CHAPTER III.

GENERAL AND POLITE LITERATURE.

=_William Wirt, 1772-1834._= (Manual, pp. 487, 490.)

From the "Life of Patrick Henry."

=_175._= HENRY'S EXAMPLE NO ARGUMENT FOR INDOLENCE.

I cannot learn that he gave in his youth any evidence of that precocity

which sometimes distinguishes uncommon genius. His companions recollect

no instance of premature wit, no striking sentiment, no flash of fancy,

no remarkable beauty or strength of expression, and no indication

however slight, either of that impassioned love of liberty, or of that

adventurous daring and intrepidity, which marked so strongly his future

character. So far was he indeed from exhibiting any one prognostic of

this greatness, that every omen foretold a life at best, of mediocrity,

if not of insignificance. His person is represented as having been

coarse, his manners uncommonly awkward, his dress slovenly, his

conversation very plain, his aversion to study invincible, and his

faculties almost entirely benumbed by indolence. No persuasion could

bring him either to read or to work. On the contrary, he ran wild in the

forest like one of the _Aborigines_ of the country, and divided his life

between the dissipation and uproar of the chase, and the languor of

inaction.

His propensity to observe and comment upon the human character, was,

so far as I can learn, the only circumstance which distinguished him

advantageously from his youthful companions. This propensity seems to

have been born with him, and to have exerted itself instinctively, the

moment that a new subject was presented to his view. Its action was

incessant, and it became at length almost the only intellectual exercise

in which he seemed to take delight. To this cause, may be traced that

consummate knowledge of the human heart which he finally attained, and

which enabled him when he came upon the public stage, to touch the

springs of passion with a master hand, and to control the resolutions

and decisions of his hearers with a power almost more than mortal.

From what has been already stated, it will be seen how little education

had to do with the formation of this great man's mind. He was indeed a

mere child of nature, and nature seems to have been too proud and too

jealous of her work, to permit it to be touched by the hand of art. She

gave him Shakespeare's genius, and bade him, like Shakespeare, to depend

on that alone. Let not the youthful reader, however, deduce from the

example of Mr. Henry, an argument in favor of indolence, and the

contempt of study. Let him remember that the powers which surmounted the

disadvantage of those early habits, were such as very rarely appear upon

this earth. Let him remember, too, how long the genius even of Mr. Henry

was kept down, and hidden from the public view, by the sorcery of those

pernicious habits; through what years of poverty and wretchedness they

doomed him to struggle; and let him remember, that at length, when in

the zenith of his glory. Mr. Henry himself, had frequent occasions to

deplore the consequences of his early neglect of literature, and to

bewail the ghosts of his departed hours.

* * * * *

From "Eulogium on Adams and Jefferson."

=_176._= JEFFERSON'S SEAT AT MONTICELLO.

Approaching the house on the east, the visitor instinctively paused, to

cast around one thrilling glance at this magnificent panorama, and then

passed to the vestibule, where, if he had not been previously informed,

he would immediately perceive that he was entering the house of no

common man. In the spacious and lofty hall which opens before him, he

marks no tawdry and unmeaning ornaments, but before, on the right, on

the left, all around, the eye is struck and gratified with objects of

science and taste, so classed and arranged as to produce their finest

effect. On one side, specimens of sculpture set out in such order as to

exhibit ... the historical progress of that art, from the first rude

attempts of the aborigines of our country up to that exquisite and

finished bust of the great patriot himself, from the master-hand

of Ceracchi. On the other side, the visitor sees displayed a vast

collection of specimens of Indian art--their paintings, weapons,

ornaments, and manufactures; on another, an array of the fossil

productions of our country, mineral and animal, the polished remains of

those colossal monsters that once trod our forests, and are no more; and

a variegated display of the branching honors of those "monarchs of the

waste," that still people the wilds of the American continent.

From this hall he was ushered into a noble saloon, from which the

glorious landscape of the west again bursts upon his view, and which

within is hung thick around with the finest productions of the

pencil--historical paintings of the most striking subjects from all

countries and all ages, the portraits of distinguished men and patriots

both of Europe and America, and medallions and engravings in endless

profusion.

While the visitor was yet lost in the contemplation of these treasures

of the arts and sciences, he was startled by the approach of a strong

and sprightly step; and, turning with instinctive reverence to the door

of entrance, he was met by the tall, and animated, and stately figure

of the patriot himself, his countenance beaming with intelligence and

benignity, and his outstretched hand, with its strong and cordial

pressure, confirming the courteous welcome of his lips; and then came

that charm of manner and conversation that passes all description--so

cheerful, so unassuming, so free, and easy, and frank, and kind, and

gay, that even the young, and overawed, and embarrassed visitor at once

forgot his fears, and felt himself by the side of an old and familiar

friend.

* * * * *

=_Timothy Flint, 1780-1840._= (Manual, p. 490.)

From "Recollections of the Mississippi Valley."

=_177._= THE WESTERN BOATMAN.

Three is no wonder that the way of life which the boatman, lead, in turn

extremely indolent and extremely laborious, for days together requiring

little or no effort, and attended with no danger, and then on a sudden

laborious and hazardous beyond the Atlantic navigation, generally

plentiful as it regards food, and always so as it regards whiskey,

should always have seductions that prove irresistible to the young

people that live near the banks of the river. The boats float by their

dwellings on beautiful spring mornings, when the verdant forest, the

mild and delicious temperature of the air, the delightful azure of the

sky of this country, the fine bottom on the one hand, and the romantic

bluff on the other, the broad, and smooth stream rolling calmly down

through the forest, and floating the boat gently forward,--all these

circumstances harmonize in the excited youthful imagination. The boatmen

are dancing to the violin on the deck of their boat. They scatter their

wit among the girls on the shore, who come down to the water's edge to

see the pageant pass. The boat glides on until it disappears behind a

point of wood; at this moment, perhaps, the bugle, with which all the

boats are provided, strikes up its note in the distance, over the water.

These scenes, and these notes, echoing from the bluffs of the beautiful

Ohio, have a charm for the imagination, which, although I have heard a

thousand times repeated, and at all hours, and in all positions, is even

to me always new, and always delightful. No wonder that to the young,

who are reared in these remote regions, with that restless curiosity

which is fostered by solitude and silence, who witness scenes like these

so frequently,--no wonder that the severe and unremitting labors of

agriculture, performed directly in the view of such scenes, should

become tasteless and irksome.

* * * * *

=_Washington Irving, 1783-1839._= (Manual, pp. 478, 498.)

From "Knickerbocker's History of New York."

=_178._= FROM "TITLE AND TABLE OF CONTENTS."

A history of New York, from the beginning of the world to the end of the

Dutch dynasty,... being the only authentic history of the times that

ever hath been or ever will be published, by Diedrick Knickerbocker....

Book I., chap. i. Description of the World.... Book II., chap. i....

Also of Master Hendrick Hudson, his discovery of a strange country....

Chap. vii. How the people of Pavonia migrated from Communipaw to the

Island of Manhattan.... Chap. ix. How the city of New Amsterdam waxed

great under the protection of St. Nicholas, and the absence of laws and

statutes. Book III., chap. iii. How the town of New Amsterdam arose out

of mud, and came to be marvellously polished and polite, together with

a picture of the manners of our great-great-grandfathers.... Book IV.,

chap. vi. Projects of William the Testy for increasing the currency; he

is outwitted by the Yankees. The great Oyster War.... Book V., chap.

viii. How the Yankee crusade against the New Netherlands was baffled by

the sudden outbreak of witchcraft among the people of the East ... Book

VII., chap. ii. How Peter Stuyvesant labored to civilize the community.

How he was a great promoter of holydays. How he instituted kissing on

New Year's Day.... Chap. iii. How troubles thicken on the province. How

it is threatened by the Helderbergers,--the Merrylanders, and the Giants

of the Susquehanna.

* * * * *

=_179._= THE ARMY AT NEW AMSTERDAM.

First of all came the Van Bummels, who inhabit the pleasant borders

of the Bronx. These were short, fat men, wearing exceeding large

trunk-breeches, and are renowned for feats of the trencher; they were

the first inventors of suppawn, or mush and milk.... Lastly came the

Knickerbockers, of the great town of Schahticoke, where the folks lay

stones upon the houses in windy weather, lest they should be blown away.

These derive their name, as some say, from _Knicker_, to shake, and

_Beker_, a goblet, indicating thereby that they were sturdy tosspots of

yore; but in truth, it was derived from _Knicker_, to nod, and _Bocken_,

books, plainly meaning that they were great nodders or dozers over

books; from them did descend the writer of this History.

* * * * *

From the "Tales of a Traveller."

=_180._= A MOTHER'S MEMORY.

A part of the church-yard is shaded by large trees. Under one of them

my mother lay buried. You have no doubt thought me a light, heartless

being. I thought myself so; but there are moments of adversity which let

us into some feelings of our nature to which we might otherwise remain

perpetual strangers.

I sought my mother's grave: the weeds were already matted over it, and

the tombstone was half hid among nettles. I cleared them away, and they

stung my hands; but I was heedless of the pain, for my heart ached too

severely. I sat down on the grave, and read, over and over again, the

epitaph on the stone.

It was simple,--but it was true. I had written it myself, I had tried

to write a poetical epitaph, but in vain; my feelings refused to utter

themselves in rhyme. My heart had gradually been filling during my

lonely wanderings; it was now charged to the brim, and overflowed, I

sunk upon the grave, and buried my face in the tall grass, and wept like

a child. Yes, I wept in manhood upon the grave, as I had in infancy upon

the bosom, of my mother. Alas! how little do we appreciate a mother's

tenderness while living! how heedless are we in youth of all her

anxieties and kindness! But when she is dead and gone; when the cares

and coldness of the world come withering to our hearts; when we find how

hard it is to find true sympathy;--how few love us for ourselves; how

few will befriend us in our misfortunes--then it is that we think of

the mother we have lost. It is true I had always loved my mother, even

in my most heedless days; but I felt how inconsiderate and ineffectual

had been my love. My heart melted as I retraced the days of infancy,

when I was led by a mother's hand, and rocked to sleep in a mother's

arms, and was without care or sorrow. "O my mother!" exclaimed I,

burying my face again in the grass of the grave, "O that I were once

more by your side; sleeping never to wake again on the cares and

troubles of this world."

I am not naturally of a morbid temperament, and the violence of my

emotion gradually exhausted itself. It was a hearty, honest, natural

discharge of grief which had been slowly accumulating, and gave me

wonderful relief. I rose from the grave as if I had been offering up a

sacrifice, and I felt as if that sacrifice had been accepted.

I sat down again on the grass, and plucked one by one the weeds from her

grave: the tears trickled more slowly down my cheeks, and ceased to be

bitter. It was a comfort to think that she had died before sorrow

and poverty came upon her child, and all his great expectations were

blasted.

I leaned my cheek upon my hand, and looked upon the landscape. Its quiet

beauty soothed me. The whistle of a peasant from an adjoining field came

cheerily to my ear. I seemed to respire hope and comfort with the free

air that whispered through the leaves, and played lightly with my hair,

and dried the tears upon my cheek. A lark, rising from the field before

me, and leaving as it were a stream of song behind him as he rose,

lifted my fancy with him. He hovered in the air just above the place

where the towers of Warwick castle marked the horizon, and seemed as

if fluttering with delight at his own melody. "Surely," thought I, "if

there were such a thing as a transmigration of souls, this might be

taken for some poet let loose from earth, but still revelling in song,

and carolling about fair fields and lordly towers."

* * * * *

From "The Life and Voyages of Columbus."

=_181._= COLUMBUS A PRISONER.

The arrival of Columbus at Cadiz, a prisoner, and in chains, produced

almost as great a sensation as his triumphant return from his first

voyage. It was one of those striking and obvious facts, which speak to

the feelings of the multitude, and preclude the necessity of reflection.

No one stopped to inquire into the case. It was sufficient to be

told that Columbus was brought home in irons from the world he had

discovered. A general burst of indignation arose in Cadiz, and its

neighboring city, Seville, which was immediately echoed throughout all

Spain.... However Ferdinand might have secretly felt disposed towards

Columbus, the momentary tide of public feeling was not to be resisted.

He joined with his generous queen in her reprobation of the treatment of

the admiral, and both sovereigns hastened to give evidence to the world,

that his imprisonment had been without their authority, and contrary to

their wishes.

* * * * *

=_182._= HIS ARRIVAL AT COURT.

He appeared at court in Granada, on the 17th of December, not as a man

ruined and disgraced, but richly dressed, and attended by an honorable

retinue. He was received by their majesties with unqualified favor and

distinction. When the queen beheld this venerable man approach, and

thought on all that he had deserved, and all that he had suffered,

she was moved to tears. Columbus had borne up firmly against the rude

conflicts of the world; he had endured with lofty scorn the injuries and

insults of ignoble men; but he possessed strong and quick sensibility.

When he found himself thus kindly received by his sovereigns, and beheld

tears in the benign eyes of Isabella, his long-suppressed feelings burst

forth. He threw himself upon his knees, and for some time could not

utter a word for the violence of his tears and sobbings.

* * * * *

From Wolfert's Roost.

=_183._= "A TIME OF UNEXAMPLED PROSPERITY."

Every now and then the world is visited by one of these delusive

seasons, when "the credit system," as it is called, expands to full

luxuriance; every body trusts every body; a bad debt is a thing unheard

of; the broad way to certain and sudden wealth lies plain and open, and

men are tempted to dash forward boldly, from the facility of borrowing.

Promissory notes, interchanged between scheming individuals, are

liberally discounted at the banks, which become so many mints to coin

words into cash; and as the supply of words is inexhaustible, it may

readily be supposed what a vast amount of promissory capital is soon

in circulation. Every one now talks in thousands; nothing is heard

but gigantic operations in trade, great purchases and sales of real

property, and immense sums made at every transfer. All, to be sure,

as yet exists in promise; but the believer in promises calculates the

aggregate as solid capital, and falls back in amazement at the amount of

public wealth, "the unexampled state of public prosperity!"

Now is the time for speculative and dreaming or designing men. They

relate their dreams and projects to the ignorant and credulous, dazzle

them with golden visions, and set them maddening after shadows. The

example of one stimulates another; speculation rises on speculation;

bubble rises on bubble; every one helps with his breath to swell the

windy superstructure, and admires and wonders at the magnitude of the

inflation he has contributed to produce.

Speculation is the romance of trade, and casts contempt upon all its

sober realities. It renders the stock-jobber a magician, and the

exchange a region of enchantment. It elevates the merchant into a kind

of Knight-errant, or rather a commercial Quixote. The slow but sure

gains of snug percentage become despicable in his eyes: no "operation"

is thought worthy of attention, that does not double or treble the

investment. No business is worth following, that does not promise an

immediate fortune. As he sits musing over his ledger, with pen behind

his ear, he is like La Mancha's hero in his study, dreaming over his

books of chivalry. His dusty counting-house fades before his eyes, or

changes into a Spanish mine; he gropes after diamonds, or dives after

pearls. The subterranean garden of Aladdin is nothing to the realms of

wealth that break upon his imagination.

When a man of business, therefore, hears on every side rumors of

fortunes suddenly acquired; when he finds banks liberal, and brokers

busy; when he sees adventurers flush of paper capital, and full of

scheme and enterprise; when he perceives a greater disposition to buy

than to sell; when trade overflows its accustomed channels, and deluges

the country; when he hears of new regions of commercial adventure, of

distant marts and distant mines, swallowing merchandise and disgorging

gold; when he finds joint stock companies of all kinds forming;

railroads, canals, and locomotive engines, springing up on every side;

when idlers suddenly become men of business, and dash into the game

of commerce as they would into the hazards of the faro table; when he

beholds the streets glittering with new equipages, palaces conjured up

by the magic of speculation; tradesmen flushed with sudden success, and

vying with each other in ostentatious expense; in a word, when he hears

the whole community joining in the theme of "unexampled prosperity."

let him look upon the whole as a "weather breeder," and prepare for the

impending storm.

* * * * *

From The Life of Washington.

=_184._= DEATH AND BURIAL OF BRADDOCK.

The proud spirit of Braddock was broken by his defeat. He remained

silent the first evening after the battle, only ejaculating at night,

"Who would have thought it!" He was equally silent the following day;

yet hope still seemed to linger in his breast, from another ejaculation:

"We shall better know how to deal with them another time!"

He was grateful for the attentions paid to him by Captain Stewart and

Washington, and more than once, it is said, expressed his admiration of

the gallantry displayed by the Virginians in the action. It is said,

moreover, that in his last moments, he apologized to Washington for the

petulance with which he had rejected his advice, and bequeathed to him

his favorite charger and his faithful servant, Bishop, who had helped to

convey him from the field.

Some of these facts, it is true, rest on tradition, yet we are willing

to believe them, as they impart a gleam of just and generous feeling

to his closing scene. He died on the night of the 13th, at the Great

Meadows, the place of Washington's discomfiture in the preceding year.

His obsequies were performed before break of day. The chaplain having

been wounded, Washington read the funeral service. All was done in

sadness, and without parade, so as not to attract the attention of

lurking savages, who might discover and outrage his grave. It is

doubtful even whether a volley was fired over it, that last military

honor which he had recently paid to the remains of an Indian warrior.

The place of his sepulture, however, is still known, and pointed out.

Reproach spared him not, even when in his grave. The failure of the

expedition was attributed both in England and America, to his obstinacy,

his technical pedantry, and his military conceit. He had been

continually warned to be on his guard against ambush and surprise, but

without avail. Had he taken the advice urged on him by Washington and

others, to employ scouting parties of Indians and rangers, he would

never have been so signally surprised and defeated.

Still his dauntless conduct on the field of battle shows him to have

been a man of fearless spirit; and he was universally allowed to be an

accomplished disciplinarian. His melancholy end, too, disarms censure

of its asperity. Whatever may have been his faults and errors, he in a

manner expiated them by the hardest lot that can befall a brave soldier,

ambitious of renown--an unhonored grave in a strange land: a memory

clouded by misfortune, and a name for ever coupled with defeat.

* * * * *

=_185._= BARON STEUBEN IN THE REVOLUTIONARY ARMY.

The committee having made their report, the baron's proffered services

were accepted with a vote of thanks for his disinterestedness, and he

was ordered to join the army of Valley Forge. That army, in its ragged

condition and squalid quarters, presented a sorry aspect to a strict

disciplinarian from Germany, accustomed to the order and appointments

of European camps; and the baron often declared, that under such

circumstances no army in Europe could be kept together for a single

month. The liberal mind of Steuben, however, made every allowance; and

Washington soon found in him a consummate soldier, free from pedantry or

pretension.

* * * * *

For a time, there was nothing but drills throughout the camp, then

gradually came evolutions of every kind. The officers were schooled as

well as the men. The troops, says a person who was present in the camp,

were paraded in a single line with shouldered arms; every officer in his

place. The baron passed in front, then took the musket of each soldier

in hand, to see whether it was clean and well polished, and examined

whether the men's accoutrements were in good order.

He was sadly worried for a time with the militia; especially when any

manoeuvre was to be performed. The men blundered in their exercise; the

baron blundered in his English; his French and German were of no avail;

he lost his temper, which was rather warm; swore in all three languages

at once, which made the matter worse, and at length called his aide

to his assistance, to help him curse the blockheads as it was

pretended--but no doubt to explain the manoeuvre.

Still the grand marshal of the court of Hohenzollern mingled with the

veteran soldier of Frederick, and tempered his occasional bursts of

impatience; and he had a kind generous heart, that soon made him a

favorite with the men. His discipline extended to their comforts. He

inquired into their treatment by the officers. He examined into the

doctor's reports; visited the sick; and saw that they were well lodged

and attended.

He was an example, too, of the regularity and system he exacted. One of

the most alert and indefatigable men in the camp; up at day-break if not

before, whenever there were to be any important manoeuvres, he took his

cup of coffee and smoked his pipe while his servant dressed his hair,

and by sunrise he was in the saddle, equipped at all points, with the

star of his order of knighthood glittering on his breast, and was off to

the parade, alone, if his suite were not ready to attend him.

The strong good sense of the baron was evinced in the manner in which he

adapted his tactics to the nature of the army and the situation of the

country, instead of adhering with bigotry to the systems of Europe. His

instructions were appreciated by all. The officers received them gladly

and conformed to them. The men soon became active and adroit. The army

gradually acquired a proper organization, and began to operate, like

a great machine; and Washington found in the baron an intelligent,

disinterested, truthful coadjutor, well worthy of the badge he wore of

the Order of _Fidelity_.

* * * * *

=_Richard Henry Wilde, 1789-1847._= (Manual, pp. 501, 521.)

From "Conjectures concerning Torquato Tasso."

=_186._= INTEREST OF TASSO'S LIFE.

There is scarcely any poet whose life excites a more profound and

melancholy interest than that of Torquato Tasso.

His short and brilliant career of glory captivates the imagination,

while the heart is deeply affected by his subsequent misfortunes.

Greater fame and greater misery have seldom been the lot of man, and a

few brief years sufficed for each extreme.

An exile even in his boyhood, the proscription and confiscation suffered

by his father deprived him of home and patrimony. Honor and love, and

the favor of princes, and enthusiastic praise, dazzled his youth. Envy,

malice, and treachery, tedious imprisonment and imputed madness, insult,

poverty, and persecution, clouded his manhood. The evening of his days

was saddened by a troubled spirit, want, sickness, bitter memories, and

deluded hopes; and when at length a transient gleam of sunshine fell

upon his prospects, death substituted the immortal for the laurel crown.

Mystery adds its fascination to his story. The causes of his

imprisonment are hidden in obscurity; it is still disputed whether he

was insane or not.

Few points of literary history, therefore, are more interesting, or more

obscure, than the love, the madness, and the imprisonment of Tasso.

* * * * *

=_George Ticknor, 1791-1871._= (Manual, p. 502.)

From "The History of Spanish Literature."

=_187._= DESIGN OF CERVANTES IN WRITING DON QUIXOTE.

His purpose in writing the Don Quixote has sometimes been enlarged by

the ingenuity of a refined criticism, until it has been made to embrace

the whole of the endless contrast between the poetical and the prosaic

in our natures,--between heroism and generosity on one side, as if they

were mere illusions, and a cold selfishness on the other, as if it were

the truth and reality of life. But this is a metaphysical conclusion

drawn from views of the work at once imperfect and exaggerated; a

conclusion contrary to the spirit of the age, which was not given to a

satire so philosophical and generalizing, and contrary to the character

of Cervantes himself, as we follow it from the time when he first became

a soldier, through all his trials in Algiers, and down to the moment

when his warm and trusting heart dictated the Dedication of "Persiles

and Sigismunda" to the Count de Lemos. His whole spirit, indeed, seems

rather to have been filled with a cheerful confidence in human virtue,

and his whole bearing in life seems to have been a contradiction to that

discouraging and saddening scorn for whatever is elevated and generous,

which such an interpretation of the Don Quixote necessarily implies.

* * * * *

At the very beginning of the work, he announces it to be his sole

purpose to break down the vogue and authority of books of chivalry, and

at the end of the whole he declares anew in his own person, that "he

had no other desire than to render abhorred of men the false and absurd

stories contained in books of chivalry;" exulting in his success as an

achievement of no small moment. And such, in fact, it was, for we have

abundant proof that the fanaticism for these romances was so great in

Spain, during the sixteenth century, as to have become matter of alarm

to the more judicious....

To destroy a passion that had struck its roots so deeply in the

character of all classes of men, to break up the only reading which

at that time could be considered widely popular and fashionable, was

certainly a bold undertaking, and one that marks anything rather than

a scornful or broken spirit, or a want of faith in what is most to

be valued in our common nature. The great wonder is, that Cervantes

succeeded. But that he did there is no question. No book of chivalry was

written after the appearance of Don Quixote, in 1605; and from the same

date, even those already enjoying the greatest favor ceased, with one or

two unimportant exceptions, to be reprinted; so that, from that time to

the present, they have been constantly disappearing, until they are now

among the rarest of literary curiosities--a solitary instance of the

power of genius to destroy, by a single well-timed blow, an entire

department, and that, too, a flourishing and favored one, in the

literature of a great and proud nation.

The general plan Cervantes adopted to accomplish this object, without,

perhaps, foreseeing its whole course, and still less all its results,

was simple as well as original. In 1605 he published the first part of

Don Quixote, in which a country gentleman of La Mancha, full of genuine

Castilian honor and enthusiasm, gentle and dignified in his character,

trusted by his friends, and loved by his dependants--is represented as

so completely crazed by long reading the most famous books of chivalry,

that he believes them to be true, and feels himself called on to become

the impossible knight-errant they describe,--nay, actually goes forth,

into the world to defend, the oppressed and avenge the injured, like the

heroes of his romances.

* * * * *

=_James Hall, 1793-1868._= (Manual, p. 510.)

From "Statistics of the West."

=_188._= DESCRIPTION OF A PRAIRIE.

Imagine a stream of a mile in width, whose waters are as transparent as

those of the mountain spring, flowing over beds of rock or gravel. Fancy

the prairie commencing at the water's edge--a natural meadow covered

with grass and flowers, rising, with a gentle slope, for miles, so that

in the vast panorama thousands of acres are exposed to the eye. The

prospect is bounded by a range of low hills, which sometimes approach

the river, and again recede, and whose summits, which are seen gently

waving along the horizon, form the level of the adjacent country.... The

timber is scattered in groves and strips, the whole country being one

vast illimitable prairie, ornamented by small collections of trees....

But more often we see the single tree, without a companion near, or

the little clump, composed of a few dozen oaks or elms; and not

unfrequently, hundreds of acres embellished with a kind of open

woodland, and exhibiting the appearance of a splendid park, decorated

with skill and care by the hand of taste. Here we behold the beautiful

lawn enriched with flowers, and studded with trees, which are so

dispersed about as not to intercept the prospect, standing singly, so as

not to shade the ground, and occasionally collected in clusters, while

now and then the shade deepens into the gloom of the forest, or opens

into long vistas and spacious plains, destitute of tree or shrub.

When the eye roves off from the green plain, to the groves, or points of

timber, these also are found ... robed in the most attractive hues.

The rich undergrowth is in full bloom. The red-bud, the dog-wood, the

crab-apple, the wild plum, the cherry, the wild rose, are abundant in

all the rich lands; and the grape-vine, though its blossom is unseen,

fills the air with fragrance. The variety of the wild fruit and

flowering shrubs is so great, and such the profusion of the blossoms

with which they are bowed down, that the eye is regaled almost to

satiety.

The gayety of the prairie, its embellishments, and the absence of the

gloom and savage wildness of the forest, all contribute to dispel the

feeling of lonesomeness which usually creeps over the mind of the

solitary traveler in the wilderness. Though he may not see a house nor

a human being, and is conscious that he is far from the habitations of

men, he can scarcely divest himself of the idea that he is traveling

through scenes embellished by the hand of art. The flowers so fragile,

so delicate, and so ornamental, seem to have been tastefully disposed

to adorn the scene. The groves and clumps of trees appear to have been

scattered over the lawn to beautify the landscape; and it is not easy to

avoid that illusion of the fancy which persuades the beholder, that such

scenery has been created to gratify the refined taste of civilized man.

* * * * *

=_Henry R. Schoolcraft, 1793-1864._= (Manual, p. 504.)

From "Oneota."

=_189._= THE CHIPPEWA INDIAN.

Of all the existing branches of the Algonquin stock in America, this

extensive and populous tribe appears to have the strongest claims to

intellectual distinction, on the score of their traditions, so far at

least, as the present state of our inquiries extends. They possess

in their curious fictitious legends and lodge-tales, a varied and

exhaustless fund of tradition, which is repeated from generation to

generation. These legends hold, among the wild men of the north, the

relative rank of story-books; and are intended both to amuse and

instruct. This people possess also the art of picture writing in a

degree which denotes that they have been, either more careful, or more

fortunate, in the preservation of this very ancient art of the

human race. Warriors, and the bravest of warriors, they are yet an

intellectual people.

... They believe that the great Spirit created material matter, and that

He made the earth and heavens, by the power of His will.... He made one

great and master-spirit of evil, to whom He also gave assimilated and

subordinate evil spirits having something of his own nature, to execute

his will. Two antagonist powers, they believe, were thus placed in the

world, who are continually striving for the mastery, and who have power

to affect the lives and fortunes of men. This constitutes the

ground-work of their religion, sacrifices, and worship.

They believe that animals were created before men, and that they

originally had rule on the earth. By the power of necromancy, some of

these animals were transformed to men, who, as soon as they assumed this

new form, began to hunt the animals, and make war against them. It is

expected that these animals will resume their human shapes, in a future

state, and hence their hunters feign some clumsy excuses for their

present policy of killing them. They believe that all animals, and

birds, and reptiles, and even insects, possess reasoning faculties,

and have souls. It is in these opinions, that we detect the ancient,

doctrine of transmigration.

One of the most curious opinions of this people is their belief in the

mysterious and sacred character of fire. They obtain sacred fire, for

all national and ecclesiastical purposes, from the flint. Their national

pipes are lighted with this fire. It is symbolical of purity. Their

notions of the boundary between life and death, which is also

symbolically the limit of the material verge between this and a future

state, are revealed in connection with the exhibition of flames of fire.

They also make sacrifices by fire of some part of the first fruits of

the chase. These traits are to be viewed, perhaps, in relation to their

ancient worship of the sun, above noticed, of which the traditions and

belief are still generally preserved. The existence of the numerous

classes of jossakeeds, or mutterers (the word is from the utterance of

sounds low on the earth), is a trait that will remind the reader of a

similar class of men in early ages in the eastern hemisphere. These

persons constitute, indeed, the Magi of our western forests.

* * * * *

=_Edward Everett, 1794-1865._= (Manual, pp. 487, 531.)

From "Orations and Speeches."

=_190._= ASTRONOMY, FOR ALL TIME.

There is much by day to engage the attention of the observatory; the

sun, his apparent motions, his dimensions, the spots on his disk (to

us the faint indications of movements of unimagined grandeur in his

luminous atmosphere), a solar eclipse, a transit of the interior

planets, the mysteries of the spectrum--all phenomena of vast importance

and interest. But night is the astronomer's accepted time: he goes to

his delightful labors when the busy world goes to its rest. A dark pall

spreads over the resorts of active life; terrestrial objects, hill and

valley, and rock and stream, and the abodes of men, disappear; but the

curtain is drawn up which concealed the heavenly hosts. There they shine

and there they move, as they moved and shone to the eyes of Newton and

Galileo, of Kepler and Copernicus, of Ptolemy and Hipparchus; yea, as

they moved and shone when the morning stars sang together, and all the

sons of God shouted for joy. All has changed on earth; but the glorious

heavens remain unchanged. The plough has passed over the remains of

mighty cities, the homes of powerful nations are desolate, the languages

they spoke are forgotten; but the stars that shone for them are shining

for us; the same eclipses run their steady cycle; the same equinoxes

call out the flowers of spring, and send the husbandman to the harvest;

the sun pauses at either tropic, as he did when his course began; and

sun and moon, and planet and satellite, and star, and constellation, and

galaxy, still bear witness to the power, the wisdom, and the love of Him

who placed them in the heavens, and upholds them there.

* * * * *

=_191._= DESCRIPTION OF THE SUNRISE.

Much, however, as we are indebted to our observatories for elevating our

conceptions of the heavenly bodies, they present even to the unaided

sight, scenes of glory which, words are too feeble to describe. I had

occasion, a few weeks since, to take the early train from Providence

to Boston; and for this purpose rose at two o'clock in the morning.

Everything around was wrapt in darkness and hushed in silence, broken

only by what seemed at that hour the unearthly clank and rush of the

train. It was a mild, serene, midsummer's night,--the sky was without a

cloud,--the winds were whist. The moon, then in the last quarter, had

just risen, and the stars shone with a spectral lustre, but little

affected by her presence. Jupiter, two hours high, was the herald of the

day; the Pleiades, just above the horizon, shed their sweet influence

in the east; Lyra sparkled near the zenith; Andromeda veiled her

newly-discovered glories from the naked eye, in the south; the steady

pointers, far beneath the pole, looked meekly up from the depths of the

north, to their sovereign.

Such was the glorious spectacle as I entered the train. As we proceeded,

the timid approach of twilight became more perceptible; the intense blue

of the sky began to soften; the smaller stars, like little children,

went first to rest; the sister beams of the Pleiades soon melted

together; but the bright constellations of the west and north remained

unchanged. Steadily the wondrous transfiguration went on. Hands of

angels, hidden from mortal eyes, shifted the scenery of the heavens; the

glories of night dissolved into the glories of the dawn. The blue sky

now turned more softly gray; the great watch-stars shut up their holy

eyes; the east began to kindle. Faint streaks of purple soon blushed

along the sky; the whole celestial concave was filled with the inflowing

tides of the morning light, which came pouring down from above in one

great ocean of radiance; till at length, as we reached the Blue Hills, a

flash of purple fire blazed out from above the horizon, and turned the

dewy tear-drops of flower and leaf, into rubies and diamonds. In a few

seconds, the everlasting gates of the morning were thrown wide open,

and the lord of day, arrayed in glories too severe for the gaze of man,

began his state.

I do not wonder at the superstition of the ancient Magians, who, in the

morning of the world, went up to the hill-tops of Central Asia, and

ignorant of the true God, adored the most glorious work of His hand. But

I am filled with amazement when I am told that in this enlightened age,

and in the heart of the Christian world, there are persons who can

witness this daily manifestation of the power and wisdom of the Creator,

and yet say in their hearts, "there is no God."

* * * * *

From a Discourse on the Discover and Colonization of America.

=_192._= THE CELTIC IMMIGRATION.

This great Celtic race is one of the most remarkable that has appeared

in history. Whether it belongs to that extensive Indo-European family of

nations, which, in ages before the dawn of history, took up a line of

march in two columns from Lower India, and moving westward by both a

northern and a southward route, finally diffused itself over Western

Asia, Northern Africa, and the greater part of Europe; or whether, as

others suppose, the Celtic race belongs to a still older stock, and was

itself driven down upon the south and into the west of Europe by the

overwhelming force of the Indo-Europeans, is a question which we have

no time at present to discuss. However it may be decided, it would seem

that for the first time, as far as we are acquainted with the fortunes

of this interesting race, they have found themselves in a really

prosperous condition, in this country. Driven from the soil in the west

of Europe, to which their forefathers clang for two thousand years, they

have at length, and for the first time in their entire history, found

a real home in a land of strangers. Having been told, in the frightful

language of political economy, that at the daily table which Nature

spreads for the human family there is no cover laid for them in Ireland,

they have crossed the ocean to find occupation, shelter, and bread, on a

foreign but friendly soil.

This "Celtic Exodus," as it has been aptly called, is to all the parties

immediately connected with it one of the most important events of the

day. To the emigrants themselves it may be regarded as a passing from

death to life. It will benefit Ireland by reducing a surplus population,

and restoring a sounder and juster relation of capital and labor. It

will benefit the laboring classes in England, where wages have been kept

down to the starvation-point by the struggle between native population

and the inhabitants of the sister island, for that employment and food,

of which there is not enough for both. This benefit will extend from

England to ourselves, and will lessen the pressure of that competition

which our labor is obliged to sustain, with the ill-paid labor of

Europe. In addition to all this, the constant influx into America of

stout and efficient hands supplies the greatest want in a new country,

which is that of labor, gives value to land, and facilitates the

execution of every species of private enterprise and public work.

I am not insensible to the temporary inconveniences which are to be set

off against these advantages, on both sides of the water. Much suffering

attends the emigrant, there, on his passage, and after his arrival. It

is possible that the value of our native labor may have been depressed

by too sudden and extensive a supply from abroad; and it is certain that

our asylums and alms-houses are crowded with foreign inmates, and the

resources of public and private benevolence have been heavily drawn

upon. These are considerable evils, but they have perhaps been

exaggerated.

* * * * *

=_Hugh S. Legaré, 1797-1843._= (Manual, p. 487.)

From his "Collected Writings."

=_193._= THE STUDY OF THE ANCIENT CLASSICS.

Not to have the curiosity to study the learned languages is not to have

any vocation at all for literature: it is to be destitute of liberal

curiosity and of enthusiasm; to mistake a self-sufficient and

superficial dogmatism for philosophy, and that complacent indolence

which is the bane of all improvement, for a proof of the highest degree

of it....

All that we ask, then, is, that a boy should be thoroughly taught the

ancient languages from his eighth to his sixteenth year, or thereabouts,

in which time he will have his taste formed, his love of letters

completely, perhaps enthusiastically, awakened, his knowledge of the

principles of universal grammar perfected, his memory stored with the

history, the geography, and the chronology of all antiquity, and with

a vast fund of miscellaneous literature besides, and his imagination

kindled with the most beautiful and glowing passages of Greek and Roman

poetry and eloquence; all the rules of criticism familiar to him--the

sayings of sages and the achievements of heroes indelibly impressed upon

his heart. He will have his curiosity fired for further acquisition,

and find himself in possession of the golden keys which open all the

recesses where the stores of knowledge have ever been laid up by

civilized man. The consciousness of strength will give him confidence,

and he will go to the rich treasures themselves, and take what he wants,

instead of picking up eleemosynary scraps from those whom, in spite of

himself, he will regard as his betters in literature. He will be let

into that great communion of scholars throughout all ages and all

nations,--like that more awful communion of saints in the holy church

universal,--and feel a sympathy with departed genius, and with the

enlightened and the gifted minds of other countries, as they appear

before him, in the transports of a sort of vision beatific, bowing down

at the same shrines, and flowing with the same holy love of whatever is

most pure, and fair, and exalted, and divine in human nature.

* * * * *

From a Review of Kent's Commentaries.

=_194._= DISADVANTAGES OF COLONIAL LIFE.

It is our misfortune, in one sense, to have succeeded, at the very

outset of our career, to an over-grown inheritance in the literature of

the mother country, and to have stood for a century in that political

and social relation towards her, which was of all others most

unfavorable to any originality in genius and opinions. Our good

fathers piously spoke of England as their _home_. The inferiority--the

discouraging and degrading inferiority--implied in a state of colonial

dependence, chilled the enthusiasm of talent, and repressed the

aspirations of ambition. Our youth were trained in English schools to

classical learning and good manners; but no scholarship--great as we

believe its efficacy to be--can either inspire or supply, the daring

originality and noble pride of genius, to which, by some mysterious

law of nature, the love of country and a national spirit seem to

be absolutely necessary. We imported our opinions ready-made--"by

balefuls," if it so pleases the Rev. Sidney Smith. We were taught

to read by English school-masters--and to reason by English

authors--English clergymen filled our pulpits, English lawyers our

courts--and above all things, we deferred to and dreaded the dictatorial

authority and withering contempt of English criticism. It is difficult

to imagine a state of things more fatal to intellectual dignity

and enterprise, and the consequences were such as might have been

anticipated. What is still more lamentable, although the cause has in a

good measure ceased, the effect continues, nor do we see any remedy for

the evil until our youth shall be taught to go up to the same original

and ever-living fountains of all literature, at which the Miltons, and

the Barrows, and the Drydens drank in so much of their enthusiasm and

inspiration, and to cast off entirely that slavish dependence upon the

opinions of others which they must feel, who take their knowledge of

what it is either their duty, their interest, or their ambition to

learn, at second hand.

* * * * *

=_Francis L. Hawks, 1798-1866._= (Manual, p. 480.)

From "Narrative of the United States Expedition to Japan."

=_195._= JAPAN INTERESTING IN MANY ASPECTS.

Viewed in any of its aspects, the empire of Japan has long presented to

the thoughtful mind an object of uncommon interest. And this interest

has been greatly increased by the mystery with which, for the last two

centuries, an exclusive policy has sought to surround the institutions

of this remarkable country....

The political inquirer, for instance, has wished to study in detail

the form of government, the administration of laws, and the domestic

institutions, under which a nation systematically prohibiting

intercourse with the rest of the world has attained to a state of

civilization, refinement, and intelligence, the mere glimpses of which

so strongly invite further investigation.

The student of physical geography, aware how much national

characteristics are formed or modified by peculiarities of physical

structure in every country, would fain know more of the lands and the

seas, the mountains and the rivers, the forests and the fields, which

fall within the limits of this almost _terra incognita_.

... The man of commerce asks to be told of its products and its trade,

its skill in manufactures, the commodities it needs, and the returns it

can supply.

The scholar asks to be introduced to its literature, that he may

contemplate in historians, poets, and dramatists (for Japan has them

all), a picture of the national mind.

The Christian desires to know the varied phases of their superstition

and idolatry, and longs for the dawn of that day when a purer faith

and more enlightened worship shall bring them within the circle of

Christendom.

Amid such a diversity of pursuits as we have enumerated, a common

interest unites all in a common sympathy; and hence the divine and the

philosopher, the navigator and the naturalist, the man of business and

the man of letters, have alike joined in a desire for the thorough

exploration of a field at once so extensive and so inviting.

* * * * *

=_George P. Marsh, 1801-._= (Manual, p. 532.)

From "Lectures on the English Language."

=_196._= METHOD OF LEARNING ENGLISH.

The groundwork of English, indeed, can be, and best is, learned at the

domestic fireside--a school for which there is no adequate substitute;

but the knowledge there acquired is not, as in homogeneous languages, a

root, out of which will spontaneously grow the flowers and the fruits

which adorn and enrich the speech of man. English has been so much

affected by extraneous, alien, and discordant influences, so much

mixed with foreign ingredients, so much overloaded with adventitious

appendages, that it is to most of those who speak it, in a considerable

degree, a conventional and arbitrary symbolism. The Anglo-Saxon tongue

has a craving appetite, and is as rapacious of words, and as tolerant of

forms, as are its children, of territory and of religions. But in spite

of its power of assimilation, there is much of the speech of England

which has never become connatural to the Anglican people; and its

grammar has passively suffered the introduction of many syntactical

combinations, which are not merely irregular, but repugnant. I shall not

here inquire whether this condition of English is an evil. There are

many cases where a complex and cunningly-devised machine, dexterously

guided, can do that which the congenital hand fails to accomplish; but

the computing, of our losses and gains, the striking of our linguistic

balance, belongs elsewhere. Suffice it to say, that English is not a

language which teaches itself by mere unreflecting usage. It can only be

mastered, in all its wealth, in all its power, by conscious, persistent

labor; and therefore, when all the world is awaking to the value of

general philological science, it would ill become us to be slow in

recognizing the special importance of the study of our own tongue.

* * * * *

From "Man and Nature."

=_197._= THE EVERGREENS OF SOUTHERN EUROPE.

The multitude of species, intermixed as they are in their spontaneous

growth, gives the American forest landscape a variety of aspect not

often seen in the woods of Europe; and the gorgeous tints which nature

repeats from the dying dolphin to paint the falling leaf of the American

maples, oaks, and ash trees, clothe the hill-sides and fringe the

watercourses with a rainbow splendor of foliage, unsurpassed by the

brightest groupings of the tropical flora. It must be admitted, however,

that both the northern and the southern declivities of the Alps exhibit

a nearer approximation to this rich and multifarious coloring of

autumnal vegetation than most American travellers in Europe are willing

to allow; and, besides, the small deciduous shrubs, which often carpet

the forest glades of these mountains, are dyed with a ruddy and orange

glow, which, in the distant landscape, is no mean substitute for the

scarlet and crimson and gold and amber of the trans-atlantic woodland.

No American evergreen known to me resembles the umbrella pine

sufficiently to be a fair object of comparison with it. A cedar, very

common above the Highlands on the Hudson, is extremely like the cypress,

straight, slender, with erect, compressed ramification, and feathered to

the ground, but its foliage is neither so dark nor so dense, the tree

does not attain the majestic height of the cypress, nor has it the lithe

flexibility of that tree. In mere shape, the Lombardy poplar nearly

resembles this latter, but it is almost a profanation to compare the

two, especially when they are agitated by the wind; for under such

circumstances, the one is the most majestic, the other the most

ungraceful, or--if I may apply such an expression to any thing but human

affectation of movement--the most awkward of trees. The poplar trembles

before the blast, flutters, struggles wildly, dishevels its foliage,

gropes around with its feeblest branches, and hisses as in impotent

passion. The cypress gathers its limbs still more closely to its stem,

bows a gracious salute rather than an humble obeisance to the tempest,

bends to the winds with an elasticity that assures you of its prompt

return to its regal attitude, and sends from its thick leaflets a murmur

like the roar of the far-off ocean.

* * * * *

=_George H. Calvert, 1803-._= (Manual pp. 503, 505.)

From "First Years in Europe."

=_198._= ESTIMATE OF COLERIDGE.

That Coleridge with his mental pockets full of gold, and with a mine in

fee wherefrom he not only replenished his daily purse but enriched his

neighbors, should now and then borrow a guinea, is a fact at which we

should rather smile than frown, or, more fitly, pass by without special

sensation, seeing what has been the practice of the highest,--a practice

which may with full ethical assent be regarded as a privilege inherent

in their supremacy, the free use of all knowledge collected and

experience acquired, no matter when, where, or by whom, being a natural

right of him _who has the genius to turn it to best account_. That in

certain cases where acknowledgment was due it was not made, we may

ascribe to opinion; or to defects which broke the complete rotundity of

such a circle of endowments that without this breach they would have

swollen their possessor to almost preterhuman proportions, empowering

him to "bestride the narrow world like a Colossus."

Let the truth be spoken of all men. Let no man's greatness be a bar

to full utterance; but let temperance and charity--duties peculiarly

imperative when uttering derogatory truth--be especially observed

towards a resplendent suffering brother like Coleridge, suffering from

his own weakness, but on that very account entitled to a tenderer

consideration from those who are themselves endowed to feel and claim

something more than common human affinity with a nature so large and so

susceptive. Could but a tithe of the fresh insights he has given us be

allowed as an offset against his short-comings, never, from any scholar

of sound sensibilities, would a whisper be heard against his name. Under

the coarse, rusty, one-pronged spur of sectarian or political rancor,

or from the knawing consciousness of sterile inferiority to a creative

mind, plenty of people are ready and eager to try, with their net-work

of flimsy phrases, to cramp the play of a giant's limbs, or, with the

slow slimy poison of envy and malice, to spot and deform his beauty and

his symmetry. To such, to the half-eyed and the half-souled, to the

prosaic and the unsympathetic, be left all harsh condemnation of

Coleridge.

For the living, not for the dead, are these inadequate words spoken. The

writings of Coleridge--in tone high, refined, noble; in expression rich,

choice, copious; in spirit as pure as the sun's light; intellectually

of rare breadth and mellowness and brilliancy--are a healthful power in

literature, their influence solely for good, warming, strengthening,

elevating. As for Coleridge himself, his is an immortal name; and as

he walks through the ages his robes adjusting themselves with varying

grace, in harmony with the mutations of opinion, his inward life will be

ever fresh to his fellow-men, while his detractors will be shaken from

him as _gryllidoe_ from the tunic of the superb Diana.

* * * * *

=_Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-_= (Manual pp. 478, 503, 531.)

From "Essays," Second Series.

=_199._= INFLUENCE OF NATURE.

There are days which occur in this climate, at almost any season of

the year, wherein the world reaches its perfection; when the air, the

heavenly bodies, and the earth, make a harmony, as if Nature would

indulge her offspring; when, in these bleak upper sides of the planet,

nothing is to desire that we have heard of the happiest latitudes, and

we bask in the shining hours of Florida and Cuba; when everything that

has life gives sign of satisfaction, and the cattle that lie on the

ground seem to have great and tranquil thoughts. These halcyons may be

looked for with a little more assurance in that pure October weather

which we distinguish by the name of Indian summer. The day, immeasurably

long, sleeps over the broad hills, and warm, wide fields. To have lived

through all its sunny hours seems longevity enough. The solitary places

do not seem quite lonely. At the gates of the forest, the surprised man

of the world is forced to leave his city estimates of great and small,

wise and foolish. The knapsack of custom falls off his back with the

first step he makes into these precincts. Here is sanctity which shames

our religions, and reality which discredits our heroes.

* * * * *

From "Society and Solitude."

=_200._= THE POWER OF CHILDHOOD.

The perfection of the providence for childhood is easily acknowledged.

The care which covers the seed of the tree under tough husks and, stony

cases, provides, for the human plant, the mother's breast and the

father's house. The size of the nestler is comic, and its tiny

beseeching weakness is compensated perfectly by the happy patronizing

look of the mother, who is a sort of high reposing Providence toward it.

Welcome to the parents the puny straggler, strong in his weakness, his

little arms more irresistible than the soldier's, his lips touched with

persuasion which Chatham and Pericles in manhood had not. His unaffected

lamentations when he lifts up his voice on high, or, more beautiful, the

sobbing child,--the face all liquid grief, as he tries to swallow his

vexation,--soften all hearts to pity, and to mirthful and clamorous

compassion. The small despot asks so little that all reason and all

nature are on his side. His ignorance is more charming than all

knowledge, and his little sins more bewitching than any virtue. His

flesh is angels' flesh, all alive. "Infancy," said Coleridge, "presents

body and spirit in unity: the body is all animated." All day, between

his three or four sleeps, he coos like a pigeon-house, sputters, and

spurs, and puts on his faces of importance; and when he fasts, the

little Pharisee fails not to sound his trumpet before him. By lamp-light

he delights in shadows on the wall; by daylight, in yellow and scarlet.

Carry him out of doors,--he is overpowered by the light and the extent

of natural objects, and is silent. Then presently begins his use of his

fingers, and he studies power, the lesson of his race. First it appears

in no great harm, in architectural tastes. Out of blocks, thread-spools,

cards, and checkers, he will build his pyramid with the gravity of

Palladio. With an acoustic apparatus of whistle and rattle, he explores

the laws of sound. But chiefly, like his senior countrymen, the young

American studies new and speedier modes of transportation. Mistrusting

the cunning of his small legs, he wishes to ride on the necks and

shoulders of all flesh. The small enchanter nothing can withstand, no

seniority of age, no gravity of character; uncles, aunts, grandsires,

grandams, fall an easy prey: he conforms to nobody, all conform to

him; all caper and make mouths, and babble, and chirrup to him. On the

strongest shoulders he rides, and pulls the hair of laurelled heads.

* * * * *

=_201._= MAN MUST WORK IN HARMONY WITH PRINCIPLES.

Civilization depends on morality. Everything good in man leans on what

is higher. This rule holds in small as in great. Thus, all our strength

and success in the work of our hands depend on our borrowing the aid of

the elements. You have seen a carpenter on a ladder with a broad-axe,

chopping upward chips from a beam. How awkward! At what disadvantage he

works! But see him on the ground, dressing his timber under him. Now,

not his feeble muscles, but the force of gravity brings down the axe;

that is to say, the planet itself splits his stick. The farmer had much

ill-temper, laziness, and shirking, to endure from his hand-sawyers

until one day he bethought him to put his saw-mill on the edge of a

waterfall; and the river never tires of turning his wheel; the river is

good-natured, and never hints an objection.

We had letters to send: couriers could not go fast enough, nor far

enough; broke their wagons, foundered their horses, bad roads in spring,

snow-drifts in winter, heat in summer, could not get the horses out of a

walk. But we found out that the air and earth were full of electricity;

and always going our way,--just the way we wanted to send. _Would he

take a message?_ Just as lief as not; had nothing else to do;

would carry it in no time. Only one doubt occurred, one staggering

objection,--he had no carpet bag, no visible pockets, no hands, not so

much as a mouth, to carry a letter. But, after much thought and many

experiments, we managed to meet the conditions, and to fold up the

letter in such invisible compact form as he could carry in those

invisible pockets of his, never wrought by needle and thread,--and it

went like a charm.

I admire still more than the saw-mill the skill which, on the sea-shore,

makes the tides drive the wheels and grind corn, and which thus engages

the assistance of the moon like a hired hand, to grind, and wind, and

pump, and saw, and split stone, and roll iron.

Now that is the wisdom of a man, in every instance of his labor,

to hitch his wagon to a star, and see his chore done by the gods

themselves. That is the way we are strong, by borrowing the might of the

elements. The forces of steam, gravity, galvanism, light, magnets, wind,

fire, serve us day by day, and cost us nothing.

Our astronomy is full of examples of calling in the aid of these

magnificent helpers. Thus, on a planet so small as ours, the want of

an adequate base for astronomical measurements is early felt, as, for

example, in detecting the parallax of a star. But the astronomer, having

by an observation fixed the place of a star, by so simple an expedient

as waiting six months, and then repeating his observation, contrived

to put the diameter of the earth's orbit, say two hundred millions of

miles, between his first observation and his second, and this line

afforded him a respectable base for his triangle.

All our arts aim to win this vantage. We cannot bring the heavenly

powers to us, but, if we will only choose our jobs in directions in

which they travel, they will undertake them with the greatest pleasure.

It is a peremptory rule with them, that _they never go out of their

road_. We are dapper little busybodies, and run this way and that

way superserviceably; but they swerve never from their foreordained

paths,--neither the sun, nor the moon, nor a bubble of air, nor a mote

of dust.

And as our handiworks borrow the elements, so all our social and

political action leans on principles. To accomplish anything excellent,

the will must work for catholic and universal ends. A puny creature

walled in on every side, as Daniel wrote,--

"Unless above himself he can,

Erect himself, how poor a thing is man!"

but when his will leans on a principle, when, he is the vehicle of

ideas, he borrows their omnipotence. Gibraltar may be strong, but ideas

are impregnable, and bestow on the hero their invincibility. "It was

a great instruction," said a saint in Cromwell's war, "that the best

courages are but beams of the Almighty." Hitch your wagon to a star. Let

us not fag in paltry works which serve our pot and bag alone. Let us not

lie and steal. No god will help. We shall find all their teams going the

other way. Charles's Wain, Great Bear, Orion, Leo, Hercules: every god

will leave us. Work rather for those interests which the divinities

honor and promote,--justice, love, freedom, knowledge, utility.

* * * * *

=_202._= RULES FOR READING.

Be sure, then, to read no mean books. Shun the spawn of the press on the

gossip of the hour. Do not read what you shall learn without asking, in

the street and the train. Dr. Johnson said, "he always went into stately

shops;" and good travelers stop at the best hotels; for, though they

cost more, they do not cost much more, and there is the good company and

the best information. In like manner, the scholar knows that the famed

books contain, first and last, the best thoughts and facts. Now and

then, by rarest luck, in some foolish grub street is the gem we want.

But in the best circles is the best information. If you should transfer

the amount of your reading day by day from the newspaper to the standard

authors.--But who dare speak of such a thing.

The three practical rules, then, which I have to offer, are: 1st. Never

read any book that is not a year old. 2d. Never read any but famed

books. 3d. Never read any but what you like; or, in Shakespeare's

phrase,

"No profit goes where is no pleasure ta'en:

In brief, sir, study what you most affect."

Montaigne says, "Books are a languid pleasure;" but I find certain books

vital and spermatic, not leaving the reader what he was: he shuts the

book a richer man. I would never willingly read any others than such.

* * * * *

=_John Russell Bartlett, 1805-._=

From the "Personal Narrative of Explorations," &c.

=_203._= LYNCH LAW AT EL PASO.

On the present occasion, circumstances rendered it necessary for safety,

as well as for the purpose of warning the desperate gang who were now

about to have their deserts, that all should be doubly armed. In the

court-room, therefore, where one of the most solemn scenes of human

experience was enacting, all were armed save the prisoners. There sat

the judge, with a pistol lying on the table before him; the clerks and

attorneys wore revolvers at their sides; and the jurors were either

armed with similar weapons, or carried with them the unerring rifle. The

members of the commission and citizens, who were either guarding the

prisoners or protecting the court, carried by their sides a revolver, a

rifle, or a fowling-piece, thus presenting a scene more characteristic

of feudal times than of the nineteenth century. The fair but sun-burnt

complexion of the American portion of the jury, with their weapons

resting against their shoulders, and pipes in their mouths, presented a

striking contrast to the swarthy features of the Mexicans, muffled in

checkered _serapes_, holding their broad-brimmed glazed hats in their

hands, and delicate cigarritos in their lips. The reckless, unconcerned

appearance of the prisoners, whose unshaven faces and dishevelled hair

gave them the appearance of Italian bandits rather than of Americans or

Englishmen, the grave and determined bearing of the bench; the varied

costume and expression of the spectators and members of the Commission,

clad in serapes, blankets, or overcoats, with their different weapons,

and generally with long beards, made altogether one of the most

remarkable groups which ever graced a court-room....

The evidence being closed, a few remarks were now made by the

prosecuting attorney, followed by the charge of the judge, when the case

was given to the jury. In a short time they returned into court with a

verdict of guilty, against William Craig, Marcus Butler, and John Wade;

upon whom the judge then pronounced sentence of death.

The prisoners were now escorted to the little plaza or open square in

front of the village church, where the priest met them, to give such

consolation as his holy office would afford. But their conduct,

notwithstanding the desire on the part of all to afford them every

comfort their position was susceptible of, continued reckless and

indifferent, even to the last moment. Butler alone was affected. He wept

bitterly, and excited much sympathy by his youthful appearance, being

but 21 years of age. His companions begged him "not to cry, as he could

die but once."

The sun was setting when they arrived at the place of execution. The

assembled spectators formed a guard around a small alamo, or poplar

tree, which had been selected for the gallows. It was fast growing

dark, and the busy movements of a large number of the associates of the

condemned, dividing and collecting again in small bodies at different

points around and outside of the party, and then approaching nearer

to the centre, proved that an attack was meditated, if the slightest

opportunity should be given. But the sentence of the law was carried

into effect.

* * * * *

=_Nathaniel Parker Willis, 1807-1867._= (Manual, pp. 504, 519.)

From "Pencillings by the Way."

=_204._= THE AMERICAN ABROAD.

It is a queer feeling to find oneself a _foreigner_. One can not realize

long at a time how his face or his manners should have become peculiar;

and after looking at a print for five minutes in a shop-window, or

dipping into an English book, or in any manner throwing off the mental

habit of the instant, the curious gaze of the passer-by, or the accent

of a strange language, strikes one very singularly. Paris is full of

foreigners of all nations, and of course physiognomies of all characters

may be met everywhere; but, differing as the European nations do

decidedly from each other, they differ still more from the American. Our

countrymen, as a class, are distinguishable wherever they are met; not

as Americans however, for of the habits and manners of Our country,

people know nothing this side the water. But there is something in an

American face, of which I never was aware till I met them in Europe,

that is altogether peculiar. The French take the Americans to be

English; but an Englishman, while he presumes him his countryman, shows

a curiosity to know who he is, which is very foreign to his usual

indifference. As far as I can analyze it, it is the independent,

self-possessed bearing of a man unused to look up to any one as his

superior in rank, united to the inquisitive, sensitive, communicative

expression which is the index to our national character. The first is

seldom possessed in England but by a man of decided rank, and the latter

is never possessed by an Englishman at all. The two are united in no

other nation. Nothing is easier than to tell the rank of an Englishman,

and nothing puzzles an European more than to know how to rate the

pretensions of an American....

* * * * *

From "Ephemera."

=_205._= CHARACTER AND WRITINGS OF JAMES HILLHOUSE.

Like the public feeling, the condition and powers of criticism toward

an author's fame, are essentially changed by his death. His personal

character, and the events of his life--the foreground, so to speak, in

the picture of his mind, are, till this event, wanting to the critical

perspective; and when the hand to correct is cold, and the ear to be

caressed and wounded is sealed, some of the uses of censure, and all

reserve in comparison and final estimate, are done away.

* * * * *

Such men as Hillhouse are not common, even in these days of universal

authorship. In accomplishment of mind and person, he was probably second

to no man. His poems show the first. They are fully conceived, nicely

balanced, exquisitely finished--works for the highest taste to relish,

and for the severest student in dramatic style to erect into a model.

Hadad was published in 1825, during my second year in college, and to

me it was the opening of a new heaven of imagination. The leading

characters possessed me for months, and the bright, clear, harmonious

language was, for a long time, constantly in my ears. The author was

pointed out to me, soon after, and for once, I saw a poet whose mind was

well imaged in his person. In no part of the world have I seen a man of

more distinguished mien, or of a more inborn dignity and elegance of

address. His person was very finely proportioned, his carriage chivalric

and high-bred, and his countenance purely and brightly intellectual.

Add to this a sweet voice, a stamp of high courtesy on everything he

uttered, and singular simplicity and taste in dress, and you have the

portrait of one who, in other days, would have been the mirror of

chivalry, and the flower of nobles and troubadours. Hillhouse was no

less distinguished in oratory.

... Hillhouse had fallen upon days of thrift, and many years of his life

which he should have passed either in his study, or in the councils of

the nation, were enslaved to the drudgery of business. His constitution

seemed to promise him a vigorous manhood, however, and an old age of

undiminished fire, and when he left his mercantile pursuits, and retired

to the beautiful and poetic home of "Sachem's Wood," his friends looked

upon it as the commencement of a ripe and long enduring career

of literature. In harmony with such a life were all his

surroundings--scenery, society, domestic refinement, and

companionship--and never looked promise fairer for the realization of a

dream of glory. That he had laid out something of such a field in the

future, I chance to know, for, though my acquaintance with him was

slight, he confided to me in a casual conversation, the plan of a series

of dramas, different from all he had attempted, upon which he designed

to work with the first mood and leisure he could command. And with his

scholarship; knowledge of life, taste, and genius, what might not have

been expected from its fulfilment? But his hand is cold, and his lips

still, and his light, just rising to its meridian, is lost now to the

world. Love and honor to the memory of such a man.

* * * * *

=_Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1807-. _= (Manual, pp. 503, 505.)

From "Hyperion."

=_206._= THE INTERRUPTED LEGEND.

One by one the objects of our affection depart from us. But our

affections remain, and like vines stretch forth their broken, wounded

tendrils for support. The bleeding heart needs a balm to heal it; and

there is none but the love of its kind,--none but the affection of a

human heart. Thus the wounded, broken affections of Flemming began to

lift themselves from the dust and cling around this new object. Days

and weeks passed; and, like the Student Crisostomo, he ceased to love,

because he began to adore. And with this adoration mingled the prayer,

that, in that hour when the world is still, and the voices that praise

are mute, and reflection cometh like twilight, and the maiden, in her

day dreams, counted the number of her friends, some voice in the sacred

silence of her thoughts might whisper his name.

They were sitting together one morning, on the green, flowery meadow,

under the ruins of Burg Unspunnen. She was sketching the ruins. The

birds were singing, one and all, as if there were no aching hearts, no

sin nor sorrow, in the world. So motionless was the bright air, that the

shadow of the trees lay engraven on the grass. The distant snow-peaks

sparkled in the sun, and nothing frowned, save the square tower of the

old ruin above them.

"What a pity it is," said the lady, as she stopped to rest her weary

fingers, "what a pity it is, that there is no old tradition connected

with this ruin!"

"I will make you one, if you wish," said Flemming.

"Can you make old traditions?"

"O, yes! I made three, the other day, about the Rhine, and one very old

one about the Black Forest. A lady with dishevelled hair; a robber with

a horrible slouched hat; and a night storm among the roaring pines."

"Delightful! Do make one for me."

"With the greatest pleasure. Where will you have the scene? Here, or in

the Black Forest."

"In the Black Forest, by all means! Begin."

"I will unite this ruin and the forest together. But first promise not

to interrupt me. If you snap the golden threads of thought, they will

float away on the air like the film of the gossamer, and I shall never

be able to recover them."

"I promise." "Listen, then, to the Tradition of 'THE FOUNTAIN OF

OBLIVION.'"

"Begin."

Flemming was reclining on the flowery turf, at the lady's feet, looking

up with dreamy eyes into her sweet face, and then into the leaves of the

linden-trees overhead.

"Gentle Lady! Dost thou remember the linden trees of Bülach,--those

tall and stately trees, with velvet down upon their shining leaves, and

rustic benches underneath their overhanging eaves? A leafy dwelling, fit

to be the home of elf or fairy, where first I told my love to thee,

thou cold and stately Hermione! A little peasant girl stood near,

and listened all the while, with eyes of wonder and delight, and an

unconscious smile, to hear the stranger still speak on in accents deep

yet mild,--none else was with us in that hour, save God and that little

child!"

"Why, it is in rhyme!"

"No, no! the rhyme is only in your imagination. You promised not to

interrupt me, and you have already snapped asunder the gossamer threads

of as sweet a dream as was ever spun from a poet's brain."

"It certainly did rhyme!"

* * * * *

=_Henry Reed, 1808-1854._= (Manual, p. 501.)

From "Lectures on English History."

=_207._= LEGENDARY PERIOD OF BRITISH HISTORY.

It would be a weary, and probably vain inquiry to consider minutely the

claims which such historical materials have on our belief; and so little

is there attractive in the legends of British history, that I need

not attempt to dwell upon any of the alleged facts. But I wish before

passing from this part of my subject, briefly to examine the curious

tenacity with which the belief in this legendary literature was once

held, and to show that it was not relinquished until a more critical

standard of historic belief was adopted, and scientific investigation

took the place of uninquiring and passive credulity. It has been said

that no man, before the sixteenth century, presumed to doubt that the

Britons were descended from Brutus the Trojan; and it is equally certain

that no modern writer could presume confidently to assert it.

... It is most difficult for us, in these later days of higher standards

of historic credibility, to form anything like an adequate conception,

of the entire and unquestioning confidence which was felt for the story

of British origin, and the race of ancient British kings. Of this

feeling there is a curious proof in a transaction in the reign of Edward

I., when the sovereignty of Scotland was claimed by the English monarch.

The Scots sought the interposition and protection of the pope, alleging

that the Scottish realm belonged of right to the see of Rome. Boniface

VIII., a pontiff not backward in asserting the claims of the papacy,

did interpose to check the English conquest, and was answered by an

elaborate and respectful epistle from Edward, in which the English claim

is most carefully and confidently derived from the conquest of the whole

country by the Trojans in the times of Eli and Samuel--assuredly a

very respectable antiquity of some two thousand four hundred years.

No Philadelphia estate could be more methodically traced back to the

proprietary title of William Penn, than was this claim to Scotland up to

Brutus, the exile from Troy.... Now, all this is set forth with the most

imperturbable seriousness, and with an air of complete assurance of the

truth. It appears, too, to have fully answered the purpose intended;

and the Scots, finding that the papal antiquity was but a poor defence

against such claims, and as if determined not to be outdone by the

Southron, replied in a document asserting their independence by virtue

of descent from Scota, one of the daughters of Pharaoh. The pope seems

to have been silenced in a conflict of ancestral authority, in which the

succession of St. Peter seemed quite a modern affair, when overshadowed,

by such Trojan and Egyptian antiquity.

* * * * *

=_Caroline M. Kirkland, 1808-1864._= (Manual, p. 484.)

From "Forest Life."

=_208._= THE FELLING OF A GREAT TREE.

One darling tree,--a giant oak which looked as if half a dozen Calibans

might have been pegged in its knotty entrails--this one tree, the

grandfather of the forest, we thought we had saved. It stood a little

apart,--it shadowed no man's land,--it shut the broiling sun from

nobody's windows, so we hoped it might be allowed to die a natural

death. But one unlucky day, a family fresh from "the 'hio" removed into

a house which stood at no great distance from this relic of primeval

grandeur. These people were but little indebted to fortune, and the size

of their potato-patch did not exactly correspond with the number of

rosy-cheeks within doors. So the loan of a piece of ground was a small

thing to ask or to grant. Upon this piece of lent land stood our

favorite oak. The potatoes were scarcely peeping green above the soil,

when we observed that the great boughs which we looked at admiringly a

dozen times a day, as they towered far above the puny race around them,

remained distinct in their outline, instead of exhibiting the heavy

masses of foliage which had usually clothed them before the summer

heat began. Upon nearer inspection it was found that our neighbor had

commenced his plantation by the operation of girdling the tree, for

which favor he expected our thanks, observing pithily that "nothing

wouldn't never grow under sich a great mountain as that!" It is well

that "Goth" and "Vandal" are not actionable.

Yet the felling of a great tree has something of the sublime in it. When

the axe first falls on the trunk of a stately oak, laden with the green

wealth of a century, or a pine whose aspiring peak might look down on a

moderate church steeple, the contrast between the puny instrument and

the gigantic result to be accomplished approaches the ridiculous. But as

"the eagle towering in his pride of place was, by a mousing owl, hawked

at and killed," so the leaf-crowned monarch of the wood has no small

reason to quiver at the sight of a long-armed Yankee approaching his

deep-rooted trunk with an awkward axe. One blow seems to accomplish

nothing: not even a chip falls. But with another stroke comes a broad

slice of the bark, leaving an ominous, gaping wound. Another pair of

blows extends the gash, and when twenty such have fallen, behold a

girdled tree. This would suffice to kill, and a melancholy death it is;

but to fell is quite another thing.... Two deep incisions are made,

yet the towering crown sits firm as ever. And now the destroyer

pauses,--fetches breath,--wipes his beaded brow, takes a wary view

of the bearings of the tree,--and then with a slow and watchful care

recommences his work. The strokes fall doubtingly, and many a cautious

glance is cast upward, for the whole immense mass now trembles, as if

instinct with life, and conscious of approaching ruin. Another blow! it

waves,--a groaning sound is heard--... yet another stroke is necessary.

It is given with desperate force, and the tall peak leaves its place

with an easy sailing motion accelerated every instant, till it crashes

prone on the earth, sending far and wide its scattered branches, and

letting in the sunlight upon the cool, damp, mossy earth, for the first

time perhaps in half a century.

* * * * *

From "Western Clearings."

=_209._= THE BEE TREE.

One of the greatest temptations to our friend Silas, and to most of his

class, is a bee hunt. Neither deer, nor 'coons, nor prairie hens, nor

even bears, prove half as powerful enemies to anything like regular

business, as do these little thrifty vagrants of the forest. The

slightest hint of a bee tree will entice Silas Ashburn and his sons from

the most profitable job of the season, even though the defection is sure

to result in entire loss of the offered advantage; and if the hunt prove

successful, the luscious spoil is generally too tempting to allow of

any care for the future, so long as the "sweet'nin" can be persuaded to

last. "It costs nothing," will poor Mrs. Ashburn observe; "let 'em enjoy

it. It isn't often we have such good luck."

* * * * *

=_Margaret Fuller Ossoli, 1810-1850._= (Manual, p. 502.)

From "At Home and Abroad."

=_210._= CHARACTER OF CARLYLE.

Accustomed to the infinite wit and exhuberant richness of his writings,

his talk is still an amazement and a splendor scarcely to be faced with

steady eyes. He does not converse,--only harangues. It is the usual

misfortune of such marked men (happily not one invariable or inevitable)

that they cannot allow other minds room to breathe and show themselves

in their atmosphere, and thus miss the refreshment and instruction which

the greatest never cease to need from the experience of the humblest.

Carlyle allows no one a chance, but bears down all opposition, not only

by his wit and onset of words, resistless in their sharpness as so many

bayonets, but by actual physical superiority, raising his voice and

rushing on his opponent with a torrent of sound. This is not the least

from unwillingness to allow freedom to others; on the contrary, no

man would more enjoy a manly resistance to his thought; but it is the

impulse of a mind accustomed to follow out its own impulse as the hawk

its prey, and which knows not how to stop in the chase. Carlyle, indeed,

is arrogant and overbearing, but in his arrogance there is no littleness

or self-love: it is the heroic arrogance of some old Scandinavian

conqueror,--it is his nature, and the untamable impulse that has given

him power to crush the dragons. You do not love him, perhaps, nor

revere, and perhaps, also, he would only laugh at you if you did; but

you like him heartily, and like to see him the powerful smith, the

Siegfried, melting all the old iron, in his furnace till it glows to a

sunset red, and burns you if you senselessly go too near. He seemed to

me quite isolated, lonely as the desert; yet never was man more fitted

to prize a man, could he find one to match his mood. He finds such, but

only in the past. He sings rather than talks. He pours upon you a kind

of satirical, heretical, critical poem, with regular cadences, and

generally catching up near the beginning some singular epithet, which

serves as a _refrain_ when his song is full, or with which as with a

knitting-needle he catches up the stitches, if he has chanced now and

then to let fall a row. For the higher kinds of poetry he has no sense,

and his talk on that subject is delightfully and gorgeously absurd; he

sometimes stops a minute to laugh at it himself, then begins anew with

fresh vigor; for all the spirits he is driving before him seem to him as

Fata Morgana; ugly masks in fact, if he can but make them turn about,

but he laughs that they seem to others such dainty Ariels. He puts out

his chin sometimes till it looks like the beak of a bird, and his eyes

flash bright instinctive meanings like Jove's bird; yet he is not calm

and grand enough for the eagle: he is more like the falcon, and yet not

of gentle blood enough for that either. He is not exactly like anything

but himself, and therefore you cannot see him without the most hearty

refreshment and goodwill, for he is original, rich, and strong enough to

afford a thousand faults; one expects some wild land in a rich kingdom.

His talk, like his books, is full of pictures, his critical strokes

masterly; allow for his point of view, and his survey is admirable. He

is a large subject; I cannot speak more nor wiselier of him now, nor

needs it; his works are true, to blame and praise him, the Siegfried of

England, great and powerful, if not quite invulnerable, and of a might

rather to destroy evil than legislate for good. At all events, he seems

to be what Destiny intended, and represents fully a certain side; so we

make no remonstrance as to his being and proceeding for himself, though

we sometimes must for us.

* * * * *

=_Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1809-._= (Manual, p. 520.)

From "The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table."

=_211._= CONSEQUENCES OF EXPOSING AN OLD ERROR.

Did you never, in walking in the fields, come across a large flat stone

which had lain, nobody knows how long, just where you found it, with the

grass forming a little hedge, as it were, all round it, close to its

edges,--and have you not, in obedience to a kind of feeling that told

you it had been lying there long enough, insinuated your stick, or your

foot, or your fingers, under its edge, and turned it over as a housewife

turns a cake, when she says to herself, "It's done brown enough by this

time?" What an odd revelation, and what an unforeseen and unpleasant

surprise to a small community, the very existence of which you had not

suspected, until the sudden dismay and scattering among its members

produced by your turning the old stone over! Blades of grass flattened

down, colorless, matted together, as if they had been bleached and

ironed; hideous crawling creatures, some of them coleopterous or

horny-shelled,--turtle-bugs one wants to call them; some of them softer

but cunningly spread out and compressed like Lepine watches; (Nature

never loses a crack or a crevice, mind you, or a joint in a tavern

bedstead, but she always has one of her flat pattern live timekeepers

to slide into it;) black, glossy crickets, with their long filaments

sticking out like the whips of four-horse stage-coaches; motionless,

slug-like creatures, young larvae, perhaps more horrible in their pulpy

stillness than even in the infernal wriggle of maturity. But no sooner

is the stone turned and the wholesome light of day let upon this

compressed and blinded community of creeping things, than all of them

which enjoy the luxury of legs--and some of them have a good many--rush

round wildly, butting each other and everything in their way, and end in

a general stampede for underground retreats from the region poisoned by

sunshine. _Next year_ you will find the grass growing tall and green

where the stone lay; the ground-bird builds her nest where the beetle

had his hole; the dandelion and the buttercup are growing there, and the

broad fans of insect-angels open and shut over their golden disks, as

the rhythmic waves of blissful consciousness pulsate through their

glorified being.

--The young fellow whom they call John saw fit to say, in his very

familiar way,--at which I do not choose to take offence, but which I

sometimes think it necessary to repress,--that I was coming it rather

strong on the butterflies.

No, I replied; there is meaning in each of those images, the butterfly

as well as the others. The stone is ancient error. The grass is human

nature borne down and bleached of all its color by it. The shapes which

are found beneath are the crafty beings that thrive in darkness, and the

weaker organisms kept helpless by it. He who turns the stone over is

whosoever puts the staff of truth to the old lying incubus, no matter

whether he do it with a serious face or a laughing one. The next year

stands for the coming time. Then shall the nature which had lain

blanched and broken, rise in its full stature and native hues, in the

sunshine. Then shall God's minstrels build their nests in the hearts of

a new-born humanity. Then shall beauty--Divinity taking outlines and

color--light upon the souls of men as the butterfly, image of the

beautified spirit rising from the dust, soars from the shell that held

a poor grub, which would never have found wings, had not the stone been

lifted.

You never need think you can turn over any old falsehood without a

terrible squirming and scattering of the horrid little population that

dwells under it.

* * * * *

=_212._= PLEASURES OF BOATING.

I dare not publicly name the rare joys, the infinite delights, that

intoxicate me on some sweet June morning, when the river and bay are

smooth as a sheet of beryl-green silk, and I run along ripping it up

with my knife-edged shell of a boat, the rent closing after me like

those wounds of angels which Milton tells of, but the seam still shining

for many a long road behind me. To lie still, over the Flats, where the

waters are shallow, and see the crabs crawling and the sculpins gliding

busily and silently beneath the boat,--to rustle in through the long

harsh grass that leads up some tranquil creek,--to take shelter from the

sunbeams under one of the thousand-footed bridges, and look down its

interminable colonnades, crusted with green and oozy growths, studded

with minute barnacles, and belted with rings of dark muscles, while

overhead, streams and thunders that other river, whose every wave is

a human soul flowing to eternity as the river below flows to the

ocean,--lying there moored unseen, in loneliness so profound that

the columns of Tadmoor in the Desert could not seem more remote from

life,--the cool breeze on one's forehead, the stream whispering against

the half-sunken pillars,--why should I tell of these things, that I

should live to see my beloved haunts invaded and the waves blackened

with boats as with a swarm of water-beetles? What a city of idiots

we must be, not to have covered this glorious bay with gondolas and

wherries, as we have just learned to cover the ice in winter with

skaters!

* * * * *

From "The Guardian Angel."

=_213._= THE UNSPOKEN DECLARATION.

Myrtle had, perhaps, never so seriously inclined her ear to the honeyed

accents of the young pleader. He flattered her with so much tact,

that she thought she heard an unconscious echo through his lips of an

admiration which he only shared with all around him. But in him he made

it seem discriminating, deliberate, not blind, but very real. This it

evidently was which had led him to trust her with his ambitions and his

plans,--they might be delusions, but he could never keep them from her,

and she was the one woman in the world to whom he thought he could

safely give his confidence.

The dread moment was close at had. Myrtle was listening with an

instinctive premonition of what was coming,--ten thousand mothers and

grandmothers, and great-grandmothers, and so on, had passed through it

all in preceding generations, until time readied backwards to the sturdy

savage who asked no questions of any kind, but knocked down the primeval

great-grandmother of all, and carried her off to his hole in the rock,

or into the tree where he had made his nest. Why should not the coming

question announce itself by stirring in the pulses, and thrilling in the

nerves, of the descendant of all these grandmothers?

She was leaning imperceptibly towards him, drawn by the mere blind

elemental force, as the plummet was attracted to the side of

Schehallien. Her lips were parted, and she breathed a little faster than

so healthy a girl ought to breathe in a state of repose. The steady

nerves of William Murray Bradshaw felt unwonted thrills and tremors

tingling through them, as he came nearer and nearer the few simple words

with which he was to make Myrtle Hazard the mistress of his destiny. His

tones were becoming lower and more serious; there were slight breaks

once or twice in the conversation; Myrtle had cast down her eyes.

"There is but one word more to add," he murmured softly, as he bent

towards her--

A grave voice interrupted him. "Excuse me, Mr. Bradshaw," said Master

Byles Gridley, "I wish to present a young gentleman to my friend here. I

promised to show him the most charming young person I have the honor to

be acquainted with, and I must redeem my pledge. Miss Hazard, I have

the pleasure of introducing to your acquaintance my distinguished young

friend, Mr. Clement Lindsay."

* * * * *

From "Currents and Counter Currents."

=_214._= MECHANISM OF VITAL ACTION.

But if the student of nature and the student of divinity can once agree

that all the forces of the universe, as well as all its power,

are immediately dependent upon its Creator,--that He is not only

omni_potent_ but omni_movent_,--we have no longer any fear of nebular

theories, or doctrines of equivocal generation, or of progressive

development....

We begin then by examining the general rules which the Creator seems

to have prescribed to His own operations. We ask, in the first place,

whether He is wont, so far as we know, to employ a great multitude

of materials, patterns, and forces, or whether He has seen fit to

accomplish many different ends by the employment of a few of these only.

In all our studies of external nature, the tendency of increasing

knowledge has uniformly been to show that the rules of creation are

simplicity of material, economy of inventive effort, and thrift in the

expenditure of force. All the endless forms in which matter presents

itself to us, are resolved by chemistry into some three-score supposed

simple substances, some of these perhaps being only modifications of the

same element. The shapes of beasts and birds, of reptiles and fishes,

vary in every conceivable degree; yet a single vertebra is the pattern

and representation of the framework of them all, from eels to elephants.

The identity reaches still further,--across a mighty gulf of being,--but

bridges it over with a line of logic as straight as a sunbeam, and as

indestructible as the scymitar-edge that spanned the chasm, in the fable

of the Indian Hades. Strange as it may sound, the tail which the serpent

trails after him in the dust, and the head of Plato, were struck in the

die of the same primitive conception, and differ only in their special

adaptation to particular ends. Again, the study of the movements of the

universe has led us, from their complex phenomena, to the few simple

forces from which they flow. The falling apple and the rolling planet

are shown to obey the same tendency. The stick of sealing-wax which

draws a feather to it, is animated by the same impulse that convulses

the stormy heavens. These generalizations have simplified our view of

the grandest material operations, yet we do not feel that creative power

and wisdom have been shorn of any single ray, by the demonstrations of

Newton, or of Franklin. On the contrary, the larger the collection of

seemingly heterogeneous facts we can bring under the rule of a single

formula, the nearer we feel that we have reached towards the source

of knowledge, and the more perfectly we trace the little arc of

the immeasurable circle which comes within the range of our hasty

observations, at first like the broken fragments of a many-sided

polygon, but at last as a simple curve which encloses all we know, or

can know, of nature. To our own intellectual wealth, the gain is like

that of the over-burdened traveller, who should exchange hundred-weights

of iron for ounces of gold. Evanescent, formless, unstable, impalpable,

a fog of uncondensed experiences hovers over our consciousness like an

atmosphere of uncombined gases. One spark of genius shoots through

it, and its elements rush together and glitter before us in a single

translucent drop. It would hardly be extravagant to call Science the art

of packing knowledge.

* * * * *

=_John William Draper,[52] 1810-._=

From the "Human Physiology."

=_215._= TRUTHS IN THE ANCIENT PHILOSOPHIES.

It is not my intention to enter on an examination, or even enumeration,

of ancient philosophical opinions, nor to show that many of the

doctrines which have been brought forward within the last three

centuries existed in embryo in those times. It may, however, be observed

that, in the midst of much error, there were those who held just views

of the various problems of theology, law, politics, philosophy, and

particularly of the fundamental doctrines of natural science, the

constitution of the solar system, the geological history of the earth,

the nature of chemical forces, the physiological relations of animals

and plants.

It is supposed by many, whose attention has been casually drawn to the

philosophical opinions of antiquity, that the doctrines which we still

retain as true came to the knowledge of the old philosophers, not so

much by processes of legitimate investigation as by mere guessing or

crude speculation, for which there was an equal chance whether they were

right or wrong; but a closer examination will show that many of them

must have depended on results previously determined or observed by the

Africans or Asiatics, and thus they seem to indicate that the human mind

has undergone in twenty centuries but little change in its manner of

action, and that, commencing with the same data, it always comes to the

same conclusions. Nor is this at all dependent on any inherent logic

of truth. Very many of the errors of antiquity have re-appeared in our

times. If the Greek schools were infected with materialism, pantheism,

and atheism, the later progress of philosophy has shown the same

characters. To a certain extent, such doctrines will receive an

impression from the prevailing creeds, but the arguments which have been

appealed to in their favor have always been the same. The distinction

between these heresies in ancient and modern times lies chiefly in the

grosser characters which they formerly assumed, arising partly from

the reflected influence of the existing mythology, and partly from the

imperfections of exact knowledge. Even the errors of early antiquity are

venerable. We must judge our predecessors by the rules by which we

hope posterity will judge us, making a generous allowance for the

imperfections of reason, the infirmities of character, and especially

for the prejudices of the times. To have devoutly believed in the

existence of a human soul, to have looked forward to its continuing

after the death of the body, to have expected a future state of rewards

and punishments, and to have drawn therefrom, as a philosophical

conclusion, the necessity of leading a virtuous life--these, though

they may be enveloped in a cloud of errors, are noble results of the

intellect of man.

[Footnote 52: Distinguished as an author in chemistry

and physiology, and as a philosophical historian: a native of England,

but long a professor in New York University.]

* * * * *

From "Thoughts on the Future Civil Policy of America."

=_216._= PROSPECTIVE INFLUENCES OF THE REPUBLIC.

Now, when, we consider the position of the American continent,--its

Atlantic front looking upon Europe, its Pacific front looking upon

Asia,--when we reflect how much Nature has done for it in the wonderful

river system she has bestowed, and how varied are the mineral and

agricultural products it yields, it would seem as if we should be

constrained by circumstances to carry out spontaneously in practical

life the abstract suggestions of policy.... Great undertakings, such

as the construction of the Pacific Railroad, pressed into existence by

commercial motives and fostered for military reasons, will indirectly

accomplish political objects not yielding in importance to those that

are obvious and avowed.

A few years more, and the influence of the great republic will

resistlessly extend in a direction that will lead to surprising

results.... The stream of Chinese emigration already setting into

California is but the precursor of the flood that is to come. Here are

the fields, there are the men. The dominant power on the Pacific Ocean

must necessarily exert a controlling influence in the affairs of Asia.

The Roman empire is regarded, perhaps not unjustly, as the most imposing

of all human political creations. Italy extended her rule across the

eastern and western basins of the Mediterranean Sea, from the confines

of Parthia to Spain. A similar central, but far grander, position is

occupied by the American continent. The partitions of an interior and

narrow sea are replaced by the two great oceans. But, since history ever

repeats itself, the maxims that guided the policy of Rome in her advance

to sovereignty are not without application here. Her mistakes may be

monitions to us.

A great, a homogeneous, and yet an active people, having strength and

security in its political institutions, may look forward to a career of

glory. It may, without offense, seek to render its life memorable in the

annals of the human race.

* * * * *

=_James Russell Lowell, 1810-._= (Manual, pp. 503, 520.)

From "Among my Books."

=_217._= NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO.

I have little sympathy with declaimers about the Pilgrim Fathers, who

look upon them all as men of grand conceptions and superhuman foresight.

An entire ship's company of Columbuses is what the world never saw. It

is not wise to form any theory and fit our facts to it, as a man in a

hurry is apt to cram his traveling-bag, with a total disregard of shape

or texture. But perhaps it may be found that the facts will only fit

comfortably together on a single plan, namely, that the fathers did have

a conception (which those will call grand who regard simplicity as a

necessary element of grandeur) of founding here a commonwealth on

those two eternal bases of Faith and Work; that they had, indeed, no

revolutionary ideas of universal liberty; but yet, what answered the

purpose quite as well, an abiding faith in the brotherhood of man and

the fatherhood of God; and that they did not so much propose to make all

things new, as to develop the latent possibilities of English law and

English character by clearing away the fences by which the abuse of

the one was gradually discommoning the other from the broad fields of

natural right. They were not in advance of their age, as it is called,

for no one who is so can ever work profitably in it; but they were alive

to the highest and most earnest thinking of their time.

* * * * *

=_218._= From an "Essay on Dryden."

I do not think he added a single word to the language, unless, as

I suspect, he first used magnetism in its present sense of moral

attraction. What he did in his best writing was, to use the English as

if it were a spoken, and not merely an inkhorn language; as if it were

his own to do what he pleased with it, as if it need not be ashamed of

itself. In this respect, his service to our prose was greater than

any other man has ever rendered. He says he formed his style upon

Tillotson's (Bossuet on the other hand, formed _his_ upon Corneille's);

but I rather think he got it at Will's, for its greatest charm is, that

it has the various freedom of talk. In verse, he has a pomp which,

excellent in itself, became pompousness in his imitators. But he had

nothing of Milton's ear for various rhythm and interwoven harmony. He

knew how to give new modulation, sweetness, and force to the pentameter;

but in what used to be called pindarics, I am heretic enough to think

he generally failed.

* * * * *

From "My Study Windows."

=_219._= LOVE OF BIRDS AND SQUIRRELS.

Wilson's thrush comes every year to remind me of that most poetic of

ornithologists. He flits before me through the pine-walk like the very

genius of solitude. A pair of pewees have built immemorially on a

jutting brick in the arched entrance to the ice-house. Always on the

same brick, and never more than a single pair, though two broods of five

each are raised there every summer. How do they settle their claim to

the homestead? By what right of primogeniture? Once, the children of a

man employed about the place oölogized the nest, and the pewees left us

for a year or two. I felt towards those boys as the messmates of the

Ancient Mariner did towards him after he had shot the albatross. But the

pewees came back at last, and one of them is now on his wonted perch, so

near my window that I can hear the click of his bill as he snaps a fly

on the wing.... The pewee is the first bird to pipe up in the morning;

and, during the early summer he preludes his matutinal ejaculation of

_pewee_ with a slender whistle, unheard at any other time. He saddens

with the season, and, as summer declines, he changes his note to _eheu,

pewee_! I as if in lamentation. Had he been an Italian bird, Ovid would

have had a plaintive tale to tell about him. He is so familiar as often

to pursue a fly through the open window into my library.

There is something inexpressibly dear to me in these old friendships of

a lifetime. There is scarce a tree of mine but has had, at some time or

other, a happy homestead among its boughs, to which I cannot say,

"Many light hearts and wings,

Which now be dead, lodged in thy living bowers."

My walk under the pines would lose half its summer charm were I to miss

that shy anchorite, the Wilson's thrush, nor hear in haying time

the metallic ring of his song, that justifies his rustic name of

_scythe-whet_. I protect my game as jealously as an English squire. If

anybody had oölogized a certain cuckoo's nest I know of (I have a pair

in my garden every year), it would have left me a sore place in my mind

for weeks. I love to bring these aborigines back to the mansuetude they

showed to the early voyagers, and before (forgive the involuntary pun),

they had grown accustomed to man and knew his savage ways. And they

repay your kindness with a sweet familiarity too delicate ever to breed

contempt. I have made a Penn-treaty with them, preferring that to the

Puritan way with the native, which converted them to a little Hebraism

and a great deal of Medford rum. If they will not come near enough to me

(as most of them will), I bring them close with an opera-glass,--a much

better weapon than a gun. I would not, if I could, convert them from

their pretty pagan ways. The only one I sometimes have savage doubts

about, is the red squirrel. I _think_ he oölogizes; I _know_ he eats

cherries, (we counted five of them at one time in a single tree, the

stones pattering down like the sparse hail that preludes a storm), and

that he knaws off the small end of pears to get at the seeds. He steals

the corn from under the noses of my poultry. But what would you have? He

will come down upon the limb of the tree I am lying under, till he is

within a yard of me. He and his mate will scurry up and down the great

black-walnut for my diversion, chattering like monkeys. Can I sign his

death-warrant who has tolerated me about his grounds so long? Not I. Let

them steal, and welcome, I am sure I should, had I the same bringing up

and the same temptation. As for the birds, I do not believe there is one

of them but does more good than harm; and of how many featherless bipeds

can this be said.