In vain I see the morning rise,
In vain observe the western blaze,
Who idly look to other skies,
Expecting life by other ways.
Amidst such boundless wealth without,
I only still am poor within,
The birds have sung their summer out,
But still my spring does not begin.
Shall I then wait the autumn wind,
Compelled to seek a milder day,
And leave no curious nest behind,
No woods still echoing to my lay?
This raw and gusty day, and the creaking of the oaks and pines on
shore, reminded us of more northern climes than Greece, and more wintry
seas than the Ægean.
The genuine remains of Ossian, or those ancient poems which bear his
name, though of less fame and extent, are, in many respects, of the
same stamp with the Iliad itself. He asserts the dignity of the bard no
less than Homer, and in his era we hear of no other priest than he. It
will not avail to call him a heathen, because he personifies the sun
and addresses it; and what if his heroes did “worship the ghosts of
their fathers,” their thin, airy, and unsubstantial forms? we worship
but the ghosts of our fathers in more substantial forms. We cannot but
respect the vigorous faith of those heathen, who sternly believed
somewhat, and are inclined to say to the critics, who are offended by
their superstitious rites,—Don’t interrupt these men’s prayers. As if
we knew more about human life and a God, than the heathen and ancients.
Does English theology contain the recent discoveries!
Ossian reminds us of the most refined and rudest eras, of Homer,
Pindar, Isaiah, and the American Indian. In his poetry, as in Homer’s,
only the simplest and most enduring features of humanity are seen, such
essential parts of a man as Stonehenge exhibits of a temple; we see the
circles of stone, and the upright shaft alone. The phenomena of life
acquire almost an unreal and gigantic size seen through his mists. Like
all older and grander poetry, it is distinguished by the few elements
in the lives of its heroes. They stand on the heath, between the stars
and the earth, shrunk to the bones and sinews. The earth is a boundless
plain for their deeds. They lead such a simple, dry, and everlasting
life, as hardly needs depart with the flesh, but is transmitted entire
from age to age. There are but few objects to distract their sight, and
their life is as unencumbered as the course of the stars they gaze at.
“The wrathful kings, on cairns apart,
Look forward from behind their shields,
And mark the wandering stars,
That brilliant westward move.”
It does not cost much for these heroes to live; they do not want much
furniture. They are such forms of men only as can be seen afar through
the mist, and have no costume nor dialect, but for language there is
the tongue itself, and for costume there are always the skins of beasts
and the bark of trees to be had. They live out their years by the vigor
of their constitutions. They survive storms and the spears of their
foes, and perform a few heroic deeds, and then
“Mounds will answer questions of them,
For many future years.”
Blind and infirm, they spend the remnant of their days listening to the
lays of the bards, and feeling the weapons which laid their enemies
low, and when at length they die, by a convulsion of nature, the bard
allows us a short and misty glance into futurity, yet as clear,
perchance, as their lives had been. When Mac-Roine was slain,
“His soul departed to his warlike sires,
To follow misty forms of boars,
In tempestuous islands bleak.”
The hero’s cairn is erected, and the bard sings a brief significant
strain, which will suffice for epitaph and biography.
“The weak will find his bow in the dwelling,
The feeble will attempt to bend it.”
Compared with this simple, fibrous life, our civilized history appears
the chronicle of debility, of fashion, and the arts of luxury. But the
civilized man misses no real refinement in the poetry of the rudest
era. It reminds him that civilization does but dress men. It makes
shoes, but it does not toughen the soles of the feet. It makes cloth of
finer texture, but it does not touch the skin. Inside the civilized man
stand the savage still in the place of honor. We are those blue-eyed,
yellow-haired Saxons, those slender, dark-haired Normans.
The profession of the bard attracted more respect in those days from
the importance attached to fame. It was his province to record the
deeds of heroes. When Ossian hears the traditions of inferior bards, he
exclaims,—
“I straightway seize the unfutile tales,
And send them down in faithful verse.”
His philosophy of life is expressed in the opening of the third Duan of
Ca-Lodin.
“Whence have sprung the things that are?
And whither roll the passing years?
Where does Time conceal its two heads,
In dense impenetrable gloom,
Its surface marked with heroes’ deeds alone?
I view the generations gone;
The past appears but dim;
As objects by the moon’s faint beams,
Reflected from a distant lake.
I see, indeed, the thunderbolts of war,
But there the unmighty joyless dwell,
All those who send not down their deeds
To far, succeeding times.”
The ignoble warriors die and are forgotten;
“Strangers come to build a tower,
And throw their ashes overhand;
Some rusted swords appear in dust;
One, bending forward, says,
‘The arms belonged to heroes gone;
We never heard their praise in song.’”
The grandeur of the similes is another feature which characterizes
great poetry. Ossian seems to speak a gigantic and universal language.
The images and pictures occupy even much space in the landscape, as if
they could be seen only from the sides of mountains, and plains with a
wide horizon, or across arms of the sea. The machinery is so massive
that it cannot be less than natural. Oivana says to the spirit of her
father, “Gray-haired Torkil of Torne,” seen in the skies,
“Thou glidest away like receding ships.”
So when the hosts of Fingal and Starne approach to battle,
“With murmurs loud, like rivers far,
The race of Torne hither moved.”
And when compelled to retire,
“dragging his spear behind,
Cudulin sank in the distant wood,
Like a fire upblazing ere it dies.”
Nor did Fingal want a proper audience when he spoke;
“A thousand orators inclined
To hear the lay of Fingal.”
The threats too would have deterred a man. Vengeance and terror were
real. Trenmore threatens the young warrior whom he meets on a foreign
strand,
“Thy mother shall find thee pale on the shore,
While lessening on the waves she spies
The sails of him who slew her son.”
If Ossian’s heroes weep, it is from excess of strength, and not from
weakness, a sacrifice or libation of fertile natures, like the
perspiration of stone in summer’s heat. We hardly know that tears have
been shed, and it seems as if weeping were proper only for babes and
heroes. Their joy and their sorrow are made of one stuff, like rain and
snow, the rainbow and the mist. When Fillan was worsted in fight, and
ashamed in the presence of Fingal,
“He strode away forthwith,
And bent in grief above a stream,
His cheeks bedewed with tears.
From time to time the thistles gray
He lopped with his inverted lance.”
Crodar, blind and old, receives Ossian, son of Fingal, who comes to aid
him in war;—
“‘My eyes have failed,’ says he, ‘Crodar is blind,
Is thy strength like that of thy fathers?
Stretch, Ossian, thine arm to the hoary-haired.’
I gave my arm to the king.
The aged hero seized my hand;
He heaved a heavy sigh;
Tears flowed incessant down his cheek.
’Strong art thou, son of the mighty,
Though not so dreadful as Morven’s prince.
Let my feast be spread in the hall,
Let every sweet-voiced minstrel sing;
Great is he who is within my walls,
Sons of wave-echoing Croma.’”
Even Ossian himself, the hero-bard, pays tribute to the superior
strength of his father Fingal.
“How beauteous, mighty man, was thy mind,
Why succeeded Ossian without its strength?”
————————
While we sailed fleetly before the wind, with the river gurgling under
our stern, the thoughts of autumn coursed as steadily through our
minds, and we observed less what was passing on the shore, than the
dateless associations and impressions which the season awakened,
anticipating in some measure the progress of the year.
I hearing get, who had but ears,
And sight, who had but eyes before,
I moments live, who lived but years,
And truth discern, who knew but learning’s lore.
Sitting with our faces now up stream, we studied the landscape by
degrees, as one unrolls a map, rock, tree, house, hill, and meadow,
assuming new and varying positions as wind and water shifted the scene,
and there was variety enough for our entertainment in the metamorphoses
of the simplest objects. Viewed from this side the scenery appeared new
to us.
The most familiar sheet of water viewed from a new hill-top, yields a
novel and unexpected pleasure. When we have travelled a few miles, we
do not recognize the profiles even of the hills which overlook our
native village, and perhaps no man is quite familiar with the horizon
as seen from the hill nearest to his house, and can recall its outline
distinctly when in the valley. We do not commonly know, beyond a short
distance, which way the hills range which take in our houses and farms
in their sweep. As if our birth had at first sundered things, and we
had been thrust up through into nature like a wedge, and not till the
wound heals and the scar disappears, do we begin to discover where we
are, and that nature is one and continuous everywhere. It is an
important epoch when a man who has always lived on the east side of a
mountain, and seen it in the west, travels round and sees it in the
east. Yet the universe is a sphere whose centre is wherever there is
intelligence. The sun is not so central as a man. Upon an isolated
hill-top, in an open country, we seem to ourselves to be standing on
the boss of an immense shield, the immediate landscape being apparently
depressed below the more remote, and rising gradually to the horizon,
which is the rim of the shield, villas, steeples, forests, mountains,
one above another, till they are swallowed up in the heavens. The most
distant mountains in the horizon appear to rise directly from the shore
of that lake in the woods by which we chance to be standing, while from
the mountain-top, not only this, but a thousand nearer and larger
lakes, are equally unobserved.
Seen through this clear atmosphere, the works of the farmer, his
ploughing and reaping, had a beauty to our eyes which he never saw. How
fortunate were we who did not own an acre of these shores, who had not
renounced our title to the whole. One who knew how to appropriate the
true value of this world would be the poorest man in it. The poor rich
man! all he has is what he has bought. What I see is mine. I am a large
owner in the Merrimack intervals.
Men dig and dive but cannot my wealth spend,
Who yet no partial store appropriate,
Who no armed ship into the Indies send,
To rob me of my orient estate.
He is the rich man, and enjoys the fruits of riches, who summer and
winter forever can find delight in his own thoughts. Buy a farm! What
have I to pay for a farm which a farmer will take?
When I visit again some haunt of my youth, I am glad to find that
nature wears so well. The landscape is indeed something real, and
solid, and sincere, and I have not put my foot through it yet. There is
a pleasant tract on the bank of the Concord, called Conantum, which I
have in my mind;—the old deserted farm-house, the desolate pasture with
its bleak cliff, the open wood, the river-reach, the green meadow in
the midst, and the moss-grown wild-apple orchard,—places where one may
have many thoughts and not decide anything. It is a scene which I can
not only remember, as I might a vision, but when I will can bodily
revisit, and find it even so, unaccountable, yet unpretending in its
pleasant dreariness. When my thoughts are sensible of change, I love to
see and sit on rocks which I _have_ known, and pry into their moss, and
see unchangeableness so established. I not yet gray on rocks forever
gray, I no longer green under the evergreens. There is something even
in the lapse of time by which time recovers itself.
As we have said, it proved a cool as well as breezy day, and by the
time we reached Penichook Brook we were obliged to sit muffled in our
cloaks, while the wind and current carried us along. We bounded swiftly
over the rippling surface, far by many cultivated lands and the ends of
fences which divided innumerable farms, with hardly a thought for the
various lives which they separated; now by long rows of alders or
groves of pines or oaks, and now by some homestead where the women and
children stood outside to gaze at us, till we had swept out of their
sight, and beyond the limit of their longest Saturday ramble. We glided
past the mouth of the Nashua, and not long after, of Salmon Brook,
without more pause than the wind.
Salmon Brook,
Penichook,
Ye sweet waters of my brain,
When shall I look,
Or cast the hook,
In your waves again?
Silver eels,
Wooden creels,
These the baits that still allure,
And dragon-fly
That floated by,
May they still endure?
The shadows chased one another swiftly over wood and meadow, and their
alternation harmonized with our mood. We could distinguish the clouds
which cast each one, though never so high in the heavens. When a shadow
flits across the landscape of the soul, where is the substance?
Probably, if we were wise enough, we should see to what virtue we are
indebted for any happier moment we enjoy. No doubt we have earned it at
some time; for the gifts of Heaven are never quite gratuitous. The
constant abrasion and decay of our lives makes the soil of our future
growth. The wood which we now mature, when it becomes virgin mould,
determines the character of our second growth, whether that be oaks or
pines. Every man casts a shadow; not his body only, but his imperfectly
mingled spirit. This is his grief. Let him turn which way he will, it
falls opposite to the sun; short at noon, long at eve. Did you never
see it?—But, referred to the sun, it is widest at its base, which is no
greater than his own opacity. The divine light is diffused almost
entirely around us, and by means of the refraction of light, or else by
a certain self-luminousness, or, as some will have it, transparency, if
we preserve ourselves untarnished, we are able to enlighten our shaded
side. At any rate, our darkest grief has that bronze color of the moon
eclipsed. There is no ill which may not be dissipated, like the dark,
if you let in a stronger light upon it. Shadows, referred to the source
of light, are pyramids whose bases are never greater than those of the
substances which cast them, but light is a spherical congeries of
pyramids, whose very apexes are the sun itself, and hence the system
shines with uninterrupted light. But if the light we use is but a
paltry and narrow taper, most objects will cast a shadow wider than
themselves.
The places where we had stopped or spent the night in our way up the
river, had already acquired a slight historical interest for us; for
many upward day’s voyaging were unravelled in this rapid downward
passage. When one landed to stretch his limbs by walking, he soon found
himself falling behind his companion, and was obliged to take advantage
of the curves, and ford the brooks and ravines in haste, to recover his
ground. Already the banks and the distant meadows wore a sober and
deepened tinge, for the September air had shorn them of their summer’s
pride.
“And what’s a life? The flourishing array
Of the proud summer meadow, which to-day
Wears her green plush, and is to-morrow hay.”
The air was really the “fine element” which the poets describe. It had
a finer and sharper grain, seen against the russet pastures and
meadows, than before, as if cleansed of the summer’s impurities.
Having passed the New Hampshire line and reached the Horseshoe Interval
in Tyngsborough, where there is a high and regular second bank, we
climbed up this in haste to get a nearer sight of the autumnal flowers,
asters, golden-rod, and yarrow, and blue-curls (_Trichostema
dichotoma_), humble roadside blossoms, and, lingering still, the
harebell and the _Rhexia Virginica_. The last, growing in patches of
lively pink flowers on the edge of the meadows, had almost too gay an
appearance for the rest of the landscape, like a pink ribbon on the
bonnet of a Puritan woman. Asters and golden-rods were the livery which
nature wore at present. The latter alone expressed all the ripeness of
the season, and shed their mellow lustre over the fields, as if the now
declining summer’s sun had bequeathed its hues to them. It is the
floral solstice a little after midsummer, when the particles of golden
light, the sun-dust, have, as it were, fallen like seeds on the earth,
and produced these blossoms. On every hillside, and in every valley,
stood countless asters, coreopses, tansies, golden-rods, and the whole
race of yellow flowers, like Brahminical devotees, turning steadily
with their luminary from morning till night.
“I see the golden-rod shine bright,
As sun-showers at the birth of day,
A golden plume of yellow light,
That robs the Day-god’s splendid ray.
“The aster’s violet rays divide
The bank with many stars for me,
And yarrow in blanch tints is dyed,
As moonlight floats across the sea.
“I see the emerald woods prepare
To shed their vestiture once more,
And distant elm-trees spot the air
With yellow pictures softly o’er.
* * * * *
“No more the water-lily’s pride
In milk-white circles swims content,
No more the blue-weed’s clusters ride
And mock the heavens’ element.
* * * * *
“Autumn, thy wreath and mine are blent
With the same colors, for to me
A richer sky than all is lent,
While fades my dream-like company.
“Our skies glow purple, but the wind
Sobs chill through green trees and bright grass,
To-day shines fair, and lurk behind
The times that into winter pass.
“So fair we seem, so cold we are,
So fast we hasten to decay,
Yet through our night glows many a star,
That still shall claim its sunny day.”
So sang a Concord poet once.
There is a peculiar interest belonging to the still later flowers,
which abide with us the approach of winter. There is something
witch-like in the appearance of the witch-hazel, which blossoms late in
October and in November, with its irregular and angular spray and
petals like furies’ hair, or small ribbon streamers. Its blossoming,
too, at this irregular period, when other shrubs have lost their
leaves, as well as blossoms, looks like witches’ craft. Certainly it
blooms in no garden of man’s. There is a whole fairy-land on the
hillside where it grows.
Some have thought that the gales do not at present waft to the voyager
the natural and original fragrance of the land, such as the early
navigators described, and that the loss of many odoriferous native
plants, sweet-scented grasses and medicinal herbs, which formerly
sweetened the atmosphere, and rendered it salubrious,—by the grazing of
cattle and the rooting of swine, is the source of many diseases which
now prevail; the earth, say they, having been long subjected to
extremely artificial and luxurious modes of cultivation, to gratify the
appetite, converted into a stye and hot-bed, where men for profit
increase the ordinary decay of nature.
According to the record of an old inhabitant of Tyngsborough, now dead,
whose farm we were now gliding past, one of the greatest freshets on
this river took place in October, 1785, and its height was marked by a
nail driven into an apple-tree behind his house. One of his descendants
has shown this to me, and I judged it to be at least seventeen or
eighteen feet above the level of the river at the time. According to
Barber, the river rose twenty-one feet above the common high-water
mark, at Bradford in the year 1818. Before the Lowell and Nashua
railroad was built, the engineer made inquiries of the inhabitants
along the banks as to how high they had known the river to rise. When
he came to this house he was conducted to the apple-tree, and as the
nail was not then visible, the lady of the house placed her hand on the
trunk where she said that she remembered the nail to have been from her
childhood. In the mean while the old man put his arm inside the tree,
which was hollow, and felt the point of the nail sticking through, and
it was exactly opposite to her hand. The spot is now plainly marked by
a notch in the bark. But as no one else remembered the river to have
risen so high as this, the engineer disregarded this statement, and I
learn that there has since been a freshet which rose within nine inches
of the rails at Biscuit Brook, and such a freshet as that of 1785 would
have covered the railroad two feet deep.
The revolutions of nature tell as fine tales, and make as interesting
revelations, on this river’s banks, as on the Euphrates or the Nile.
This apple-tree, which stands within a few rods of the river, is called
“Elisha’s apple-tree,” from a friendly Indian, who was anciently in the
service of Jonathan Tyng, and, with one other man, was killed here by
his own race in one of the Indian wars,—the particulars of which affair
were told us on the spot. He was buried close by, no one knew exactly
where, but in the flood of 1785, so great a weight of water standing
over the grave, caused the earth to settle where it had once been
disturbed, and when the flood went down, a sunken spot, exactly of the
form and size of the grave, revealed its locality; but this was now
lost again, and no future flood can detect it; yet, no doubt, Nature
will know how to point it out in due time, if it be necessary, by
methods yet more searching and unexpected. Thus there is not only the
crisis when the spirit ceases to inspire and expand the body, marked by
a fresh mound in the churchyard, but there is also a crisis when the
body ceases to take up room as such in nature, marked by a fainter
depression in the earth.
We sat awhile to rest us here upon the brink of the western bank,
surrounded by the glossy leaves of the red variety of the mountain
laurel, just above the head of Wicasuck Island, where we could observe
some scows which were loading with clay from the opposite shore, and
also overlook the grounds of the farmer, of whom I have spoken, who
once hospitably entertained us for a night. He had on his pleasant
farm, besides an abundance of the beach-plum, or _Prunus littoralis_,
which grew wild, the Canada plum under cultivation, fine Porter apples,
some peaches, and large patches of musk and water melons, which he
cultivated for the Lowell market. Elisha’s apple-tree, too, bore a
native fruit, which was prized by the family. He raised the blood
peach, which, as he showed us with satisfaction, was more like the oak
in the color of its bark and in the setting of its branches, and was
less liable to break down under the weight of the fruit, or the snow,
than other varieties. It was of slower growth, and its branches strong
and tough. There, also, was his nursery of native apple-trees, thickly
set upon the bank, which cost but little care, and which he sold to the
neighboring farmers when they were five or six years old. To see a
single peach upon its stem makes an impression of paradisaical
fertility and luxury. This reminded us even of an old Roman farm, as
described by Varro:—Cæsar Vopiscus Ædilicius, when he pleaded before
the Censors, said that the grounds of Rosea were the garden (_sumen_
the tid-bit) of Italy, in which a pole being left would not be visible
the day after, on account of the growth of the herbage. This soil may
not have been remarkably fertile, yet at this distance we thought that
this anecdote might be told of the Tyngsborough farm.
When we passed Wicasuck Island, there was a pleasure-boat containing a
youth and a maiden on the island brook, which we were pleased to see,
since it proved that there were some hereabouts to whom our excursion
would not be wholly strange. Before this, a canal-boatman, of whom we
made some inquiries respecting Wicasuck Island, and who told us that it
was disputed property, suspected that we had a claim upon it, and
though we assured him that all this was news to us, and explained, as
well as we could, why we had come to see it, he believed not a word of
it, and seriously offered us one hundred dollars for our title. The
only other small boats which we met with were used to pick up
driftwood. Some of the poorer class along the stream collect, in this
way, all the fuel which they require. While one of us landed not far
from this island to forage for provisions among the farm-houses whose
roofs we saw, for our supply was now exhausted, the other, sitting in
the boat, which was moored to the shore, was left alone to his
reflections.
If there is nothing new on the earth, still the traveller always has a
resource in the skies. They are constantly turning a new page to view.
The wind sets the types on this blue ground, and the inquiring may
always read a new truth there. There are things there written with such
fine and subtile tinctures, paler than the juice of limes, that to the
diurnal eye they leave no trace, and only the chemistry of night
reveals them. Every man’s daylight firmament answers in his mind to the
brightness of the vision in his starriest hour.
These continents and hemispheres are soon run over, but an always
unexplored and infinite region makes off on every side from the mind,
further than to sunset, and we can make no highway or beaten track into
it, but the grass immediately springs up in the path, for we travel
there chiefly with our wings.
Sometimes we see objects as through a thin haze, in their eternal
relations, and they stand like Palenque and the Pyramids, and we wonder
who set them up, and for what purpose. If we see the reality in things,
of what moment is the superficial and apparent longer? What are the
earth and all its interests beside the deep surmise which pierces and
scatters them? While I sit here listening to the waves which ripple and
break on this shore, I am absolved from all obligation to the past, and
the council of nations may reconsider its votes. The grating of a
pebble annuls them. Still occasionally in my dreams I remember that
rippling water.
Oft, as I turn me on my pillow o’er,
I hear the lapse of waves upon the shore,
Distinct as if it were at broad noonday,
And I were drifting down from Nashua.
With a bending sail we glided rapidly by Tyngsborough and Chelmsford,
each holding in one hand half of a tart country apple-pie which we had
purchased to celebrate our return, and in the other a fragment of the
newspaper in which it was wrapped, devouring these with divided relish,
and learning the news which had transpired since we sailed. The river
here opened into a broad and straight reach of great length, which we
bounded merrily over before a smacking breeze, with a devil-may-care
look in our faces, and our boat a white bone in its mouth, and a speed
which greatly astonished some scow boatmen whom we met. The wind in the
horizon rolled like a flood over valley and plain, and every tree bent
to the blast, and the mountains like school-boys turned their cheeks to
it. They were great and current motions, the flowing sail, the running
stream, the waving tree, the roving wind. The north-wind stepped
readily into the harness which we had provided, and pulled us along
with good will. Sometimes we sailed as gently and steadily as the
clouds overhead, watching the receding shores and the motions of our
sail; the play of its pulse so like our own lives, so thin and yet so
full of life, so noiseless when it labored hardest, so noisy and
impatient when least effective; now bending to some generous impulse of
the breeze, and then fluttering and flapping with a kind of human
suspense. It was the scale on which the varying temperature of distant
atmospheres was graduated, and it was some attraction for us that the
breeze it played with had been out of doors so long. Thus we sailed,
not being able to fly, but as next best, making a long furrow in the
fields of the Merrimack toward our home, with our wings spread, but
never lifting our heel from the watery trench; gracefully ploughing
homeward with our brisk and willing team, wind and stream, pulling
together, the former yet a wild steer, yoked to his more sedate fellow.
It was very near flying, as when the duck rushes through the water with
an impulse of her wings, throwing the spray about her, before she can
rise. How we had stuck fast if drawn up but a few feet on the shore!
When we reached the great bend just above Middlesex, where the river
runs east thirty-five miles to the sea, we at length lost the aid of
this propitious wind, though we contrived to make one long and
judicious tack carry us nearly to the locks of the canal. We were here
locked through at noon by our old friend, the lover of the higher
mathematics, who seemed glad to see us safe back again through so many
locks; but we did not stop to consider any of his problems, though we
could cheerfully have spent a whole autumn in this way another time,
and never have asked what his religion was. It is so rare to meet with
a man out-doors who cherishes a worthy thought in his mind, which is
independent of the labor of his hands. Behind every man’s busy-ness
there should be a level of undisturbed serenity and industry, as within
the reef encircling a coral isle there is always an expanse of still
water, where the depositions are going on which will finally raise it
above the surface.
The eye which can appreciate the naked and absolute beauty of a
scientific truth is far more rare than that which is attracted by a
moral one. Few detect the morality in the former, or the science in the
latter. Aristotle defined art to be Λόγος τοῦ ἔργου ἄνευ ὕλης, _The
principle of the work without the wood_; but most men prefer to have
some of the wood along with the principle; they demand that the truth
be clothed in flesh and blood and the warm colors of life. They prefer
the partial statement because it fits and measures them and their
commodities best. But science still exists everywhere as the sealer of
weights and measures at least.
We have heard much about the poetry of mathematics, but very little of
it has yet been sung. The ancients had a juster notion of their poetic
value than we. The most distinct and beautiful statement of any truth
must take at last the mathematical form. We might so simplify the rules
of moral philosophy, as well as of arithmetic, that one formula would
express them both. All the moral laws are readily translated into
natural philosophy, for often we have only to restore the primitive
meaning of the words by which they are expressed, or to attend to their
literal instead of their metaphorical sense. They are already
_supernatural_ philosophy. The whole body of what is now called moral
or ethical truth existed in the golden age as abstract science. Or, if
we prefer, we may say that the laws of Nature are the purest morality.
The Tree of Knowledge is a Tree of Knowledge of good and evil. He is
not a true man of science who does not bring some sympathy to his
studies, and expect to learn something by behavior as well as by
application. It is childish to rest in the discovery of mere
coincidences, or of partial and extraneous laws. The study of geometry
is a petty and idle exercise of the mind, if it is applied to no larger
system than the starry one. Mathematics should be mixed not only with
physics but with ethics, _that_ is _mixed_ mathematics. The fact which
interests us most is the life of the naturalist. The purest science is
still biographical. Nothing will dignify and elevate science while it
is sundered so wholly from the moral life of its devotee, and he
professes another religion than it teaches, and worships at a foreign
shrine. Anciently the faith of a philosopher was identical with his
system, or, in other words, his view of the universe.
My friends mistake when they communicate facts to me with so much
pains. Their presence, even their exaggerations and loose statements,
are equally good facts for me. I have no respect for facts even except
when I would use them, and for the most part I am independent of those
which I hear, and can afford to be inaccurate, or, in other words, to
substitute more present and pressing facts in their place.
The poet uses the results of science and philosophy, and generalizes
their widest deductions.
The process of discovery is very simple. An unwearied and systematic
application of known laws to nature, causes the unknown to reveal
themselves. Almost any _mode_ of observation will be successful at
last, for what is most wanted is method. Only let something be
determined and fixed around which observation may rally. How many new
relations a foot-rule alone will reveal, and to how many things still
this has not been applied! What wonderful discoveries have been, and
may still be, made, with a plumb-line, a level, a surveyor’s compass, a
thermometer, or a barometer! Where there is an observatory and a
telescope, we expect that any eyes will see new worlds at once. I
should say that the most prominent scientific men of our country, and
perhaps of this age, are either serving the arts and not pure science,
or are performing faithful but quite subordinate labors in particular
departments. They make no steady and systematic approaches to the
central fact. A discovery is made, and at once the attention of all
observers is distracted to that, and it draws many analogous
discoveries in its train; as if their work were not already laid out
for them, but they had been lying on their oars. There is wanting
constant and accurate observation with enough of theory to direct and
discipline it.
But, above all, there is wanting genius. Our books of science, as they
improve in accuracy, are in danger of losing the freshness and vigor
and readiness to appreciate the real laws of Nature, which is a marked
merit in the ofttimes false theories of the ancients. I am attracted by
the slight pride and satisfaction, the emphatic and even exaggerated
style in which some of the older naturalists speak of the operations of
Nature, though they are better qualified to appreciate than to
discriminate the facts. Their assertions are not without value when
disproved. If they are not facts, they are suggestions for Nature
herself to act upon. “The Greeks,” says Gesner, “had a common proverb
(Λαγος καθευδον) a sleeping hare, for a dissembler or counterfeit;
because the hare sees when she sleeps; for this is an admirable and
rare work of Nature, that all the residue of her bodily parts take
their rest, but the eye standeth continually sentinel.”
Observation is so wide awake, and facts are being so rapidly added to
the sum of human experience, that it appears as if the theorizer would
always be in arrears, and were doomed forever to arrive at imperfect
conclusions; but the power to perceive a law is equally rare in all
ages of the world, and depends but little on the number of facts
observed. The senses of the savage will furnish him with facts enough
to set him up as a philosopher. The ancients can still speak to us with
authority, even on the themes of geology and chemistry, though these
studies are thought to have had their birth in modern times. Much is
said about the progress of science in these centuries. I should say
that the useful results of science had accumulated, but that there had
been no accumulation of knowledge, strictly speaking, for posterity;
for knowledge is to be acquired only by a corresponding experience. How
can we _know_ what we are _told_ merely? Each man can interpret
another’s experience only by his own. We read that Newton discovered
the law of gravitation, but how many who have heard of his famous
discovery have recognized the same truth that he did? It may be not
one. The revelation which was then made to him has not been superseded
by the revelation made to any successor.
We see the _planet_ fall,
And that is all.
In a review of Sir James Clark Ross’s Antarctic Voyage of Discovery,
there is a passage which shows how far a body of men are commonly
impressed by an object of sublimity, and which is also a good instance
of the step from the sublime to the ridiculous. After describing the
discovery of the Antarctic Continent, at first seen a hundred miles
distant over fields of ice,—stupendous ranges of mountains from seven
and eight to twelve and fourteen thousand feet high, covered with
eternal snow and ice, in solitary and inaccessible grandeur, at one
time the weather being beautifully clear, and the sun shining on the
icy landscape; a continent whose islands only are accessible, and these
exhibited “not the smallest trace of vegetation,” only in a few places
the rocks protruding through their icy covering, to convince the
beholder that land formed the nucleus, and that it was not an
iceberg;—the practical British reviewer proceeds thus, sticking to his
last, “On the 22d of January, afternoon, the Expedition made the
latitude of 74° 20’ and by 7h P.M., having ground (ground! where did
they get ground?) to believe that they were then in a higher southern
latitude than had been attained by that enterprising seaman, the late
Captain James Weddel, and therefore higher than all their predecessors,
an extra allowance of grog was issued to the crews as a reward for
their perseverance.”
Let not us sailors of late centuries take upon ourselves any airs on
account of our Newtons and our Cuviers; we deserve an extra allowance
of grog only.
We endeavored in vain to persuade the wind to blow through the long
corridor of the canal, which is here cut straight through the woods,
and were obliged to resort to our old expedient of drawing by a cord.
When we reached the Concord, we were forced to row once more in good
earnest, with neither wind nor current in our favor, but by this time
the rawness of the day had disappeared, and we experienced the warmth
of a summer afternoon. This change in the weather was favorable to our
contemplative mood, and disposed us to dream yet deeper at our oars,
while we floated in imagination farther down the stream of time, as we
had floated down the stream of the Merrimack, to poets of a milder
period than had engaged us in the morning. Chelmsford and Billerica
appeared like old English towns, compared with Merrimack and Nashua,
and many generations of civil poets might have lived and sung here.
What a contrast between the stern and desolate poetry of Ossian, and
that of Chaucer, and even of Shakespeare and Milton, much more of
Dryden, and Pope, and Gray. Our summer of English poetry like the Greek
and Latin before it, seems well advanced toward its fall, and laden
with the fruit and foliage of the season, with bright autumnal tints,
but soon the winter will scatter its myriad clustering and shading
leaves, and leave only a few desolate and fibrous boughs to sustain the
snow and rime, and creak in the blasts of ages. We cannot escape the
impression that the Muse has stooped a little in her flight, when we
come to the literature of civilized eras. Now first we hear of various
ages and styles of poetry; it is pastoral, and lyric, and narrative,
and didactic; but the poetry of runic monuments is of one style, and
for every age. The bard has in a great measure lost the dignity and
sacredness of his office. Formerly he was called a _seer_, but now it
is thought that one man sees as much as another. He has no longer the
bardic rage, and only conceives the deed, which he formerly stood ready
to perform. Hosts of warriors earnest for battle could not mistake nor
dispense with the ancient bard. His lays were heard in the pauses of
the fight. There was no danger of his being overlooked by his
contemporaries. But now the hero and the bard are of different
professions. When we come to the pleasant English verse, the storms
have all cleared away and it will never thunder and lighten more. The
poet has come within doors, and exchanged the forest and crag for the
fireside, the hut of the Gael, and Stonehenge with its circles of
stones, for the house of the Englishman. No hero stands at the door
prepared to break forth into song or heroic action, but a homely
Englishman, who cultivates the art of poetry. We see the comfortable
fireside, and hear the crackling fagots in all the verse.
Notwithstanding the broad humanity of Chaucer, and the many social and
domestic comforts which we meet with in his verse, we have to narrow
our vision somewhat to consider him, as if he occupied less space in
the landscape, and did not stretch over hill and valley as Ossian does.
Yet, seen from the side of posterity, as the father of English poetry,
preceded by a long silence or confusion in history, unenlivened by any
strain of pure melody, we easily come to reverence him. Passing over
the earlier continental poets, since we are bound to the pleasant
archipelago of English poetry, Chaucer’s is the first name after that
misty weather in which Ossian lived, which can detain us long. Indeed,
though he represents so different a culture and society, he may be
regarded as in many respects the Homer of the English poets. Perhaps he
is the youthfullest of them all. We return to him as to the purest
well, the fountain farthest removed from the highway of desultory life.
He is so natural and cheerful, compared with later poets, that we might
almost regard him as a personification of spring. To the faithful
reader his muse has even given an aspect to his times, and when he is
fresh from perusing him, they seem related to the golden age. It is
still the poetry of youth and life, rather than of thought; and though
the moral vein is obvious and constant, it has not yet banished the sun
and daylight from his verse. The loftiest strains of the muse are, for
the most part, sublimely plaintive, and not a carol as free as
nature’s. The content which the sun shines to celebrate from morning to
evening, is unsung. The muse solaces herself, and is not ravished but
consoled. There is a catastrophe implied, and a tragic element in all
our verse, and less of the lark and morning dews, than of the
nightingale and evening shades. But in Homer and Chaucer there is more
of the innocence and serenity of youth than in the more modern and
moral poets. The Iliad is not Sabbath but morning reading, and men
cling to this old song, because they still have moments of unbaptized
and uncommitted life, which give them an appetite for more. To the
innocent there are neither cherubim nor angels. At rare intervals we
rise above the necessity of virtue into an unchangeable morning light,
in which we have only to live right on and breathe the ambrosial air.
The Iliad represents no creed nor opinion, and we read it with a rare
sense of freedom and irresponsibility, as if we trod on native ground,
and were autochthones of the soil.
Chaucer had eminently the habits of a literary man and a scholar. There
were never any times so stirring that there were not to be found some
sedentary still. He was surrounded by the din of arms. The battles of
Hallidon Hill and Neville’s Cross, and the still more memorable battles
of Cressy and Poictiers, were fought in his youth; but these did not
concern our poet much, Wickliffe and his reform much more. He regarded
himself always as one privileged to sit and converse with books. He
helped to establish the literary class. His character as one of the
fathers of the English language would alone make his works important,
even those which have little poetical merit. He was as simple as
Wordsworth in preferring his homely but vigorous Saxon tongue, when it
was neglected by the court, and had not yet attained to the dignity of
a literature, and rendered a similar service to his country to that
which Dante rendered to Italy. If Greek sufficeth for Greek, and Arabic
for Arabian, and Hebrew for Jew, and Latin for Latin, then English
shall suffice for him, for any of these will serve to teach truth
“right as divers pathes leaden divers folke the right waye to Rome.” In
the Testament of Love he writes, “Let then clerkes enditen in Latin,
for they have the propertie of science, and the knowinge in that
facultie, and lette Frenchmen in their Frenche also enditen their
queinte termes, for it is kyndely to their mouthes, and let us shewe
our fantasies in soche wordes as we lerneden of our dames tonge.”
He will know how to appreciate Chaucer best, who has come down to him
the natural way, through the meagre pastures of Saxon and
ante-Chaucerian poetry; and yet, so human and wise he appears after
such diet, that we are liable to misjudge him still. In the Saxon
poetry extant, in the earliest English, and the contemporary Scottish
poetry, there is less to remind the reader of the rudeness and vigor of
youth, than of the feebleness of a declining age. It is for the most
part translation of imitation merely, with only an occasional and
slight tinge of poetry, oftentimes the falsehood and exaggeration of
fable, without its imagination to redeem it, and we look in vain to
find antiquity restored, humanized, and made blithe again by some
natural sympathy between it and the present. But Chaucer is fresh and
modern still, and no dust settles on his true passages. It lightens
along the line, and we are reminded that flowers have bloomed, and
birds sung, and hearts beaten in England. Before the earnest gaze of
the reader, the rust and moss of time gradually drop off, and the
original green life is revealed. He was a homely and domestic man, and
did breathe quite as modern men do.
There is no wisdom that can take place of humanity, and we find _that_
in Chaucer. We can expand at last in his breadth, and we think that we
could have been that man’s acquaintance. He was worthy to be a citizen
of England, while Petrarch and Boccacio lived in Italy, and Tell and
Tamerlane in Switzerland and in Asia, and Bruce in Scotland, and
Wickliffe, and Gower, and Edward the Third, and John of Gaunt, and the
Black Prince, were his own countrymen as well as contemporaries; all
stout and stirring names. The fame of Roger Bacon came down from the
preceding century, and the name of Dante still possessed the influence
of a living presence. On the whole, Chaucer impresses us as greater
than his reputation, and not a little like Homer and Shakespeare, for
he would have held up his head in their company. Among early English
poets he is the landlord and host, and has the authority of such. The
affectionate mention which succeeding early poets make of him, coupling
him with Homer and Virgil, is to be taken into the account in
estimating his character and influence. King James and Dunbar of
Scotland speak of him with more love and reverence than any modern
author of his predecessors of the last century. The same childlike
relation is without a parallel now. For the most part we read him
without criticism, for he does not plead his own cause, but speaks for
his readers, and has that greatness of trust and reliance which compels
popularity. He confides in the reader, and speaks privily with him,
keeping nothing back. And in return the reader has great confidence in
him, that he tells no lies, and reads his story with indulgence, as if
it were the circumlocution of a child, but often discovers afterwards
that he has spoken with more directness and economy of words than a
sage. He is never heartless,
“For first the thing is thought within the hart,
Er any word out from the mouth astart.”
And so new was all his theme in those days, that he did not have to
invent, but only to tell.
We admire Chaucer for his sturdy English wit. The easy height he speaks
from in his Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, as if he were equal to
any of the company there assembled, is as good as any particular
excellence in it. But though it is full of good sense and humanity, it
is not transcendent poetry. For picturesque description of persons it
is, perhaps, without a parallel in English poetry; yet it is
essentially humorous, as the loftiest genius never is. Humor, however
broad and genial, takes a narrower view than enthusiasm. To his own
finer vein he added all the common wit and wisdom of his time, and
everywhere in his works his remarkable knowledge of the world, and nice
perception of character, his rare common sense and proverbial wisdom,
are apparent. His genius does not soar like Milton’s, but is genial and
familiar. It shows great tenderness and delicacy, but not the heroic
sentiment. It is only a greater portion of humanity with all its
weakness. He is not heroic, as Raleigh, nor pious, as Herbert, nor
philosophical, as Shakespeare, but he is the child of the English muse,
that child which is the father of the man. The charm of his poetry
consists often only in an exceeding naturalness, perfect sincerity,
with the behavior of a child rather than of a man.
Gentleness and delicacy of character are everywhere apparent in his
verse. The simplest and humblest words come readily to his lips. No one
can read the Prioress’s tale, understanding the spirit in which it was
written, and in which the child sings _O alma redemptoris mater_, or
the account of the departure of Constance with her child upon the sea,
in the Man of Lawe’s tale, without feeling the native innocence and
refinement of the author. Nor can we be mistaken respecting the
essential purity of his character, disregarding the apology of the
manners of the age. A simple pathos and feminine gentleness, which
Wordsworth only occasionally approaches, but does not equal, are
peculiar to him. We are tempted to say that his genius was feminine,
not masculine. It was such a feminineness, however, as is rarest to
find in woman, though not the appreciation of it; perhaps it is not to
be found at all in woman, but is only the feminine in man.
Such pure and genuine and childlike love of Nature is hardly to be
found in any poet.
Chaucer’s remarkably trustful and affectionate character appears in his
familiar, yet innocent and reverent, manner of speaking of his God. He
comes into his thought without any false reverence, and with no more
parade than the zephyr to his ear. If Nature is our mother, then God is
our father. There is less love and simple, practical trust in
Shakespeare and Milton. How rarely in our English tongue do we find
expressed any affection for God. Certainly, there is no sentiment so
rare as the love of God. Herbert almost alone expresses it, “Ah, my
dear God!” Our poet uses similar words with propriety; and whenever he
sees a beautiful person, or other object, prides himself on the
“maistry” of his God. He even recommends Dido to be his bride,—
“if that God that heaven and yearth made,
Would have a love for beauty and goodnesse,
And womanhede, trouth, and semeliness.”
But in justification of our praise, we must refer to his works
themselves; to the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, the account of
Gentilesse, the Flower and the Leaf, the stories of Griselda, Virginia,
Ariadne, and Blanche the Dutchesse, and much more of less distinguished
merit. There are many poets of more taste, and better manners, who knew
how to leave out their dulness; but such negative genius cannot detain
us long; we shall return to Chaucer still with love. Some natures,
which are really rude and ill-developed, have yet a higher standard of
perfection than others which are refined and well balanced. Even the
clown has taste, whose dictates, though he disregards them, are higher
and purer than those which the artist obeys. If we have to wander
through many dull and prosaic passages in Chaucer, we have at least the
satisfaction of knowing that it is not an artificial dulness, but too
easily matched by many passages in life. We confess that we feel a
disposition commonly to concentrate sweets, and accumulate pleasures;
but the poet may be presumed always to speak as a traveller, who leads
us through a varied scenery, from one eminence to another, and it is,
perhaps, more pleasing, after all, to meet with a fine thought in its
natural setting. Surely fate has enshrined it in these circumstances
for some end. Nature strews her nuts and flowers broadcast, and never
collects them into heaps. This was the soil it grew in, and this the
hour it bloomed in; if sun, wind, and rain came here to cherish and
expand the flower, shall not we come here to pluck it?
A true poem is distinguished not so much by a felicitous expression, or
any thought it suggests, as by the atmosphere which surrounds it. Most
have beauty of outline merely, and are striking as the form and bearing
of a stranger; but true verses come toward us indistinctly, as the very
breath of all friendliness, and envelop us in their spirit and
fragrance. Much of our poetry has the very best manners, but no
character. It is only an unusual precision and elasticity of speech, as
if its author had taken, not an intoxicating draught, but an electuary.
It has the distinct outline of sculpture, and chronicles an early hour.
Under the influence of passion all men speak thus distinctly, but wrath
is not always divine.
There are two classes of men called poets. The one cultivates life, the
other art,—one seeks food for nutriment, the other for flavor; one
satisfies hunger, the other gratifies the palate. There are two kinds
of writing, both great and rare; one that of genius, or the inspired,
the other of intellect and taste, in the intervals of inspiration. The
former is above criticism, always correct, giving the law to criticism.
It vibrates and pulsates with life forever. It is sacred, and to be
read with reverence, as the works of nature are studied. There are few
instances of a sustained style of this kind; perhaps every man has
spoken words, but the speaker is then careless of the record. Such a
style removes us out of personal relations with its author; we do not
take his words on our lips, but his sense into our hearts. It is the
stream of inspiration, which bubbles out, now here, now there, now in
this man, now in that. It matters not through what ice-crystals it is
seen, now a fountain, now the ocean stream running under ground. It is
in Shakespeare, Alpheus, in Burns, Arethuse; but ever the same. The
other is self-possessed and wise. It is reverent of genius, and greedy
of inspiration. It is conscious in the highest and the least degree. It
consists with the most perfect command of the faculties. It dwells in a
repose as of the desert, and objects are as distinct in it as oases or
palms in the horizon of sand. The train of thought moves with subdued
and measured step, like a caravan. But the pen is only an instrument in
its hand, and not instinct with life, like a longer arm. It leaves a
thin varnish or glaze over all its work. The works of Goethe furnish
remarkable instances of the latter.
There is no just and serene criticism as yet. Nothing is considered
simply as it lies in the lap of eternal beauty, but our thoughts, as
well as our bodies, must be dressed after the latest fashions. Our
taste is too delicate and particular. It says nay to the poet’s work,
but never yea to his hope. It invites him to adorn his deformities, and
not to cast them off by expansion, as the tree its bark. We are a
people who live in a bright light, in houses of pearl and porcelain,
and drink only light wines, whose teeth are easily set on edge by the
least natural sour. If we had been consulted, the backbone of the earth
would have been made, not of granite, but of Bristol spar. A modern
author would have died in infancy in a ruder age. But the poet is
something more than a scald, “a smoother and polisher of language”; he
is a Cincinnatus in literature, and occupies no west end of the world.
Like the sun, he will indifferently select his rhymes, and with a
liberal taste weave into his verse the planet and the stubble.
In these old books the stucco has long since crumbled away, and we read
what was sculptured in the granite. They are rude and massive in their
proportions, rather than smooth and delicate in their finish. The
workers in stone polish only their chimney ornaments, but their
pyramids are roughly done. There is a soberness in a rough aspect, as
of unhewn granite, which addresses a depth in us, but a polished
surface hits only the ball of the eye. The true finish is the work of
time, and the use to which a thing is put. The elements are still
polishing the pyramids. Art may varnish and gild, but it can do no
more. A work of genius is rough-hewn from the first, because it
anticipates the lapse of time, and has an ingrained polish, which still
appears when fragments are broken off, an essential quality of its
substance. Its beauty is at the same time its strength, and it breaks
with a lustre.
The great poem must have the stamp of greatness as well as its essence.
The reader easily goes within the shallowest contemporary poetry, and
informs it with all the life and promise of the day, as the pilgrim
goes within the temple, and hears the faintest strains of the
worshippers; but it will have to speak to posterity, traversing these
deserts, through the ruins of its outmost walls, by the grandeur and
beauty of its proportions.
———————
But here on the stream of the Concord, where we have all the while been
bodily, Nature, who is superior to all styles and ages, is now, with
pensive face, composing her poem Autumn, with which no work of man will
bear to be compared.
In summer we live out of doors, and have only impulses and feelings,
which are all for action, and must wait commonly for the stillness and
longer nights of autumn and winter before any thought will subside; we
are sensible that behind the rustling leaves, and the stacks of grain,
and the bare clusters of the grape, there is the field of a wholly new
life, which no man has lived; that even this earth was made for more
mysterious and nobler inhabitants than men and women. In the hues of
October sunsets, we see the portals to other mansions than those which
we occupy, not far off geographically,—
“There is a place beyond that flaming hill,
From whence the stars their thin appearance shed,
A place beyond all place, where never ill,
Nor impure thought was ever harbored.”
Sometimes a mortal feels in himself Nature, not his Father but his
Mother stirs within him, and he becomes immortal with her immortality.
From time to time she claims kindredship with us, and some globule from
her veins steals up into our own.
I am the autumnal sun,
With autumn gales my race is run;
When will the hazel put forth its flowers,
Or the grape ripen under my bowers?
When will the harvest or the hunter’s moon,
Turn my midnight into mid-noon?
I am all sere and yellow,
And to my core mellow.
The mast is dropping within my woods,
The winter is lurking within my moods,
And the rustling of the withered leaf
Is the constant music of my grief.
To an unskilful rhymer the Muse thus spoke in prose:
The moon no longer reflects the day, but rises to her absolute rule,
and the husbandman and hunter acknowledge her for their mistress.
Asters and golden-rods reign along the way, and the life-everlasting
withers not. The fields are reaped and shorn of their pride, but an
inward verdure still crowns them. The thistle scatters its down on the
pool, and yellow leaves clothe the vine, and naught disturbs the
serious life of men. But behind the sheaves, and under the sod, there
lurks a ripe fruit, which the reapers have not gathered, the true
harvest of the year, which it bears forever, annually watering and
maturing it, and man never severs the stalk which bears this palatable
fruit.
Men nowhere, east or west, live yet a _natural_ life, round which the
vine clings, and which the elm willingly shadows. Man would desecrate
it by his touch, and so the beauty of the world remains veiled to him.
He needs not only to be spiritualized, but _naturalized_, on the soil
of earth. Who shall conceive what kind of roof the heavens might extend
over him, what seasons minister to him, and what employment dignify his
life! Only the convalescent raise the veil of nature. An immortality in
his life would confer immortality on his abode. The winds should be his
breath, the seasons his moods, and he should impart of his serenity to
Nature herself. But such as we know him he is ephemeral like the
scenery which surrounds him, and does not aspire to an enduring
existence. When we come down into the distant village, visible from the
mountain-top, the nobler inhabitants with whom we peopled it have
departed, and left only vermin in its desolate streets. It is the
imagination of poets which puts those brave speeches into the mouths of
their heroes. They may feign that Cato’s last words were
“The earth, the air, and seas I know, and all
The joys and horrors of their peace and wars;
And now will view the Gods’ state and the stars,”
but such are not the thoughts nor the destiny of common men. What is
this heaven which they expect, if it is no better than they expect? Are
they prepared for a better than they can now imagine? Where is the
heaven of him who dies on a stage, in a theatre? Here or nowhere is our
heaven.
“Although we see celestial bodies move
Above the earth, the earth we till and love.”
We can conceive of nothing more fair than something which we have
experienced. “The remembrance of youth is a sigh.” We linger in manhood
to tell the dreams of our childhood, and they are half forgotten ere we
have learned the language. We have need to be earth-born as well as
heaven-born, γηγενεῖς, as was said of the Titans of old, or in a better
sense than they. There have been heroes for whom this world seemed
expressly prepared, as if creation had at last succeeded; whose daily
life was the stuff of which our dreams are made, and whose presence
enhanced the beauty and ampleness of Nature herself. Where they walked,
“Largior hic campos æther et lumine vestit
Purpureo: Solemque suum, sua sidera nôrunt.”
“Here a more copious air invests the fields, and clothes with purple
light; and they know their own sun and their own stars.” We love to
hear some men speak, though we hear not what they say; the very air
they breathe is rich and perfumed, and the sound of their voices falls
on the ear like the rustling of leaves or the crackling of the fire.
They stand many deep. They have the heavens for their abettors, as
those who have never stood from under them, and they look at the stars
with an answering ray. Their eyes are like glow-worms, and their
motions graceful and flowing, as if a place were already found for
them, like rivers flowing through valleys. The distinctions of
morality, of right and wrong, sense and nonsense, are petty, and have
lost their significance, beside these pure primeval natures. When I
consider the clouds stretched in stupendous masses across the sky,
frowning with darkness or glowing with downy light, or gilded with the
rays of the setting sun, like the battlements of a city in the heavens,
their grandeur appears thrown away on the meanness of my employment;
the drapery is altogether too rich for such poor acting. I am hardly
worthy to be a suburban dweller outside those walls
“Unless above himself he can
Erect himself, how poor a thing is man!”
With our music we would fain challenge transiently another and finer
sort of intercourse than our daily toil permits. The strains come back
to us amended in the echo, as when a friend reads our verse. Why have
they so painted the fruits, and freighted them with such fragrance as
to satisfy a more than animal appetite?
“I asked the schoolman, his advice was free,
But scored me out too intricate a way.”
These things imply, perchance, that we live on the verge of another and
purer realm, from which these odors and sounds are wafted over to us.
The borders of our plot are set with flowers, whose seeds were blown
from more Elysian fields adjacent. They are the pot-herbs of the gods.
Some fairer fruits and sweeter fragrances wafted over to us, betray
another realm’s vicinity. There, too, does Echo dwell, and there is the
abutment of the rainbow’s arch.
A finer race and finer fed
Feast and revel o’er our head,
And we titmen are only able
To catch the fragments from their table.
Theirs is the fragrance of the fruits,
While we consume the pulp and roots.
What are the moments that we stand
Astonished on the Olympian land!
We need pray for no higher heaven than the pure senses can furnish, a
_purely_ sensuous life. Our present senses are but the rudiments of
what they are destined to become. We are comparatively deaf and dumb
and blind, and without smell or taste or feeling. Every generation
makes the discovery, that its divine vigor has been dissipated, and
each sense and faculty misapplied and debauched. The ears were made,
not for such trivial uses as men are wont to suppose, but to hear
celestial sounds. The eyes were not made for such grovelling uses as
they are now put to and worn out by, but to behold beauty now
invisible. May we not _see_ God? Are we to be put off and amused in
this life, as it were with a mere allegory? Is not Nature, rightly
read, that of which she is commonly taken to be the symbol merely? When
the common man looks into the sky, which he has not so much profaned,
he thinks it less gross than the earth, and with reverence speaks of
“the Heavens,” but the seer will in the same sense speak of “the
Earths,” and his Father who is in them. “Did not he that made that
which is _within_, make that which is _without_ also?” What is it,
then, to educate but to develop these divine germs called the senses?
for individuals and states to deal magnanimously with the rising
generation, leading it not into temptation,—not teach the eye to
squint, nor attune the ear to profanity. But where is the instructed
teacher? Where are the _normal_ schools?
A Hindoo sage said, “As a dancer, having exhibited herself to the
spectator, desists from the dance, so does Nature desist, having
manifested herself to soul—. Nothing, in my opinion, is more gentle
than Nature; once aware of having been seen, she does not again expose
herself to the gaze of soul.”
It is easier to discover another such a new world as Columbus did, than
to go within one fold of this which we appear to know so well; the land
is lost sight of, the compass varies, and mankind mutiny; and still
history accumulates like rubbish before the portals of nature. But
there is only necessary a moment’s sanity and sound senses, to teach us
that there is a nature behind the ordinary, in which we have only some
vague pre-emption right and western reserve as yet. We live on the
outskirts of that region. Carved wood, and floating boughs, and sunset
skies, are all that we know of it. We are not to be imposed on by the
longest spell of weather. Let us not, my friends, be wheedled and
cheated into good behavior to earn the salt of our eternal porridge,
whoever they are that attempt it. Let us wait a little, and not
purchase any clearing here, trusting that richer bottoms will soon be
put up. It is but thin soil where we stand; I have felt my roots in a
richer ere this. I have seen a bunch of violets in a glass vase, tied
loosely with a straw, which reminded me of myself.
I am a parcel of vain strivings tied
By a chance bond together,
Dangling this way and that, their links
Were made so loose and wide,
Methinks,
For milder weather.
A bunch of violets without their roots,
And sorrel intermixed,
Encircled by a wisp of straw
Once coiled about their shoots,
The law
By which I’m fixed.
A nosegay which Time clutched from out
Those fair Elysian fields,
With weeds and broken stems, in haste,
Doth make the rabble rout
That waste
The day he yields.
And here I bloom for a short hour unseen,
Drinking my juices up,
With no root in the land
To keep my branches green,
But stand
In a bare cup.
Some tender buds were left upon my stem
In mimicry of life,
But ah! the children will not know,
Till time has withered them,
The woe
With which they’re rife.
But now I see I was not plucked for naught,
And after in life’s vase
Of glass set while I might survive,
But by a kind hand brought
Alive
To a strange place.
That stock thus thinned will soon redeem its hours,
And by another year,
Such as God knows, with freer air,
More fruits and fairer flowers
Will bear,
While I droop here.
This world has many rings, like Saturn, and we live now on the outmost
of them all. None can say deliberately that he inhabits the same
sphere, or is contemporary with, the flower which his hands have
plucked, and though his feet may seem to crush it, inconceivable spaces
and ages separate them, and perchance there is no danger that he will
hurt it. What do the botanists know? Our lives should go between the
lichen and the bark. The eye may see for the hand, but not for the
mind. We are still being born, and have as yet but a dim vision of sea
and land, sun, moon and stars, and shall not see clearly till after
nine days at least. That is a pathetic inquiry among travellers and
geographers after the site of ancient Troy. It is not near where they
think it is. When a thing is decayed and gone, how indistinct must be
the place it occupied!
The anecdotes of modern astronomy affect me in the same way as do those
faint revelations of the Real which are vouchsafed to men from time to
time, or rather from eternity to eternity. When I remember the history
of that faint light in our firmament, which we call Venus, which
ancient men regarded, and which most modern men still regard, as a
bright spark attached to a hollow sphere revolving about our earth, but
which we have discovered to be _another world_, in itself,—how
Copernicus, reasoning long and patiently about the matter, predicted
confidently concerning it, before yet the telescope had been invented,
that if ever men came to see it more clearly than they did then, they
would discover that it had phases like our moon, and that within a
century after his death the telescope was invented, and that prediction
verified, by Galileo,—I am not without hope that we may, even here and
now obtain some accurate information concerning that OTHER WORLD which
the instinct of mankind has so long predicted. Indeed, all that we call
science, as well as all that we call poetry, is a particle of such
information, accurate as far as it goes, though it be but to the
confines of the truth. If we can reason so accurately, and with such
wonderful confirmation of our reasoning, respecting so-called material
objects and events infinitely removed beyond the range of our natural
vision, so that the mind hesitates to trust its calculations even when
they are confirmed by observation, why may not our speculations
penetrate as far into the immaterial starry system, of which the former
is but the outward and visible type? Surely, we are provided with
senses as well fitted to penetrate the spaces of the real, the
substantial, the eternal, as these outward are to penetrate the
material universe. Veias, Menu, Zoroaster, Socrates, Christ,
Shakespeare, Swedenborg,—these are some of our astronomers.
There are perturbations in our orbits produced by the influence of
outlying spheres, and no astronomer has ever yet calculated the
elements of that undiscovered world which produces them. I perceive in
the common train of my thoughts a natural and uninterrupted sequence,
each implying the next, or, if interruption occurs, it is occasioned by
a new object being presented to my _senses_. But a steep, and sudden,
and by these means unaccountable transition, is that from a
comparatively narrow and partial, what is called common sense view of
things, to an infinitely expanded and liberating one, from seeing
things as men describe them, to seeing them as men cannot describe
them. This implies a sense which is not common, but rare in the wisest
man’s experience; which is sensible or sentient of more than common.
In what enclosures does the astronomer loiter! His skies are shoal, and
imagination, like a thirsty traveller, pants to be through their
desert. The roving mind impatiently bursts the fetters of astronomical
orbits, like cobwebs in a corner of its universe, and launches itself
to where distance fails to follow, and law, such as science has
discovered, grows weak and weary. The mind knows a distance and a space
of which all those sums combined do not make a unit of measure,—the
interval between that which _appears_, and that which _is_. I know that
there are many stars, I know that they are far enough off, bright
enough, steady enough in their orbits,—but what are they all worth?
They are more waste land in the West,—star territory,—to be made slave
States, perchance, if we colonize them. I have interest but for six
feet of star, and that interest is transient. Then farewell to all ye
bodies, such as I have known ye.
Every man, if he is wise, will stand on such bottom as will sustain
him, and if one gravitates downward more strongly than another, he will
not venture on those meads where the latter walks securely, but rather
leave the cranberries which grow there unraked by himself. Perchance,
some spring a higher freshet will float them within his reach, though
they may be watery and frost-bitten by that time. Such shrivelled
berries I have seen in many a poor man’s garret, ay, in many a
church-bin and state-coffer, and with a little water and heat they
swell again to their original size and fairness, and added sugar
enough, stead mankind for sauce to this world’s dish.
What is called common sense is excellent in its department, and as
invaluable as the virtue of conformity in the army and navy,—for there
must be subordination,—but uncommon sense, that sense which is common
only to the wisest, is as much more excellent as it is more rare. Some
aspire to excellence in the subordinate department, and may God speed
them. What Fuller says of masters of colleges is universally
applicable, that “a little alloy of dulness in a master of a college
makes him fitter to manage secular affairs.”
“He that wants faith, and apprehends a grief
Because he wants it, hath a true belief;
And he that grieves because his grief’s so small,
Has a true grief, and the best Faith of all.”