it would have to show, to
wit:—He cobbled shoes without glasses at a hundred, and cut a handsome
swath at a hundred and five! Lovewell’s house is said to have been the
first which Mrs. Dustan reached on her escape from the Indians. Here
probably the hero of Pequawket was born and bred. Close by may be seen
the cellar and the gravestone of Joseph Hassell, who, as is elsewhere
recorded, with his wife Anna, and son Benjamin, and Mary Marks, “were
slain by our Indian enemies on September 2d, [1691,] in the evening.”
As Gookin observed on a previous occasion, “The Indian rod upon the
English backs had not yet done God’s errand.” Salmon Brook near its
mouth is still a solitary stream, meandering through woods and meadows,
while the then uninhabited mouth of the Nashua now resounds with the
din of a manufacturing town.
A stream from Otternic Pond in Hudson comes in just above Salmon Brook,
on the opposite side. There was a good view of Uncannunuc, the most
conspicuous mountain in these parts, from the bank here, seen rising
over the west end of the bridge above. We soon after passed the village
of Nashua, on the river of the same name, where there is a covered
bridge over the Merrimack. The Nashua, which is one of the largest
tributaries, flows from Wachusett Mountain, through Lancaster, Groton,
and other towns, where it has formed well-known elm-shaded meadows, but
near its mouth it is obstructed by falls and factories, and did not
tempt us to explore it.
Far away from here, in Lancaster, with another companion, I have
crossed the broad valley of the Nashua, over which we had so long
looked westward from the Concord hills without seeing it to the blue
mountains in the horizon. So many streams, so many meadows and woods
and quiet dwellings of men had lain concealed between us and those
Delectable Mountains;—from yonder hill on the road to Tyngsborough you
may get a good view of them. There where it seemed uninterrupted forest
to our youthful eyes, between two neighboring pines in the horizon, lay
the valley of the Nashua, and this very stream was even then winding at
its bottom, and then, as now, it was here silently mingling its waters
with the Merrimack. The clouds which floated over its meadows and were
born there, seen far in the west, gilded by the rays of the setting
sun, had adorned a thousand evening skies for us. But as it were, by a
turf wall this valley was concealed, and in our journey to those hills
it was first gradually revealed to us. Summer and winter our eyes had
rested on the dim outline of the mountains, to which distance and
indistinctness lent a grandeur not their own, so that they served to
interpret all the allusions of poets and travellers. Standing on the
Concord Cliffs we thus spoke our mind to them:—
With frontier strength ye stand your ground,
With grand content ye circle round,
Tumultuous silence for all sound,
Ye distant nursery of rills,
Monadnock and the Peterborough Hills;—
Firm argument that never stirs,
Outcircling the philosophers,—
Like some vast fleet,
Sailing through rain and sleet,
Through winter’s cold and summer’s heat;
Still holding on upon your high emprise,
Until ye find a shore amid the skies;
Not skulking close to land,
With cargo contraband,
For they who sent a venture out by ye
Have set the Sun to see
Their honesty.
Ships of the line, each one,
Ye westward run,
Convoying clouds,
Which cluster in your shrouds,
Always before the gale,
Under a press of sail,
With weight of metal all untold,—
I seem to feel ye in my firm seat here,
Immeasurable depth of hold,
And breadth of beam, and length of running gear
Methinks ye take luxurious pleasure
In your novel western leisure;
So cool your brows and freshly blue,
As Time had naught for ye to do;
For ye lie at your length,
An unappropriated strength,
Unhewn primeval timber,
For knees so stiff, for masts so limber;
The stock of which new earths are made,
One day to be our _western_ trade,
Fit for the stanchions of a world
Which through the seas of space is hurled.
While we enjoy a lingering ray,
Ye still o’ertop the western day,
Reposing yonder on God’s croft
Like solid stacks of hay;
So bold a line as ne’er was writ
On any page by human wit;
The forest glows as if
An enemy’s camp-fires shone
Along the horizon,
Or the day’s funeral pyre
Were lighted there;
Edged with silver and with gold,
The clouds hang o’er in damask fold,
And with such depth of amber light
The west is dight,
Where still a few rays slant,
That even Heaven seems extravagant.
Watatic Hill
Lies on the horizon’s sill
Like a child’s toy left overnight,
And other duds to left and right,
On the earth’s edge, mountains and trees
Stand as they were on air graven,
Or as the vessels in a haven
Await the morning breeze.
I fancy even
Through your defiles windeth the way to heaven;
And yonder still, in spite of history’s page,
Linger the golden and the silver age;
Upon the laboring gale
The news of future centuries is brought,
And of new dynasties of thought,
From your remotest vale.
But special I remember thee,
Wachusett, who like me
Standest alone without society.
Thy far blue eye,
A remnant of the sky,
Seen through the clearing or the gorge,
Or from the windows of the forge,
Doth leaven all it passes by.
Nothing is true
But stands ’tween me and you,
Thou western pioneer,
Who know’st not shame nor fear,
By venturous spirit driven
Under the eaves of heaven;
And canst expand thee there,
And breathe enough of air?
Even beyond the West
Thou migratest,
Into unclouded tracts,
Without a pilgrim’s axe,
Cleaving thy road on high
With thy well-tempered brow,
And mak’st thyself a clearing in the sky.
Upholding heaven, holding down earth,
Thy pastime from thy birth;
Not steadied by the one, nor leaning on the other,
May I approve myself thy worthy brother!
At length, like Rasselas and other inhabitants of happy valleys, we had
resolved to scale the blue wall which bounded the western horizon,
though not without misgivings that thereafter no visible fairy-land
would exist for us. But it would be long to tell of our adventures, and
we have no time this afternoon, transporting ourselves in imagination
up this hazy Nashua valley, to go over again that pilgrimage. We have
since made many similar excursions to the principal mountains of New
England and New York, and even far in the wilderness, and have passed a
night on the summit of many of them. And now, when we look again
westward from our native hills, Wachusett and Monadnock have retreated
once more among the blue and fabulous mountains in the horizon, though
our eyes rest on the very rocks on both of them, where we have pitched
our tent for a night, and boiled our hasty-pudding amid the clouds.
As late as 1724 there was no house on the north side of the Nashua, but
only scattered wigwams and grisly forests between this frontier and
Canada. In September of that year, two men who were engaged in making
turpentine on that side, for such were the first enterprises in the
wilderness, were taken captive and carried to Canada by a party of
thirty Indians. Ten of the inhabitants of Dunstable, going to look for
them, found the hoops of their barrel cut, and the turpentine spread on
the ground. I have been told by an inhabitant of Tyngsborough, who had
the story from his ancestors, that one of these captives, when the
Indians were about to upset his barrel of turpentine, seized a pine
knot and flourishing it, swore so resolutely that he would kill the
first who touched it, that they refrained, and when at length he
returned from Canada he found it still standing. Perhaps there was more
than one barrel. However this may have been, the scouts knew by marks
on the trees, made with coal mixed with grease, that the men were not
killed, but taken prisoners. One of the company, named Farwell,
perceiving that the turpentine had not done spreading, concluded that
the Indians had been gone but a short time, and they accordingly went
in instant pursuit. Contrary to the advice of Farwell, following
directly on their trail up the Merrimack, they fell into an ambuscade
near Thornton’s Ferry, in the present town of Merrimack, and nine were
killed, only one, Farwell, escaping after a vigorous pursuit. The men
of Dunstable went out and picked up their bodies, and carried them all
down to Dunstable and buried them. It is almost word for word as in the
Robin Hood ballad:—
“They carried these foresters into fair Nottingham,
As many there did know,
They digged them graves in their churchyard,
And they buried them all a-row.”
Nottingham is only the other side of the river, and they were not
exactly all a-row. You may read in the churchyard at Dunstable, under
the “Memento Mori,” and the name of one of them, how they “departed
this life,” and
“This man with seven more that lies in
this grave was slew all in a day by
the Indians.”
The stones of some others of the company stand around the common grave
with their separate inscriptions. Eight were buried here, but nine were
killed, according to the best authorities.
“Gentle river, gentle river,
Lo, thy streams are stained with gore,
Many a brave and noble captain
Floats along thy willowed shore.
“All beside thy limpid waters,
All beside thy sands so bright,
_Indian_ Chiefs and Christian warriors
Joined in fierce and mortal fight.”
It is related in the History of Dunstable, that on the return of
Farwell the Indians were engaged by a fresh party which they compelled
to retreat, and pursued as far as the Nashua, where they fought across
the stream at its mouth. After the departure of the Indians, the figure
of an Indian’s head was found carved by them on a large tree by the
shore, which circumstance has given its name to this part of the
village of Nashville,—the “Indian Head.” “It was observed by some
judicious,” says Gookin, referring to Philip’s war, “that at the
beginning of the war the English soldiers made a nothing of the
Indians, and many spake words to this effect: that one Englishman was
sufficient to chase ten Indians; many reckoned it was no other but
_Veni, vidi, vici._” But we may conclude that the judicious would by
this time have made a different observation.
Farwell appears to have been the only one who had studied his
profession, and understood the business of hunting Indians. He lived to
fight another day, for the next year he was Lovewell’s lieutenant at
Pequawket, but that time, as we have related, he left his bones in the
wilderness. His name still reminds us of twilight days and forest
scouts on Indian trails, with an uneasy scalp;—an indispensable hero to
New England. As the more recent poet of Lovewell’s fight has sung,
halting a little but bravely still:—
“Then did the crimson streams that flowed
Seem like the waters of the brook,
That brightly shine, that loudly dash,
Far down the cliffs of Agiochook.”
These battles sound incredible to us. I think that posterity will doubt
if such things ever were; if our bold ancestors who settled this land
were not struggling rather with the forest shadows, and not with a
copper-colored race of men. They were vapors, fever and ague of the
unsettled woods. Now, only a few arrow-heads are turned up by the
plough. In the Pelasgic, the Etruscan, or the British story, there is
nothing so shadowy and unreal.
It is a wild and antiquated looking graveyard, overgrown with bushes,
on the high-road, about a quarter of a mile from and overlooking the
Merrimack, with a deserted mill-stream bounding it on one side, where
lie the earthly remains of the ancient inhabitants of Dunstable. We
passed it three or four miles below here. You may read there the names
of Lovewell, Farwell, and many others whose families were distinguished
in Indian warfare. We noticed there two large masses of granite more
than a foot thick and rudely squared, lying flat on the ground over the
remains of the first pastor and his wife.