Be saved, my father! _alone_
Conquer and come to thy goal,
Leaving the rest in the wild.
We were weary; and we
Fearful, and we in our march
Fain to drop down and to die.
Still thou turnedst, and still
Beckonedst the trembler, and still
Gavest the weary thy hand.
If, in the paths of the world,
Stones might have wounded thy feet,
Toil or dejection have tried
Thy spirit, of that we saw
Nothing--to us thou wast still
Cheerful, and helpful, and firm!
Therefore to thee it was given
Many to save with thyself;
And, at the end of thy day,
O faithful shepherd! to come,
Bringing thy sheep in thy hand,
And through thee I believe
In the noble and great who are gone;
Pure souls honor'd and blest
By former ages, who else--
Such, so soulless, so poor,
Is the race of men whom I see--
Seem'd but a dream of the heart,
Seem'd but a cry of desire.
Yes! I believe that there liv'd
Others like thee in the past,
Not like the men of the crowd
Who all round me to-day
Bluster or cringe, and make life
Hideous, and arid, and vile;
But souls temper'd with fire,
Fervent, heroic, and good,
Helpers and friends of mankind.
Servants of God!--or sons
Shall I not call you? because
Not as servants ye knew
Your Father's innermost mind,
His, who unwillingly sees
One of his little ones lost--
Yours is the praise, if mankind
Hath not as yet in its march
Fainted, and fallen, and died!
See! In the rocks of the world
Marches the host of mankind,
A feeble, wavering line.
Where are they tending?--A God
Marshall'd them, gave them their goal.--
Ah, but the way is so long!
Years they have been in the wild!
Sore thirst plagues them, the rocks,
Rising all round, overawe;
Factions divide them, their host
Threatens to break, to dissolve.--
Ah, keep, keep them combined!
Else, of the myriads who fill
That army, not one shall arrive;
Sole they shall stray; on the rocks
Batter forever in vain,
Die one by one in the waste.
Then, in such hour of need
Of your fainting, dispirited race,
Ye, like angels, appear,
Radiant with ardor divine.
Beacons of hope, ye appear!
Languor is not in your heart,
Weakness is not in your word,
Weariness not on your brow.
Ye alight in our van! at your voice,
Panic, despair, flee away.
Ye move through the ranks, recall
The stragglers, refresh the outworn,
Praise, re-inspire the brave.
Order, courage, return;
Eyes rekindling, and prayers,
Follow your steps as ye go.
Ye fill up the gaps in our files,
Strengthen the wavering line,
Stablish, continue our march,
On, to the bound of the waste,
On, to the City of God.
* * * * *
_What know we greater than the soul?
On God and Godlike men we build our trust._
TENNYSON.
XCI. IN THE ORILLIA WOODS.
CHARLES SANGSTER.--1822-
My footsteps press where, centuries ago,
The Red Men fought and conquer'd; lost and won.
Whole tribes and races, gone like last year's snow,
Have found the Eternal Hunting-Grounds, and run
The fiery gauntlet of their active days,
Till few are left to tell the mournful tale:
And these inspire us with such wild amaze
They seem like spectres passing down a vale
Steep'd in uncertain moonlight, on their way
Towards some bourn where darkness blinds the day,
And night is wrapp'd in mystery profound.
We cannot lift the mantle of the past:
We seem to wander over hallow'd ground:
We scan the trail of Thought, but all is overcast.
THERE WAS A TIME--and that is all we know!
No record lives of their ensanguin'd deeds:
The past seems palsied with some giant blow,
And grows the more obscure on what it feeds.
A rotted fragment of a human leaf;
A few stray skulls; a heap of human bones!
These are the records--the traditions brief--
'Twere easier far to read the speechless stones.
The fierce Ojibwas, with tornado force,
Striking white terror to the hearts of braves!
The mighty Hurons, rolling on their course,
Compact and steady as the ocean waves!
The fiery Iroquois, a warrior host!
Who were they?--Whence?--And why? no human tongue can boast!
XCII. MORALS AND CHARACTER IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.
GOLDWIN SMITH.--1823-
_From_ COWPER.
The world into which Cowper came was one very adverse to him, and at the
same time very much in need of him. It was a world from which the spirit
of poetry seemed to have fled. There could be no stronger proof of this
than the occupation of the throne of Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton,
by the arch-versifier Pope. The Revolution of 1688 was glorious, but
unlike the Puritan Revolution which it followed, and in the political
sphere partly ratified, it was profoundly prosaic. Spiritual religion,
the source of Puritan grandeur and of the poetry of Milton, was almost
extinct; there was not much more of it among the Nonconformists, who had
now become to a great extent mere Whigs, with a decided Unitarian
tendency. The Church was little better than a political force cultivated
and manipulated by political leaders for their own purposes. The Bishops
were either politicians, or theological polemics collecting trophies of
victory over free-thinkers as titles to higher preferment. The inferior
clergy as a body were far nearer in character to Trulliber than to Dr.
Primrose; coarse, sordid, neglectful of their duties, shamelessly
addicted to sinecurism and pluralities, fanatics in their Toryism and in
attachment to their corporate privileges, cold, rationalistic, and
almost heathen in their preachings, if they preached at all. The society
of the day is mirrored in the pictures of Hogarth in the works of
Fielding and Smollett; hard and heartless polish was the best of it; and
not a little of it was _Marriage a la Mode_. Chesterfield, with his
soulless culture, his court graces, and his fashionable immoralities,
was about the highest type of an English gentleman; but the Wilkeses,
Potters, and Sandwiches, whose mania for vice culminated in the
Hell-fire Club, were more numerous than the Chesterfields. Among the
country squires, for one Allworthy, or Sir Roger de Coverley, there were
many Westerns. Among the common people religion was almost extinct, and
assuredly no new morality or sentiment, such as Positivists now promise,
had taken its place. Sometimes the rustic thought for himself, and
scepticism took formal possession of his mind; but as we see from one of
Cowper's letters, it was a coarse scepticism which desired to be buried
with its hounds. Ignorance and brutality reigned in the cottage.
Drunkenness reigned in palace and cottage alike. Gambling,
cock-fighting, and bull-fighting were the amusements of the people.
Political life, which, if it had been pure and vigorous, might have made
up for the absence of spiritual influences, was corrupt from the top of
the scale to the bottom: its effect on national character is portrayed
in Hogarth's _Election_. That property had its duties as well as its
rights, nobody had yet ventured to say or think. The duty of a gentleman
towards his own class was to pay his debts of honor, and to fight a duel
whenever he was challenged by one of his own order; towards the lower
class his duty was none. Though the forms of government were elective,
and Cowper gives us a description of the candidate at election time
obsequiously soliciting votes, society was intensely aristocratic, and
each rank was divided from that below it by a sharp line which precluded
brotherhood or sympathy. Says the Duchess of Buckingham to Lady
Huntingdon, who had asked her to come and hear Whitefield, "I thank
your ladyship for the information concerning the Methodist preachers;
their doctrines are most repulsive, and strongly tinctured with
disrespect towards their superiors, in perpetually endeavoring to level
all ranks and do away with all distinctions. It is monstrous to be told
you have a heart as sinful as the common wretches that crawl on the
earth. This is highly offensive and insulting; and I cannot but wonder
that your ladyship should relish any sentiments so much at variance with
high rank and good breeding. I shall be most happy to come and hear your
favorite preacher." Her Grace's sentiments towards the common wretches
that crawl on the earth were shared, we may be sure, by her Grace's
waiting-maid. Of humanity there was as little as there was of religion.
It was the age of the criminal law which hanged men for petty thefts, of
life-long imprisonment for debt, of the stocks and the pillory, of a
Temple Bar garnished with the heads of traitors, of the unreformed
prison system, of the press-gang, of unrestrained tyranny and savagery
at public schools. That the slave trade was iniquitous hardly any one
suspected; even men who deemed themselves religious took part in it
without scruple. But a change was at hand, and a still mightier change
was in prospect. At the time of Cowper's birth, John Wesley was
twenty-eight, and Whitefield was seventeen. With them the revival of
religion, was at hand. Johnson, the moral reformer, was twenty-two.
Howard was born, and in less than a generation Wilberforce was to come.
* * * * *
_That is best blood that hath most iron in 't
To edge resolve with, pouring without stint
For what makes manhood dear._
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.
XCIII. A LIBERAL EDUCATION.
THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY.--1825-
_From_ LAY SERMONS, ADDRESSES, AND REVIEWS.
Suppose it were perfectly certain that the life and fortune of every one
of us would, one day or other, depend upon his winning or losing a game
at chess. Don't you think that we should all consider it to be a primary
duty to learn at least the names and the moves of the pieces; to have a
notion of a gambit, and a keen eye for all the means of giving and
getting out of check? Do you not think that we should look with a
disapprobation amounting to scorn, upon the father who allowed his son,
or the state which allowed its members, to grow up without knowing a
pawn from a knight?
Yet it is a very plain and elementary truth, that the life, the
fortune, and the happiness of every one of us, and, more or less,
of those who are connected with us, do depend upon our knowing
something of the rules of a game infinitely more difficult and
complicated than chess. It is a game which has been played for
untold ages, every man and woman of us being one of the two players
in a game of his or her own. The chess-board is the world, the
pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are
what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is
hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just, and
patient. But also we know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a
mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance. To the man
who plays well, the highest stakes are paid, with that sort of
overflowing generosity with which the strong shows delight in
strength. And one who plays ill is checkmated--without haste, but
without remorse.
My metaphor will remind some of you of the famous picture in which
Retzsch has depicted Satan playing at chess with man for his soul.
Substitute for the mocking fiend in that picture, a calm, strong angel,
who is playing for love, as we say, and would rather lose than win--and
I should accept it as an image of human life.
Well, what I mean by Education, is learning the rules of this mighty
game. In other words, education is the instruction of the intellect in
the laws of Nature, under which name I include not merely things and
their forces, but men and their ways; and the fashioning of the
affections and of the will into an earnest and loving desire to move in
harmony with those laws. For me, education means neither more nor less
than this. Anything which professes to call itself education must be
tried by this standard, and if it fails to stand the test, I will not
call it education, whatever may be the force of authority, or of
numbers, upon the other side.
It is important to remember that, in strictness, there is no such thing
as an uneducated man. Take an extreme case. Suppose that an adult man,
in the full vigor of his faculties, could be suddenly placed in the
world, as Adam is said to have been, and then left to do as he best
might. How long would he be left uneducated? Not five minutes. Nature
would begin to teach him, through the eye, the ear, the touch, the
properties of objects. Pain and pleasure would be at his elbow telling
him to do this and avoid that; and by slow degrees the man would receive
an education, which, if narrow, would be thorough, real, and adequate to
his circumstances, though there would be no extras and very few
accomplishments.
And if to this solitary man entered a second Adam, or, better still, an
Eve, a new and greater world, that of social and moral phenomena, would
be revealed. Joys and woes, compared with which all others might seem
but faint shadows, would spring from the new relations. Happiness and
sorrow would take the place of the coarser monitors, pleasure and pain;
but conduct would still be shaped by the observation of the natural
consequences of actions; or, in other words, by the laws of the nature
of man.
To every one of us the world was once as fresh and new as to Adam. And
then, long before we were susceptible of any other mode of instruction,
Nature took us in hand, and every minute of waking life brought its
educational influence, shaping our actions into rough accordance with
Nature's laws, so that we might not be ended untimely by too gross
disobedience. Nor should I speak of this process of education as past
for any one, be he as old as he may. For every man, the world is as
fresh as it was at the first day, and as full of untold novelties for
him who has the eyes to see them. And Nature is still continuing her
patient education of us in that great university, the universe, of which
we are all members--Nature having no Test-Acts.
Those who take honors in Nature's university, who learn the laws which
govern men and things, and obey them, are the really great and
successful men in this world. The great mass of mankind are the "Poll,"
who pick up just enough to get through without much discredit. Those who
won't learn at all are plucked; and then you can't come up again.
Nature's pluck means extermination.
Thus the question of compulsory education is settled so far as Nature is
concerned. Her bill on that question was framed and passed long ago.
But, like all compulsory legislation, that of Nature is harsh and
wasteful in its operation. Ignorance is visited as sharply as wilful
disobedience--incapacity meets with the same punishment as crime.
Nature's discipline is not even a word and a blow, and the blow first;
but the blow without the word. It is left to you to find out why your
ears are boxed.
The object of what we commonly call education--that education in which
man intervenes and which I shall distinguish as artificial education--is
to make good these defects in Nature's methods; to prepare the child to
receive Nature's education, neither incapably nor ignorantly, nor with
wilful disobedience; and to understand the preliminary symptoms of her
displeasure, without waiting for the box on the ear. In short, all
artificial education ought to be an anticipation of natural education.
And a liberal education is an artificial education, which has not only
prepared a man to escape the great evils of disobedience to natural
laws, but has trained him to appreciate and to seize upon the rewards
which Nature scatters with as free a hand as her penalties.
That man, I think, has had a liberal education, who has been so trained
in youth that his body is the ready servant of his will, and does with
ease and pleasure all the work that, as a mechanism, it is capable of;
whose intellect is a clear, cold, logic engine, with all its parts of
equal strength, and in smooth working order; ready, like a steam engine,
to be turned to any kind of work, and spin the gossamers as well as
forge the anchors of the mind; whose mind is stored with a knowledge of
the great and fundamental truths of Nature and of the laws of her
operations; one, who, no stunted ascetic, is full of life and fire, but
whose passions are trained to come to heel by a vigorous will, the
servant of a tender conscience; who has learned to love all beauty,
whether of Nature or of art, to hate all vileness, and to respect others
as himself.
Such an one and no other, I conceive, has had a liberal education; for
he is, as completely as a man can be, in harmony with Nature. He will
make the best of her, and she of him. They will get on together rarely;
she as his ever beneficent mother; he as her mouth-piece, her conscious
self, her minister and interpreter.
XCIV. TOO LATE.
DINAH MARIA MULOCK CRAIK.--1826-
Could ye come back to me, Douglas, Douglas,
In the old likeness that I knew,
I would be so faithful, so loving, Douglas,
Douglas, Douglas, tender and true.
Never a scornful word should grieve ye,
I'd smile on ye sweet as the angels do,--
Sweet as your smile on me shone ever,
Douglas, Douglas, tender and true.
O to call back the days that are not!
My eyes were blinded, your words were few;
Do you know the truth now up in heaven,
Douglas, Douglas, tender and true?
I never was worthy of you, Douglas,
Not half worthy the like of you;
Now all men beside seem to me like shadows,--
I love _you_, Douglas, tender and true.
Stretch out your hand to me, Douglas, Douglas,
Drop forgiveness from heaven like dew,
As I lay my heart on your dead heart, Douglas,
Douglas, Douglas, tender and true.
XCV. AMOR MUNDI.
CHRISTINA GEORGINA ROSSETTI.--1830-
"O where are you going with your love-locks flowing,
On the west wind blowing along this valley track?"
"The down-hill path is easy, come with me an it please ye,
We shall escape the up-hill by never turning back."
So they two went together in glowing August weather,
The honey-breathing heather lay to their left and right;
And dear she was to doat on, her swift feet seem'd to float on
The air like soft twin pigeons too sportive to alight.
"Oh, what is that in heaven where grey cloud-flakes are seven,
Where blackest clouds hang riven just at the rainy skirt?"
"Oh, that's a meteor sent us, a message dumb, portentous,
An undecipher'd solemn signal of help or hurt."
"Oh, what is that glides quickly where velvet flowers grow thickly,
Their scent comes rich and sickly?" "A scaled and hooded worm."
"Oh, what's that in the hollow, so pale I quake to follow?"
"Oh, that's a thin dead body which waits the eternal term."
"Turn again, O my sweetest,--turn again, false and fleetest:
This beaten way thou beatest, I fear is hell's own track."
"Nay, too steep for hill mounting; nay, too late for cost counting:
This down-hill path is easy, but there's no turning back."
XCVI. TOUJOURS AMOUR.
EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN.--1833-
Prithee tell me, Dimple-Chin,
At what age does love begin?
Your blue eyes have scarcely seen
Summers three, my fairy queen,
But a miracle of sweets,
Soft approaches, sly retreats,
Show the little archer there,
Hidden in your pretty hair;
When didst learn a heart to win?
Prithee tell me, Dimple-Chin!
"Oh!" the rosy lips reply,
"I can't tell you if I try.
Tis so long I can't remember:
Ask some younger lass than I."
Tell, O tell me, Grizzled-Face,
Do your heart and head keep pace?
When does hoary Love expire,
When do frosts put out the fire?
Can its embers burn below
All that chill December snow?
Care you still soft hands to press,
Bonny heads to smooth and bless?
When does Love give up the chase?
Tell, O tell me, Grizzled-Face!
"Ah!" the wise old lips reply,
"Youth may pass and strength may die;
But of Love I can't foretoken:
Ask some older sage than I!"
XCVII. ENGLAND.
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH.--1836-
While men pay reverence to mighty things,
They must revere thee, thou blue-cinctured isle
Of England--not to-day, but this long while
In the front of nations, Mother of great kings,
Soldiers, and poets. Round thee the Sea flings
His steel-bright arm, and shields thee from the guile
And hurt of France. Secure, with august smile,
Thou sittest, and the East its tribute brings.
Some say thy old-time power is on the wane,
Thy moon of grandeur fill'd, contracts at length--
They see it darkening down from less to less.
Let but a hostile hand make threat again,
And they shall see thee in thy ancient strength,
Each iron sinew quivering, lioness!
* * * * *
_Such kings of shreds have woo'd and won her,
Such crafty knaves her laurel own'd,
It has become almost an honor
Not to be crown'd._
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH.
_On Popularity._
XCVIII. ROCOCO.
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH.
By studying my lady's eyes
I've grown so learned day by day,
So Machiavelian in this wise,
That when I send her flowers, I say
To each small flower (no matter what,
Geranium, pink, or tuberose,
Syringa, or forget-me-not,
Or violet) before it goes:
"Be not triumphant, little flower,
When on her haughty heart you lie,
But modestly enjoy your hour:
She'll weary of you by-and-by."
XCIX. KINGS OF MEN.
JOHN READE.--1837-
As hills seem Alps, when veil'd in misty shroud,
Some men seem kings, through mists of ignorance;
Must we have darkness, then, and cloud on cloud,
To give our hills and pigmy kings a chance?
Must we conspire to curse the humbling light,
Lest some one, at whose feet our fathers bow'd,
Should suddenly appear, full length, in sight,
Scaring to laughter the adoring crowd?
Oh, no! God send us light!--Who loses then?
The king of slaves and not the king of men.
True kings are kings for ever, crown'd of God,
The King of Kings,--we need not fear for them.
'Tis only the usurper's diadem
That shakes at touch of light, revealing fraud.
C. THALATTA! THALATTA!
JOHN READE.
In my ear is the moan of the pines--in my heart is the song of
the sea,
And I feel his salt breath on my face as he showers his kisses
on me,
And I hear the wild scream of the gulls, as they answer the call
of the tide,
And I watch the fair sails as they glisten like gems on the breast
of a bride.
From the rock where I stand to the sun is a pathway of sapphire
and gold,
Like a waif of those Patmian visions that wrapt the lone seer
of old,
And it seems to my soul like an omen that calls me far over
the sea--
But I think of a little white cottage and one that is dearest to me.
Westward ho! Far away to the East is a cottage that looks to
the shore,--
Though each drop in the sea were a tear, as it was, I can see it
no more;
For the heart of its pride with the flowers of the "Vale of the
Shadow" reclines,
And--hush'd is the song of the sea and hoarse is the moan of
the pines.
CI. THE FORSAKEN GARDEN.
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE.--1837-
In a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland,
At the sea-down's edge between windward and lee,
Wall'd round with rocks as an inland island,
The ghost of a garden fronts the sea.
A girdle of brushwood and thorn encloses
The steep square slope of the blossomless bed
Where the weeds that grew green from the graves of its roses
Now lie dead.
The fields fall southward, abrupt and broken,
To the low last edge of the long lone land.
If a step should sound or a word be spoken,
Would a ghost not rise at the strange guest's hand?
So long have the gray bare walks lain guestless,
Through branches and briers if a man make way,
He shall find no life but the sea-wind's, restless
Night and day.
The dense hard passage is blind and stifled,
That crawls by a track none turn to climb
To the strait waste place that the years have rifled
Of all but the thorns that are touch'd not of time.
The thorns he spares when the rose is taken;
The rocks are left when he wastes the plain.
The wind that wanders, the weeds wind-shaken,
These remain.
Not a flower to be prest of the foot that falls not;
As the heart of a dead man the seed-plots are dry;
From the thicket of thorns whence the nightingale calls not,
Could she call, there were never a rose to reply.
Over the meadows that blossom and wither
Rings but the note of sea-bird's song;
Only the sun and the rain come hither
All year long.
The sun burns sere and the rain dishevels
One gaunt bleak blossom of scentless breath.
Only the wind here hovers and revels
In a round where life seems barren as death.
Here there was laughing of old, there was weeping,
Haply, of lovers none ever will know,
Whose eyes went seaward a hundred sleeping
Years ago.
Heart handfast in heart as they stood, "Look thither,"
Did he whisper? "Look forth from the flowers to the sea;
For the foam-flowers endure when the rose-blossoms wither,
And men that love lightly may die--but we?"
And the same wind sang and the same waves whiten'd,
And or ever the garden's last petals were shed,
In the lips that had whisper'd, the eyes that had lighten'd,
Love was dead.
Or they lov'd their life through, and then went whither?
And were one to the end--but what end who knows?
Love deep as the sea as a rose must wither,
As the rose-red seaweed that mocks the rose.
Shall the dead take thought for the dead to love them?
What love was ever as deep as a grave?
They are loveless now as the grass above them
Or the wave.
All are at one now, roses and lovers,
Not known of the cliffs and the fields and the sea.
Not a breath of the time that has been hovers
In the air now soft with a summer to be.
Not a breath shall there sweeten the seasons hereafter
Of the flowers or the lovers that laugh now or weep,
When as they that are free now of weeping and laughter
We shall sleep.