working now for a century in a great nation, not wholly unfettered and
on a complete scale even with us, but with wider acceptance and broader
application than elsewhere in the world, and with most prosperity in
those parts of the country where they are most mastering; and the nation
has grown great in their charge. What, in brief, are the results, so
clear, so grand, so vast, that they stand out like mountain ranges, the
configuration of a national life? The diffusion of material comfort
among masses of men, on a scale and to an amount abolishing peasantry
forever; the dissemination of education, which is the means of life to
the mind as comfort is to the body, in no more narrow bounds, but
through the State universal, abolishing ignorance; the development of
human capacity in intelligence, energy, and character, under the
stimulus of the open career, with a result in enlarging and
concentrating the available talent of the State to a compass and with an
efficiency and diversity by which alone was possible the material
subjugation of the continent which it has made tributary to man's life;
the planting of self-respect in millions of men, and of respect for
others grounded in self-respect, constituting a national characteristic
now first to be found, and to be found in the bosom of every child of
our soil, and, with this, of a respect for womanhood, making the common
ways safe and honourable for her, unknown before; the moulding of a
conservative force, so sure, so deep, so instinctive, that it has its
seat in the very vitals of the State and there maintains as its blood
and bone the principles which the fathers handed down in institutions
containing our happiness, security, and destiny, yet maintains them as a
living present, not as a dead past; the incorporation into our body
politic of millions of half-alien people, without disturbance, and with
an assimilating power that proves the universal value of democracy as a
mode of dealing with the race, as it now is; an enthronement of reason
as the sole arbiter in a free forum where every man may plead, and have
the judgment of all men upon the cause; a rooted repugnance to use
force; an aversion to war; a public and private generosity that knows no
bounds of sect, race, or climate; a devotion to public duty that excuses
no man and least of all the best, and has constantly raised the standard
of character; a commiseration for all unfortunate peoples and warm
sympathy with them in their struggles; a love of country as
inexhaustible in sacrifice as it is unparalleled in ardour; and a will
to serve the world for the rise of man into such manhood as we have
achieved, such prosperity as earth has yielded us, and such justice as,
by the grace of heaven, is established within our borders. Is it not a
great work? and all these blessings, unconfined as the element, belong
to all our people. In the course of these results, the imperfection of
human nature and its institutions has been present; but a just
comparison of our history with that of other nations, ages, and systems,
and of our present with our past, shows that such imperfection in
society has been a diminishing element with us, and that a steady
progress has been made in methods, measures, and men. No great issue, in
a whole century, has been brought to a wrong conclusion. Our public life
has been starred with illustrious names, famous for honesty, sagacity,
and humanity, and, above all, for justice. Our Presidents in particular
have been such men as democracy should breed, and some of them such men
as humanity has seldom bred. We are a proud nation, and justly; and,
looking to the future, beholding these things multiplied million-fold
in the lives of the children of the land to be, we may well humbly own
God's bounty which has earliest fallen upon us, the first fruits of
democracy in the new ages of a humaner world.
It will be plain to those who have read what has elsewhere been said of
the ideal life, that democracy is for the nation a true embodiment of
that life, and wears its characteristics upon its sleeve. In it the
individual mingles with the mass, and becomes one with mankind, and
mankind itself sums the totality of individual good in a well-nigh
perfect way. In it there is the slow embodiment of a future nobly
conceived and brought into existence on an ideal basis of the best that
is, from age to age, in man's power. It includes the universal wisdom,
the reach of thought and aspiration, by virtue of which men climb, and
here manhood climbs. It knows no limit; it rejects no man who wears the
form Christ wore; it receives all into its benediction. Through
democracy, more readily and more plainly than through any other system
of government or conception of man's nature and destiny, the best of men
may blend with his race, and store in their common life the energies of
his own soul, looking for as much aid as he may give. Democracy, as
elsewhere has been said, is the earthly hope of men; and they who stand
apart, in fancied superiority to mankind, which is by creation equal in
destiny, and in fact equal in the larger part of human nature, however
obstructed by time and circumstance, are foolish withdrawers from the
ways of life. On the battle-field or in the senate, or in the humblest
cabin of the West, to lead an American life is to join heart and soul in
this cause.
THE RIDE
Mystery is the natural habitat of the soul. It is the child's element,
though he sees it not; for, year by year, acquiring the solid and
palpable, the visible and audible, the things of mortal life, he lives
in horizons of the senses, and though grown a youth he still looks
intellectually for things definite and clear. Education in general
through its whole period induces the contempt of all else, impressing
almost universally the positive element in life, whose realm in early
years at least is sensual. So it was with me: the mind's eye saw all
that was or might be in an atmosphere of scepticism, as my bodily eye
beheld the world washed in colour. Yet the habitual sense of mystery in
man's life is a measure of wisdom in the man; and, at last, if the mind
be open and turn upon the poles of truth, whether in the sage's
knowledge or the poet's emotion or such common experience of the world
as all have, mystery visibly envelops us, equally in the globed sky or
the unlighted spirit,
I well remember the very moment when a poetical experience precipitated
this conviction out of moods long familiar, but obscurely felt and
deeply distrusted. I was born and bred by the sea; its mystery had
passed into my being unawares, and was there unconscious, or, at least,
not to be separated from the moods of my own spirit. But on my first
Italian voyage, day by day we rolled upon the tremendous billows of a
stormy sea, and all was strange and solemn--the illimitable tossing of a
wave-world, darkening night after night through weird sunsets of a
spectral and unknown beauty, enchantments that were doorways of a new
earth and new heavens; and, on the tenth day, when I came on deck in
this water-world, we had sighted Santa Maria, the southernmost of the
Azores, and gradually we drew near to it. I shall never forget the
strangeness of that sight--that solitary island under the sunlit showers
of early morning; it lay in a beautiful atmosphere of belted mists and
wreaths of rain, and tracts of soft sky, frequent with many near and
distant rainbows that shone and faded and came again as we steamed
through them, and the white wings of the birds, struck by the sun, were
the whitest objects I have ever seen; slowly we passed by, and I could
not have told what it was in that island scene which had so arrested me.
But when, some days afterward, at the harbor of Gibraltar I looked upon
the magnificent rock, and saw opposite the purple hills of Africa, again
I felt through me that unknown thrill. It was the mystery of the land.
It was altogether a discovery, a direct perception, a new sense of the
natural world. Under the wild heights of Sangue di Christo I had dreamed
that on the further side I should find the "far west" that had fled
before me beyond the river, the prairies, and the plains; but there was
no such mystery in the thought, or in the prospect, as this that saluted
me coming landward for the first time from the ocean-world. Since that
morning in the Straits, every horizon has been a mystery to me, to the
spirit no less than to the eye; and truths have come to me like that
lone island embosomed in eternal waters, like the capes and mountain
barriers of Africa thrusting up new continents unknown, untravelled, of
a land men yet might tread as common ground.
"A poet's mood"--I know what once I should have said. But mystery I then
accepted as the only complement, the encompassment, of what we know of
our life. In many ways I had drawn near to this belief before, and I
have since many times confirmed it. One occasion, however, stands out in
my memory even more intensely than those I have made bold to
mention,--one experience that brought me near to my mother earth, as
that out of which I was formed and to which I shall return, and made
these things seem as natural as to draw my breath from the sister
element of air. I had returned to the West; and while there, wandering
in various places, I went to a small town, hardly more than a hamlet,
some few hundred miles beyond the Missouri, where the mighty railroad,
putting out a long feeler for the future, had halted its great steel
branch--sinking like a thunderbolt into the ground for no imaginable
reason, and affecting me vaguely with a sense of utmost limits. There a
younger friend, five years my junior, in his lonely struggle with life
bore to live, in such a camp of pioneer civilization as made my heart
fail at first sight, though not unused to the meagreness, crudity, and
hardness of such a place; but there I had come to take the warm welcome
of his hands and look once more into his face before time should part
us. He flung his arms about me, with a look of the South in his eyes,
full of happy dancing lights, and the barren scene was like Italy made
real for one instant of golden time.
But if we had wandered momentarily, as if out of some quiet sunlit
gallery of Monte Beni, I soon found it was into the frontier of our
western border. A herd of Texas ponies were to be immediately on sale,
and I went to see them--wild animals, beautiful in their wildness, who
had never known bit or spur; they were lariated and thrown down, as the
buyers picked them out, and then led and pulled away to man's life. It
was a typical scene: the pen, the hundred ponies bunched together and
startled with the new surroundings, the cowboys whose resolute habit sat
on them like cotillion grace--athletes in the grain--with the gray,
close garb for use, the cigarette like a slow spark under the broad
sombrero, the belted revolver, the lasso hung loose-coiled in the hand,
quiet, careless, confident, with the ease of the master in his craft,
now pulling down a pony without a struggle, and now showing strength and
dexterity against frightened resistance; but the hour sped on, and our
spoil was two of these creatures, so attractive to me at least that
every moment my friend's eye was on me, and he kept saying, "They're
wild, mind!" The next morning in the dark dawn we had them in harness,
and drove out, when the stars were scarce gone from the sky, due north
to the Bad Lands, to give me a new experience of the vast American land
that bore us both, and made us, despite the thousands of miles that
stretched between ocean and prairie, brothers in blood and
brain,--brothers and friends.
Yet how to tell that ride, now grown a shining leaf of my book of
memory! for my eyes were fascinated with the land, in the high blowing
August wind, full of coolness and upland strength, like new breath in my
nostrils; and forward over the broken country, fenceless, illimitable,
ran the brown road, like a ploughed ribbon of soil, into the distance,
where pioneer and explorer and prospector had gone before, and now the
farmer was thinly settling,--the new America growing up before my eyes!
and him only by me to make me not a stranger there, with talk of absent
friends and old times, though scarce the long age of a college course
had gone by,--talk lapsing as of old on such rides into serious strains,
problems such as the young talk of together and keep their secret,
learning life,--the troubles of the heart of youth. And if now I recur
to some of the themes we touched on, and set down these memoranda,
fragments of life, thinking they may be of use to other youths as they
were then to us, I trust they will lose no privacy; for, as I write, I
see them in that place, with that noble prospect, that high sky, and him
beside me whose young listening yet seems to woo them from my breast.
We mounted the five-mile ridge,--and, "Poor Robin," he said, "what of
him?" "Poor Robin sleeps in the Muses' graveyard," I laughed, "in the
soft gray ashes of my blazing hearth. One must live the life before he
tells the tale." "I loved his 'awakening,'" he replied, "and I have
often thought of it by myself. And will nothing come of him now?" "Who
can tell?" I said, looking hard off over the prairie. "The Muses must
care for their own. That 'awakening,'" I went on, after a moment of
wondering why the distant stream of the valley was called "the
Looking-glass," and learning only that such was its name, "was when
after the bookish torpor of his mind--you remember he called books his
opiates--he felt the beauty of the spring and the marvel of human
service come back on him like a flood. It was the growing consciousness
of how little of life is our own. Youth takes life for granted; the hand
that smoothed his pillow the long happy years, the springs that brought
new blossoms to his cheeks, the common words that martyr and patriot
have died to form on childish lips, and make them native there with
life's first breath, are natural to him as Christmas gifts, and bring no
obligation. Our life from babyhood is only one long lesson in
indebtedness; and we best learn what we have received by what we give.
This was dawning on my hero then. I recall how he ran the new passion.
That outburst you used to like, amid the green bloom of the prairies,
like the misted birches at home, under the heaven-wide warmth of April
breathing with universal mildness through the softened air--why, you can
remember the very day," I said. "It was one--" "Yes, I can remember more
than that," he interrupted; "I know the words, or some of them; what you
just said was the old voice--tang and colour--Poor Robin's voice;" and
he began, and I listened to the words, which had once been mine, and now
were his.
"By heaven, I never believed it. 'Clotho spins, Lachesis weaves, and
Atropos cuts,' I said, 'and the poor illusion vanishes; the loud
laughter, the fierce wailing, die on pale lips; the foolish and the
wise, the merciful and the pitiless, the workers in the vineyard and the
idlers in the market-place, are huddled into one grave, and the heart of
Mary Mother and of Mary Magdalen are one dust.' Duly in those years the
sun rose to cheer me; the breath of the free winds was in my nostrils;
the grass made my pathways soft to my feet. Spring with its blossomed
fruit trees, and the ungarnered summer, gladdened me; the flame of
autumn was my torch of memory, and winter lighted my lamp of solitude.
Men tilled the fields to feed me, and worked the loom to clothe me, and
so far as in them was power and in me was need, brought to my doors
sustenance for the body and whatsoever of divine truth was theirs for my
soul. Women ministered to me in blessed charities; and some among my
fellows gave me their souls in keeping. How true is that which my friend
said to the poor boy-murderer condemned to die,--'I tell you, you cannot
escape the mercy of God;' and tears coursed down the imbruted face, and
once more the human soul, that the ministers of God could not reach,
shone in its tabernacle. Now the butterfly has flown in at the
tavern-window, and rebuked me. I go out, and on the broad earth the warm
sun shines; the spring moves throughout our northern globe as when first
man looked upon it; the seasons keep their word; the birds know their
pathways through the air; the animals feed and multiply; the succession
of day and night has no shadow of turning; the stars keep their order in
the blue depths of infinite space; Sirius has not swerved from his
course, nor Aldebaran flamed beyond his sphere; nature puts forth her
strength in all the vast compass of her domain, and is manifest in life
that continues and is increased in fuller measures of joy, heightened to
fairer beauty, instinct with love in the heart of man. Wiser were the
ascetics whom I used to scorn; they made themselves ascetics of the
body, but I have been an ascetic of the soul."
* * * * *
"_Eccola!_" I said, "was it like that? But a heady rhetoric is not
inconsistent with sobriety of thought, as many a Victorian page we have
read together testifies. The style tames with the spirit; and wild blood
is not the worst of faults in poets or boys. But I will change old coin
for the new mintage with you, if you like, and it is not so very
different. There is a good stretch ahead, and the ponies never seem to
misbehave both at once." In fact, these ponies, who seemed to enjoy the
broad, open world with us, had yet to learn the first lesson of
civilization, and unite their private wills in rebellion; for, while one
or the other of them would from time to time fling back his heels and
prepare to resist, the other dragged him into the course with the steady
pace, and, under hand and voice, they kept going in a much less
adventurous way than I had anticipated. And so I read a page or two from
the small blank-book in which I used to write, saying only, by way of
preface, that the April morning my friend so well remembered marked the
time when I began that direct appeal to life of which these notes were
the first-fruits.
The waters of the Looking-glass had been lost behind its bluffs to the
west as we turned inland, though we still rose with the slope of the
valley; and now on higher land we saw the open country in a broad sweep,
but with bolder configuration than was familiar to me in prairie
regions, the rolling of the country being in great swells; and this
slight touch of strangeness, this accentuation of the motionless lines
of height and hollow, and the general lift of the land, perhaps, was
what first gave that life to the soil, that sense of a presence in the
earth itself, which was felt at a later time. Then I saw only the
outspread region, with here and there a gleam of grain on side-hills and
far-curved embrasures of the folded slopes, or great strands of Indian
corn, acres within acres, and hardly a human dwelling anywhere; the
loneliness, the majesty, the untouched primitiveness of it, were the
elements I remember; and the wind, and the unclouded great expanse of
the blue upper sky, like a separate element lifted in deep color over
the gold of harvest, the green of earth, and the touches of brown road
and soil. So, with pauses for common sights and things, and some word of
comment and fuller statement and personal touches that do not matter
now, I read my brief notes of life in its most sacred part.
"The gift of life at birth is only a little breath on a baby's lips; the
air asks no consent to fill the lungs, the heart beats, the senses
awaken, the mind begins, and the first handwriting of life is a child's
smile; but as boyhood gathers fuller strength, and youth hives a more
intimate sweetness, and manhood expands in richer values, life is not
less entirely a gift. As well say a self-born as a self-made man. Nature
does not intrust to us her bodily processes and functions, and the
fountains of feeling within well up, and the forms of thought define,
without obligation to man's wisdom; body and soul alike are above his
will--our garment of sense comes from no human loom, nor were the bones
of the spirit fashioned by any mortal hands; in our progress and growth,
too, bloom of health and charm of soul owe their loveliness to that law
of grace that went forth with the creative word. Slow as men are to
realize the fact and the magnitude of this great grant, and the supreme
value of it as life itself in all its abundance of blessings, there
comes a time to every generous and open heart when the youth is made
aware of the stream of beneficence flowing in upon him from the forms
and forces of nature with benedictions of beauty and vigour; he knows,
too, the cherishing of human service all about him in familiar love and
the large brothering of man's general toil; he begins to see, shaping
itself in him, the vast tradition of the past,--its mighty sheltering of
mankind in institution and doctrine and accepted hopes, its fostering
agencies, its driving energies. What a breaking out there is then in him
of the emotions that are fountain-heads of permanent life,--filial love,
patriotic duty, man's passion for humanity! It is then that he becomes a
man. Strange would it be, if, at such tidal moments, the youth should
not, in pure thankfulness, find out the Giver of all good!
"As soon as man thus knows himself a creature, he has established a
direct relation with the Creator, did he but realize it,--not in mere
thought of some temporal creation, some antecedent fact of a beginning,
but in immediate experience of that continuing act which keeps the
universe in being,
'Which wields the world with never wearied love,
Sustains it from beneath and kindles it above,'--
felt and known now in the life which, moment to moment, is his own. The
extreme sense of this may take on the expression of the pantheistic
mood, as here in Shelley's words, without any logical irreverence: for
pantheism is that great mood of the human spirit which it is, permanent,
recurring in every age and race, as natural to Wordsworth as to Shelley,
because of the fundamental character of these facts and the
inevitability of the knowledge of them. The most arrogant thought of
man, since it identifies him with deity, it springs from that same sense
of insignificance which makes humility the characteristic of religious
life in all its forms. A mind deeply penetrated with the feeling that
all we take and all we are, our joys and the might and grace of life in
us, are the mere lendings of mortality like Lear's rags, may come to
think man the passive receptacle of power, and the instrument scarce
distinguishable from the hand that uses it; the thought is as nigh to
St. Paul as to Plato. This intimate and infinite sense of obligation
finds its highest expression, on the secular side, and takes on the
touch of mystery, in those great men of action who have believed
themselves in a special manner servants of God, and in great poets who
found some consecration in their calling. They, more than other men,
know how small is any personal part in our labours and our wages alike.
But in all men life comes to be felt to be, in itself and its
instruments, this gift, this debt; to continue to live is to contract a
greater debt in proportion to the greatness of the life; it is greatest
in the greatest.
"This spontaneous gratitude is a vital thing. He who is most sensitive
to beauty and prizes it, who is most quick to love, who is most ardent
in the world's service, feels most constantly this power which enfolds
him in its hidden infinity; he is overwhelmed by it: and how should
gratitude for such varied and constant and exhaustless good fail to
become a part of the daily life of his spirit, deepening with every hour
in which the value, the power and sweetness of life, is made more plain?
Yet at the same instant another and almost contrary mood is twin-born
with this thankfulness,--the feeling of helplessness. Though the secret
and inscrutable power, sustaining and feeding life, be truly felt,--
'Closer is He than breathing and nearer than
hands and feet,'--