Sing long ago the song of other shores—
Listen to me, and then in chorus gather
All your deep voices, as ye pull your oars:
CHORUS.
_Fair these broad meads—these hoary woods are grand;_
_But we are exiles from our father’s land._
From the lone sheiling of the misty island
Mountains divide us, and the waste of seas—
Yet still the blood is strong, the heart is Highland,
And we in dreams behold the Hebrides:
_Fair these broad meads, etc._
We ne’er shall tread the fancy-haunted valley,
Where ’tween the dark hills creeps the small clear stream,
In arms around the patriarch banner rally,
Nor see the moon on royal tombstones gleam:
_Fair these broad meads, etc._
When the bold kindred, in the time long vanish’d,
Conquered the soil and fortified the keep,—
No seer foretold the children would be banish’d,
That a degenerate Lord might boast his sheep;
_Fair these broad meads, etc._
Come foreign rage—let Discord burst in slaughter!
O then for clansmen true, and stern claymore—
The hearts that would have given their blood like water,
Beat heavily beyond the Atlantic roar.
_Fair these broad meads—these hoary woods are grand;_
_But we are exiles from our fathers’ land._
The authorship of these verses is uncertain, but it probably
lies between John Galt, author of _Annals of the Parish_, and
Lockhart, son-in-law of Sir Walter Scott. The verses were
quoted by Professor Wilson (Christopher North) in his _Noctes
Ambrosianae_ in _Blackwood_, Sept., 1829, but, because Wilson
was not the author, they are not reproduced in his collected
works (_Blackwood_, 1855).
_A degenerate Lord_, &c. This refers to the eviction of the
Highland crofters and cottars. In 1829 the Duke of Hamilton had
just cleared the population out of the Isle of Arran.
_Sheiling_ or _Shealing_, a hut used by shepherds, fishermen,
or others for shelter when at work at a distance from home.
* * * * *
Love took up the harp of Life, and smote on all the chords with might;
Smote the chord of Self, that, trembling, passed in music out of sight.
TENNYSON (_Locksley Hall_).
* * * * *
If thou wouldst have high God thy soul assure
That she herself shall as herself endure,
Shall in no alien semblance, thine and wise,
Fulfil her and be young in Paradise,
One way I know; forget, forswear, disdain
Thine own best hopes, thine utmost loss and gain,
Till when at last thou scarce rememberest now
If on the earth be such a man as thou,
Nor hast one thought of self-surrender,—no,
For self is none remaining to forego,—
If ever, then shall strong persuasion fall
That in thy giving thou hast gained thine all,
Given the poor present, gained the boundless scope,
And kept thee virgin for the further hope....
When all base thoughts like frighted harpies flown
In her own beauty leave the soul alone;
When Love,—not rosy-flushed as he began,
But Love, still Love, the prisoned God in man,—
Shows his face glorious, shakes his banner free,
Cries like a captain for Eternity:—
O halcyon air across the storms of youth,
O trust him, he is true, he is one with Truth!
Nay, is he Christ? I know not; no man knows
The right name of the heavenly Anterôs,—
But here is God, whatever God may be,
And whomsoe’er we worship, this is He.
F. W. MYERS (_The Implicit Promise of
Immortality_).
Anterôs is the god of mutual love, who punishes those who do
not return the love of others, as otherwise his brother Erôs,
god of love, will be unhappy.
The fine poem from which this is quoted represents one of the
phases of Myers’ experience. It was published in 1882, but
written about ten years before. He had then lost his faith in
Christianity, but believed in a future life on grounds based
partly upon philosophy and partly on “vision.” He had those
moments of exaltation when, as he says:
The open secret flashes on the brain,
As if one almost guessed it, almost knew
Whence we have sailed and voyage whereunto.
For entrance into the future life, Love and complete
Self-surrender are the best equipment for the soul.
* * * * *
But all through life I see a Cross,
Where sons of God yield up their breath:
There is no gain except by loss,
There is no life except by death,
There is no vision but by Faith.
Nor glory but by bearing shame,
Nor Justice but by taking blame;
And that Eternal Passion saith,
“Be emptied of glory and right and name.”
W. C. SMITH (_Olrig Grange_).
* * * * *
Life is short, and we have not too much time for gladdening the lives of
those who are travelling the dark road with us. Oh, be swift to love,
make haste to be kind.
AMIEL’S _Journal_.
* * * * *
SELF-SACRIFICE
What though thine arm hath conquered in the fight,—
What though the vanquished yield unto thy sway,
Or riches garnered pave thy golden way,—
Not therefore hast thou gained the sovran height
Of man’s nobility! No halo’s light
From these shall round thee shed its sacred ray;
If these be all thy joy,—then dark thy day,
And darker still thy swift approaching night!
But if in thee more truly than in others
Hath dwelt Love’s charity;—if by thine aid
Others have passed above thee, and if thou,
Though victor, yieldest victory to thy brothers,
Though conquering conquered, and a vassal made—
Then take thy crown, well mayst thou wear it now.
SAMUEL WADDINGTON.
* * * * *
We bury decay in the earth; we plant in it the perishing; we feed it with
offensive refuse: but nothing grows out of it that is not clean; it gives
us back life and beauty.
CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER (_My Summer in a Garden_).
* * * * *
SOUL’S BEAUTY
Under the arch of Life, where love and death,
Terror and mystery guard her shrine, I saw
Beauty enthroned; and though her gaze struck awe,
I drew it in as simply as my breath.
Hers are the eyes which, over and beneath,
The sky and sea bend on thee,—which can draw,
By sea or sky or woman, to one law,
The allotted bondman of her palm and wreath.
This is that Lady Beauty, in whose praise
Thy voice and hand shake still,—long known to thee
By flying hair and fluttering hem,—the beat
Following her daily of thy heart and feet,
How passionately and irretrievably,
In what fond flight, how many ways and days!
D. G. ROSSETTI.
Although Rossetti was not a classical student, he seems here
to have arrived at the Platonic idea of an abstract Beauty, of
whose essence are all beautiful things, “sea or sky or woman.”
Love and death, terror and mystery guard her, as a goddess on
her throne, and all lovers of the beautiful are worshippers at
her shrine.
* * * * *
Thinking is only a dream of feeling; a dead feeling; a pale-grey, feeble
life.
NOVALIS.
* * * * *
A whetstone cannot cut, but it makes iron sharp, and gives it a keen edge.
ISOCRATES (436-338 B.C.).
This is quoted in Plutarch’s _Lives_. Isocrates was asked why
he taught rhetoric so much and yet spoke so rarely; and this
was his reply. Horace (_Ars Poetica_ 304) playfully says that
he is no longer able to write verses but he will teach others
to write, adding “a whetstone is not used for cutting, but is
used for sharpening steel nevertheless.”
The career of Isocrates, “that old man eloquent,”[31] is
extremely interesting. He preserved his energy and his
influence to the end of his long life of 98 years.
* * * * *
From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods there be
That no life lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.
SWINBURNE (_The Garden of Proserpine_).
A very musical expression of a very ugly thought.
* * * * *
Women never betray themselves to men as they do to each other.
GEORGE ELIOT (_Middlemarch_).
* * * * *
THE RETREAT
Happy those early days, when I
Shined in my Angel-infancy!
Before I understood this place
Appointed for my second race,
Or taught my soul to fancy aught
But a white celestial thought:
When yet I had not walk’d above
A mile or two from my first Love,
And looking back, at that short space,
Could see a glimpse of His bright face:
When on some gilded cloud or flower
My gazing soul would dwell an hour,
And in those weaker glories spy
Some shadows of eternity:
Before I taught my tongue to wound
My Conscience with a sinful sound,
Or had the black art to dispense
A several sin to ev’ry sense,
But felt through all this fleshly dress
Bright shoots of everlastingness.
O how I long to travel back,
And tread again that ancient track!
That I might once more reach that plain
Where first I left my glorious train;
From whence th’ enlighten’d spirit sees
That shady City of Palm-trees!
But ah! my soul with too much stay
Is drunk, and staggers in the way!
Some men a forward motion love,
But I by backward steps would move;
And when this dust falls to the urn,
In that state I came, return.
HENRY VAUGHAN (1621-1695).
I include this poem, although it is in the anthologies, because
from my own experience a young reader will not see its beauty
without some words of explanation. It is the precursor of the
greatest ode ever written, Wordsworth’s _Ode on Intimations
of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood_.
Wordsworth, Vaughan, and many others believe that we had a
separate existence before we came into this world (and there is
much in the experience of each of us to warrant that belief).
Wordsworth says:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.
But in order to appreciate either Wordsworth’s or Vaughan’s
poem it is not necessary to have this belief in a past separate
existence—it is enough to realize that
Trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.
* * * * *
One may see the small value God has for riches by the people He gives
them to.
ALEXANDER POPE.
* * * * *
There’s a fancy some lean to and others hate—
That, when this life is ended, begins
New work for the soul in another state,
Where it strives and gets weary, loses and wins:
Where the strong and the weak, this world’s congeries,
Repeat in large what they practised in small,
Through life after life in unlimited series;
Only the scale’s to be changed, that’s all.
Yet I hardly know. When a soul has seen
By the means of Evil that Good is best,
And, through earth and its noise, what is heaven’s serene,—
When our faith in the same has stood the test—
Why, the child grown man, you burn the rod,
The uses of labour are surely done;
There remaineth a rest for the people of God:
And I have had troubles enough, for one.
R. BROWNING (_Old Pictures in Florence_).
Browning in his last poem, the well-known “Epilogue,” speaks
with another voice. He wishes his friends to think of him after
death as he was when alive:—
One who never turned his back but marched breast-forward.
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
Sleep to wake.
No, at noonday in the bustle of man’s work-time
Greet the unseen with a cheer!
Bid him forward, breast and back as either should be,
“Strive and thrive!” cry, “Speed,—fight on, fare ever,
There as here!”
F. W. H. Myers wrote:—
We need a summons to no houri-haunted paradise, no passionless
contemplation, no monotony of prayer and praise; but to endless
advance by endless effort, and, if need be, by endless pain. Be
it mine, then, to plunge among the unknown Destinies—to dare
and still to dare!
Emerson’s heaven also was
Built of furtherance and pursuing,
Not of spent deeds, but of doing.
(“Threnody.”)
* * * * *
In life, Love comes first. Indeed, _we_ only come because Love calls for
us. We find it waiting with outstretched arms on arrival. Love is the
beginning of everything.
F. W. BOREHAM (_Faces in the Fire_).
* * * * *
Our daies are full of dolor and disease,
Our life afflicted with incessant paine,
That nought on earth may lessen or appease.
Why then should I desire here to remaine?
Or why should he that loves me, sorie bee
For my deliverence, or at all complaine
My good to hear, and tóward joyes to see?
EDMUND SPENSER (_Daphnaïda_).
_Tóward_, “approaching.”
* * * * *
My closing remark is as to avoiding debates that are in their very nature
interminable.... There is a certain intensity of emotion, interest, bias
or prejudice if you will, that can neither reason nor be reasoned with.
On the purely intellectual side, the disqualifying circumstances are
complexity and vagueness. If a topic necessarily hauls in numerous other
topics of difficulty, the essay may do something for it, but not the
debate. Worst of all is the presence of several large, ill-defined, and
unsettled terms. A not unfrequent case is a combination of the several
defects, each, perhaps, in a small degree. A tinge of predilection or
party, a double or triple complication of doctrines, and one or two hazy
terms will make a debate that is pretty sure to end as it began. Thus
it is that a question, plausible to appearance, may contain within it
capacities of misunderstanding, cross-purposes, and pointless issues,
sufficient to occupy the long night of Pandemonium, or beguile the
journey to the nearest fixed star.
ALEXANDER BAIN (_Contemporary Review, April, 1877_).
From an address to the Edinburgh University Philosophical
Society.
* * * * *
Diogenes, seeing Neptune’s temple with votive pictures of those saved
from wreck, says, “Yea, but where are they painted, that have been
drowned?”
BACON.
* * * * *
THE BELLE OF THE BALL-ROOM
I saw her at the County Ball:
There, when the sounds of flute and fiddle
Gave signal sweet in that old hall
Of hands across and down the middle,
Hers was the subtlest spell by far
Of all that set young hearts romancing;
She was our queen, our rose, our star;
And then she danced—O Heaven, her dancing!
Through sunny May, through sultry June,
I loved her with a love eternal;
I spoke her praises to the moon,
I wrote them to the Sunday Journal:
My mother laugh’d: I soon found out
That ancient ladies have no feeling;
My father frown’d: but how should gout
See any happiness in kneeling?...
She smiled on many, just for fun,—
I knew that there was nothing in it;
I was the first—the only one
Her heart had thought of for a minute.—
I knew it, for she told me so,
In phrase which was divinely moulded;
She wrote a charming hand,—and oh!
How sweetly all her notes were folded!
...
We parted; months and years roll’d by
We met again four summers after:
Our parting was all sob and sigh;
Our meeting was all mirth and laughter:
For in my heart’s most secret cell
There had been many other lodgers;
And she was not the ball-room’s Belle,
But only—Mrs. Something Rogers!
W. M. PRAED.
* * * * *
A canon of my own in judging verses is that no man has a right to put
into metre what he can as well say out of metre. To which I may add, as
a corollary, that _a fortiore_ he has no right to put into metre what he
can better say out of metre.
W. S. LILLY (_Essay on George Eliot_).
* * * * *
Aujourd’hui, ce qui ne vaut pas la peine d’être dit, on le chante.
(Now-a-days when a thing is not worth saying they sing it—_i.e._ put it
in a song.)
BEAUMARCHAIS (_Le Barbier de Séville_, Act I. Sc. I.)
* * * * *
I do not know whether I gave you at any time the details of my work here,
or the principles upon which I have been proceeding.... Some of the work
set down includes Ancient Ethics—which is almost entirely grossly wrong
and great rubbish also. This part I have persistently refused to get
up, not because I disliked it, but because it is decidedly injurious
to warp and twist the brain by impressing it with wrong thoughts and
systems—just as it would be insane in the polisher of a mirror to think
it would reflect the external world more truly, if he gave it a dint
here, a scratch there, a bulge in another place, and so forth. It would
take me too long to describe the details. Suffice it to say that one of
the examiners in Mental Philosophy and in Moral and Political Philosophy
is an old, _blind_ (literally) man of the old school, who gave a very
abnormally large amount of questions relating to Ancient Ethics, and an
abnormally large amount to the _early_ part of English Ethics—leaving
hardly any marks to be scored by thorough understanding and ability to
use the principles of the subjects.
The consequence was that those, who had crammed up the earlier text-books
and could reproduce them, had an enormous advantage. This old fogey
moreover is strongly anti-Spencerian. Indeed I heard that he had objected
to my answers because “there was too much of Spencer and myself!” So
that instead of _criticism and originality_, he avowedly preferred _mere
reproduction_, a good example of the slavishness of that method of
examination predominant mostly, which, as Spencer wrote to me some time
ago, is devised for testing a man’s “power of acquisition instead of
using that which has been acquired.”
RICHARD HODGSON (1855-1905) (_Letter, Dec., 1881_).
This letter was written to me from Cambridge, when Hodgson
(see Preface) had found his immediate prospects blasted by
the results of the Moral Science Tripos. No one was placed in
the First Class and he (although at the head of the Tripos)
only in the Second Class. This meant that he had no hope of
a Fellowship, which would have enabled him to go on with
original work in philosophy, and he would have to employ his
time in earning a livelihood. Added to this was the cruel
disappointment to his family and friends.
Hodgson was one of the most gifted men that Australia has
produced. He had completed his M.A. and LL.D. courses in
Melbourne by 1877, when he was twenty-two years of age, and
then, discarding the profession of the law, left for Cambridge
to read Mental and Moral Science. While still an undergraduate
there he had written an article in reply to T. H. Green, and
submitted it to Herbert Spencer, who highly approved of it,
and sent it to the _Contemporary_. However, as stated above,
Hodgson’s immediate future depended on the result of the
examination. (He was at the time preparing one of the articles
he contributed to _Mind_, and had in view further original
work.)
When the result of the Tripos appeared, Henry Sidgwick and Venn
who were then Lecturers and by far the best Moral Science men
in Cambridge, came to sympathize with Hodgson, on the unfair
result. They urged him to go to Germany so that he might
acquire that perfect command of the German language which was
necessary for his philosophic work. On learning that he was not
in a position to do this, Sidgwick insisted—as he said, “in
the interests of philosophy”—on defraying _the whole of the
expenses_ of Hodgson’s residence in Germany. As he insisted
strongly, Hodgson accepted the offer, and went to Jena, armed
with a very flattering letter of introduction from Herbert
Spencer to Haeckel.
Almost immediately after his return from Germany the Society
for Psychical Research was founded, and Hodgson joined it. He
came to the conclusion that the work of this Society was more
important than any other study, while probably it would also
be of fundamental assistance to philosophy. He went out to
India in 1884, and thoroughly exposed Madame Blavatsky and her
“Theosophy,” and, from about 1886, devoted the rest of his life
to Psychical Research. Although maintaining his reading and
his intimacy with Henry Sidgwick, William James, and others,
his services practically became lost to philosophy. This,
however, does not affect the important fact illustrated by the
Tripos incident. We learn what ineptitude can exist in a great
university, and what grave results must necessarily follow
therefrom.
Although Hodgson was writing under stress of a grievous
calamity (yet with a dauntless heart—see verse on Dedication
page), his remarks on Ancient Ethics are not, in my opinion,
exaggerated.
Herbert Spencer’s remark to Hodgson about examinations may also
be noted.
* * * * *
_Prometheus._ And thou, O Mother Earth!
_Earth._ I hear, I feel
Thy lips are on me, and their touch runs down
Even to the adamantine central gloom
Along these marble nerves; ’tis life, ’tis joy,
And, through my withered, old, and icy frame
The warmth of an immortal youth shoots down
Circling. Henceforth the many children fair
Folded in my sustaining arms; all plants,
And creeping forms, and insects rainbow-winged,
And birds, and beasts, and fish, and human shapes,
Which drew disease and pain from my wan bosom
Draining the poison of despair, shall take
And interchange sweet nutriment.
SHELLEY (_Prometheus Unbound_, III, 3).
In Shelley’s great poem, Prometheus is not merely the Titan
who, having stolen fire from heaven to benefit man, was chained
to a pillar while an eagle tore at his vitals, he is the
spirit of humanity. Man has (through superstition) given the
god, Zeus, great powers which he uses to enslave and oppress
man’s own mind and body. Ultimately the god is overthrown,
Prometheus, the spirit of man, is released, and the world
enters upon its progress towards perfection.
This and the following quotations are from a collection of
references to Mother-Earth.
* * * * *
Say, mysterious Earth! O say, great mother and goddess,
Was it not well with thee then, when first thy lap was ungirdled,
Thy lap to the genial Heaven, the day that he wooed thee and won thee!...
Myriad myriads of lives teemed forth from the mighty embracement.
Thousand-fold tribes of dwellers, impelled by thousand-fold instincts.
Filled, as a dream, the wide waters; the rivers sang on their channels;
Laughed on their shores the wide seas; the yearning ocean swelled upward;
Young life lowed through the meadows, the woods, and the echoing
mountains,
Wandered bleating in valleys, and warbled on blossoming branches.
S. T. COLERIDGE (_Hymn to the Earth_).
An imitation of Stolberg’s _Hymne an die Erde_.
* * * * *
From my wings are shaken the dews that waken
The sweet buds every one,
When rocked to rest on their mother’s breast,
As she dances about the sun.
SHELLEY (_The Cloud_).
* * * * *
For Nature ever faithful is
To such as trust her faithfulness.
When the forest shall mislead me,
When the night and morning lie,
When sea and land refuse to feed me,
’Twill be time enough to die.
Then will yet my mother yield
A pillow in her greenest field
Nor the June flowers scorn to cover
The clay of their departed lover.
EMERSON (_Woodnotes_).
* * * * *
Long have I loved what I behold,
The night that calms, the day that cheers;
The common growth of mother-earth
Suffices me—her tears, her mirth,
Her humblest mirth and tears.
WORDSWORTH (_Peter Bell_).
* * * * *
So mayst thou live, till like ripe fruit thou drop
Into thy mother’s lap.
MILTON (_Paradise Lost_, XI, 535).
* * * * *
SONG OF PROSERPINE.
Sacred Goddess, Mother Earth
Thou from whose immortal bosom
Gods, and men, and beasts have birth,
Leaf and blade, and bud and blossom,
Breathe thine influence most divine
On thine own child, Proserpine.
If with mists of evening dew
Thou dost nourish these young flowers
Till they grow, in scent and hue,
Fairest children of the Hours,
Breathe thine influence most divine
On thine own child, Proserpine.
SHELLEY.
Proserpine, daughter of Ceres, whilst gathering flowers with
her playmates at Enna in Sicily, was carried off by Pluto, also
called Dis, god of the dead. (For two-thirds, or, according to
later writers, one-half of each year, she returns to the earth,
bringing spring and summer.)
That fair field
Of Enna, where Proserpine gathering flowers,
Herself a fairer flower, by gloomy Dis
Was gathered; which cost Ceres all that pain
To seek her through the world.
(_Paradise Lost_, IV, 269).
* * * * *
And ... the rich winds blow,
And ... the waters go,
And the birds for joy, and the trees for prayer,
Bowing their heads in the sunny air....
All make a music, gentle and strong,
Bound by the heart into one sweet song;
And amidst them all, the mother Earth
Sits with the children of her birth....
Go forth to her from the dark and the dust
And weep beside her, if weep thou must;
If she may not hold thee to her breast,
Like a weary infant, that cries for rest;
At least she will press thee to her knee
And tell a low, sweet tale to thee,
Till the hue to thy cheek, and the light to thine eye
Strength to thy limbs, and courage high
To thy fainting heart return amain.
G. MACDONALD (_Phantastes_).
_Hold thee to her breast_, give rest in death.
* * * * *