Essay No. I.
By moral feeling, we mean a recognition of those great principles of
right and wrong, which form the basis of our relation to each other as
social beings. When it is exhibited in our varied character of members
of a community, citizens of a commonwealth, and brethren of the human
family, we give it the specific names of benevolence, patriotism, and
philanthropy. Since then, these relations are so comprehensive, and so
necessarily blended and interwoven with all our habits of thought and
action, the influence of this feeling must extend to most, if not to
all the powers of the mind. It will be our object in this series of
essays, to demonstrate this influence as affecting the pleasures of the
imagination.
By the benignity of our Creator, we have been endowed with the powers
of taste and imagination, to throw a charm over the ruggedness of
human life, and bring in a thousand tributes of enjoyment to cheer
our hearts in our journeyings through this ‘vale of tears.’ These
pleasures, as long as the powers themselves are uncorrupted by vice,
and their purity free from the taint of unhallowed passions, are of a
kind the most pure and innocent. We believe it to be an immutable law,
in all the operations of the mind, that the exercise of our virtuous
affections, as far as it is carried, induces the highest possible
degree of happiness which we are capable of feeling. Our most exquisite
enjoyments in Literature and the Fine Arts, will be found to receive
their origin from something which most directly calls up virtuous
associations; and in the beauties of the natural world, those scenes
prove the most delightful, which elevate our contemplations to the
infinite perfections of the ‘great First Cause.’
We would remark, that the influence of moral feeling tends to heighten
the pleasure which we derive from Eloquence and Poetry. The pleasure
which flows from these sources belongs to the highest and purest
order of intellectual enjoyments. They bear with them a voice that
wakes the soul to intense interest, now throwing over its powers the
inspiration of sublimity, and now floating around it in tones as mellow
and gentle as the last whisper of a summer breeze. Who, as he has
listened to the voice of the living speaker, and been borne along on
the full tide of eloquence at the will of the moving spirit, has not
felt his heart swell within him to a loftier expansion, and his bosom
throb with the pulsations of a new and more glorious intelligence?
Who, as his imagination has drank in the sweet and thrilling strains
of the poet’s lyre, and his own spirit has caught the glow of his
burning aspirations, has not felt a yearning to soar above and beyond
the cold, sluggish atmosphere of sense, and mingle in the fancied
existence portrayed so winningly before him? There is something in the
ideal but splendid creations of poetry, embodying in its images all
that is sublime, and all that is beautiful in the world of thought and
of nature, that must ever strike within us a kindred chord. It bids
the dim and far off past roll back its tide of vanished years, and
centuries of almost forgotten ages pass again, with their memorials,
across the theatre of existence. Palmyra rises before us from her ruin
of ages, and her long deserted streets are thronged once more by the
congregated strangers from a thousand lands. Rome, too, shakes off the
yoke of Goth and Vandal, and resumes her proud title of ‘mistress of
the world.’ Again the lofty Capitol is reared on the Tarpeian rock, the
long and splendid triumphal procession enters the gates of the temple
of Jupiter, and Rome is once more the ‘eternal city.’ Then we turn
toward the classic shores of Greece, and Athens, the ‘mother of the
arts,’ opens her splendors before us. The stately Parthenon, sublime
in its proportions and chastely beautiful in its Doric simplicity,
still surmounts the summit of the Acropolis. We roam with Plato through
the shades of Academia; we stray with Socrates along the banks of the
Ilissus; we enter the crowded forum, and listen to the soul-thrilling
eloquence of the ‘prince of orators.’ We need not waste words to prove,
that to the man of sensibility, there is a rich repast of intellectual
luxuries in such exercises of the imagination. But rich as it is, there
is one thing which can bestow a still higher flavor. It is only when
the orator rises in the kindling majesty of virtue, when the soul of a
patriot lightens in the flashing eye, when the wrongs of the oppressed
pour the flush of noble indignation over his brow, and a nation’s voice
is heard in the thunders of his eloquence, that we can know the full
power of his appeals, and receive our most exquisite gratification. For
by the very constitution of our mind, our deepest sympathies can be
excited only when the holier and lovelier sensibilities of our being
are awakened by the exhibition of moral beauty. There is something
so commanding, so godlike, in this subservience of great talents to
high and noble ends, that while the graces and the fire of the orator
delight the fancy and the taste, all our better feelings are enlisted
in the purity and exaltation of his purpose. Thus also with the
poet--it is only when a spirit from above has breathed the inspiration
over him, and his harp is tuned to the minstrelsy of Holiness,--when
in the glories of antiquity, the ravages of time, and the mighty
revolutions of empires, he leads us, with tender sublimity of feeling,
to trace the wonder workings of that wisdom which ‘sees the end from
the beginning’--that the imagination revels in the fullness of its
enjoyment.