companionship. And this, in its truer sense, is a relation of spirit, an
elective affinity, rather than a mere concurrence of intellectual or
artistic tastes. It is quite possible for two persons to like Sargent's
pictures, or to draw the line at the inane "society" play without, after
all, finding themselves in any relations of especial sympathy. "Only
that soul can be my friend," said Emerson, "which I encounter on the
line of my own march; that soul to which I do not decline, and which
does not decline to me, but, native of the same celestial latitude,
repeats in its own all my experience." Margaret Fuller defined this
sympathy as that of beings born under the same star. But phrases are of
little worth,--the experience eludes all definitions and defies all
phrasings. It exists by divine right, or it does not exist at all. It is
a law unto itself. It is a recognition that has to do with the inward
springs of thought and action.
Companionship is the inflorescence of social life,--its finest result,
its most exquisite and perfect ideal. But it requires a certain degree
of fitness. It requires the choice organization, the nobler and the
finer degree of spiritual development. The crude person can pass well
enough in a social assemblage, but only the choicer individuality is fit
for that finer and more subtle relation of companionship.
Yet this highest realization of social enjoyment is, for the most part,
relegated to shreds and patches of time. The mornings must be given to
lectures, readings, receptions, clubs, and teas; the evenings must be
devoted to dinners, dances, opera, concerts, plays, or musicales. For
communion of friend with friend, spirit with spirit, there is no time.
The crowning joy of life, in its possibilities for sympathetic
companionship, is ignored. For companionship is a spiritual joy, and
society recognizes only the spectacular pleasures. The finer order of
social life for which the world were well lost, awaits its evolution.
* * * * *
"The life a man lives and the life he ought to live belong together. The
real and the ideal lie side by side in the thought of God."
The distractions of life are every day's tragedy. The mutilation of
purpose, the disintegration of time, the neutralization of all endeavor,
which result from the perpetual occurrence of the unforeseen, cannot but
prefigure itself as a theme for meditation to the worker who looks back
on a day, a week, a month, an entire season, in which "the flighty
purpose" has never been overtaken. The calendar has the inexorableness
of fate. The day, the month, goes by, unrelenting. It may be shattered
with feeble and inexpressive demands, but all the same it is gone, and
it is unreturning. Whether freighted richly with the essential, or
merely burdened with the ineffectual, it is equally irretrievable.
This involves a problem of life full of spiritual perplexity. Certainly,
no man liveth to himself, or, if he does, his living is a selfish and
worthless thing. Certainly a man _is_ his brother's keeper--to a degree.
The poet whose dream is about to crystallize in verse is assured that
life is more than art, and that to sustain the spirits of the depressed
caller who appears at that precise instant, with the unfailing instinct
with which the depressed do invariably appear at a literary crisis,--he
is assured that this act is a "nobler poem" than any he could write. And
such is the tremendous impression that the gospel in the air of the
service of humanity makes on us all, that he dare not disregard this
possibility. He is not absolutely sure, it is true, that he is "serving
humanity" in this individual instance, but he is not at all sure that it
is _not_ true; and he reflects that other days are coming, when,
perhaps, by some divine dispensation, the depressed caller will _not_
appear! But there are no days on which he, or his prototype, is not on
hand, and so the problem ever remains a present, an immediate, and,
alas! an insoluble one. For this is an age when the depressed, who have
nothing to do, require, to sustain their drooping spirits, the
sympathetic ministrations of those who are too busy to indulge in the
languid luxury of gentle and romantic sadness. In fact, they feel a
certain inalienable right to demand that current of sympathetic interest
which otherwise would express itself in the specific work in which one
is engaged. "You desire to 'serve humanity,' do you?" the depressed
caller says, virtually, as he fixes the mere worker with his glittering
eye. "Well, I am Humanity. What is a book compared to a human soul?
Here, before you, in living personality, is a need. Can you forsake it
for abstract literature?"
If the unfortunate worker has any species of the New England conscience
he is at a disadvantage. He has nothing to say for himself. There are
behind him more than two centuries of his ancestors who have preached
and practiced self-sacrifice, generosity, love. In one sense he is even
enfeebled by his ethical nature. It possesses him, rather than enables
him to clearly and consciously possess it. He feels a certain magnetic
attraction to the fulfilment of a definite purpose; but after all, the
world is full of purposes and of far greater and abler persons than
himself to carry them on; and perhaps this particular appeal is from one
of those "little ones" whom the Christ he holds in reverence bids him
care for first of all. Perhaps the immediate human need should take
precedence over specific work. Perhaps it _is_ a real human need. "Treat
the people as if they were real," said Emerson; "perhaps they are so."
And so he becomes the victim rather than the master of his own diviner
life. He sees through a glass darkly. He is not in the least sure that
he can do any good, but he is fearful he may do evil. And so he espouses
what is really a negative side; a side of blind chance; a mere spiritual
gambling, so to speak, and throws his stakes on the side of what _may_
be useful, as he cannot prove to himself that it is not, and his life
becomes a poor, mean, weak, ineffectual thing. He recalls Sir Hugo's
counsel to Daniel Deronda: "Be courteous, be obliging, Dan; but don't
give yourself over to be melted down for the tallow trade." He becomes
sadly conscious that his entire time, purpose, energies are being
simply, with his own dull consent, "melted down for the tallow trade,"
and that he himself is by way of being on a far more perilous margin
than that of any one of the gently depressed spirits who devastate his
days, and command him to create for them,--not energy, purpose,
will,--but, instead, external conditions in which they may more
luxuriously enjoy their romantic languor and their comforting
consciousness of superior qualities.
Now is it not more than an open question that when temptation assumes
the masque of "service," it is no less temptation, and that it is evil
disguised as good? The woman who reads the infinitely uplifting sermons
of Rev. Doctor Charles G. Ames; who solaces what she is pleased to call
her soul in that marvelously great work, "The Expansion of Religion," by
Rev. Doctor E. Winchester Donald; who is excited--and mistakes it for
being aroused--by Rev. Doctor Philip Moxom's noble book called "The
Religion of Hope;" or who entertains similar emotions over recent new
and great and uplifting books by Rev. Doctor George A. Gordon or Rev.
Doctor Lyman Abbott, or many another, often evolves the pleasing fantasy
that all she requires for producing the same quality of work is the
illumination of personal interviews or personal correspondence with
them. "Surely," she reasons, "these men are servants of the Lord, and I
am one of the least of these whose needs they are divinely commanded to
serve. Is not the life more than meat? Should not the minister break off
his morning meditation--an abstract thing, at best--to see me, who needs
an immediate infusion of encouragement?"
And the tragedy of this is that the worker, who is true to his own
purpose,--through good report or through ill report,--to the duties he
is divinely commissioned to perform, is not infrequently entirely
misunderstood. The woman who sends him a voluminous manuscript,
accompanying pretty phrasings regarding his work, and modestly
requesting that he shall read it, give his "views" on it, and decide
just what editor or publisher will be rejoiced to issue it,--and who
receives her pages of outpouring back by return mail with a note,
however courteous, expressing his inability to fulfil this
commission,--this woman becomes, as a rule, the enemy of the person who
declines to be "melted down for the tallow trade." She may do no
particular harm, but the antagonism is there. This, however, could be
borne; but the nature sensitive to shades of human need is always liable
to torture itself because of any failure to meet a specific demand. And
this torture is disintegrating to that force of positive energy which a
special work requires.
Is there not, then, a need for the gospel of one's own endeavor? that a
given line of work, plainly revealed in hours of mystic communion with
the Divine, indicated by the subtle trend of circumstance and
condition,--is there not a need of realizing so clearly that it is the
duty apportioned to the one fitted for it, that it shall inspire
fidelity and reverence,--even at the risk of what the unthinking may
describe as selfish absorption? For there are vast varieties of
ministering for ministering spirits. The work of the social settlement
is divine; but the poet and the painter, if they produce poems and
paintings, cannot devote their time to its work. And the poems and the
pictures have their value, as well as service in giving food and
clothing to those in need. The special gift does require special
conditions, and it is not selfish to insist on those conditions, when
the special work is held as unto the Lord. It often requires more
heroism, more faith, more love to deny than to accede to a given
request. To yield is often easy; to be steadfast to one's own purpose,
shining like a star upon the horizon, is not infrequently very
difficult.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: A Summer Pilgrimage in Arizona.]
No pilgrimage of the Crusaders of old could be more impressive in its
spiritual results than that which can be made to-day to the Grand Canyon
of the Colorado in Arizona. The majesty and sublimity of the scene
suggest another world, not, indeed, an "Inferno," but a "Paradiso." It
is a sea of color, a very New Jerusalem, on which one looks down from
the rim of this Titanic chasm. It is a vision not less wonderful than
that beheld by Saint John in the Isle of Patmos.
The term "canyon" is a misnomer for this supreme marvel of earth. One
journeys to it anticipating a colossal variation on Cheyenne Canon or
the Royal Gorge. Instead, what does the tourist see?
The ridge of a vast mountain-chain over two hundred miles in length
split asunder in a yawning chasm eighteen miles in width and over seven
thousand feet deep; one in which a thousand Niagaras would be lost; in
which a cliff that, relatively to the scene, does not impress one as
especially lofty, yet which exceeds in height the Eiffel Tower in Paris;
and another which does not arrest special attention, yet is taller than
the Washington Monument. But the splendor of apparent architectural
creations arrests the eye. "Solomon's Temple," the "Temple of Vishnu,"
and altars, minarets, towers, pagodas, colonnades, as if designed by
architectural art, lie grouped in wonderful combinations of form and
color.
"An Inferno, swathed in soft, celestial fires; a whole chaotic
underworld, just emptied of primeval floods, and waiting for a new
creative word; a boding, terrible thing, unflinchingly real, yet
spectral as a dream, eluding all sense of perspective or dimension,
outstretching the faculty of measurement, overlapping the confines
of definite apprehension. The beholder is at first unimpressed by
any detail; he is overwhelmed by the _ensemble_ of a stupendous
panorama, a thousand square miles in extent, that lies wholly
beneath the eye, as if he stood upon a mountain peak instead of the
level brink of a fearful chasm in the plateau whose opposite shore
is thirteen miles away. A labyrinth of huge architectural forms,
endlessly varied in design, fretted with ornamental devices,
festooned with lace-like webs formed of talus from the upper
cliffs, and painted with every color known to the palette in pure
transparent tones of marvellous delicacy. Never was picture more
harmonious, never flower more exquisitely beautiful. It flashes
instant communication of all that architecture and painting and
music for a thousand years have gropingly striven to express. It is
the soul of Michael Angelo and of Beethoven.
"The spectacle is so symmetrical, and so completely excludes the
outside world and its accustomed standards, it is with difficulty
one can acquire any notion of its immensity. Were it half as deep,
half as broad, it would be no less bewildering, so utterly does it
baffle human grasp. Something may be gleaned from the account given
by geologists. What is known to them as the Grand Canyon district
lies principally in northwestern Arizona, its length from northwest
to southeast in a straight line being about one hundred and eighty
miles, its width one hundred and twenty-five miles, and its total
area some fifteen thousand square miles. Its northerly beginning,
at the high plateaus in southern Utah, is a series of terraces,
many miles broad, dropping like a stairway step by step to
successively lower geological formations, until in Arizona the
platform is reached which borders the real chasm and extends
southward beyond, far into the central part of that territory. It
is the theory of geologists that ten thousand feet of strata have
been swept by erosion from the surface of this entire platform,
whose present uppermost formation is the Carboniferous; the
deduction being based upon the fact that the missing Permian,
Mesozoic, and Tertiary formations, which belong above this
Carboniferous in the series, are found in their place at the
beginning of the northern terraces referred to. The theory is
fortified by many evidences supplied by examination of the
district, where, more than anywhere else, mother earth has laid
bare the secrets of her girlhood. The climax in this extraordinary
example of erosion is, of course, the chasm of the Grand Canyon
proper, which, were the missing strata restored to the adjacent
plateau, would be sixteen thousand feet deep. The layman is apt to
stigmatize such an assertion as a vagary of theorists, and until
the argument has been heard it does seem incredible that water
should have carved such a trough in solid rock. It is easier for
the imagination to conceive it as a work of violence, a sudden
rending of earth's crust in some huge volcanic fury; but it appears
to be true that the whole region was repeatedly lifted and
submerged, both under the ocean and under a fresh-water sea, and
that during the period of the last upheaval the river cut its
gorge. Existing as the drainage system of a vast territory, it had
the right of way, and as the plateau deliberately rose before the
pressure of the internal forces, slowly, as grinds the mills of the
gods, through a period to be measured by thousands of centuries,
the river kept its bed worn down to the level of erosion; sawed its
channel free, as the saw cuts the log that is thrust against it.
Tributaries, traceable now only by dry lateral gorges, and the
gradual but no less effective process of weathering, did the rest."
In the innermost depths of this colossal chasm runs the Colorado River.
Descending the stupendous crags and terraces by one of the two or three
"trails," the traveller at last stands upon a sandy rift confronted by
nearly vertical walls many hundred feet high, at whose base a black
torrent pitches in a giddying onward slide that gives him momentarily
the sensation of slipping into an abyss.
"With so little labor may one come to the Colorado River in the heart of
its most tremendous channel, and gaze upon a sight that heretofore has
had fewer witnesses than have the wilds of Africa. Dwarfed by such
prodigious mountain shores, which rise immediately from the water at an
angle that would deny footing to a mountain sheep, it is not easy to
estimate confidently the width and volume of the river. Choked by the
stubborn granite at this point, its width is probably between two
hundred and fifty and three hundred feet, its velocity fifteen miles an
hour, and its volume and turmoil equal to the Whirlpool Rapids of
Niagara. Its rise in time of heavy rain is rapid and appalling, for the
walls shed almost instantly all the water that falls upon them. Drift is
lodged in the crevices thirty feet overhead."
Descending to this ledge the tourist "can hardly credit Powell's
achievement, in spite of its absolute authenticity. Never was a more
magnificent self-reliance displayed than by the man who not only
undertook the passage of the Colorado River, but won his way. And after
viewing a fraction of the scene at close range, one cannot hold it to
the discredit of three of Major Powell's companions that they abandoned
the undertaking not far below this point. The fact that those who
persisted got through alive is hardly more astonishing than that any
should have had the hardihood to persist. For it could not have been
alone the privation, the infinite toil, the unending suspense in
constant menace of death that assaulted their courage; these they had
looked for; it was rather the unlifted gloom of those tartarean depths,
the unspeakable horrors of an endless valley of the shadow of death, in
which every step was irrevocable....
"Not the most fervid pictures of a poet's fancy could transcend the
glories revealed in the depths of the Canyon; inky shadows, pale gildings
of lofty spires, golden splendors of sun beating full on facades of red
and yellow, obscurations of distant peaks by veils of transient shower,
glimpses of white towers half drowned in purple haze, suffusions of rosy
light blended in reflection from a hundred tinted walls. Caught up to
exalted emotional heights, the beholder becomes unmindful of fatigue. He
mounts on wings. He drives the chariot of the sun."
The language is not yet invented that can suggest any adequate idea of
the Grand Canyon. Nor can it be painted or photographed, or in any way
pictorially reproduced in a manner to afford any suggestion, even, of
its sublimity in design and its perpetual enchantment of color. One
beholds the temples and towers and mosques and pagodas glowing in
rose-red, sapphire blue, with emerald and amber and amethyst, all
blending, and swimming, apparently, in a sea of purple, or of pearl gray
mist, the colors flashing through like flame under alabaster. The
sunlight changes as the day wears on, and so this play of color
changes,--glowing, fading, paling, flaming. Watching these magical
effects from dawn to sunset, watching the panorama of color as it
deepens into mysterious shadows and spectral illusions under the
moonlight, one can only say, "What hath God wrought!" To contemplate
this marvellous and sublime spectacle is to come into a new perception
of the Divine creation.
* * * * *
Formerly almost as inaccessible as the Himalayas, the Grand Canyon in
Arizona can now be reached by the most luxurious methods of modern
travelling. From Williams, on the Santa Fe road, a branch line of sixty
miles runs over the rolling mesas to the "Bright Angel" hotel at the
"Bright Angel Trail." The journey is enchanted by beautiful views of
the San Francisco mountains seen through a purple haze.
The entire journey through Arizona offers one of the most unique
experiences of a lifetime. Is this "The Country God Forgot"? The vast
stretch of the plains offer effects as infinite as the sea. The vista
includes only land and sky. The cloud forms and the atmospheric effects
are singularly beautiful. As one flies on into Arizona this wonderful
color effect in the air becomes more vivid. Mountains appear here and
there: the journey is up a high grade, and one realizes that he is
entering the altitudes.
A special feature of interest in Arizona is the town of Flagstaff,
famous for the great Lowell Observatory, established there by Percival
Lowell, a nephew of the noble John Lowell, who founded the Lowell
Institute in Boston. Professor Percival Lowell is a man of broad and
varied culture, a great traveller, who has familiarized himself with
most things worth seeing in this sublunary sphere, and has only failed
to explore Mars from reasons quite beyond his own control. At his own
expense he has founded here an Observatory, with a telescope of great
power, by means of which he is making astronomical researches of the
greatest value to science. The special advantage of Arizona in
astronomical study is not the altitude, but in the fact that there is
the least possible vibration in the air here. Mr. Lowell's work makes
Flagstaff a scientific centre of cosmopolitan importance, and scholars
and great scientists from all over the world are constantly arriving in
the little Arizona mountain town to visit the Observatory.
Flagstaff has no little archaeological interest, also; the famous cliff
dwellings of the Zuni tribe, which Frank Cushing explored and studied so
deeply, are within a few miles of the town, located on the summit and
sides of an extinct volcano. They now present the appearance of black
holes, a few yards deep, often surrounded with loose and broken stone
walls, and broken pottery abounds all over the vicinity. The most
remarkable group of the cliff dwellers is to be seen in Walnut Canyon,
eight miles from Flagstaff. This is one of the deep gorges, the cliffs
rising several hundred feet above the valley; and they are sheer
terraced walls of limestone, running for over three miles. In these
terraces, in the most singularly inaccessible places, are dozens of the
cliff dwellings. Some of them are divided into compartments by means of
cemented walls, and they retain traces of quite a degree of
civilization.
The petrified forests of Arizona are a most extraordinary spectacle,
with its acres of utter desolation in its giant masses of dead trees
lying prostrate on the ground. Arizona is a land of the most mysterious
charm. The Grand Canyon alone is worth a pilgrimage around the world to
see,--a spectacle so bewildering that words are powerless to suggest the
living, changing picture. "Long may the visitor loiter upon the rim,
powerless to shake loose from the charm, tirelessly intent upon the
silent transformations until the sun is low in the west. Then the canyon
sinks into mysterious purple shadow, the far Shinumo Altar is tipped
with a golden ray, and against a leaden horizon the long line of the
Echo Cliffs reflects a soft brilliance of indescribable beauty, a light
that, elsewhere, surely never was on sea or land. Then darkness falls,
and should there be a moon, the scene in part revives in silver light, a
thousand spectral forms projected from inscrutable gloom; dreams of
mountains, as in their sleep they brood on things eternal."
[Sidenote: A Tragic Idyl of Colorado.]
I hung my verses in the wind,
Time and tide their faults may find.
All were winnowed through and through,
Five lines lasted sound and true;
Five were smelted in a pot
Than the South more fierce and hot;
These the siroc could not melt,
Fire their fiercer flaming felt,
And the meaning was more white
Than July's meridian light.
Sunshine cannot bleach the snow,
Nor time unmake what poets know.
Have you eyes to find the five
Which five hundred did survive?
--EMERSON.
Not only verses, but lives, are "winnowed through and through," and time
and tide reveal their faults and their virtues. In the history of the
State of Colorado there is one man whose life and work stand out in
noble pre-eminence; whose character is one to inspire and to reward
study as an example of intellectual and moral greatness. This man is
Nathan Cook Meeker, the founder of the town of Greeley, Colorado; the
founder and for many years the editor of the Greeley "Tribune;" later
appointed by President Hayes, in a somewhat confidential capacity, the
Indian Commissioner at White River, where he died the death of a hero,
and where, marking the spot of the tragic massacre, the town of Meeker
now stands, among the mountains of the Snowy Range.