other heathen freebooters, who celebrated in the mountain fastnesses
their monstrous rites. In the mountains above Aosta the god Pen had
long been worshiped; the word pen in Celtic meaning the highest.
Later, Julius Caesar conquered these wild tribes, and imposed upon them
the religion of the Roman Empire. A statue of Jupiter ("_Jove optimo
maximo_") was set up in the mountain in the place of the idol Pen.
Afterwards, by way of compromise, the Romans permitted the two to
become one, and the people worshiped Jovis Pennius (Jupiter Pen), the
great god of the highest mountains. A statue of Jupiter Pen was set up
by the side of the lake in the great pass of the mountain; and from
Jupiter Pen these mountains took the name of Pennine Alps, which they
bear to this day. The pass itself was called Mons Jovis, the Mountain
of Jove, and this, in due time, became shortened to Mont Joux. Through
this pass of Mont Joux the armies of every nation have marched, the
heroes of every age, from Saint Peter, who, the legend says, came over
in the year 57, down to Napoléon, who passed nearly eighteen centuries
later, on a much less worthy errand. The Hotel "Déjeuner de Napoléon,"
in the little village of "Bourg Saint Pièrre," recalls in its name the
story of both these visits.
In the earliest days a refuge hut was built by the side of the statue
of Jupiter Pen. In the early pilgrimages to Rome this became a place
of some importance. Later on, marauding armies of Goths, Saracens, and
Hungarians, successively passing through, destroyed this refuge. In
the days of Bernard the pass was filled with a horde of brigands,
French, Italians, Saracens, and Jews, who had cast aside all religious
faith of their fathers, and had re-established the worship of the demon
in the temple of Jupiter Pen.
The old manuscripts tell us that in the middle of the tenth century the
demons were in full sway on these mountains; that through the mouth of
the statue of Jupiter the worst of lies and blasphemies were spoken to
those who came to consult it. These worshipers of strange old gods
lived by plunder, and exacted toll of all who came through the pass.
The same conditions existed on the Graian Alps to the southward. On
one of these mountain passes, some fifty miles from Mont Joux, there
lived a rich man named Polycarpe. He, too, did homage to Jupiter, and
on the summit of a tall column which he built in the pass he had placed
a splendid diamond, which he called the "Eye of Jove." People came
from great distances to be healed by its magic glance, and the mountain
on which he dwelt was the mountain of the Columna Jovis. This became
changed, in time, to Colonne Joux, the Mountain of the Column of Jove.
And the demons of these two heights, the Mountain of Jove and the
Column of Jove, sent down their baleful call of defiance to the valley
over which Bernard ruled as Archdeacon of Aosta.
It came to pass that a troop of ten French travelers crossed over the
pass of Mont Joux. In the pass they were attacked by marauders, and
one of their number was carried away captive. When they came down to
Aosta, Bernard, the Archdeacon, fearlessly offered to go back with them
to attack the giant of the mountain, to rescue their friend, and to
replace the standard of the cross over the altar of the demon.
That night, so says the old chronicle, Saint Nicholas appeared to him
in the garb of a pilgrim and said: "Bernard, let us attack these
mountains. We shall put the demon to flight. We shall overturn this
statue of Jupiter, which the demons have taken possession of to bring
trouble among Christians. We will destroy it, and we will destroy the
column and its diamond, and in their place we will build two refuges
for the use of the pilgrims who cross the two mountains. Go thou, as
the tenth one in this band; then wilt thou conjure the demons. Thou
shalt bind the statue with a blessed stole, and its ruins will mingle
with the chaos of the mountains. Thus shalt thou destroy the power of
evil to the day of judgment."
And in proof of the thoroughness with which Bernard performed his work,
it is told that a spiritualist who took pleasure in tipping tables came
through the pass in 1857. The monks were incredulous of his powers,
and he wished to convince them by an actual experience. His efforts
were all in vain. The tables, the record tells us, were quiet as the
rocks. The traveler, astonished, said: "This is the first time they
have failed to obey me." And thus, says the record, the pledge of
Saint Nicholas was accomplished. The enemy had never more an entrance
into the mountain.
When Bernard and his followers reached Mont Joux, they found the
mountain filled with fog and storm, but his heart was undaunted.
Passing boldly between the guards of the temple, he flung, so the story
says, his blessed stole over the neck of the statue of Jupiter. It
changed at once into an iron chain, against which the statue, now
become a huge demon-monster, struggled in vain. The good man
overturned it and flung it at his feet. With the same chain he bound
the high priest who guarded the demon. The struggle was short, but
decisive. In a few minutes, so the chronicle says, Bernard had
banished the demon of Mont Joux and his accomplices to eternal snow and
ice to the end of time, and had commanded them to cease forever their
evil doings on the mountain.
An old painting in the Hospice shows this scene in vivid portrait.
Bernard stands erect and fearless, his fine face lit up by celestial
zeal, his bare head surrounded by a halo, a pilgrim's staff in his
right hand, the stole, now become a chain, in his left, while one foot
is on the breast of the demon, which gasps helpless at his feet. The
demon has the body of a man, covered with a wolf's rough, shaggy hair,
his fingers and toes ending in sharp claws, a long tail, rough and
scaly, like the tail of a rat, coiled snake-like above his legs, the
head and ears of a wolf, the horns of a goat, and on his back an
indefinable outgrowth, perhaps the framework of a horrible pair of
wings, its long tongue thrust out from between its bloody teeth. He
was certainly a gruesome creature.
[Illustration: Saint Bernard and the demon.]
And thus it came to pass in the year 970, in the place of the temple of
Jupiter Pen, but at the other end of the lake, and in the very summit
of the pass, was built the Hospice of the Great Saint Bernard. From
that day to this, almost a thousand years, the work of doing good to
men has been humbly and patiently carried on.
Not long afterward, in a similar way, Bernard attacked the Graian Alps,
overthrew the column of Jupiter, crushed its bright diamond to the
finest dust, which he scattered in the winds, and built in its place a
second Hospice, which, with the pass, has borne ever since the name of
the Little Saint Bernard.
Silver and gold, the builders of this Hospice had none. Ever since the
beginning, they have exercised their charities at the expense of those
who cared for the Lord's work. All who pass by are treated alike.
Those who are received into the Hospice can leave much or
little--something or nothing, whatever they please,--to carry the same
same help to others.
In the book of the good Saint Francis de Sales long ago, so the
chronicle says, these words were written:
"There are many degrees in charity. To lend to the poor, this is the
first degree. To give to the poor is a higher degree. Still higher to
give oneself; to devote one's life to the service of the poor.
Hospitality, when necessity is not extreme, is a counsel, and to
receive the stranger is its first degree. But to go out on the roads
to find and help, as Abraham did, this is a grade still higher. Still
higher is to live in dangerous places, to serve, aid, and save the
passers-by; to attend, lodge, succor, and save from danger the
travelers, who else would die in cold and storm. This is the work of
the noble friend of God, who founded the hospitals on the two
mountains, now for this called by his name, Great Saint Bernard, in the
diocese of Sion, and the Little Saint Bernard, in the Tarentaise."
And so the Hospice was built, and in the enthusiastic words of a
chronicle of the times, "Tears and sorrow were banished, peace and joy
have replaced them; abundance has made there her abode; the terrors
have disappeared, and there reigns eternal springtime. Instead of
hell, you will find there paradise." Not quite paradise, perhaps, so
far as the elements are concerned, but a dozen kindly men, a legion of
dogs, big, cheerful, and noisy, a warm fire, a simple meal, and a
God-speed to all men, whatever their race, or creed, or temper.
I need add but a word more of the history of Bernard himself. One day
an old man and his wife came up to visit the Hospice and to pay their
respects to the monk who had founded it. Bernard met them there, and
at once recognized his father and mother. He received them
sympathetically, and they told him the story of their lost son.
Bernard spoke to them tenderly of the work to which God must have
called him. He told them they should rejoice that their child had been
found worthy of his purposes, and after a time they seemed to become
reconciled, and felt that He doeth all things well. Then Bernard told
them who he was, and when after many days they went away from the
Hospice, they left the money to build in each of them a chapel.
Bernard died in the year 1007, at the age of eighty-three. His last
words were these: "O Lord, I give my soul into thy hands." The words,
"The saint is dead," passed on from mouth to mouth throughout these
Alpine regions. The peasants had canonized him already a hundred years
before the sanctity of his work was officially recognized at Rome.
The story of his burial is again marked by miracles. Rich men vied
with each other in making funeral offerings. One gave him a
magnificent stone coffin, but this man had been a usurer. Usury was a
sin abhorred by Saint Bernard, and the people found that no force or
persuasion could place his body within this coffin. So another tomb,
less pretentious, but more worthy, was found. At the end Bernard's
remains were divided among the churches, each of whom claimed him as
its own. To the Hospice fell his ring and his cup, a tooth, and a few
finger-bones, and, most important of all, his name--the "Great Saint
Bernard."
The chronicles give a long list of miracles which since then have been
wrought in his name. These are for the most part wonderful healings,
the stilling of storms, the bringing of rain, the driving away of
grasshoppers. However, men are prone always to look for the miracle in
the things that are of least moment. The life and work of the man was
the real miracle, not the flight of grasshoppers. The miracle of all
time is the power of humanity when it works in harmony with the laws
and purposes of God. Consecrated to God's work, and by the work's own
severity protected through the centuries from corruption and
temptation, the work of the monk of Aosta has outlasted palaces and
thrones. Through the influence of charity, and piety, and truth, the
demon has been driven from these mountains. When the love of man joins
to the love of God, all spirits of evil vanish as mist before the
morning sun.
[1] St. Bernard de Menthon must not be confounded with Bernard de
Clairvaux, born in 1091, the preacher of the Crusades.
THE LAST OF THE PURITANS.[1]
I have a word to say of Thoreau, and of an episode which brought his
character into bold relief, and which has fairly earned for him a place
in American history, as well as in our literature.
I do not wish now to give any account of the life of Thoreau. In the
preface to his volume called "Excursions" you will find a biographical
sketch, written by the loving hand of Mr. Emerson, his neighbor and
friend. Neither shall I enter into any justification of Thoreau's
peculiar mode of life, nor shall I describe the famous cabin in the
pine woods by Walden Pond, already becoming the Mecca of the Order of
Saunterers, whose great prophet was Thoreau. His profession of
land-surveyor was one naturally adopted by him; for to him every hill
and forest was a being, each with its own individuality. This
profession kept him in the fields and woods, with the sky over his head
and the mold under his feet. It paid him the money needed for his
daily wants, and he cared for no more.
He seldom went far away from Concord, and, in a half-playful way, he
used to view everything in the world from a Concord standpoint. All
the grandest trees grew there and all the rarest flowers, and nearly
all the phenomena of nature could be observed at Concord.
"Nothing can be hoped of you," he said, "if this bit of mold under your
feet is not sweeter to you than any other in this world--in any world."
Although one of the most acute of observers, Thoreau was never reckoned
among the scientific men of his time. He was never a member of any
Natural History Society, nor of any Academy of Sciences, bodies which,
in a general way, he held in not altogether unmerited contempt. When
men band together for the study of nature, they first draft a long
constitution, with its attendant by-laws, and then proceed to the
election of officers, and, by and by, the study of nature becomes
subordinate to the maintenance of the organization.
In technical scientific work, Thoreau took little pleasure. It is
often pedantic, often bloodless, and often it is a source of
inspiration only to him by whom the work is done. Animals and plants
were interesting to him, not in their structure and genealogical
affinities, but in their relations to his mind. He loved wild things,
not alone for themselves, but for the tonic effect of their savagery
upon him.
"I wish to speak a word for nature," he said, "for absolute freedom and
wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil, to
regard man as an inhabitant, a part and parcel of nature, rather than
as a member of society. I wish to make an extreme statement; if so, I
may make an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of
civilization. The minister and the school committees, and every one of
you, will take care of that."
To Thoreau's admirers, he is the prophet of the fields and woods, the
interpreter of nature, and his every word has to them the deepest
significance. He is the man who
"Lives all alone, close to the bone,
And where life is sweetest, constantly eatest."
They resent all criticism of his life or his words. They are impatient
of all analysis of his methods or of his motives, and a word of praise
of him is the surest passport to their good graces.
But the critics sometimes miss the inner harmony which Thoreau's
admirers see, and discern only queer paradoxes and extravagances of
statement where the others hear the voice of nature's oracle. With
most literary men, the power or disposition of those who know or
understand their writings is in some degree a matter of literary
culture. It is hardly so in the case of Thoreau.
The most illiterate man I know who had ever heard of Thoreau, Mr.
Barney Mullins, of Freedom Centre, Outagamie County, Wisconsin, was a
most ardent admirer of Thoreau, while the most eminent critic in
America, James Russell Lowell, does him scant justice. To Lowell, the
finest thoughts of Thoreau are but strawberries from Emerson's garden,
and other critics have followed back these same strawberries through
Emerson's to still older gardens, among them to that of Sir Thomas
Browne.
But, setting the critics aside, let me tell you about Barney Mullins.
Twenty years ago, I lived for a year in the northern part of Wisconsin.
The snow is very deep in the winter there, and once I rode into town
through the snowbanks on a sled drawn by two oxen and driven by Barney
Mullins. Barney was born on the banks of Killarney, and he could
scarcely be said to speak the English language. He told me that before
he came to Freedom Centre he had lived in a town called Concord, in
Massachusetts. I asked him if he had happened to know a man there by
the name of Henry Thoreau. He at once grew enthusiastic and he said,
among other things: "Mr. Thoreau was a land-surveyor in Concord. I
knew him well. He had a way of his own, and he didn't care naught
about money, but if there was ever a gentleman alive, he was one."
Barney seemed much saddened when I told him that Mr. Thoreau had been
dead a dozen years. On parting, he asked me to come out some time to
Freedom Centre, and to spend a night with him. He had n't much of a
room to offer me, but there was always a place in his house for a
friend of Mr. Thoreau. Such is the feeling of this guild of lovers of
Thoreau, and some of you may come to belong to it.
Here is a test for you. Thoreau says: "I long ago lost a hound, a bay
horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail. Many are the
travelers I have spoken to regarding them, describing their tracks, and
what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who have heard the
hound and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear
behind the cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they
had lost them themselves."
Now, if any of you, in your dreams, have heard the horse, or seen the
sunshine on the dove's wings, you may join in the search. If not, you
may close the book, for Thoreau has not written for you.
This Thoreau guild is composed, as he himself says, "of knights of a
new, or, rather, an old order, not equestrians or chevaliers, not
Ritters, or riders, but walkers, a still more ancient and honorable
class, I trust."
"I have met," he says, "but one or two persons who understand the art
of walking; who had a genius for sauntering, which word is beautifully
derived from idle people who roved about the country in the Middle Ages
and asked charity, under pretense of going '_à la Sainte Terre_'--a
Sainte-terrer, a Holy Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in
their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but
they who go there are saunterers, in the good sense. Every walk is a
kind of crusade preached by some Peter the Hermit within us, to go
forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels.
"It is true that we are but faint-hearted crusaders, who undertake no
persevering, never-ending enterprises. Our expeditions are but tours,
and come round again at evening to the old hearthside from which we set
out. Half the walk is but retracing our steps. We should go forth on
the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never
to return, prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to
our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother,
and brother and sister, and wife and child, and friends; if you have
paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and
are a free man, you are ready for a walk."
Though a severe critic of conventional follies, Thoreau was always a
hopeful man; and no finer rebuke to the philosophy of Pessimism was
ever given than in these words of his: "I know of no more encouraging
fact than the unquestionable ability of a man to elevate his life by a
conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular
picture, or to carve a statue, and so make a few objects beautiful; but
it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and
medium through which we look. This, morally, we can do."
But it is not of Thoreau as a saunterer, or as a naturalist, or as an
essayist, that I wish to speak, but as a moralist, and this in relation
to American politics. Thoreau lived in a dark day of our political
history. At one time he made a declaration of independence in a small
way, and refused allegiance and poll-tax to a Government built on a
corner-stone of human slavery. Because of this he was put into jail,
where he remained one night, and where he made some curious
observations on his townspeople as viewed from the inside of the bars.
Emerson came along in the morning, and asked him what he was there for.
"Why are you not in here, Mr. Emerson?" was his reply; for it seemed to
him that no man had the right to be free in a country where some men
were slaves.
"Voting for the right," Thoreau said, "is doing nothing for it; it is
only expressing feebly your desire that right should prevail." He
would not for an instant recognize that political organization as his
government which was the slave's government also. "In fact," he said,
"I will quietly, after my fashion, declare war with the State. Under a
government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man
is also a prison. I know this well, that if one thousand, if one
hundred, or if one honest man in this State of Massachusetts, ceasing
to remain in this co-partnership, should be locked up in the county
jail therefor, it would be the abolition of slavery in America. It
matters not how small the beginning may seem to be, what is once well
done is done forever."
Thoreau's friends paid his taxes for him, and he was set free, so that
the whole affair seemed like a joke. Yet, as Stevenson says, "If his
example had been followed by a hundred, or by thirty of his followers,
it would have greatly precipitated the era of freedom and justice. We
feel the misdeeds of our country with so little fervor, for we are not
witnesses to the suffering they cause. But when we see them awake an
active horror in our fellow-man; when we see a neighbor prefer to lie
in prison than be so much as passively implicated in their
perpetration, even the dullest of us will begin to realize them with a
quicker pulse."
In the feeling that a wrong, no matter how great, must fall before the
determined assault of a man, no matter how weak, Thoreau found the
reason for his action. The operation of the laws of God is like an
incontrollable torrent. Nothing can stand before them; but the work of
a single man may set the torrent in motion which will sweep away the
accumulations of centuries of wrong.
There is a long chapter in our national history which is not a glorious
record. Most of us are too young to remember much of politics under
the Fugitive Slave Law, or to understand the deference which
politicians of every grade then paid to the peculiar institution. It
was in those days in the Middle West that Kentucky blackguards, backed
by the laws of the United States, and aided not by Northern blackguards
alone, but by many of the best citizens of those States, chased runaway
slaves through the streets of our Northern capitals.
And not the politicians alone, but the teachers and preachers, took
their turn in paying tribute to Caesar. We were told that the Bible
itself was a champion of slavery. Two of our greatest theologians in
the North declared, in the name of the Higher Law, that slavery was a
holy thing, which the Lord, who cursed Canaan, would ever uphold.
In those days there came a man from the West--a tall, gaunt, grizzly,
shaggy-haired, God-fearing man, a son of the Puritans, whose ancestors
came over on the Mayflower. A dangerous fanatic or lunatic, he was
called, and, with the aid of a few poor negroes whom he had stolen from
slavery, he defied the power of this whole slave-catching United
States. A little square brick building, once a sort of car-shop,
stands near the railway station in the town of Harper's Ferry, with the
mountain wall not far behind it, and the Potomac River running below.
And from this building was fired the shot which pierced the heart of
slavery. And the Governor of Virginia captured this man, and took him
out and hung him, and laid his body in the grave, where it still lies
moldering. But there was part of him not in the jurisdiction of
Virginia, a part which they could neither hang nor bury; and, to the
infinite surprise of the Governor of Virginia, his soul went marching
on.
[Illustration: John Brown.]
When they heard in Concord that John Brown had been captured, and was
soon to be hung, Thoreau sent notice through the city that he would
speak in the public hall on the condition and character of John Brown,
on Sunday evening, and invited all to be present.
The Republican Committee and the Committee of the Abolitionists sent
word to him that this was no time to speak; to discuss such matters
then was premature and inadvisable. He replied: "I did not send to you
for advice, but to tell you that I am going to speak." The selectmen
of Concord dared neither grant nor refuse him the hall. At last they
ventured to lose the key in a place where they thought he could find it.
This address of Thoreau, "A Plea for Captain John Brown," should be a
classic in American history. We do not always realize that the time of
American history is now. The dates of the settlement of Jamestown, and
Plymouth, and St. Augustine do not constitute our history. Columbus
did not discover us. In a high sense, the true America is barely
thirty years old, and its first President was Abraham Lincoln.