From a Note-Book.
THE pain of erring,--the bitterest in the world,--is it not strange
that it should be so bitter? Is it not strange that growth must be
attained on such hard terms? Nay, but is it not simply applying the
sharpest instrument to the cutting and carving of the finest and
grandest form of things on earth,--a noble character?
The work is but begun on earth. Man is the only being in this world
whose nature is not half developed, whose powers are in their infancy;
the ideal in whose constitution is not yet, and never on earth,
realized. The animal arrives at animal perfection here,--becomes all
[329] that it was made to be. The beetle, the dragon-fly, the eagle,
is as perfect as it can be. But man comes far short of the ideal that
presided over his formation. Any way it would be unaccountable, not to
say incredible, that God's highest work on earth should fail of its
end, fail of realizing its ideal, fail of being what it was made for.
But when the process, unlike that in animals, which is all facility
and pleasure, is full of difficulty and pain, then for the unfinished
work to be dropped would be, not as if a sculptor should go on blocking
out marble statues only to throw them away half finished, but as if he
should take the living human frame for his subject, and should cut and
gash and torture it for years, only to fling it into the ditch.
To William Cullen Bryant, Esq.
ST. DAVID'S, Dec. 22, 1874.
THANK you, my friend, and three times over, for Allibone's volumes. I
did want and never expected to have them. But I had no idea Allibone
was such a big thing. All the bigger are my thanks. What an ocean of
drowned authors it is,--only here and there one with masts up and the
flags flying!
My little oracular, pro-Indians admonition was correctly printed, and
the changes you made were good.
Do you know that to-day sol stat? I don't believe that you mind it
in the city as we do in the country. To-day the glorious orb pauses
and rests a little, to turn back and march up and along the mountain
top,-about a mile and a half a month on the same,--and bring us summer.
And there is cheer and comfort in [330] that, though the proverb about
the cold strengthening holds for a couple of months.
With our Merry Christmas to you all, I am, all days of the year,
Yours heartily,