The rounded world is fair to see,
Nine times folded in mystery:
Though baffled seers cannot impart
The secret of its laboring heart,
Throb thine with Nature's throbbing breast,
And all is clear from east to west.
Spirit that lurks each form within
Beckons to spirit of its kin;
Self-kindled every atom glows,
And hints the future which it owes.
1. There are days[470] 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[471] may be looked for with a little more assurance in that
pure October weather, which we distinguish by the name of Indian
Summer.[472] 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. Here we find nature to be the
circumstance which dwarfs every other circumstance, and judges like a
god all men that come to her. We have crept out of our close and
crowded houses into the night and morning, and we see what majestic
beauties daily wrap us in their bosom. How willingly we would escape
the barriers which render them comparatively impotent, escape the
sophistication and second thought, and suffer nature to entrance us.
The tempered light of the woods is like a perpetual morning, and is
stimulating and heroic. The anciently reported spells of these places
creep on us. The stems of pines, hemlocks, and oaks, almost gleam like
iron on the excited eye. The incommunicable trees begin to persuade us
to live with them, and quit our life of solemn trifles. Here no
history, or church, or state, is interpolated on the divine sky and
the immortal year. How easily we might walk onward into opening
landscape, absorbed by new pictures, and by thoughts fast succeeding
each other, until by degrees the recollection of home was crowded out
of the mind, all memory obliterated by the tyranny of the present,
and we were led in triumph by nature.
2. These enchantments are medicinal, they sober and heal us. These are
plain pleasures, kindly and native to us. We come to our own, and make
friends with matter, which the ambitious chatter of the schools would
persuade us to despise. We never can part with it; the mind loves its
old home: as water to our thirst, so is the rock, the ground, to our
eyes, and hands, and feet. It is firm water: it is cold flame: what
health, what affinity! Ever an old friend, ever like a dear friend and
brother, when we chat affectedly with strangers, comes in this honest
face, and takes a grave liberty with us, and shames us out of our
nonsense. Cities give not the human senses room enough. We go out
daily and nightly to feed the eyes on the horizon, and require so much
scope, just as we need water for our bath. There are all degrees of
natural influence, from these quarantine powers of nature, up to her
dearest and gravest ministrations to the imagination and the soul.
There is the bucket of cold water from the spring, the wood-fire to
which the chilled traveler rushes for safety,--and there is the
sublime moral of autumn and of noon. We nestle in nature, and draw our
living as parasites from her roots and grains, and we receive glances
from the heavenly bodies, which call us to solitude, and foretell the
remotest future. The blue zenith is the point in which romance and
reality meet. I think, if we should be rapt away into all that we
dream of heaven, and should converse with Gabriel[473] and Uriel,[474]
the upper sky would be all that would remain of our furniture.
3. It seems as if the day was not wholly profane, in which we have
given heed to some natural object. The fall of snowflakes in a still
air, preserving to each crystal its perfect form; the blowing of sleet
over a wide sheet of water, and over plains; the waving rye-fields;
the mimic waving of acres of houstonia, whose innumerable florets
whiten and ripple before the eye; the reflections of trees and flowers
in glassy lakes; the musical steaming odorous south wind, which
converts all trees to wind-harps;[475] the crackling and spurting of
hemlock in the flames; or of pine-logs, which yield glory to the walls
and faces in the sitting-room,--these are the music and pictures of
the most ancient religion. My house stands in low land, with limited
outlook, and on the skirt of the village.[476] But I go with my
friend[477] to the shore of our little river,[478] and with one stroke
of the paddle, I leave the village politics and personalities, yes,
and the world of villages and personalities behind, and pass into a
delicate realm of sunset and moonlight, too bright almost for spotted
man to enter without novitiate and probation.[479] We penetrate bodily
this incredible beauty: we dip our hands in this painted element: our
eyes are bathed in these lights and forms. A holiday, a
villeggiatura,[480] a royal revel, the proudest, most heart-rejoicing
festival that valor and beauty, power and taste, ever decked and
enjoyed, establishes itself on the instant. These sunset clouds, these
delicately emerging stars, with their private and ineffable glances,
signify it and proffer it. I am taught the poorness of our invention,
the ugliness of towns and palaces. Art and luxury have early learned
that they must work as enhancement and sequel to this original beauty.
I am overinstructed for my return. Henceforth I shall be hard to
please. I cannot go back to toys. I am grown expensive and
sophisticated. I can no longer live without elegance: but a countryman
shall be my master of revels. He who knows the most, he who knows what
sweets and virtues are in the ground, the waters, the plants, the
heavens, and how to come at these enchantments, is the rich and royal
man. Only as far as masters of the world have called in nature to
their aid, can they reach the height of magnificence. This is the
meaning of their hanging-gardens,[481] villas, garden-houses, islands,
parks, and preserves, to back their faulty personality with these
strong accessories. I do not wonder that the landed interest should be
invincible in the state with these dangerous auxiliaries. These bribe
and invite; not kings, not palaces, not men, not women, but these
tender and poetic stars, eloquent of secret promises. We heard what
the rich man said, we knew of his villa, his grove, his wine, and his
company, but the provocation and point of the invitation came out of
these beguiling stars. In their soft glances, I see what men strove to
realize in some Versailles,[482] or Paphos,[483] or Ctesiphon.[484]
Indeed, it is the magical lights of the horizon, and the blue sky for
the background, which save all our works of art, which were otherwise
baubles. When the rich tax the poor with servility and obsequiousness,
they should consider the effect of man reputed to be the possessors of
nature, on imaginative minds. Ah! if the rich were rich as the poor
fancy riches! A boy hears a military band play on the field at night,
and he has kings and queens, and famous chivalry palpably before him.
He hears the echoes of a horn in a hill country, in the Notch
Mountains,[485] for example, which converts the mountains into an
Æolian harp,[486] and this supernatural _tiralira_ restores to him the
Dorian[487] mythology, Apollo,[488] Diana,[489] and all divine hunters
and huntresses. Can a musical note be so lofty, so haughtily
beautiful! To the poor young poet, thus fabulous is his picture of
society; he is loyal; he respects the rich; they are rich for the sake
of his imagination; how poor his fancy would be, if they were not
rich! That they have some high-fenced grove, which they call a park;
that they live in larger and better-garnished saloons than he has
visited, and go in coaches, keeping only the society of the elegant,
to watering-places, and to distant cities, are the groundwork from
which he has delineated estates of romance, compared with which their
actual possessions are shanties and paddocks. The muse herself betrays
her son, and enhances the gift of wealthy and well-born beauty, by a
radiation out of the air, and clouds, and forests that skirt the
road,--a certain haughty favor, as if from patrician genii to
patricians, a kind of aristocracy in nature, a prince of the power of
the air.
4. The moral sensibility which makes Edens[490] and Tempes[491] so
easily, may not be always found, but the material landscape is never
far off. We can find these enchantments without visiting the Como
Lake,[492] or the Madeira Islands.[493] We exaggerate the praises of
local scenery. In every landscape, the point of astonishment is the
meeting of the sky and the earth, and that is seen from the first
hillock as well as from the top of the Alleghanies. The stars at night
stoop down over the brownest, homeliest common,[494] with all the
spiritual magnificence which they shed on the Campagna,[495] or on the
marble deserts of Egypt. The uprolled clouds and the colors of morning
and evening, will transfigure maples and alders. The difference
between landscape and landscape is small, but there is great
difference in the beholders. There is nothing so wonderful in any
particular landscape, as the necessity of being beautiful under which
every landscape lies. Nature cannot be surprised in undress. Beauty
breaks in everywhere.
5. But it is very easy to outrun the sympathy of readers on this
topic, which school-men called _natura naturata_, or nature passive.
One can hardly speak directly of it without excess. It is as easy to
broach in mixed companies what is called "the subject of religion." A
susceptible person does not like to indulge his tastes in this kind,
without the apology of some trivial necessity: he goes to see a
wood-lot, or to look at the crops, or to fetch a plant or a mineral
from a remote locality, or he carries a fowling-piece, or a
fishing-rod. I suppose this shame must have a good reason. A
dilettantism[496] in nature is barren and unworthy. The fop of fields
is no better than his brother of Broadway. Men are naturally hunters
and inquisitive of woodcraft and I suppose that such a gazetteer as
wood-cutters and Indians should furnish facts for would take place in
the most sumptuous drawing-rooms of all the "Wreaths" and "Flora's
chaplets"[497] of the book-shops; yet ordinarily, whether we are too
clumsy for so subtle a topic, or from whatever cause, as soon as men
begin to write on nature, they fall into euphuism. Frivolity is a most
unfit tribute to Pan,[498] who ought to be represented in the
mythology as the most continent of gods. I would not be frivolous
before the admirable reserve and prudence of time, yet I cannot
renounce the right of returning often to this old topic. The multitude
of false churches[499] accredits the true religion. Literature,
poetry, science, are the homage of man to this unfathomed secret,
concerning which no sane man can affect an indifference or
incuriosity. Nature is loved by what is best in us. It is loved as the
city of God, although, or rather because there is no citizen. The
sunset is unlike anything that is underneath it: it wants men. And the
beauty of nature must always seem unreal and mocking, until the
landscape has human figures, that are as good as itself. If there
were good men, there would never be this rapture in nature. If the
king is in the palace nobody looks at the walls. It is when he is
gone, and the house is filled with grooms and gazers, that we turn
from the people, to find relief in the majestic men that are suggested
by the pictures and architecture. The critics who complain of the
sickly separation of the beauty of nature from the thing to be done,
must consider that our hunting of the picturesque is inseparable from
our protest against false society. Man is fallen; nature is erect, and
serves as a differential thermometer, detecting the presence or
absence of the divine sentiment in man. By fault of our dulness and
selfishness, we are looking up to nature, but when we are
convalescent, nature will look up to us. We see the foaming brook with
compunction; if our own life flowed with the right energy, we should
shame the brook. The stream of zeal sparkles with real fire, and not
with reflex rays of sun and moon. Nature may be as selfishly studied
as trade. Astronomy to the selfish becomes astrology; psychology,
mesmerism (with intent to show where our spoons are gone); and anatomy
and physiology become phrenology and palmistry.
6. But taking timely warning, and leaving many things unsaid on this
topic, but not longer omit our homage to the Efficient Nature, _natura
naturans_, the quick cause, before which all forms flee as the driven
snows, itself secret, its works driven before it in flocks and
multitudes, (as the ancient represented nature by Proteus,[500] a
shepherd), and in undescribable variety. It publishes itself in
creatures, reaching from particles and spicula, through transformation
on transformation to the highest symmetries, arriving at consummate
results without a shock or a leap. A little heat, that is, a little
motion, is all that differences the bald, dazzling white, and deadly
cold poles of the earth from the prolific tropical climates. All changes
pass without violence, by reason of the two cardinal conditions of
boundless space and boundless time. Geology has initiated us into the
secularity of nature, and taught us to disuse our dame-school measures,
and exchange our Mosaic[501] and Ptolemaic schemes[502] for her large
style. We know nothing rightly, for want of perspective. Now we learn
what patient periods must round themselves before the rock is formed,
then before the rock is broken, and the first lichen race has
disintegrated the thinnest external plate into soil, and opened the door
for the remote Flora,[503] Fauna,[504] Ceres,[505] and Pomona,[506] to
come in. How far off yet is the trilobite! how far the quadruped! how
inconceivably remote is man! All duly arrive,[507] and then race after
race of men. It is a long way from granite to the oyster; farther yet to
Plato,[508] and the preaching of the immortality of the soul. Yet all
must come, as surely as the first atom has two sides.
7. Motion or change, and identity or rest, are the first and second
secrets of nature: Motion and Rest. The whole code of her laws may be
written on the thumb-nail, or the signet of a ring. The whirling
bubble on the surface of a brook, admits us to the secret of the
mechanics of the sky. Every shell on the beach is a key to it. A
little water made to rotate in a cup explains the formation of the
simpler shells; the addition of matter from year to year, arrives at
last at the most complex forms; and yet so poor is nature with all her
craft, that, from the beginning to the end of the universe, she has
but one stuff,--but one stuff with its two ends, to serve up all her
dream-like variety. Compound it how she will, star, sand, fire, water,
tree, man, it is still one stuff, and betrays the same properties.
8. Nature is always consistent, though she feigns to contravene her
own laws. She keeps her laws, and seems to transcend them. She arms
and equips an animal to find its place and living in the earth, and,
at the same time, she arms and equips another animal to destroy it.
Space exists to divide creatures; but by clothing the sides of a bird
with a few feathers, she gives him a petty omnipresence. The direction
is forever onward, but the artist still goes back for materials, and
begins again with the first elements on the most advanced stage:
otherwise, all goes to ruin. If we look at her work, we seem to catch
a glance of a system in transition. Plants are the young of the world,
vessels of health and vigor; but they grope ever upward toward
consciousness; the trees are imperfect men, and seem to bemoan their
imprisonment, rooted in the ground. The animal is the novice and
probationer of a more advanced order. The men, though young, having
tasted the first drop from the cup of thought, are already dissipated:
the maples and ferns are still uncorrupt; yet no doubt, when they come
to consciousness, they too will curse and swear. Flowers so strictly
belong to youth, that we adult men soon come to feel, that their
beautiful generations concern not us: we have had our day; now let the
children have theirs. The flowers jilt us, and we are old bachelors
with our ridiculous tenderness.
9. Things are so strictly related, that according to the skill of the
eye, from any one object the parts and properties of any other may be
predicted. If we had eyes to see it, a bit of stone from the city wall
would certify us of the necessity that man must exist, as readily as
the city. That identity makes us all one, and reduces to nothing great
intervals on our customary scale. We talk of deviations from natural
life, as if artificial life were not also natural. The smoothest
curled courtier in the boudoirs of a palace has an animal nature, rude
and aboriginal as a white bear, omnipotent to its own ends, and is
directly related, there amid essences and billets-doux, to Himalaya
mountain-chains[509] and the axis of the globe. If we consider how
much we are nature's, we need not be superstitious about towns, as if
that terrific or benefic force did not find us there also, and fashion
cities. Nature, who made the mason, made the house. We may easily hear
too much of rural influences. The cool, disengaged air of natural
objects, makes them enviable to us, chafed and irritable creatures
with red faces, and we think we shall be as grand as they, if we camp
out and eat roots, but let us be men instead of wood-chucks, and the
oak and the elm shall gladly serve us, though we sit in chairs of
ivory on carpets of silk.
10. This guiding identity runs through all the surprises and contrasts
of the piece, and characterizes every law. Man carries the world in
his head, the whole astronomy and chemistry suspended in a thought.
Because the history of nature is charactered in his brain, therefore
is he the prophet and discoverer of her secrets. Every known fact in
natural science was divined by the presentiment of somebody, before it
was actually verified. A man does not tie his shoe without recognizing
laws which bind the farthest regions of nature: moon, plant, gas,
crystal, are concrete geometry and numbers. Common sense knows its
own, and recognizes the fact at first sight in chemical experiment.
The common sense of Franklin,[510] Dalton,[511] Davy[512] and
Black,[513] is the same common sense which made the arrangements which
now it discovers.
11. If the identity expresses organized rest, the counter action runs
also into organization. The astronomers said,[514] "Give us matter,
and a little motion, and we will construct the universe. It is not
enough that we should have matter, we must also have a single impulse,
one shove to launch the mass, and generate the harmony of the
centrifugal and centripetal[515] forces. Once heave the ball from the
hand, and we can show how all this mighty order grew." "A very
unreasonable postulate," said the metaphysicians, "and a plain begging
of the question. Could you not prevail to know the genesis of
projection, as well as the continuation of it?" Nature, meanwhile, had
not waited for the discussion, but, right or wrong, bestowed the
impulse, and the balls rolled. It was no great affair, a mere push,
but the astronomers were right in making much of it, for there is no
end of the consequences of the act. That famous aboriginal push
propagates itself through all the balls of the system, and through
every atom of every ball, through all the races of creatures, and
through the history and performances of every individual. Exaggeration
is in the course of things. Nature sends no creature, no man into the
world, without adding a small excess of his proper quality. Given the
planet, it is still necessary to add the impulse; so, to every
creature nature added a little violence of direction in its proper
path, a shove to put it on its way; in every instance, a slight
generosity, a drop too much. Without electricity the air would rot,
and without this violence of direction which men and women have,
without a spice of bigot and fanatic, no excitement, no efficiency. We
aim above the mark, to hit the mark. Every act hath some falsehood of
exaggeration in it. And when now and then comes along some sad,
sharp-eyed man, who sees how paltry a game is played, and refuses to
play, but blabs the secret;--how then? is the bird flown? O no, the
wary Nature sends a new troop of fairer forms, of lordlier youths,
with a little more excess of direction to hold them fast to their
several aims; makes them a little wrongheaded in that direction in
which they are rightest, and on goes the game again with new whirl,
for a generation or two more. The child with his sweet pranks, the
fool of his senses, commanded by every sight and sound, without any
power to compare and rank his sensations, abandoned to a whistle or a
painted chip, to a lead dragoon, or a ginger-bread dog,
individualizing everything, generalizing nothing, delighted with every
new thing, lies down at night overpowered by the fatigue, which this
day of continual petty madness has incurred. But Nature has answered
her purpose with the curly, dimpled lunatic. She has tasked every
faculty, and has secured the symmetrical growth of the bodily frame,
by all these attitudes and exertions,--an end of the first importance,
which could not be trusted to any care less perfect than her own. This
glitter, this opaline luster plays round the top of every toy to his
eye, to insure his fidelity, and he is deceived to his good. We are
made alive and kept alive by the same arts. Let the Stoics[516] say
what they please, we do not eat for the good of living, but because
the meat is savory and the appetite is keen. The vegetable life does
not content itself with casting from the flower or the tree a single
seed, but it fills the air and earth with a prodigality of seeds,
that if thousands perish, thousands may plant themselves, that
hundreds may come up, that tens may live to maturity, that, at least,
one may replace the parent. All things betray the same calculated
profusion. The excess of fear with which the animal frame is hedged
round, shrinking from cold, starting at sight of a snake, or a sudden
noise, protects us, through a multitude of groundless alarms, from
some one real danger at last. The lover seeks in marriage his private
felicity and perfection, with no prospective end; and nature hides in
his happiness her own end, namely, progeny, or the perpetuity of the
race.
12. But the craft with which the world is made runs also into the mind
and character of men. No man is quite sane; each has a vein of folly in
his composition, a slight determination of blood to the head, to make
sure of holding him hard to some one point which nature had taken to
heart. Great causes are never tried on their merits; but the cause is
reduced to particulars to suit the size of the partisans, and the
contention is ever hottest on minor matters. Not less remarkable is the
overfaith of each man in the importance of what he has to do or say. The
poet, the prophet, has a higher value for what he utters than any
hearer, and therefore it gets spoken. The strong, self-complacent
Luther[517] declares with an emphasis, not to be mistaken, that "God
himself cannot do without wise men." Jacob Behmen[518] and George
Fox[519] betray their egotism in the pertinacity of their controversial
tracts, and James Naylor[520] once suffered himself to be worshiped as
the Christ. Each prophet comes presently to identify himself with his
thought, and to esteem his hat and shoes sacred. However this may
discredit such persons with the judicious, it helps them with the
people, as it gives heat, pungency, and publicity to their words. A
similar experience is not infrequent in private life. Each young and
ardent person writes a diary, in which, when the hours of prayer and
penitence arrive, he inscribes his soul. The pages thus written are, to
him, burning and fragrant: he reads them on his knees by midnight and by
the morning star; he wets them with his tears: they are sacred; too good
for the world, and hardly yet to be shown to the dearest friend. This is
the man-child that is born to the soul, and her life still circulates in
the babe. The umbilical cord has not yet been cut. After some time has
elapsed, he begins to wish to admit his friend to this hallowed
experience, and with hesitation, yet with firmness, exposes the pages to
his eye. Will they not burn his eyes? The friend coldly turns them
over, and passes from the writing to conversation, with easy transition,
which strikes the other party with astonishment and vexation. He cannot
suspect the writing itself. Days and nights of fervid life, of communion
with angels of darkness and of light, have engraved their shadowy
characters on that tear-stained book. He suspects the intelligence or
the heart of his friend. Is there then no friend? He cannot yet credit
that one may have impressive experience, and yet may not know how to put
his private fact into literature; and perhaps the discovery that wisdom
has other tongues and ministers than we, that though we should hold our
peace, the truth would not the less be spoken, might check injuriously
the flames of our zeal. A man can only speak, so long as he does not
feel his speech to be partial and inadequate. It is partial, but he does
not see it to be so, whilst he utters it. As soon as he is released from
the instinctive and particular, and sees its partiality, he shuts his
mouth in disgust. For, no man can write anything, who does not think
that what he writes is for the time the history of the world; or do
anything well, who does not esteem his work to be of importance. My work
may be of none, but I must not think it is of none, or I shall not do it
with impunity.
13. In like manner, there is throughout nature something mocking,
something that leads us on and on, but arrives nowhere, keeps no faith
with us. All promise outruns the performance. We live in a system of
approximations. Every end is prospective of some other end, which is
also temporary; a round and final success nowhere. We are encamped in
nature, not domesticated. Hunger and thirst lead us on to eat and to
drink; but bread and wine, mix and cook them how you will, leave us
hungry and thirsty, after the stomach is full. It is the same with all
our arts and performances. Our music, our poetry, our language itself
are not satisfactions, but suggestions. The hunger for wealth, which
reduces the planet to a garden, fools the eager pursuer. What is the
end sought? Plainly to secure the ends of good sense and beauty, from
the intrusion of deformity or vulgarity of any kind. But what an
operose[521] method! What a train of means to secure a little
conversation! This palace of brick and stone, these servants, this
kitchen, these stables, horses and equipage, this bank-stock, and file
of mortgages; trade to all the world, country-house and cottage by the
water-side, all for a little conversation, high, clear, and spiritual!
Could it not be had as well by beggars on the highway? No, all these
things came from successive efforts of these beggars to remove
friction from the wheels of life, and give opportunity. Conversation,
character, were the avowed ends; wealth was good as it appeased the
animal cravings, cured the smoky chimney, silenced the creaking door,
brought friends together in a warm and quiet room, and kept the
children and the dinner-table in a different apartment. Thought,
virtue, beauty, were the ends; but it was known that men of thought
and virtue sometimes had the headache, or wet feet, or could lose good
time, whilst the room was getting warm in winter days. Unluckily, in
the exertions necessary to remove these inconveniences, the main
attention has been diverted to this object; the old aims have been
lost sight of, and to remove friction has come to be the end. That is
the ridicule of rich men, and Boston, London, Vienna, and now the
governments generally of the world, are cities and governments of the
rich, and the masses are not men, but _poor men_, that is, men who
would be rich; this is the ridicule of the class, that they arrive
with pains and sweat and fury nowhere; when all is done, it is for
nothing. They are like one who has interrupted the conversation of a
company to make his speech, and now has forgotten what he went to say.
The appearance strikes the eye everywhere of an aimless society, of
aimless nations. Were the ends of nature so great and cogent, as to
exact this immense sacrifice of men?
14. Quite analogous to the deceits in life, there is, as might be
expected, a similar effect on the eye from the face of external
nature. There is in woods and waters a certain enticement and
flattery, together with a failure to yield a present satisfaction.
This disappointment is felt in every landscape. I have seen the
softness and beauty of the summer clouds floating feathery overhead,
enjoying, as it seemed, their height and privilege of motion, whilst
yet they appeared not so much the drapery of this place and hour, as
fore-looking to such pavilions and gardens of festivity beyond. It is
an odd jealousy; but the poet finds himself not near enough to this
object. The pine tree, the river, the bank of flowers before him, does
not seem to be nature. Nature is still elsewhere. This or this is but
outskirt and far-off reflection[522] and echo of the triumph that has
passed by, and is now at its glancing splendor and heyday, perchance
in the neighboring fields, or, if you stand in the field, then in the
adjacent woods. The present object shall give you this sense of
stillness that follows a pageant which has just gone by. What splendid
distance, what recesses of ineffable pomp and loveliness in the
sunset! But who can go where they are, or lay his hand or plant his
foot thereon? Off they fall from the round world forever and ever. It
is the same among men and women as among the silent trees; always a
referred existence, an absence, never a presence and satisfaction. Is
it, that beauty can never be grasped? in persons and in landscapes is
equally inaccessible? The accepted and betrothed lover has lost the
wildest charm of his maiden in her acceptance of him. She was heaven
whilst he pursued her as a star: she cannot be heaven, if she stoops
to such a one as he.
15. What shall we say of this omnipresent appearance of that first
projectile impulse, of this flattery and balking of so many
well-meaning creatures? Must we not suppose somewhere in the universe
a slight treachery and derision? Are we not engaged to a serious
resentment of this use that is made of us? Are we tickled trout, and
fools of nature? One looks at the face of heaven and earth lays all
petulance at rest, and soothes us to wiser convictions. To the
intelligent, nature converts itself into a vast promise, and will not
be rashly explained. Her secret is untold. Many and many an
Oedipus[523] arrives: he has the whole mystery teeming in his brain.
Alas! the same sorcery has spoiled his skill; no syllable can he shape
on his lips. Her mighty orbit vaults like the fresh rainbow into the
deep, but no archangel's wing was yet strong enough to follow it, and
report of the return of the curve. But it also appears, that our
actions are seconded and disposed to greater conclusions than we
designed. We are escorted on every hand through life by spiritual
agents, and a beneficent purpose lies in wait for us. We cannot bandy
words with nature, or deal with her as we deal with persons. If we
measure our individual forces against hers, we may easily feel as if
we were the sport of an insuperable destiny. But if, instead of
identifying ourselves with the work, we feel that the soul of the
workman streams through us, we shall find the peace of the morning
dwelling first in our hearts, and the fathomless powers of gravity and
chemistry, and, over them, of life preëxisting within us in their
highest form.
16. The uneasiness which the thought of our helplessness in the chain
of causes occasions us, results from looking too much at one condition
of nature, namely, Motion. But the drag is never taken from the wheel.
Wherever the impulse exceeds the Rest or Identity insinuates its
compensation. All over the wide fields of earth grows the
prunella[524] or self-heal. After every foolish day we sleep off the
fumes and furies of its hours; and though we are always engaged with
particulars, and often enslaved to them, we bring with us to every
experiment the innate universal laws. These, while they exist in the
mind as ideas, stand around us in nature forever embodied, a present
sanity to expose and cure the insanity of men. Our servitude to
particulars betrays us into a hundred foolish expectations. We
anticipate a new era from the invention of a locomotive, or a balloon;
the new engine brings with it the old checks. They say that by
electro-magnetism, your salad shall be grown from the seed whilst your
fowl is roasting for dinner: it is a symbol of our modern aims and
endeavors,--of our condensation and acceleration of objects: but
nothing is gained: nature cannot be cheated: man's life is but seventy
salads long, grow they swift or grow they slow. In these checks and
impossibilities, however, we find our advantage, not less than in
impulses. Let the victory fall where it will, we are on that side. And
the knowledge that we traverse the whole scale of being, from the
center to the poles of nature, and have some stake in every
possibility, lends that sublime luster to death, which philosophy and
religion have too outwardly and literally striven to express in the
popular doctrine of the immortality of the soul. The reality is more
excellent than the report. Here is no ruin, no discontinuity, no spent
ball. The divine circulations never rest nor linger. Nature is the
incarnation of a thought, and turns to a thought again, as ice becomes
water and gas. The world is mind precipitated, and the volatile
essence is forever escaping again into the state of free thought.
Hence the virtue and pungency of the influence on the mind, of natural
objects, whether inorganic or organized. Man imprisoned, man
crystallized, man vegetative, speaks to man impersonated. That power
which does not respect quantity, which makes the whole and the
particle its equal channel, delegates its smile to the morning, and
distills its essence into every drop of rain. Every moment instructs
and every object: for wisdom is infused into every form. It has been
poured into us as blood; it convulsed us as pain; it slid into us as
pleasure; it enveloped us in dull, melancholy days, or in days of
cheerful labor; we did not guess its essence, until after a long
time.