of life. If a great many thoughts pass through your mind you will
believe a long time has elapsed, many hours or days. In dreams a rush
of many thoughts, of seeming experiences, of spending hours and going
through a great variety of actions and companies, and when we start
up and look at the watch, instead of a long night we are surprised to
find it was a short nap. The opium-eater says, “I sometimes seemed to
have lived seventy or a hundred years in one night.” You know what
is told of the experience of some persons who have been recovered
from drowning. They relate that their whole life’s history seemed to
pass before them in review. They remembered in a moment all that they
ever did.
If we occupy ourselves long on this wonderful faculty, and see the
natural helps of it in the mind, and the way in which new knowledge
calls upon old knowledge—new giving undreamed-of value to old;
everywhere relation and suggestion, so that what one had painfully
held by strained attention and recapitulation now falls into place
and is clamped and locked by inevitable connection as a planet in its
orbit (every other orb, or the law or system of which it is a part,
being a perpetual reminder),—we cannot fail to draw thence a sublime
hint that thus there must be an endless increase in the power of
memory only through its use; that there must be a proportion between
the power of memory and the amount of knowables; and since the
Universe opens to us, the reach of the memory must be as large.
With every broader generalization which the mind makes, with every
deeper insight, its retrospect is also wider. With every new insight
into the duty or fact of to-day we come into new possession of the
past.
When we live by principles instead of traditions, by obedience to the
law of the mind instead of by passion, the Great Mind will enter into
us, not as now in fragments and detached thoughts, but the light of
to-day will shine backward and forward.
Memory is a presumption of a possession of the future. Now we are
halves, we see the past but not the future, but in that day will
the hemisphere complete itself and foresight be as perfect as
aftersight.
BOSTON.
“We are citizens of two fair cities,” said the Genoese gentleman to
a Florentine artist, “and if I were not a Genoese, I should wish
to be Florentine.” “And I,” replied the artist, “if I were not
Florentine”—“You would wish to be Genoese,” said the other. “No,”
replied the artist, “I should wish to be Florentine.”
The rocky nook with hill-tops three
Looked eastward from the farms,
And twice each day the flowing sea
Took Boston in its arms.
* * * * *
The sea returning day by day
Restores the world-wide mart;
So let each dweller on the Bay
Fold Boston in his heart.
Let the blood of her hundred thousands
Throb in each manly vein,
And the wits of all her wisest
Make sunshine in her brain.
And each shall care for other,
And each to each shall bend,
To the poor a noble brother,
To the good an equal friend.
A blessing through the ages thus
Shield all thy roofs and towers!
GOD WITH THE FATHERS, SO WITH US,
Thou darling town of ours!
[Illustration: (decorative banner)]
BOSTON.
The old physiologists said, “There is in the air a hidden food of
life;” and they watched the effect of different climates. They
believed the air of mountains and the seashore a potent predisposer
to rebellion. The air was a good republican, and it was remarked
that insulary people are versatile and addicted to change, both in
religious and secular affairs.
The air that we breathe is an exhalation of all the solid material
globe. An aerial fluid streams all day, all night, from every flower
and leaf, from every water and soil, from every rock-ledge; and from
every stratum a different aroma and air according to its quality.
According to quality and according to temperature, it must have
effect on manners.
There is the climate of the Sahara: a climate where the sunbeams are
vertical; where is day after day, sunstroke after sunstroke, with a
frosty shadow between. “There are countries,” said Howell, “where
the heaven is a fiery furnace, or a blowing bellows, or a dropping
sponge, most parts of the year.” Such is the assimilating force of
the Indian climate, that, Sir Erskine Perry says, “the usage and
opinion of the Hindoos so invades men of all castes and colors who
deal with them that all take a Hindoo tint. Parsee, Mongol, Afghan,
Israelite, Christian, have all passed under this influence and
exchanged a good part of their patrimony of ideas for the notions,
manner of seeing, and habitual tone of Indian society.” He compares
it to the geologic phenomenon which the black soil of the Dhakkan
offers,—the property, namely, of assimilating to itself every foreign
substance introduced into its bosom.
How can we not believe in influences of climate and air, when, as
true philosophers, we must believe that chemical atoms also have
their spiritual cause why they are thus and not other; that carbon,
oxygen, alum and iron, each has its origin in spiritual nature?
Even at this day men are to be found superstitious enough to believe
that to certain spots on the surface of the planet special powers
attach, and an exalted influence on the genius of man. And it appears
as if some localities of the earth, through wholesome springs, or
as the _habitat_ of rare plants and minerals, or through ravishing
beauties of Nature, were preferred before others. There is great
testimony of discriminating persons to the effect that Rome is
endowed with the enchanting property of inspiring a longing in men
there to live and there to die.
* * * * *
Who lives one year in Boston ranges through all the climates of the
globe. And if the character of the people has a larger range and
greater versatility, causing them to exhibit equal dexterity in
what are elsewhere reckoned incompatible works, perhaps they may
thank their climate of extremes, which at one season gives them the
splendor of the equator and a touch of Syria, and then runs down to
a cold which approaches the temperature of the celestial spaces.
It is not a country of luxury or of pictures; of snows rather, of
east-winds and changing skies; visited by icebergs, which, floating
by, nip with their cool breath our blossoms. Not a luxurious climate,
but wisdom is not found with those who dwell at their ease. Give me a
climate where people think well and construct well,—I will spend six
months there, and you may have all the rest of my years.
What Vasari says, three hundred years ago, of the republican city
of Florence might be said of Boston; “that the desire for glory and
honor is powerfully generated by the air of that place, in the men
of every profession; whereby all who possess talent are impelled to
struggle that they may not remain in the same grade with those whom
they perceive to be only men like themselves, even though they may
acknowledge such indeed to be masters; but all labor by every means
to be foremost.”
We find no less stimulus in our native air; not less ambition in
our blood, which Puritanism has not sufficiently chastised; and at
least an equal freedom in our laws and customs, with as many and as
tempting rewards to toil; with so many philanthropies, humanities,
charities, soliciting us to be great and good.
New England is a sort of Scotland. ’Tis hard to say why. Climate is
much; then, old accumulation of the means,—books, schools, colleges,
literary society;—as New Bedford is not nearer to the whales than New
London or Portland, yet they have all the equipments for a whaler
ready, and they hug an oil-cask like a brother.
I do not know that Charles River or Merrimac water is more clarifying
to the brain than the Savannah or Alabama rivers, yet the men that
drink it get up earlier, and some of the morning light lasts through
the day. I notice that they who drink for some little time of the
Potomac water lose their relish for the water of the Charles River,
of the Merrimac and the Connecticut,—even of the Hudson. I think the
Potomac water is a little acrid, and should be corrected by copious
infusions of these provincial streams.
Of great cities you cannot compute the influences. In New York,
in Montreal, New Orleans and the farthest colonies,—in Guiana, in
Guadaloupe,—a middle-aged gentleman is just embarking with all his
property to fulfil the dream of his life and spend his old age in
Paris; so that a fortune falls into the massive wealth of that city
every day in the year. Astronomers come because there they can find
apparatus and companions. Chemist, geologist, artist, musician,
dancer, because there only are grandees and their patronage,
appreciators and patrons. Demand and supply run into every invisible
and unnamed province of whim and passion.
Each great city gathers these values and delights for mankind,
and comes to be the brag of its age and population. The Greeks
thought him unhappy who died without seeing the statue of Jove at
Olympia. With still more reason, they praised Athens, the “Violet
City.” It was said of Rome in its proudest days, looking at the
vast radiation of the privilege of Roman citizenship through the
then-known world,—“the extent of the city and of the world is the
same” (_spatium et urbis et orbis idem_). London now for a thousand
years has been in an affirmative or energizing mood; has not stopped
growing. Linnæus, like a naturalist, esteeming the globe a big egg,
called London the _punctum saliens_ in the yolk of the world.
* * * * *
This town of Boston has a history. It is not an accident, not a
windmill, or a railroad station, or cross-roads tavern, or an
army-barracks grown up by time and luck to a place of wealth; but
a seat of humanity, of men of principle, obeying a sentiment and
marching loyally whither that should lead them; so that its annals
are great historical lines, inextricably national; part of the
history of political liberty. I do not speak with any fondness, but
the language of coldest history, when I say that Boston commands
attention as the town which was appointed in the destiny of nations
to lead the civilization of North America.
A capital fact distinguishing this colony from all other colonies was
that the persons composing it consented to come on the one condition
that the charter should be transferred from the company in England to
themselves; and so they brought the government with them.
On the 3d of November, 1620, King James incorporated forty of his
subjects, Sir F. Gorges and others, the council established at
Plymouth in the county of Devon for the planting, ruling, ordering
and governing of New England in America. The territory—conferred on
the patentees in absolute property, with unlimited jurisdiction, the
sole power of legislation, the appointment of all officers and all
forms of government—extended from the 40th to the 48th degree of
north latitude, and in length from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
John Smith writes (1624): “Of all the four parts of the world that
I have yet seen not inhabited, could I but have means to transplant
a colony, I would rather live here than anywhere; and if it did not
maintain itself, were we but once indifferently well fitted, let us
starve. Here are many isles planted with corn, groves, mulberries,
salvage gardens and good harbours. The sea-coast as you pass shows
you all along large corn-fields and great troops of well-proportioned
people.” Massachusetts in particular, he calls “the paradise of these
parts,” notices its high mountain, and its river, “which doth pierce
many days’ journey into the entrails of that country.” Morton arrived
in 1622, in June, beheld the country, and “the more he looked, the
more he liked it.”
In sixty-eight years after the foundation of Boston, Dr. Mather
writes of it, “The town hath indeed three elder Sisters in this
colony, but it hath wonderfully outgrown them all, and her mother,
Old Boston in England, also; yea, within a few years after the first
settlement it grew to be the metropolis of the whole English America.”
How easy it is, after the city is built, to see where it ought to
stand. In our beautiful bay, with its broad and deep waters covered
with sails from every port; with its islands hospitably shining in
the sun; with its waters bounded and marked by light-houses, buoys
and sea-marks; every foot sounded and charted; with its shores
trending steadily from the two arms which the capes of Massachusetts
stretch out to sea, down to the bottom of the bay where the city
domes and spires sparkle through the haze,—a good boatman can easily
find his way for the first time to the State House, and wonder that
Governor Carver had not better eyes than to stop on the Plymouth
Sands.
But it took ten years to find this out. The colony of 1620 had landed
at Plymouth. It was December, and the ground was covered with snow.
Snow and moonlight make all places alike; and the weariness of the
sea, the shrinking from cold weather and the pangs of hunger must
justify them.
But the next colony planted itself at Salem, and the next at
Weymouth; another at Medford; before these men, instead of jumping on
to the first land that offered, wisely judged that the best point for
a city was at the bottom of a deep and islanded bay, where a copious
river entered it, and where a bold shore was bounded by a country of
rich undulating woodland.
* * * * *
The planters of Massachusetts do not appear to have been hardy men,
rather, comfortable citizens, not at all accustomed to the rough task
of discoverers; and they exaggerated their troubles. Bears and wolves
were many; but early, they believed there were lions; Monadnoc was
burned over to kill them. John Smith was stung near to death by the
most poisonous tail of a fish, called a sting-ray. In the journey of
Rev. Peter Bulkeley and his company through the forest from Boston to
Concord they fainted from the powerful odor of the sweetfern in the
sun;—like what befell, still earlier, Biorn and Thorfinn, Northmen,
in their expedition to the same coast; who ate so many grapes from
the wild vines that they were reeling drunk. The lions have never
appeared since,—nor before. Their crops suffered from pigeons and
mice. Nature has never again indulged in these exasperations. It
seems to have been the last outrage ever committed by the sting-rays
or by the sweetfern, or by the fox-grapes; they have been of
peaceable behavior ever since.
Any geologist or engineer is accustomed to face more serious dangers
than any enumerated, excepting the hostile Indians. But the awe was
real and overpowering in the superstition with which every new object
was magnified. The superstition which hung over the new ocean had
not yet been scattered; the powers of the savage were not known; the
dangers of the wilderness were unexplored; and, in that time, terrors
of witchcraft, terrors of evil spirits, and a certain degree of
terror still clouded the idea of God in the mind of the purest.
The divine will descends into the barbarous mind in some strange
disguise; its pure truth not to be guessed from the rude vizard under
which it goes masquerading. The common eye cannot tell what the bird
will be, from the egg, nor the pure truth from the grotesque tenet
which sheathes it. But by some secret tie it holds the poor savage
to it, and he goes muttering his rude ritual or mythology, which yet
conceals some grand commandment; as courage, veracity, honesty, or
chastity and generosity.
So these English men, with the Middle Ages still obscuring their
reason, were filled with Christian thought. They had a culture of
their own. They read Milton, Thomas à Kempis, Bunyan and Flavel with
religious awe and delight, not for entertainment. They were precisely
the idealists of England; the most religious in a religious era. An
old lady who remembered these pious people said of them that “they
had to hold on hard to the huckleberry bushes to hinder themselves
from being translated.”
In our own age we are learning to look as on chivalry at the
sweetness of that ancient piety which makes the genius of St.
Bernard, Latimer, Scougal, Jeremy Taylor, Herbert, and Leighton.
Who can read the fiery ejaculations of St. Augustine, a man of as
clear a sight as almost any other; of Thomas à Kempis, of Milton, of
Bunyan even, without feeling how rich and expansive a culture—not
so much a culture as a higher life—they owed to the promptings of
this sentiment; without contrasting their immortal heat with the
cold complexion of our recent wits? Who can read the pious diaries
of the Englishmen in the time of the Commonwealth and later, without
a sigh that we write no diaries to-day? Who shall restore to us the
odoriferous Sabbaths which made the earth and the humble roof a
sanctity?
This spirit, of course, involved that of Stoicism, as, in its turn,
Stoicism did this. Yet how much more attractive and true that this
piety should be the central trait and the stern virtues follow, than
that Stoicism should face the gods and put Jove on his defence. That
piety is a refutation of every skeptical doubt. These men are a
bridge to us between the unparalleled piety of the Hebrew epoch and
our own. These ancient men, like great gardens with great banks of
flowers, send out their perfumed breath across the great tracts of
time. How needful is David, Paul, Leighton, Fénelon, to our devotion.
Of these writers, of this spirit which deified them, I will say with
Confucius, “If in the morning I hear of the right way, and in the
evening die, I can be happy.”
I trace to this deep religious sentiment and to its culture great
and salutary results to the people of New England; first, namely,
the culture of the intellect, which has always been found in the
Calvinistic church. The colony was planted in 1620; in 1638 Harvard
College was founded. The General Court of Massachusetts, in 1647,
“To the end that learning may not be buried in the graves of the
forefathers, ordered, that every township, after the Lord has
increased them to the number of fifty householders, shall appoint one
to teach all children to write and read; and where any town shall
increase to the number of a hundred families, they shall set up a
Grammar School, the Masters thereof being able to instruct youth so
far as they may be fitted for the University.”
Many and rich are the fruits of that simple statute. The universality
of an elementary education in New England is her praise and her
power in the whole world. To the schools succeeds the village
Lyceum,—now very general throughout all the country towns of New
England,—where every week through the winter, lectures are read and
debates sustained which prove a college for the young rustic. Hence
it happens that the young farmers and mechanics, who work all summer
in the field or shop, in the winter often go into a neighboring town
to teach the district school arithmetic and grammar. As you know too,
New England supplies annually a large detachment of preachers and
schoolmasters and private tutors to the interior of the South and
West.
* * * * *
New England lies in the cold and hostile latitude which by shutting
men up in houses and tight and heated rooms a large part of the year,
and then again shutting up the body in flannel and leather, defrauds
the human being in some degree of his relations to external nature;
takes from the muscles their suppleness, from the skin its exposure
to the air; and the New Englander, like every other northerner, lacks
that beauty and grace which the habit of living much in the air, and
the activity of the limbs not in labor but in graceful exercise, tend
to produce in climates nearer to the sun. Then the necessity, which
always presses the northerner, of providing fuel and many clothes
and tight houses and much food against the long winter, makes him
anxiously frugal, and generates in him that spirit of detail which is
not grand and enlarging, but goes rather to pinch the features and
degrade the character.
As an antidote to the spirit of commerce and of economy, the
religious spirit—always enlarging, firing man, prompting the
pursuit of the vast, the beautiful, the unattainable—was especially
necessary to the culture of New England. In the midst of her
laborious and economical and rude and awkward population, where is
little elegance and no facility; with great accuracy in details,
little spirit of society or knowledge of the world, you shall not
unfrequently meet that refinement which no education and no habit
of society can bestow; which makes the elegance of wealth look
stupid, and unites itself by natural affinity to the highest minds
of the world; nourishes itself on Plato and Dante, Michael Angelo
and Milton; on whatever is pure and sublime in art,—and, I may say,
gave a hospitality in this country to the spirit of Coleridge and
Wordsworth, and to the music of Beethoven, before yet their genius
had found a hearty welcome in Great Britain.
I do not look to find in England better manners than the best manners
here. We can show native examples, and I may almost say (travellers
as we are) natives who never crossed the sea, who possess all the
elements of noble behavior.
It is the property of the religious sentiment to be the most refining
of all influences. No external advantages, no good birth or breeding,
no culture of the taste, no habit of command, no association with the
elegant,—even no depth of affection that does not rise to a religious
sentiment, can bestow that delicacy and grandeur of bearing which
belong only to a mind accustomed to celestial conversation. All else
is coarse and external; all else is tailoring and cosmetics beside
this;[2] for thoughts are expressed in every look or gesture, and
these thoughts are as if angels had talked with the child.
By this instinct we are lifted to higher ground. The religious
sentiment gave the iron purpose and arm. That colonizing was a great
and generous scheme, manly meant and manly done. When one thinks of
the enterprises that are attempted in the heats of youth, the Zoars,
New-Harmonies and Brook-Farms, Oakdales and Phalansteries, which have
been so profoundly ventilated, but end in a protracted picnic which
after a few weeks or months dismisses the partakers to their old
homes, we see with new increased respect the solid, well-calculated
scheme of these emigrants, sitting down hard and fast where they
came, and building their empire by due degrees.
John Smith says, “Thirty, forty, or fifty sail went yearly in America
only to trade and fish, but nothing would be done for a plantation,
till about some hundred of your Brownists of England, Amsterdam and
Leyden went to New Plymouth; whose humorous ignorances caused them
for more than a year to endure a wonderful deal of misery, with an
infinite patience.”
What should hinder that this America, so long kept in reserve from
the intellectual races until they should grow to it, glimpses being
afforded which spoke to the imagination, yet the firm shore hid until
science and art should be ripe to propose it as a fixed aim, and a
man should be found who should sail steadily west sixty-eight days
from the port of Palos to find it,—what should hinder that this New
Atlantis should have its happy ports, its mountains of security, its
gardens fit for human abode where all elements were right for the
health, power and virtue of man?
America is growing like a cloud, towns on towns, States on States;
and wealth (always interesting, since from wealth power cannot be
divorced) is piled in every form invented for comfort or pride.
If John Bull interest you at home, come and see him under new
conditions, come and see the Jonathanization of John.
There are always men ready for adventures,—more in an over-governed,
over-peopled country, where all the professions are crowded and all
character suppressed, than elsewhere. This thirst for adventure is
the vent which Destiny offers; a war, a crusade, a gold mine, a new
country, speak to the imagination and offer swing and play to the
confined powers.
The American idea, Emancipation, appears in our freedom of
intellection, in our reforms, and in our bad politics; it has, of
course, its sinister side, which is most felt by the drilled and
scholastic, but if followed it leads to heavenly places.
European and American are each ridiculous out of his sphere. There is
a Columbia of thought and art and character, which is the last and
endless sequel of Columbus’s adventure.
* * * * *