The mist in my face,
When the snows begin, and the blasts denote
I am nearing the place,
The power of the night, the press of the storm,
The post of the foe;
Where he stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form,
Yet the strong man must go:
For the journey is done and the summit attained,
And the barriers fall,
Though a battle's to fight ere the guerdon be gained,
The reward of it all.
I was ever a fighter, so--one fight more,
The best and the last!
I would hate that death bandaged my eyes, and forbore,
And bade me creep past.
No! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers
The heroes of old,
Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life's arrears.
Of pain, darkness and cold.
For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave,
The black minute's at end,
And the elements' rage, the fiend-voices that rave,
Shall dwindle, shall blend,
Shall change, shall become first a peace out of pain,
Then a light, then thy breast,
O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again,
And with God be the rest!
ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON
WAGES
Glory of warrior, glory of orator, glory of song,
Paid with a voice flying by to be lost on an endless sea--
Glory of Virtue, to fight, to struggle, to right the wrong--
Nay, but she aim'd not at glory, no lover of glory she:
Give her the glory of going on, and still to be.
The wages of sin is death: if the wages of Virtue be dust,
Would she have heart to endure for the life of the worm and the fly?
She desires no isles of the blest, no quiet seats of the just,
To rest in a golden grove, or to bask in a summer sky:
Give her the wages of going on, and not to die.
THE HIGHER PANTHEISM
The sun, the moon, the stars, the seas, the hills and the plains--
Are not these, O Soul, the Vision of Him who reigns?
Is not the Vision He? tho' He be not that which He seems?
Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams?
Earth, these solid stars, this weight of body and limb,
Are they not sign and symbol of thy division from Him?
Dark is the world to thee: thyself art the reason why;
For is He not all but that which has power to feel "I am I"?
Glory about thee, without thee; and thou fulfillest thy doom,
Making Him broken gleams, and a stifled splendor and gloom.
Speak to Him thou, for He hears, and Spirit with Spirit can meet--
Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet.
God is law, say the wise; O Soul, and let us rejoice,
For, if He thunder by law, the thunder is yet His voice.
Law is God, say some: no God at all, says the fool;
For all we have power to see is a straight staff bent in a pool;
And the ear of man cannot hear, and the eye of man cannot see;
But if we could see and hear, this Vision--were it not He?
FLOWER IN THE CRANNIED WALL
Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower--but _if_ I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.
IN MEMORIAM
PROEM
Strong Son of God, immortal Love,
Whom we, that have not seen thy face,
By faith, and faith alone, embrace,
Believing where we cannot prove;
Thine are these orbs of light and shade;
Thou madest Life in man and brute;
Thou madest Death; and lo, thy foot
Is on the skull which thou hast made.
Thou wilt not leave us in the dust:
Thou madest man, he knows not why,
He thinks he was not made to die;
And thou hast made him: thou art just.
Thou seemest human and divine,
The highest, holiest manhood, thou:
Our wills are ours, we know not how;
Our wills are ours, to make them thine.
Our little systems have their day;
They have their day and cease to be:
They are but broken lights of thee,
And thou, O Lord, art more than they.
We have but faith: we cannot know;
For knowledge is of things we see;
And yet we trust it comes from thee,
A beam in darkness: let it grow.
Let knowledge grow from more to more,
But more of reverence in us dwell;
That mind and soul, according well,
May make one music as before,
But vaster. We are fools and slight;
We mock thee when we do not fear:
But help thy foolish ones to bear;
Help thy vain worlds to bear thy light.
Forgive what seem'd my sin in me;
What seem'd my worth since I began;
For merit lives from man to man,
And not from man, O Lord, to thee.
Forgive my grief for one removed,
Thy creature, whom I found so fair.
I trust he lives in thee, and there
I find him worthier to be loved.
Forgive these wild and wandering cries,
Confusions of a wasted youth;
Forgive them where they fail in truth,
And in thy wisdom make me wise.
LIV
Oh, yet we trust that somehow good
Will be the final goal of ill,
To pangs of nature, sins of will,
Defects of doubt, and taints of blood;
That nothing walks with aimless feet;
That not one life shall be destroy'd,
Or cast as rubbish to the void,
When God hath made the pile complete;
That not a worm is cloven in vain;
That not a moth with vain desire
Is shrivel'd in a fruitless fire,
Or but subserves another's gain.
Behold, we know not anything;
I can but trust that good shall fall
At last--far off--at last, to all,
And every winter change to spring.
So runs my dream: but what am I?
An infant crying in the night:
An infant crying for the light:
And with no language but a cry.
LV
The wish, that of the living whole
No life may fail beyond the grave,
Derives it not from what we have
The likest God within the soul?
Are God and Nature then at strife,
That Nature lends such evil dreams?
So careful of the type she seems,
So careless of the single life;
That I, considering everywhere
Her secret meaning in her deeds,
And finding that of fifty seeds
She often brings but one to bear,
I falter where I firmly trod,
And falling with my weight of cares
Upon the great world's altar-stairs
That slope thro' darkness up to God,
I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope,
And gather dust and chaff, and call
To what I feel is Lord of all,
And faintly trust the larger hope.
LVI
"So careful of the type?" but no.
From scarped cliff and quarried stone
She cries, "A thousand types are gone:
I care for nothing, all shall go.
"Thou makest thine appeal to me:
I bring to life, I bring to death:
The spirit does but mean the breath:
I know no more." And he, shall he,
Man, her last work, who seem'd so fair,
Such splendid purpose in his eyes,
Who roll'd the psalm to wintry skies,
Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer,
Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation's final law--
Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek'd against his creed--
Who loved, who suffer'd countless ills,
Who battled for the True, the Just,
Be blown about the desert dust,
Or seal'd within the iron hills?
No more? A monster then, a dream,
A discord. Dragons of the prime,
That tare each other in their slime,
Were mellow music match'd with him.
O life as futile, then, as frail!
O for thy voice to soothe and bless!
What hope of answer, or redress?
Behind the veil, behind the veil.
CROSSING THE BAR
Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,
But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.
Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;
For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crost the bar.
GEORGE MEREDITH
LUCIFER IN STARLIGHT[12]
On a starred night Prince Lucifer uprose.
Tired of his dark dominion, swung the fiend
Above the rolling ball in cloud part screened,
Where sinners hugged their spectre of repose.
Poor prey to his hot fit of pride were those.
And now upon his western wing he leaned,
And now his huge bulk o'er Afric's sands careened,
And now the black planet shadowed Arctic snows.
Soaring through wider zones that pricked his scars
With memory of the old revolt from Awe,
He reached a middle height, and at the stars,
Which are the brain of heaven, he looked, and sank.
Around the ancient track marched, rank on rank,
The army of unalterable law.
WILLIAM E. HENLEY
INVICTUS
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as a pit from Pole to Pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud;
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the Shade;
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and still finds me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll:
I am the master of my fate;
I am the captain of my soul.
THOMAS HARDY
NEW YEAR'S EVE[13]
"I have finished another year," said God,
"In gray, green, white, and brown;
I have strewn the leaf upon the sod,
Sealed up the worm within the clod,
And let the last sun down."
"And what's the good of it?" I said.
"What reasons made you call
From formless void this earth we tread,
When nine-and-ninety can be read
Why nought should be at all?
"Yea, Sire; why shaped you us, 'who in
This tabernacle groan'?
If ever a joy be found herein,
Such joy no man had wished to win
If he had never known!"
Then he: "My labors--logicless--
You may explain; not I:
Sense-sealed I have wrought, without a guess
That I evolved a Consciousness
To ask for reasons why.
"Strange that ephemeral creatures who
By my own ordering are,
Should see the shortness of my view,
Use ethic tests I never knew,
Or made provision for!"
He sank to raptness as of yore,
And opening New Year's Day
Wove it by rote as theretofore,
And went on working evermore
In his unweeting way.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
CIVILIZATION[14]
A certain degree of progress from the rudest state in which man is
found,--a dweller in caves, or on trees, like an ape,--a cannibal, and
eater of pounded snails, worms, and offal,--a certain degree of progress
from this extreme, is called Civilization. It is a vague, complex name, of
many degrees. Nobody has attempted a definition. M. Guizot, writing a book
on the subject, does not. It implies the evolution of a highly-organized
man, brought to supreme delicacy of sentiment, as in practical power,
religion, liberty, sense of honor, and taste. In the hesitation to define
what it is, we usually suggest it by negations. A nation that has no
clothing, no iron, no alphabet, no marriage, no arts of peace, no abstract
thought, we call barbarous. And after many arts are invented or imported,
as among the Turks and Moorish nations, it is often a little complaisant
to call them civilized.
Each nation grows after its own genius, and has a civilization of its own.
The Chinese and Japanese, though each complete in his way, is different
from the man of Madrid or the man of New York. The term imports a
mysterious progress. In the brutes is none; and in mankind to-day the
savage tribes are gradually extinguished rather than civilized. The
Indians of this country have not learned the white man's work; and in
Africa, the negro of to-day is the negro of Herodotus. In other races the
growth is not arrested; but the like progress that is made by a boy "when
he cuts his eye-teeth," as we say,--childish illusions passing daily
away, and he seeing things really and comprehensively,--is made by tribes.
It is the learning the secret of cumulative power, of advancing on one's
self. It implies a facility of association, power to compare, the ceasing
from fixed ideas. The Indian is gloomy and distressed when urged to depart
from his habits and traditions. He is overpowered by the gaze of the
white, and his eye sinks. The occasion of one of these starts of growth is
always some novelty that astounds the mind, and provokes it to dare to
change. Thus there is a Cadmus, a Pytheas, a Manco Capac at the beginning
of each improvement--some superior foreigner importing new and wonderful
arts, and teaching them. Of course, he must not know too much, but must
have the sympathy, language, and gods of those he would inform. But
chiefly the sea-shore had been the point of departure to knowledge, as to
commerce. The most advanced nations are always those who navigate the
most. The power which the sea requires in a sailor makes a man of him very
fast, and the change of shores and population clears his head of much
nonsense of his wigwam.
Where shall we begin or end the list of those feats of liberty and wit,
each of which feats made an epoch of history? Thus, the effect of a framed
or stone house is immense on the tranquillity, power, and refinement of
the builder. A man in a cave or in a camp, a nomad, will die with no more
estate than the wolf or the horse leaves. But so simple a labor as a house
being achieved, his chief enemies are kept at bay. He is safe from the
teeth of wild animals, from frost, sunstroke, and weather; and fine
faculties begin to yield their fine harvest. Invention and art are born,
manners and social beauty and delight. 'Tis wonderful how soon a piano
gets into a log-hut on the frontier. You would think they found it under
a pine-stump. With it comes a Latin Grammar--and one of those tow-head
boys has written a hymn on Sunday. Now let colleges, now let senates, take
heed! for here is one who, opening these fine tastes on the basis of the
pioneer's iron constitution, will gather all their laurels in his strong
hands.
When the Indian trail gets widened, graded, and bridged to a good road,
there is a benefactor, there is a missionary, a pacificator, a
wealth-bringer, a maker of markets, a vent for industry. Another step in
civility is the change from war, hunting, and pasturage to agriculture.
Our Scandinavian forefathers have left us a significant legend to convey
their sense of the importance of this step. "There was once a giantess who
had a daughter, and the child saw a husbandman ploughing in the field.
Then she ran and picked him up with her finger and thumb, and put him and
his plough and his oxen into her apron, and carried them to her mother,
and said, 'Mother, what sort of a beetle is this that I found wriggling in
the sand?' But the mother said, 'Put it away, my child; we must begone out
of this land, for these people will dwell in it.'" Another success is the
post-office, with its educating energy augmented by cheapness and guarded
by a certain religious sentiment in mankind; so that the power of a wafer
or a drop of wax or gluten to guard a letter, as it flies over sea, over
land, and comes to its address as if a battalion of artillery brought it,
I look upon as a fine metre of civilization.
The division of labor, the multiplication of the arts of peace, which is
nothing but a large allowance to each man to choose his work according to
his faculty,--to live by his better hand,--fills the State with useful and
happy laborers; and they, creating demand by the very temptation of their
productions, are rapidly and surely rewarded by good sale: and what a
police and ten commandments their work thus becomes! So true is Dr.
Johnson's remark that "men are seldom more innocently employed than when
they are making money."
The skillful combinations of civil government, though they usually follow
natural leadings, as the lines of race, language, religion, and territory,
yet require wisdom and conduct in the rulers, and in their result delight
the imagination. "We see insurmountable multitudes obeying, in opposition
to their strongest passions, the restraints of a power which they scarcely
perceive, and the crimes of a single individual marked and punished at the
distance of half the earth."
Right position of woman in the State is another index. Poverty and
industry with a healthy mind read very easily the laws of humanity, and
love them; place the sexes in right relations of mutual respect, and a
severe morality gives that essential charm to woman which educates all
that is delicate, poetic, and self-sacrificing, breeds courtesy and
learning, conversation and wit, in her rough mate; so that I have thought
a sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good women.
Another measure of culture is the diffusion of knowledge, overrunning all
the old barriers of caste, and, by the cheap press, bringing the
university to every poor man's door in the newsboy's basket. Scraps of
science, of thought, of poetry, are in the coarsest sheet, so that in
every house we hesitate to burn a newspaper until we have looked it
through.
The ship, in its latest complete equipment, is an abridgment and compend
of a nation's arts: the ship steered by compass and chart,--longitude
reckoned by lunar observation and by chronometer,--driven by steam; and
in wildest sea-mountains, at vast distances from home,--
The pulses of her iron heart
Go beating through the storm.
No use can lessen the wonder of this control, by so weak a creature, of
forces so prodigious. I remember I watched, in crossing the sea, the
beautiful skill whereby the engine in its constant working was made to
produce two hundred gallons of fresh water out of salt water every
hour--thereby supplying all the ship's wants.
The skill that pervades complex details; the man that maintains himself;
the chimney taught to burn its own smoke; the farm made to produce all
that is consumed on it; the very prison compelled to maintain itself and
yield a revenue, and, better still, made a reform school, and a
manufactory of honest men out of rogues, as the steamer made fresh water
out of salt--all these are examples of that tendency to combine
antagonisms, and utilize evil, which is the index of high civilization.
Civilization is the result of highly complex organization. In the snake,
all the organs are sheathed: no hands, no feet, no fins, no wings. In bird
and beast, the organs are released, and begin to play. In man, they are
all unbound, and full of joyful action. With this unswaddling he receives
the absolute illumination we call Reason, and thereby true liberty.
Climate has much to do with this melioration. The highest civility has
never loved the hot zones. Wherever snows falls, there is usually civil
freedom. Where the banana grows, the animal system is indolent and
pampered at the cost of higher qualities; the man is sensual and cruel.
But this scale is not invariable. High degrees of moral sentiment control
the unfavorable influences of climate; and some of our grandest examples
of men and of races come from the equatorial regions--as the genius of
Egypt, of India, and of Arabia.
These feats are measures or traits of civility; and temperate climate is
an important influence, though not quite indispensable; for there have
been learning, philosophy, and art in Iceland, and in the tropics. But one
condition is essential to the social education of man, namely, morality.
There can be no high civility without a deep morality, though it may not
always call itself by that name, but sometimes the point of honor, as in
the institution of chivalry; or patriotism, as in the Spartan and Roman
republics; or the enthusiasm of some religious act which imputes its
virtue to its dogma; or the cabalism, or _esprit de corps_, of a masonic
or other association of friends.
The evolution of a highly-destined society must be moral; it must run in
the grooves of the celestial wheels. It must be catholic in aims. What is
_moral_? It is the respecting in action catholic or universal ends. Hear
the definition which Kant gives of moral conduct: "Act always so that the
immediate motive of thy will may become a universal rule for all
intelligent beings."
Civilization depends on morality. Everything good in man leans on what is
higher. This rule holds in small as in great. Thus, all our strength and
success in the work of our hands depend on our borrowing the aid of the
elements. You have seen a carpenter on a ladder with a broad axe chopping
upward chips from a beam. How awkward! at what disadvantage he works! But
see him on the ground, dressing his timber under him. Now, not his feeble
muscles, but the force of gravity brings down the axe; that is to say, the
planet itself splits his stick. The farmer had much ill-temper, laziness,
and shirking to endure from his hand-sawyers, until one day he bethought
him to put his saw-mill on the edge of a waterfall; and the river never
tires of turning his wheel: the river is good-natured, and never hints an
objection.
We had letters to send: couriers could not go fast enough, nor far enough;
broke their wagons, foundered their horses; bad roads in spring,
snow-drifts in winter, heats in summer; could not get the horses out of a
walk. But we found out that the air and earth were full of electricity,
and always going our way--just the way we wanted to send. _Would he take a
message?_ Just as lief as not; had nothing else to do; would carry it in
no time. Only one doubt occurred, one staggering objection--he had no
carpetbag, no visible pockets, no hands, not so much as a mouth, to carry
a letter. But, after much thought and many experiments, we managed to meet
the conditions, and to fold up the letter in such invisible compact form
as he could carry in those invisible pockets of his, never wrought by
needle and thread--and it went like a charm.
I admire still more than the saw-mill the skill which, on the sea-shore,
makes the tides drive the wheels and grind corn, and which thus engages
the assistance of the moon, like a hired hand, to grind, and wind, and
pump, and saw, and split stone, and roll iron.
Now that is the wisdom of a man, in every instance of his labor, to hitch
his wagon to a star, and see his chore done by the gods themselves. That
is the way we are strong, by borrowing the might of the elements. The
forces of steam, gravity, galvanism, light, magnets, wind, fire, serve us
day by day, and cost us nothing.
Our astronomy is full of examples of calling in the aid of these
magnificent helpers. Thus, on a planet so small as ours, the want of an
adequate base for astronomical measurements is early felt; as, for
example, in detecting the parallax of a star. But the astronomer, having
by an observation fixed the place of a star, by so simple an expedient as
waiting six months, and then repeating his observation, contrived to put
the diameter of the earth's orbit, say two hundred millions of miles,
between his first observation and his second, and this line afforded him a
respectable base for his triangle.
All our arts aim to win this vantage. We cannot bring the heavenly powers
to us; but, if we will only choose our jobs in directions in which they
travel, they will undertake them with the greatest pleasure. It is a
peremptory rule with them, that _they never go out of their road_. We are
dapper little busybodies, and run this way and that way superserviceably;
but they swerve never from their fore-ordained paths--neither the sun, nor
the moon, nor a bubble of air, nor a mote of dust.
And as our handiworks borrow the elements, so all our social and political
action leans on principles. To accomplish anything excellent, the will
must work for catholic and universal ends. A puny creature, walled in on
every side, as Daniel wrote,--
Unless above himself he can
Erect himself, how poor a thing is man!
But when his will leans on a principle, when he is the vehicle of ideas,
he borrows their omnipotence. Gibraltar may be strong, but ideas are
impregnable, and bestow on the hero their invincibility. "It was a great
instruction," said a saint in Cromwell's war, "that the best courages are
but beams of the Almighty." Hitch your wagon to a star. Let us not fag in
paltry works which serve our pot and bag alone. Let us not lie and steal.
No god will help. We shall find all their teams going the other
way--Charles's Wain, Great Bear, Orion, Leo, Hercules: every god will
leave us. Work rather for those interests which the divinities honor and
promote--justice, love, freedom, knowledge, utility.
If we can thus ride in Olympian chariots by putting our works in the path
of the celestial circuits, we can harness also evil agents, the powers of
darkness, and force them to serve against their will the ends of wisdom
and virtue. Thus, a wise government puts fines and penalties on pleasant
vices. What a benefit would the American government, not yet relieved of
its extreme need, render to itself, and to every city, village, and hamlet
in the States, if it would tax whiskey and rum almost to the point of
prohibition! Was it Bonaparte who said that he found vices very good
patriots? "He got five millions from the love of brandy, and he should be
glad to know which of the virtues would pay him as much." Tobacco and
opium have broad backs, and will cheerfully carry the load of armies, if
you choose to make them pay high for such joy as they give and such harm
as they do.