THE CURE--PLAN OF INNOVATION--NEW CONSTRUCTIONS.
'Unless these end in matter, and constructions according to true
definitions, they are speculative, and of little use.'--_Novum
Organum_.
Difficult, then, as the problem of Civil Government appeared to the
eye of the scientific philosopher, and threatening and appalling as
were those immediate aspects of it which it presented at that moment,
he does not despair of the State. Even on the verge of that momentous
political and social crisis, 'though he does not need to go to heaven
to predict great revolutions and imminent changes,' 'he thinks he sees
ways to save us,' and he finds in his new science of Man the ultimate
solution of that problem.
That particular and private nature which is in all men, let them
re-name themselves by what names they will, that particular and
private nature which intends always the individual and private good,
has in itself 'an incident towards the good of society,' which it may
use as means,--which it must use, if highly successful,--as means to
its end. Even in this, when science has enlightened it, and it is
impelled by blind and unsuccessful instinct no longer, the man of
science finds a place where a pillar of the true state can be planted;
even here the scientific light lays bare, in the actualities of the
human constitution, a foundation-stone,--a stone that does not
crumble--a stone that does not roll, which the state that shall stand
must rest on.
Even that 'active good,' which impels 'the troublers of the world,
such as was Lucius Sylla, and infinite others in smaller model,'--that
principle which impels the particular nature to leave its signature on
other things,--on the state, on the world, if it can,--though it is
its own end, and though it is apt, when armed with those singular
powers for 'effecting its _good_ will,' which are represented in the
hero of this action, to lead to results of the kind which this piece
represents,--this is the principle in man which seeks an individual
immortality, and works of immortal worth for man are its natural and
selectest means.
But that is not all. The bettering of _itself_, the perfection of its
own form, is, by the constitution of things, a force, a _motive_, an
_actual_ 'power in everything that moves.' This is one of the primal,
universal, natural motions. It is in the universal creative stamp of
things; and strong as that is, the rock on which here, too, the hope
of science rests--strong as that is, the pillar of the state, which
here, too, it will rear. For to man the highest '_passive_ good,' and
this, too, is of the good which is 'private and particular,' is,
constitutionally, that whereby 'the conscience of good intentions,
however succeeding, is a more continual joy to his nature than all the
provision--the most luxurious provision--which can be made for
security and repose,--whereby the mere empirical experimenter in good
will count it a higher felicity to fail in good and virtuous ends
towards the public, than to attain the most envied success limited to
his particular.
Thus, even in these decried '_private_' motives, which actuate all
men--these universal natural instincts, which impel men yet more
intensely, by the concentration of the larger sensibility, and the
faculty of the nobler nature of their species, to seek their own
private good,--even in these forces, which, unenlightened and
uncounterbalanced, tend in man to war and social dissolution, or
'monstrous' social combination,--even in these, the scientific eye
perceives the basis of new structures, 'constructions according to
true definitions,' in which _all_ the ends that nature in man grasps
and aspires to, shall be artistically comprehended and attained.
But this is only the beginning of the scientific politician's 'hope.'
This is but a collateral aid, an incidental assistance. This is the
place on his ground-plan for the buttresses of the pile he will rear.
There is an unborrowed foundation, there is an internal support for
the state in man. For along with that particular and private nature of
good, there is another in all men;--there is another motive, which
respects and beholds the good of society, not mediately, but directly
as _its_ end,--which embraces in its intention 'the form of human
nature, whereof we are members and portions, and _not_--not--our own
proper, individual form'; and this is the good 'which is in degree the
greater and the worthier, because it tends to the conservation and
advancement of a more general form.' And this, also, is an _actual_
force in man, proceeding from the universal nature of things and
original in that, not in him. This, also, is in the primeval creative
stamp of things; and here, also, the science of the interpretation of
nature finds in the constitution of man, and in the nature of things,
the foundations of the true state ready to its hand; and hewn, all
hewn and cut, and joined with nature's own true and cunning hand ere
man was, the everlasting pillars of the common-weal.
But in man _this_ law, also,--this law chiefly,--has its _special_,
essentially special, development. 'It is much _more_ impressed on man,
if he de-_generate_ not.' Great buildings have been reared on this
foundation already; great buildings, old and time-honoured, stand on
it. The history of human nature is glorious, even in its degeneracy,
with the exhibition of this larger, nobler form of humanity asserting
itself, triumphing over the intensities of the narrower motivity. It
is a species in which the organic law transcends the individual, and
embraces the kind; it is a constitution of nature, in which those who
seek the good of the kind, and subordinate the private nature to that,
are noble, and chief. It is a species in which the law of the
common-weal is for ever present to the private nature, as the law of
its own being, requiring, under the pains and penalties of the
universal laws of being, subjection.
Science cannot originate new forces in nature. 'Man, while operating,
can only apply or withdraw natural forces. Nature, internally,
performs the rest.' But here are the very forces that we want. If man
were, indeed, naturally and constitutionally, that mere species of
'vermin' which, under certain modes of culture, with great facility he
becomes, there would be no use in spending words upon this subject.
Science could not undertake the common-weal in that case. If nature's
word had been here dissolution, isolation, single intention in the
parts and members of that body that science sought to frame, what word
of creative art could she pronounce, what bonds of life could she
find, what breath of God could she boast, that she should think to
frame of such material the body politic, the organic whole, the
living, free, harmonious, triumphant common-weal.
But here are the very forces that we want, blindly moving, moving in
the dark, left to intuition and instinct, where nature had provided
reason, and required science and scientific art. That has not been
tried. And that is why this question of the state, dark as it is,
portentous, hopeless as its aspects are, if we limit the survey to our
present aids and instrumentalities, is already, to the eye of science,
kindling with the aurora of unimagined change, advancements to the
heights of man's felicity, that shall dim the airy portraiture of
poets' visions, that shall outgo here, too, the world's young dreams
with its scientific reality.
There has been no help from science in this field hitherto. The
proceeding of the world has been instinctive and empirical thus far,
in the attainment of the ends which the complex nature of man requires
him to seek. Men have been driven, and swayed hither and thither, by
these different and apparently contradictory aims, without any
_science_ of the forces that actuated them. Those ends these forces
will seek,--'it is their nature to,'--whether in man, or in any other
form in which they are incorporated. There's no amount of declamation
that is ever going to stop them. The power that is in everything that
moves, the forces of universal nature are concerned in the acts that
we deprecate and cry out upon. It is the original constitution of
things, as it was settled in that House of Commons, to whose acts the
memory of Man runneth not, that is concerned in these demonstrations;
and philosophy requires that whatever else we do, we should avoid, by
all means, coming into any collision with those statutes. 'We must so
order it,' says Michael of the Mountain, quoting in this case from
antiquity--'we must so order it, as by no means to contend with
universal nature.' 'To attempt to kick against natural necessity,' he
says in his own name, and in his own peculiar and more impressive
method of philosophic instruction--'to attempt to kick against natural
necessity, is to represent the folly of Ctesiphon, who undertook to
outkick his mule.' We must begin by distinguishing 'what is in our
power, and what not,' says the author of the Advancement of Learning,
applying that universal rule of practice to our present subject.
Here, then, carefully reduced to their most comprehensive form, traced
to the height of universal nature, and brought down to the specific
nature in man--here, as they lie on the ground of the common nature in
man, for the first time scientifically abstracted--are the powers
which science has to begin with in this field. The varieties in the
species, and the individual differences so remarkable in this kind,
are not in this place under consideration. But here is the _common_
nature in this kind, which must make the basis of any permanent
universal social constitution for it. Different races will require
that their own constitutional differences shall be respected in their
social constitutions; and if they be not, for the worse or for the
better, look for change. But this is the universal platform that
science is clearing here. This is the WORLD that she is concerning
herself with here, in the person of that High Priest of hers, who,
also, took that to be his business.
Here are these powers in man, then, to begin with. Here is this
universal natural predisposition in him, not to subsist, merely, and
maintain his form--which is nature's first law, they tell us--but to
'better himself' in some way. As Hamlet expresses it, 'he lacks
advancement'; and advancement he will have, or strive to have, if not
'_formal_ and _essential_,' then 'local.' He is instinctively impelled
to it; and in his ignorant attempt to compass that end which nature
has prescribed to him, the 'tempest of human life' arises.
The scientific plan will be, not to quarrel with these universal
forces, and undertake to found society on their annihilation. Science
will count that structure unsafe which is founded on the supposed
annihilation of these forces in anything that moves. The man of
science knows, that though by the predominance of powers, or by the
equilibrium of them, they may be for a time, '_as it were_,
annihilated,' they are in every creature; and nature in the instincts,
though blind, is cunning, and finds ways and means of overcoming
barriers, and evading restrictions, and inclines to indemnify herself
when once she finds her way again. Instead of quarrelling with these
forces, the scientific plan, having respect to the Creating Wisdom in
the constitution of man, overlooking them from that height, will
thankfully accept them, and make much of them. These are just the
motive powers that science has need of; she could not compose her
structure without them, which is only the perfecting of the structure
which the great Creating Wisdom had already outlined and
pre-ordered--not a machine, but a living organic whole.
Science takes this 'piece of work' as she finds him, ready, waiting
for the hand of art--imperfect, unfinished, but with the proceeding of
nature incorporated in him--with the creative, advancing, perfecting
motion, incorporated in him as his essence and law;--imperfect, but
with nature working within him for the rest, urging him to
self-perfection. She takes him as she finds him, a creature of
instinct, but with his large, rich, undeveloped, yet already active
nature of reason, and conscience, and religion, already struggling for
the mastery, counterbalancing his narrower motivity, holding in check,
with nobler intuitions, the error of an instinct which errs in man,
because eyes were included in nature's definition of him, as it was
written beforehand in her book, her universal book of types and
orders--eyes, and not instinct only--'that what he cannot smell out,
he may spy into.' 'O'er that art, which you say adds to nature, is an
art that nature makes.' The want of this pre-ordered art is the want
here still. The war of the unenlightened instincts is raging here
still. That is where the difficulty lies. That same patience of
investigation with which science has pursued and found out nature
elsewhere--that same intense, indefatigable concentration of
endeavour, which has been rewarded with such 'magnitude of effects' in
other fields--that same, in a higher degree, in more powerful
combinations, proportioned to the magnitude and common desirableness
of the object, is what is wanting here. It is the instincts that are
at fault here,--'the blind instincts, that seeing reason' should
'guide.'
That is where all the jar and confusion of this great storm begins,
that 'continues still,' and blasts our lives, in spite of all the
spells that we mumble over it, and in spite of all the magic that all
our magicians can bring to bear on it. 'Meagre success,' at least, is
still the word here. No wonder that the storm continues, under such
conditions. No wonder that the world is full of the uproar of this
arrested work, this violated intent of nature. She will storm on till
we hear her. Woe to those who put themselves in opposition to her, who
think to violate her intent and prosper! 'The storm continues,' and it
will continue, pronounce on it what incantations we may, so long as
the elemental forces of all nature are meeting in our lives, and
dashing in blind elemental strength against each other, and the
brooding spirit of the social life, the composing spirit of the larger
whole, cannot reconcile them, because the voices that are filling the
air with the discord of their controversy, and out-toning the noise of
this battle with theirs, are crying in one key, 'Let there be darkness
here'; because the darkness of the ages of instinct and intuition is
held back here, cowering, ashamed, but forbidden to flee away; because
the night of human ignorance still covers all this battle-ground, and
hides the combatants.
Science is the word here. The Man of the Modern Ages has spoken it,
'and now the times give it proof'; the times in which the methods of
earlier ages, in the rapid advancement of learning in other fields,
are losing their vitalities, and leaving us without those means of
social combination, without those social bonds which the rudest ages
of instinct and intuition, which the most barbaric peoples have been
able to command. The times give it proof, fearful proof, terrific
proof, when the noblest institutions of earlier ages are losing their
power to conserve the larger whole; when the conserving faith of
earlier ages, with its infinities of forces, is fainting in its
struggles, and is not supported; and men set at nought its divine
realities, because they have not been translated into their speech and
language, and think there _is_ no such thing; and under all the
exterior splendours of a material civilization advanced by science,
society tends to internal decay, and the primal war of atoms.
To meet the exigencies of a crisis like this, it is _not_ enough to
call these powers that are actual in the human nature, but which are
not yet reconciled and reduced to their true and natural order--it is
not enough at this age of the world, at this stage of human
advancement in other fields--to call these forces by some general
names which include their oppositions, and to require for want of
skill that a part of them shall be annihilated; it is not enough to
express a strong disapprobation of the result as it is, and to
require, in never-so-authoritative manner, that it shall be otherwise.
No matter what names we may use to make that requisition in, no matter
under _what_ pains and penalties we require it, the result--whatever
we may say to the contrary--the result does not follow. That is not
the way. Those who try it, and who continue to try it in the face of
no matter what failures, may think it is; but there is a voice
mightier than theirs, drowning all their speech, telling us in
thunder-tones, that it is not; with arguments that brutes might
understand, telling us that it is not!
It is, indeed, no small gain in the rude ages of warring instincts and
intuitions, when there is as yet no science to define them, and
compare them, and pronounce from its calm height its eternal axioms
here--when the world is a camp, and hostilities are deified, and
mankind is in arms when all the moral terms are still wrapped in the
confusion of the first outgoing of the perplexed, unanalysed human
motivity--it _is_ no small gain to get the word of the nobler
intuitions outspoken, to get the word of the divine law of man's
nature, his _essential_ law pronounced--even in rudest ages overawing,
commanding with its awful divinity the intenser motivity of the lesser
nature--able to summon, in rudest ages, to its ideal heights, those
colossal heroic forms, that cast their long shadows over the tracts of
time, to tell us what type it is that humanity aspires to. It is no
small gain to get these nobler intuitions outspoken in some voice that
commands with its authority the world's ear, or illustrated in some
exemplar that arrests the world's eye, and draws the human heart unto
it.
It is no small advance in human history, to get the divine authority
of those nobler intuitions, which, in man, anticipate speculation, and
their right to command the particular motives, recognised in the
common speech of men, incorporated in their speculative belief,
incorporated in their books of learning, and embalmed in institutions
that keep the divine exemplar of the human form for ever in our eyes.
It _is_ something. The warring nations war on. The world is in arms
still. The rude instincts are not stayed in their intent. They pause,
it may be; 'but a roused passion sets them _new_ a-work.' The speckled
demons, that the degenerate _angelic _nature breeds, put on the new
livery, and go abroad in it rejoicing. New rivers of blood, new seas
of carnage, are opened in the new name of peace; new engines of
torture, of fiendish wrong, are invented in the new name of love. But
it _is_ some gain. There is a new rallying-place on the earth for
those who seek truly the higher good; at the foot of the new symbol
they recognise each other, they join hand in hand, and the bands of
those who wait and watch amid the earth's darkness for the promise,
cheer us with their songs. Truths out of the Eternal Book, truths that
all hearts lean on in their need, are spoken. Words that shall never
pass away, sweet with the immortal hope and perennial joy of life, are
always in our ears.
The nations that have contributed to this result in any degree,
whether primarily or secondarily, whether they be Syrians or
Assyrians, Arabs or Egyptians, wandering or settled, wild or tame;
whether they belong to the inferior unanalysing Semitic races, or
whether they come of the more richly endowed, but yet youthful,
Indo-European stock; whether they be Hebrews or Persians, Greeks or
Romans, will always have the world's gratitude. Those to whose
intenser conceptions and bolder affirmations, in the rude ages of
instinct and spontaneous allegation, it was given to pronounce and put
on everlasting record, these primal truths of inspiration,--truths
whose divinity all true hearts respond to, may be indeed by their
natural intellectual characteristics,--if _Semitic_ must be--totally
disqualified by ethnological laws,--hopelessly disqualified--so
hopelessly that it is to lose all to put it on them--for the task of
commanding, in detail, our modern civilization;--a civilization which
has made, already, the rude ethics of these youthful races, when it
comes to details, so palpably and grossly inapplicable, that it is an
offence to modern sensibility to name--to so much as name--decisions
which stand unreversed, without comment, in our books of learning. But
that is no reason why we should not take, and thankfully appropriate
as the gift of God, all that it was their part to contribute to the
great plot of human advancement. We cannot afford to dispense with any
such gain. The movement which respects the larger whole, the divine
intent incorporates it all.
'Japhet shall dwell in the tents of Shem,' for they are world wide;
but woe to him if, in his day, he refuse to build the temple which, in
his day, his God will also require of him. Woe to him, if he think to
put upon another age and race the tasks which his Task-Master will
require of him,--which, with his many gifts, with his chief gifts,
with his ten talents, will surely be required of him. More than his
fathers' woe upon him--more than that old-world woe, which he, too,
remembers, if he think to lean on Asia, the youthful Asia, when his
own great world noon-day has come.
'There was violence on the earth in those days, and it repented the
Lord that he had made man on the earth.' 'Twill come,' says our own
poet, prefacing his proposal for a scientific art in the attainment of
the chief human ends, and giving his illustrated reasons for it,--
'Twill come [at this rate]
Humanity must, perforce, prey on itself,
Like _monsters_ of the _deep_.
But what are _these_?--these new orders,--these new species of nature,
defying nature, that we are generating with our arts here now? What
are these new varieties to which our kind is tending now? Look at this
kind for instance. What are these? Define them. Destroyers, not of
their own image in their fellow-man only, not of the image of their
kind only,--sacred by natural universal laws,--but of the chosen image
of it, the ideal of it, the one in whom the natural love of their kind
was by the law of nature concentred,--the wife and the mother,--
destroyed not as the wolf destroys its prey, but with ferocity, or
with prolonged and studious harm, that it required the human brain to
plan and perpetrate. Look at this pale lengthening widening train of
their victims. We must look at it. It will never go by till we do. We
shall have to look at it, and consider it well; it will lengthen, it
will _widen_ till we do:--ghastly, bruised, bleeding, trampled,--
trampled it may be, with nailed, booted heel, mother and child
together into one grave. But _these_ are common drunkard's wives;--we
are inured to this catastrophe, and do not think much of it. But who
are _these_, whom the grave cannot hold; that by God's edict break its
bonds and come back, making day hideous, to tell us what the earth
could not, would not keep,--to tell us of that other band who died and
made no sign? But this is nothing. Here are more. Here are others.
What are these? These are not spectres. _Their_ cheeks are red enough.
What loathsome thing is this, that we are bringing forth here now with
the human face upon it, in whom the heart of the universal nature has
expired. These are murderers,--count them--they are all murderers,
wholesale murderers, perhaps,--but of what? Of their own helpless,
tender, loving, trusting little ones. The wretched children of _our
time_,--alone in wretchedness,--alone in the universe of nature,--who
found, where nature promised them a mother's love, the knife, or the
more cruel agonizing drug of death. Was there any cause in nature for
it? Yes. They did it for the 'burial fee,' perhaps, or for some other
cause as good. They had a reason for it. Let our naturalists throw
their learning 'to the dogs,' and come this way, and tell us what this
means. Nay, let them bring their books with them, and example us with
its meaning if they can. Let them tell us what 'depth' in which nature
hides her failures, or yet unperfected hideous germinations,--what
formation in which she buries the kinds she repents that she has made
upon the earth, or what 'deep'--what ocean cave of 'monsters' we shall
drag to find our kindred in _these_ species. Let our wise men tell us
whether there be, or whether there ever was, any such thing as this in
nature before. If 'such things are,' or have been in any other kind,
let them produce the instances, and keep us in countenance and console
us for our own.
Let them look at that murderer too, and interpret _him_ for us. For he
too is waiting to be interpreted, and he will wait till we understand
his signs. He is speaking mute nature's language to us; we must get
her key. Look at him as he stands there in the dark, subordinating
that faculty which comprehends the whole, which recognises the
divinity of his neighbour's right, to his fiendish end: preparing with
the judgment of a man his little piece of machinery, with which he
will take, as he would take a salmon, or a rat, his fellow-man. Look
at him as he stands there now, listening patiently for your steps,
waiting to strangle you as you go by him unarmed to-night, confiding
in your fellow-man; waiting to drag you down from all the hopes and
joys of life, for the sake of the loose coin, gold or silver, which he
thinks he may find about you,--_perhaps_. 'How to KILL _vermin_ and
how to PREVENT the _fiend_,' was Tom's study. How to dispatch in the
most agreeable and successful manner, creatures whose notions of
_good_ are constitutionally and diametrically opposed to the good of
the larger whole, who have no sensibility to that, and no faculty
whereby they perceive it to be the worthier; that is no doubt one part
of the problem. The scientific question is, whether this creature be
really what it seems, a new and more horrid kind of beast--a
demoralization and deterioration of the human species into that. If it
be, let our naturalists come to our aid here also, and teach us how to
hunt him down and despatch him, with as much respect to the natural
decencies which the fact of the external human form would seem still
to exact from us, as the circumstances will admit of. Is it the beast,
or is it 'the fiend?'--that is the question. The fiend which tells us
that the angelic or divine nature is there--there still--overborne,
trampled on, '_as it were_, annihilated,' but lighting that gleam of
'wickedness,'--making of it, not instinct, but crime. Ah! we need not
ask which it is. This one has told his own story, if we could but read
it. He has left--he is leaving all the time, contributions, richest
contributions to our natural history of man,--that history which must
make the basis of our arts of cure. He was a wolf when you took him;
but in his cell you found something else in him--did you
not?--something that troubled and appalled you, with its kindred and
likeness, and its exaction on your sympathy. When you hung him as you
would _not_ hang a dog;--when you put him to a death which you would
think it indecent and inhuman to award to a creature of another
species, you did not find him _that_. The law of the nobler nature lay
in him as it were annihilated; _he_ thought there was no such thing;
but when nature's great voice was heard without also, and those
'bloody instructions he had taught returned to him'; when that voice
of the people, which was the voice of God to him, echoed with its doom
the voice within, and 'sweet religion,' with its divine appeals--'a
rhapsody of words' no longer, came, to second that great
argument,--the blind instincts were overpowered in him, the lesser
usurping nature was dethroned,--the angelic nature arose, and had
_her_ hour, and shed parting gleams of glory on those fleeting days
and nights; and he came forth, to die at last, not dragged like a
beast--with a manly step--with heroic grandeur, vindicating the heroic
type in nature, of that form he wore,--vindicating the violated law,
accepting his doom, bowing to its ignominy, a man, a member of
society,--a reconciled and accepted member of the commonweal.
How to _prevent_ the fiend? _is_ the question. Ah! what unlettered
forces are these, unlearned still, with all our learning, that the
dark, unaided wrestling hour 'in the little state of man,' leaves at
the head of affairs there, seated in its chair of state, crowned,
'predominant,' to speak the word of doom for us all. 'He poisons him
in the garden for his estate.' 'Lights, lights, lights!' is the word
here. There _is_ a cause in nature for these hard hearts, but it is
not in the constitution of man. There _is_ a cause; it is nature
herself, crying out upon our learning, asking to be--interpreted.
Woe for the age whose universal learning is in forms that move and
command no longer; that move and bind no longer with _fear_, or
_hope_, or _love_, 'the common people.' Woe for the people who think
that the everlasting truths of being--the eternal laws of science--are
things for saints, and schoolmasters, and preachers only,--the people
who carry about with them in secret, for week-day purposes, Edmund's
creed, to whom nature is already 'their goddess, and their law,' ere
they know her or her law--ere the appointed teacher has instructed
them in it,--ere they know what divinity she, too, holds to,--ere the
interpreter has translated into her speech, and evolved from her
books, the old truths which shall not--though their old '_garments_'
should '_be changed_'--which _shall not_ pass away. Woe for the
nations in whom that greater part that carries it, are godless, or
whose vows are paid in secret to Edmund's goddess,--whose true faith
is in appetite,--who have no secret laws imposed on that. 'Woe to the
people who are in such a case,' no matter on which side of the ocean
they may dwell, in the old world, or a new one; no matter under what
political constitutions. No matter under what favourable external
conditions, the national development that has that hollow in it, may
proceed; no matter under what glorious and before unimagined
conditions of a healthful, noble human development that development
may proceed. Alas! for such a people. The rulers may cry 'Peace!' but
there is none. And, alas! for the world in which such a power is
growing up under new conditions, and waxing strong, and preparing for
its leaps.
As a principle of social or political organisation, there is no
religion,--there never has been any,--so fatal as none. That is a
truth of which all history is an illustration. It is one which has
been illustrated in the history of modern states, not less vividly
than in the history of antiquity. And it will continue to be
illustrated, on the same grand scale, in those terrific evils which
the dissolution, or the dissoluteness of the larger whole creates,
whenever the appointed teachers of a nation, the inductors of it into
its highest learning, lag behind the common mind in their
interpretations, and leave it to the people to construct their own
rude 'tables of rejections'; whenever the practical axioms, which are
the inevitable vintage of these undiscriminating and fatally false
rejections, are suffered to become history.
'Woe to the land when its _king_ is a child'; but thrice woe to it,
when its teacher is a child. Alas! for the world, when the pabulum of
her youthful visions and anticipations of learning have become meat
for men, the prescribed provision for that nature in which man must
live, or 'cease to be,' amid the sober realities of western science.
'Thou shouldst not have been OLD _before thy time_.'
'The glow-worm shows the matin to be near,
And 'gins to pale his _ineffectual_ fire.'