CHAPTER IV.

WHO AND WHAT.

Old Elsie was not born a peasant. Originally she was the wife of

a steward in one of those great families of Rome whose state and

traditions were princely. Elsie, as her figure and profile and all her

words and movements indicated, was of a strong, shrewd, ambitious, and

courageous character, and well disposed to turn to advantage every gift

with which Nature had endowed her.

Providence made her a present of a daughter whose beauty was wonderful,

even in a country where beauty is no uncommon accident. In addition to

her beauty, the little Isella had quick intelligence, wit, grace, and

spirit. As a child she became the pet and plaything of the Duchess whom

Elsie served. This noble lady, pressed by the _ennui_ which is always

the moth and rust on the purple and gold of rank and wealth, had,

as other noble ladies had in those days, and have now, sundry pets:

greyhounds, white and delicate, that looked as if they were made of

Sèvres china; spaniels with long silky ears and fringy paws; apes and

monkeys, that made at times sad devastations in her wardrobe; and a most

charming little dwarf, that was ugly enough to frighten the very owls,

and spiteful as he was ugly. She had, moreover, peacocks, and macaws,

and parrots, and all sorts of singing-birds, and falcons of every breed,

and horses, and hounds,--in short, there is no saying what she did not

have. One day she took it into her head to add the little Isella to the

number of her acquisitions. With the easy grace of aristocracy, she

reached out her jewelled hand and took Elsie's one flower to add to her

conservatory,--and Elsie was only too proud to have it so.

Her daughter was kept constantly about the person of the Duchess, and

instructed in all the wisdom which would have been allowed her, had she

been the Duchess's own daughter, which, to speak the truth, was in

those days nothing very profound,--consisting of a little singing and

instrumentation, a little embroidery and dancing, with the power of

writing her own name and of reading a love-letter.

All the world knows that the very idea of a pet is something to be

spoiled for the amusement of the pet-owner; and Isella was spoiled in

the most particular and circumstantial manner. She had suits of apparel

for every day in the year, and jewels without end,--for the Duchess was

never weary of trying the effect of her beauty in this and that costume;

so that she sported through the great grand halls and down the long

aisles of the garden much like a bright-winged hummingbird, or a

damsel-fly all green and gold. She was a genuine child of Italy,--full

of feeling, spirit, and genius,--alive in every nerve to the

finger-tips; and under the tropical sunshine of her mistress's favor she

grew as an Italian rose-bush does, throwing its branches freakishly over

everything in a wild labyrinth of perfume, brightness, and thorns.

For a while her life was a triumph, and her mother triumphed with her at

an humble distance. The Duchess had no daughter, and was devoted to her

with the blind fatuity with which ladies of rank at times will invest

themselves in a caprice. She arrogated to herself all the praises of her

beauty and wit, allowed her to flirt and make conquests to her heart's

content, and engaged to marry her to some handsome young officer of her

train, when she had done being amused with her.

Now we must not wonder that a young head of fifteen should have been

turned by this giddy elevation, nor that an old head of fifty should

have thought all things were possible in the fortune of such a favorite.

Nor must we wonder that the young coquette, rich in the laurels of a

hundred conquests, should have turned her bright eyes on the son and

heir, when he came home from the University of Bologna. Nor is it to be

wondered at that this same son and heir, being a man as well as a duke's

son, should have done as other men did,--fallen desperately in love with

this dazzling, sparkling, piquant mixture of matter and spirit, which no

university can prepare a young man to comprehend,--which always seemed

to run from him, and yet always threw a Parthian shot behind her as she

fled. Nor is it to be wondered at, if this same duke's son, after a week

or two, did not know whether he was on his head or his heels, or whether

the sun rose in the east or the south, or where he stood, or whither he

was going.

In fact, the youthful pair very soon came into that dream-land where are

no more any points of the compass, no more division of time, no more

latitude and longitude, no more up and down, but only a general

wandering among enchanted groves and singing nightingales.

It was entirely owing to old Elsie's watchful shrewdness and address

that the lovers came into this paradise by the gate of marriage; for the

young man was ready to offer anything at the feet of his divinity, as

the old mother was not slow to perceive.

So they stood at the altar, for the time being a pair of as true lovers

as Romeo and Juliet: but then, what has true love to do with the son of

a hundred generations and heir to a Roman principality?

Of course, the rose of love, having gone through all its stages of bud

and blossom into full flower, must next begin to drop its leaves. Of

course. Who ever heard of an immortal rose?

The time of discovery came. Isella was found to be a mother; and then

the storm burst upon her and drabbled her in the dust as fearlessly as

the summer-wind sweeps down and besmirches the lily it has all summer

been wooing and flattering.

The Duchess was a very pious and moral lady, and of course threw her

favorite out into the street as a vile weed, and virtuously ground her

down under her jewelled high-heeled shoes.

She could have forgiven her any common frailty;--of course it was

natural that the girl should have been seduced by the all-conquering

charms of her son;--but aspire to _marriage_ with their house!--pretend

to be her son's _wife_! Since the time of Judas had such treachery ever

been heard of?

Something was said of the propriety of walling up the culprit alive,--a

mode of disposing of small family-matters somewhat _à la mode_ in those

times. But the Duchess acknowledged herself foolishly tender, and unable

quite to allow this very obvious propriety in the case.

She contented herself with turning mother and daughter into the streets

with every mark of ignominy, which was reduplicated by every one of her

servants, lackeys, and court-companions, who, of course, had always

known just how the thing must end.

As to the young Duke, he acted as a well-instructed young nobleman

should, who understands the great difference there is between the tears

of a duchess and those of low-born women. No sooner did he behold his

conduct in the light of his mother's countenance than he turned his

back on his low marriage with edifying penitence. He did not think it

necessary to convince his mother of the real existence of a union whose

very supposition made her so unhappy, and occasioned such an uncommonly

disagreeable and tempestuous state of things in the well-bred circle

where his birth called him to move. Being, however, a religious youth,

he opened his mind to his family-confessor, by whose advice he sent a

messenger with a large sum of money to Elsie, piously commending her and

her daughter to the Divine protection. He also gave orders for an entire

new suit of raiment for the Virgin Mary in the family-chapel, including

a splendid set of diamonds, and promised unlimited candles to the altar

of a neighboring convent. If all this could not atone for a youthful

error, it was a pity. So he thought, as he drew on his riding-gloves

and went off on a hunting-party, like a gallant and religious young

nobleman.

Elsie, meanwhile, with her forlorn and disgraced daughter, found a

temporary asylum in a neighboring mountain-village, where the poor,

bedrabbled, broken-winged song-bird soon panted and fluttered her little

life away.

When the once beautiful and gay Isella had been hidden in the grave,

cold and lonely, there remained a little wailing infant, which Elsie

gathered to her bosom.

Grim, dauntless, and resolute, she resolved, for the sake of this

hapless one, to look life in the face once more, and try the battle

under other skies.

Taking the infant in her arms, she travelled with her far from the scene

of her birth, and set all her energies at work to make for her a better

destiny than that which had fallen to the lot of her unfortunate mother.

She set about to create her nature and order her fortunes with that sort

of downright energy with which resolute people always attack the problem

of a new human existence. This child _should be happy_; the rocks on

which her mother was wrecked she should never strike upon,--they were

all marked on Elsie's chart. Love had been the root of all poor Isella's

troubles,--and Agnes never should know love, till taught it safely by a

husband of Elsie's own choosing.

The first step of security was in naming her for the chaste Saint Agnes,

and placing her girlhood under her special protection. Secondly, which

was quite as much to the point, she brought her up laboriously in habits

of incessant industry,--never suffering her to be out of her sight, or

to have any connection or friendship, except such as could be carried on

under the immediate supervision of her piercing black eyes. Every night

she put her to bed as if she had been an infant, and, wakening her again

in the morning, took her with her in all her daily toils,--of which, to

do her justice, she performed all the hardest portion, leaving to the

girl just enough to keep her hands employed and her head steady.

The peculiar circumstance which had led her to choose the old town

of Sorrento for her residence, in preference to any of the beautiful

villages which impearl that fertile plain, was the existence there of

a flourishing convent dedicated to Saint Agnes, under whose protecting

shadow her young charge might more securely spend the earlier years of

her life.

With this view, having hired the domicile we have already described,

she lost no time in making the favorable acquaintance of the

sisterhood,--never coming to them empty-handed. The finest oranges of

her garden, the whitest flax of her spinning, were always reserved as

offerings at the shrine of the patroness whom she sought to propitiate

for her grandchild.

In her earliest childhood the little Agnes was led toddling to the

shrine by her zealous relative; and at the sight of her fair, sweet,

awe-struck face, with its viny mantle of encircling curls, the torpid

bosoms of the sisterhood throbbed with a strange, new pleasure, which

they humbly hoped was not sinful,--as agreeable things, they found,

generally were. They loved the echoes of her little feet down the damp,

silent aisles of their chapel, and her small, sweet, slender voice, as

she asked strange baby-questions, which, as usual with baby-questions,

hit all the insoluble points of philosophy and theology exactly on the

head.

The child became a special favorite with the Abbess, Sister Theresa, a

tall, thin, bloodless, sad-eyed woman, who looked as if she might have

been cut out of one of the glaciers of Monte Rosa, but in whose heart

the little fair one had made herself a niche, pushing her way up

through, as you may have seen a lovely blue-fringed gentian standing in

a snow-drift of the Alps with its little ring of melted snow around it.

Sister Theresa offered to take care of the child at any time when the

grandmother wished to be about her labors; and so, during her early

years, the little one was often domesticated for days together at the

Convent. A perfect mythology of wonderful stories encircled her, which

the good sisters were never tired of repeating to each other. They

were the simplest sayings and doings of childhood,--handfuls of such

wild-flowers as bespread the green turf of nursery-life everywhere, but

miraculous blossoms in the eyes of these good women, whom Saint Agnes

had unwittingly deprived of any power of making comparisons or ever

having Christ's sweetest parable of the heavenly kingdom enacted in

homes of their own.

Old Jocunda, the porteress, never failed to make a sensation with her

one stock-story of how she found the child standing on her head and

crying,--having been put into this reversed position in consequence of

climbing up on a high stool to get her little fat hand into the vase of

holy water, failing in which Christian attempt, her heels went up and

her head down, greatly to her dismay.

"Nevertheless," said old Jocunda, gravely, "it showed an edifying turn

in the child; and when I lifted the little thing up, it stopped crying

the minute its little fingers touched the water, and it made a cross on

its forehead as sensible as the oldest among us. Ah, sisters! there's

grace there, or I'm mistaken."

All the signs of an incipient saint were, indeed, manifested in the

little one. She never played the wild and noisy plays of common

children, but busied herself in making altars and shrines, which she

adorned with the prettiest flowers of the gardens, and at which she

worked hour after hour in the quietest and happiest earnestness. Her

dreams were a constant source of wonder and edification in the Convent,

for they were all of angels and saints; and many a time, after hearing

one, the sisterhood crossed themselves, and the Abbess said, _"Ex oribus

parvulorum."_ Always sweet, dutiful, submissive, cradling herself every

night with a lulling of sweet hymns and infant murmur of prayers, and

found sleeping in her little white bed with her crucifix clasped to her

bosom, it was no wonder that the Abbess thought her the special favorite

of her divine patroness, and, like her, the subject of an early vocation

to be the celestial bride of One fairer than the children of men, who

should snatch her away from all earthly things, to be united to Him in a

celestial paradise.

As the child grew older, she often sat at evening, with wide, wondering

eyes, listening over and over again to the story of the fair Saint

Agnes:--How she was a princess, living in her father's palace, of such

exceeding beauty and grace that none saw her but to love her, yet of

such sweetness and humility as passed all comparison; and how, when a

heathen prince would have espoused her to his son, she said, "Away from

me, tempter! for I am betrothed to a lover who is greater and fairer

than any earthly suitor,--he is so fair that the sun and moon are

ravished by his beauty, so mighty that the angels of heaven are his

servants"; how she bore meekly with persecutions and threatenings and

death for the sake of this unearthly love; and when she had poured out

her blood, how she came to her mourning friends in ecstatic vision, all

white and glistening, with a fair lamb by her side, and bade them weep

not for her, because she was reigning with Him whom on earth she had

preferred to all other lovers. There was also the legend of the fair

Cecilia, the lovely musician whom angels had rapt away to their choirs;

the story of that queenly saint, Catharine, who passed through the

courts of heaven, and saw the angels crowned with roses and lilies, and

the Virgin on her throne, who gave her the wedding-ring that espoused

her to be the bride of the King Eternal.

Fed with such legends, it could not be but that a child with a

sensitive, nervous organization and vivid imagination should have grown

up with an unworldly and spiritual character, and that a poetic mist

should have enveloped all her outward perceptions similar to that

palpitating veil of blue and lilac vapor that enshrouds the Italian

landscape.

Nor is it to be marvelled at, if the results of this system of education

went far beyond what the good old grandmother intended. For, though a

stanch good Christian, after the manner of those times, yet she had not

the slightest mind to see her grand-daughter a nun; on the contrary,

she was working day and night to add to her dowry, and had in her eye

a reputable middle-aged blacksmith, who was a man of substance and

prudence, to be the husband and keeper of her precious treasure. In a

home thus established she hoped to enthrone herself, and provide for the

rearing of a generation of stout-limbed girls and boys who should grow

up to make a flourishing household in the land. This subject she had

not yet broached to her grand-daughter, though daily preparing to do

so,--deferring it, it must be told, from a sort of jealous, yearning

craving to have wholly to herself the child for whom she had lived so

many years.

Antonio, the blacksmith to whom this honor was destined, was one of

those broad-backed, full-chested, long-limbed fellows one shall often

see around Sorrento, with great, kind, black eyes like those of an ox,

and all the attributes of a healthy, kindly, animal nature. Contentedly

he hammered away at his business; and certainly, had not Dame Elsie

of her own providence elected him to be the husband of her fair

grand-daughter, he would never have thought of the matter himself; but,

opening the black eyes aforenamed upon the girl, he perceived that she

was fair, and also received an inner light through Dame Elsie as to the

amount of her dowry; and, putting these matters together, conceived a

kindness for the maiden, and awaited with tranquillity the time when he

should be allowed to commence his wooing.

REST AND MOTION.

Motion and Rest are the two feet upon which existence goes. All action

and all definite power result from the intimacy and consent of these

opposite principles. If, therefore, one would construct any serviceable

mechanism, he must incorporate into it, and commonly in a manifold way,

a somewhat passive, a somewhat contrary, and, as it were, inimical to

action, though action be the sole aim and use of his contrivance. Thus,

the human body is penetrated by the passive and powerless skeleton,

which is a mere weight upon the muscles, a part of the burden that,

nevertheless, it enables them to bear. The lever of Archimedes would

push the planet aside, provided only it were supplied with its

indispensable complement, a fulcrum, or fixity: without this it will not

push a pin. The block of the pulley must have its permanent attachment;

the wheel of the locomotive engine requires beneath it the fixed rail;

the foot of the pedestrian, solid earth; the wing of the bird rests upon

the relatively stable air to support his body, and upon his body to gain

power over the air. Nor is it alone of operations mechanical that the

law holds good: it is universal; and its application to pure mental

action may be shown without difficulty. A single act of the mind is

represented by the formation of a simple sentence. The process consists,

first, in the mind's _fixing upon and resting in_ an object, which

thereby becomes the subject of the sentence; and, secondly, in

predication, which is movement, represented by the verb. The reader will

easily supply himself with instances and illustrations of this, and need

not, therefore, be detained.

In the economy of animal and vegetable existence, as in all that Nature

makes, we observe the same inevitable association. Here is perpetual

fixity of form, perpetual flux of constituent,--the ideas of Nature

never changing, the material realization of them never ceasing to

change. A horse is a horse through all the ages; yet the horse of to-day

is changed from the horse of yesterday.

If one of these principles seem to get the start, and to separate

itself, the other quickly follows. No sooner, for example, does any

person perform an initial deed, proceeding purely (let us suppose) from

free will, than Nature in him begins to repose therein, and consequently

inclines to its repetition for the mere reason that it has been once

done. This is Habit, which makes action passive, and is the greatest of

labor-saving inventions. Custom is the habit of society, holding the

same relation to progressive genius. It is the sleeping partner in the

great social firm; it is thought and force laid up and become

fixed capital. Annihilate this,--as in the French Revolution was

attempted,--and society is at once reduced to its bare immediate force,

and must scratch the soil with its fingers.

Sometimes these principles seem to be strictly hostile to each other and

in no respect reciprocal, as where habit in the individual and custom in

society oppose themselves bitterly to free will and advancing thought:

yet even here the special warfare is but the material of a broader and

more subtile alliance. An obstinate fixity in one's bosom often serves

as a rock on which to break the shell of some hard inclosed faculty.

Upon stepping-stones of our _slain_ selves we mount to new altitudes. So

do the antagonisms of these principles in the broader field of society

equally conceal a fundamental reciprocation. By the opposition to

his thought of inert and defiant custom, the thinker is compelled to

interrogate his consciousness more deeply and sacredly; and being

cut off from that sympathy which has its foundation in similarity of

temperaments and traditions, he must fall back with simpler abandonment

upon the pure idea, and must seek responses from that absolute nature of

man which the men of his time are not human enough to afford him. This

absolute nature, this divine identity in man, underrunning times,

temperaments, individualities, is that which poet and prophet must

address: yet to speak _to_ it, they must speak _from_ it; to be heard

by the universal heart, they must use a universal language. But

this marvellous vernacular can be known to him alone whose heart is

universal, in whom even self-love is no longer selfish, but is a pure

respect to his own being as it is Being. Well it is, therefore, that

here and there one man should be so denied all petty and provincial

claim to attention, that only by speaking to Man as Man, and in the

sincerest vernacular of the human soul, he can find audience; for thus

it shall become his need, for the sake of joy no less than of duty, to

know himself purely as man, and to yield himself wholly to his immortal

humanity. Thus does fixed custom force back the most moving souls, until

they touch the springs of inspiration, and are indued with power: then,

at once potent and pure, they gush into history, to be influences, to

make epochs, and to prevail over that through whose agency they first

obtained strength.

Thus, everywhere, through all realms, do the opposite principles of Rest

and Motion depend upon and reciprocally empower each other. In every

act, mechanical, mental, social, must both take part and consent

together; and upon the perfection of this consent depends the quality

of the action. Every progress is conditioned on a permanence; every

permanence _lives_ but in and through progress. Where all, and with

equal and simultaneous impulse, strives to move, nothing can move, but

chaos is come; where all refuses to move, and therefore stagnates, decay

supervenes, which is motion, though a motion downward.

Having made this general statement, we proceed to say that there are two

chief ways in which these universal opposites enter into reciprocation.

The first and more obvious is the method of alternation, or of rest

_from_ motion; the other, that of continuous equality, which may be

called a rest _in_ motion. These two methods, however, are not mutually

exclusive, but may at once occupy the same ground, and apply to the same

objects,--as oxygen and nitrogen severally fill the same space, to the

full capacity of each, as though the other were absent.

Instances of the alternation, either total or approximative, of these

principles are many and familiar. They may be seen in the systole and

diastole of the heart; in the alternate activity and passivity of the

lungs; in the feet of the pedestrian, one pausing while the other

proceeds; in the waving wings of birds; in the undulation of the sea; in

the creation and propagation of sound, and the propagation, at least,

of light; in the alternate acceleration and retardation of the earth's

motion in its orbit, and in the waving of its poles. In all vibrations

and undulations there is a going and returning, between which must exist

minute periods of repose; but in many instances the return is simply a

relaxation or a subsidence, and belongs, therefore, to the department of

rest. Discourse itself, it will be observed, has its pauses, seasons of

repose thickly interspersed in the action of speech; and besides these

has its accented and unaccented syllables, emphatic and unemphatic

words,--illustrating thus in itself the law which it here affirms.

History is full of the same thing; the tides of faith and feeling now

ascend and now subside, through all the ages, in the soul of humanity;

each new affirmation prepares the way for new doubt, each honest doubt

in the end furthers and enlarges belief; the pendulum of destiny swings

to and fro forever, and earth's minutest life and heaven's remotest star

swing with it, rising but to fall, and falling that they may rise again.

So does rhythm go to the very bottom of the world: the heart of Nature

pulses, and the echoing shore and all music and the throbbing heart and

swaying destinies of man but follow and proclaim the law of her inward

life.

The universality and mutual relationship of these primal principles

have, perhaps, been sufficiently set forth; and this may be the place to

emphasize the second chief point,--that the perfection of this mutuality

measures the degree of excellence in all objects and actions. It

will everywhere appear, that, the more regular and symmetrical their

relationship, the more beautiful and acceptable are its results. For

example, sounds proceeding from vibrations wherein the strokes and

pauses are in invariable relation are such sounds as we denominate

_musical._ Accordingly all sounds are musical at a sufficient distance,

since the most irregular undulations are, in a long journey through the

air, wrought to an equality, and made subject to exact law,--as in

this universe all irregularities are sure to be in the end. Thus, the

thunder, which near at hand is a wild crash, or nearer yet a crazy

crackle, is by distance deepened and refined into that marvellous bass

which we all know. And doubtless the jars, the discords, and moral

contradictions of time, however harsh and crazy at the outset, flow

into exact undulation along the ether of eternity, and only as a pure

proclamation of law attain to the ear of Heaven. Nay, whoso among men is

able to plant his ear high enough above this rude clangor may, in like

manner, so hear it, that it shall be to him melody, solace, fruition,

a perpetual harvest of the heart's dearest wishes, a perpetual

corroboration of that which faith affirms.

We may therefore easily understand why musical sounds _are_ musical, why

they are acceptable and moving, while those affront the sense in which

the minute reposes are capricious, and, as it were, upon ill terms with

the movements. The former appeal to what is most universal and cosmical

within us,--to the pure Law, the deep Nature in our breasts; they fall

in with the immortal rhythm of life itself, which the others encounter

and impugn.

It will be seen also that verse differs from prose as musical sounds

from ordinary tones; and having so deep a ground in Nature, rhythmical

speech will be sure to continue, in spite of objection and protest, were

it, if possible, many times more energetic than that of Mr. Carlyle. But

always the best prose has a certain rhythmic emphasis and cadence: in

Milton's grander passages there is a symphony of organs, the bellows of

the mighty North (one might say) filling their pipes; Goldsmith's flute

still breathes through his essays; and in the ampler prose of Bacon

there is the swell of a summer ocean, and you can half fancy you hear

the long soft surge falling on the shore. Also in all good writing,

as in good reading, the pauses suffer no slight; they are treated

handsomely; and each sentence rounds gratefully and clearly into rest.

Sometimes, indeed, an attempt is made to react in an illegitimate way

this force of firm pauses, as in exaggerated French style, wherein the

writer seems never to stride or to run, but always to jump like a frog.

Again, as reciprocal opposites, our two principles should be of equal

dignity and value. To concede, however, the equality of rest with motion

must, for an American, be not easy; and it is therefore in point to

assert and illustrate this in particular. What better method of doing so

than that of taking some one large instance in Nature, if such can

be found, and allowing this, after fair inspection, to stand for all

others? And, as it happens, just what we require is quite at hand;--the

alternation of Day and Night, of sleep and waking, is so broad, obvious,

and familiar, and so mingled with our human interests, that its two

terms are easily subjected to extended and clear comparison; while also

it deserves discussion upon its own account, apart from its relation to

the general subject.

Sleep is now popularly known to be coextensive with Life,--inseparable

from vital existence of whatever grade. The rotation of the earth

is accordingly implied, as was happily suggested by Paley, in the

constitution of every animal and every plant. It is quite evident,

therefore, that this necessity was not laid upon, man through some

inadvertence of Nature; on the contrary, this arrangement must be such

as to her seemed altogether suitable, and, if suitable, economical.

Eager men, however, avaricious of performance, do not always regard it

with entire complacency. Especially have the saints been apt to set up

a controversy with Nature in this particular, submitting with infinite

unwillingness to the law by which they deem themselves, as it were,

defrauded of life and activity in so large measure. In form, to be

sure, their accusation lies solely against themselves; they reproach

themselves with sleeping beyond need, sleeping for the mere luxury and

delight of it; but the venial self-deception is quite obvious,--nothing

plainer than that it is their necessity itself which is repugnant to

them, and that their wills are blamed for not sufficiently withstanding

and thwarting it. Pious William Law, for example, is unable to disparage

sleep enough for his content. "The poorest, dullest refreshment of the

body," he calls it,... "such a dull, stupid state of existence, that

even among animals we despise them most which are most drowsy."

You should therefore, so he urges, "begin the day in the spirit of

renouncing sleep." Baxter, also,--at that moment a walking catalogue

and epitome of all diseases,--thought himself guilty for all sleep he

enjoyed beyond three hours a day. More's Utopians were to rise at very

early hours, and attend scientific lectures before breakfast.

Ambition and cupidity, which, in their way, are no whit less earnest and

self-sacrificing than sanctity, equally look upon sleep as a wasteful

concession to bodily wants, and equally incline to limit such concession

to its mere minimum. Commonplaces accordingly are perpetually

circulating in the newspapers, especially in such as pretend to a

didactic tone, wherein all persons are exhorted to early rising, to

resolute abridgment of the hours of sleep, and the like. That Sir Walter

Raleigh slept but five hours in twenty-four; that John Hunter, Frederick

the Great, and Alexander von Humboldt slept but four; that the Duke of

Wellington made it an invariable rule to "turn out" whenever he felt

inclined to turn over, and John Wesley to arise upon his first awaking:

instances such as these appear on parade with the regularity of militia

troops at muster; and the precept duly follows,--"Whoso would not be

insignificant, let him go and do likewise." "All great men have been

early risers," says my newspaper.

Of late, indeed, a better knowledge of the laws of health, or perhaps

only a keener sense of its value and its instability, begins to

supersede these rash inculcations; and paragraphs due to some discreet

Dr. Hall make the rounds of the press, in which we are reminded that

early rising, in order to prove a benefit, rather than a source of

mischief, must be duly matched with early going to bed. The one, we are

told, will by no means answer without the other. As yet, however, this

is urged upon hygienic grounds alone; it is a mere concession to the

body, a bald necessity that we hampered mortals lie under; which

necessity we are quite at liberty to regret and accuse, though we cannot

with safety resist it. Sleep is still admitted to be a waste of time,

though one with which Nature alone is chargeable. And I own, not without

reluctance, that the great authority of Plato can be pleaded for this

low view of its functions. In the "Laws" he enjoins a due measure

thereof, but for the sake of health alone, and adds, that the sleeper

is, for the time, of no more value than the dead. Clearly, mankind would

sustain some loss of good sense, were all the dullards and fat-wits

taken away; and Sancho Panza, with his hearty, "Blessings on the man

that invented sleep!" here ekes out the scant wisdom of sages. The

talking world, however, of our day takes part with the Athenian against

the Manchegan philosopher, and, while admitting the present necessity of

sleep, does not rejoice in its original invention. If, accordingly, in a

computation of the length of man's life, the hours passed in slumber are

carefully deducted, and considered as forming no part of available time,

not even the medical men dispute the justice of such procedure. They

have but this to say:--"The stream of life is not strong enough to keep

the mill of action always going; we must therefore periodically shut

down the gate and allow the waters to accumulate; and he ever loses more

than he gains who attempts any avoidance of this natural necessity."

As medical men, they are not required, perhaps, to say more; and we will

be grateful to them for faithfully urging this,--especially when we

consider, that, under the sage arrangements now existing, all that the

physician does for the general promotion of health is done in defiance

of his own interests. We, however, have further questions to ask. Why is

not the life-stream more affluent? Sleep _is_ needful,--but _wherefore_?

The physician vindicates the sleeper; but the philosopher must vindicate

Nature.

It is surely one step toward an elucidation of this matter to observe

that the necessity here accused is not one arbitrarily laid upon us _by_

Nature, but one existing _in_ Nature herself, and appertaining to the

very conception of existence. The elucidation, however, need not pause

at this point. The assumption that sleep is a piece of waste, as being a

mere restorative for the body, and not a service or furtherance to the

mind,--this must be called in question and examined closely; for it is

precisely in this assumption, as I deem, that the popular judgment goes

astray. _Is_ sleep any such arrest and detention of the mind? That it is

a shutting of those outward gates by which impressions flow in upon the

soul is sufficiently obvious; but who can assure us that it is equally

a closing of those inward and skyward gates through which come

the reinforcements of faculty, the strength that masters and uses

impression? I persuade myself, on the contrary, that it is what Homer

called it, _divine_,--able, indeed, to bring the blessing of a god; and

that hours lawfully passed under the pressure of its heavenly palms are

fruitful, not merely negatively, but positively, not only as recruiting

exhausted powers, and enabling us to be awake again, but by direct

contribution to the resources of the soul and the uses of life; that, in

fine, one awakes farther on in _life_, as well as farther on in _time_,

than he was at falling asleep. This deeper function of the night, what

is it?

Sleep is, first of all, a filter, or sieve. It strains off the

impressions that engross, but not enrich us,--that superfluous

_material_ of experience which, either from glutting excess, or from

sheer insignificance, cannot be spiritualized, made human, transmuted

into experience itself. Every man in our day, according to the measure

of his sensibility, and with some respect also to his position, is

_mobbed_ by impressions, and must fight as for his life, if he escape

being taken utterly captive by them. It is our perpetual peril that

our lives shall become so sentient as no longer to be reflective or

artistic,--so beset and infested by the immediate as to lose all

amplitude, all perspective, and to become mere puppets of the present,

mere Chinese pictures, a huddle of foreground without horizon, or

heaven, or even earthly depth and reach. It is easy to illustrate this

miserable possibility. A man, for example, in the act of submitting

to the extraction of a tooth, is, while the process lasts, one of the

poorest poor creatures with whose existence the world might be taunted.

His existence is but skin-deep, and contracted to a mere point at that:

no vision and faculty divine, no thoughts that wander through eternity,

now: a tooth, a jaw, and the iron of the dentist,--these constitute, for

the time being, his universe. Only when this monopolizing, enslaving,

sensualizing impression has gone by, may what had been a point of pained

and quivering animality expand once more to the dimensions of a human

soul. Kant, it is said, could withdraw his attention from the pain of

gout by pure mental engagement, but found the effort dangerous to

his brain, and accordingly was fain to submit, and be no more than

a toe-joint, since evil fate would have it so. These extreme cases

exemplify a process of impoverishment from which we all daily suffer.

The external, the immediate, the idiots of the moment, telling tales

that signify nothing, yet that so overcry the suggestion of our deeper

life as by the sad and weary to be mistaken for the discourse of life

itself,--these obtrude themselves upon us, and multiply and brag and

brawl about us, until we have neither room for better guests, nor

spirits for their entertainment. We are like schoolboys with eyes out at

the windows, drawn by some rattle of drum and squeak of fife, who would

study, were they but deaf. Reproach sleep as a waste, forsooth! It is

this tyrannical attraction to the surface, that indeed robs us of time,

and defrauds us of the uses of life. We cannot hear the gods for the

buzzing of flies. We are driven to an idle industry,--the idlest of all

things.

And to this description of loss men are nowadays peculiarly exposed.

The modern world is all battle-field; the smoke, the dust, the din fill

every eye and ear; and the hill-top of Lucretius, where is it? The

indispensable, terrible newspaper, with its late allies, the Titans and

sprites of steam and electricity,--bringing to each retired nook,

and thrusting in upon each otherwise peaceful household, the crimes,

follies, fears, solicitudes, doubts, problems of all kingdoms and

peoples,--exasperates the former Scotch mist of impressions into a

flooding rain, and almost threatens to swamp the brain of mankind. The

incitement to thought is ever greater; but the possibility of thinking,

especially of thinking in a deep, simple, central way, is ever less.

Problems multiply, but how to attend to them is ever a still greater

problem. Guests of the intellect and imagination accumulate until the

master of the house is pushed out of doors, and hospitality ceases from

the mere excess of its occasion. That must be a greater than Homer who

should now do Homer's work. He, there in his sweet, deep-skied Ionia,

privileged with an experience so simple and yet so salient and powerful,

might well hope to act upon this victoriously by his spirit, might hope

to transmute it, as indeed he did, into melodious and enduring human

suggestion. Would it have been all the same, had he lived in our

type-setting modern world, with its multitudinous knowledges, its

aroused conscience, its spurred and yet thwarted sympathies, its new

incitements to egotism also, and new tools and appliances for egotism

to use,--placed, as it were, in the focus of a vast whispering-gallery,

where all the sounds of heaven and earth came crowding, contending,

incessant upon his ear? One sees at a glance how the serious thought and

poetry of Greece cling to a few master facts, not being compelled to

fight always with the many-headed monster of detail; and this suggests

to me that our literature may fall short of Grecian amplitude, depth,

and simplicity, not wholly from inferiority of power, but from

complications appertaining to our position.

The problem of our time is, How to digest and assimilate the Newspaper?

To complain of it, to desire its abolition, is an anachronism of the

will: it is to complain that time proceeds, and that events follow each

other in due sequence. It is hardly too bold to say that the newspaper

_is_ the modern world, as distinct from the antique and the mediaeval.

It represents, by its advent, that epoch in human history wherein

each man must begin, in proportion to his capability of sympathy and

consideration, to collate his private thoughts, fortunes, interests with

those of the human race at large. We are now in the crude openings of

this epoch, fevered by its incidents and demands; and one of its tokens

is a general exhaustion of the nervous system and failure of health,

both here and in Europe,--those of most sensitive spirit, and least

retired and sheltered from the impressions of the time, suffering most.

All this will end, _must_ end, victoriously. In the mean time can we not

somewhat adjust ourselves to this new condition?

One thing we can and must not fail to do: we can learn to understand and

appreciate Rest. In particular, we should build up and reinforce the

powers of the night to offset this new intensity of the day. Such,

indeed, as the day now is has it ever been, though in a less degree:

always it has cast upon men impressions significant, insignificant, and

of an ill significance, promiscuously and in excess; and always sleep

has been the filter of memory, the purifier of experience, providing a

season that follows closely upon the impressions of the day, ere yet

they are too deeply imbedded, in which our deeper life may pluck away

the adhering burrs from its garments, and arise disburdened, clean, and

free. I make no doubt that Death also performs, though in an ampler and

more thorough way, the same functions. It opposes the tyranny of memory.

For were our experience to go on forever accumulating, unwinnowed,

undiminished, every man would sooner or later break down beneath it;

every man would be crushed by his own traditions, becoming a grave to

himself, and drawing the clods over his own head. To relieve us of these

accidental accretions, to give us back to ourselves, is the use,

in part, of that sleep which rounds each day, and of that other

sleep--brief, but how deep!--which rounds each human life.

Accordingly, he who sleeps well need not die so soon,--even as in the

order of Nature he will not. He has that other and rarer half of a good

memory, namely, a good forgetting. For none remembers so ill as he that

remembers all. "A great German scholar affirmed that he knew not what

it was to forget." Better have been born an idiot! An unwashed

memory,--faugh! To us moderns and Americans, therefore, who need

above all things to forget well,--our one imperative want being a

simplification of experience,--to us, more than to all other men, is

requisite, in large measure of benefit, the winnowing-fan of sleep,

sleep with its choices and exclusions, if we would not need the offices

of death too soon.

But a function of yet greater depth and moment remains to be indicated.

Sleep enables the soul not only to shed away that which is foreign,

but to adopt and assimilate whatever is properly its own. Dr. Edward

Johnson, a man of considerable penetration, though not, perhaps, of a

balanced judgment, has a dictum to the effect that the formation of

blood goes on during our waking hours, but the composition of tissue

during those of sleep. I know not upon what grounds of evidence

this statement is made; but one persuades himself that it must be

approximately true of the body, since it is undoubtedly so of the soul.

Under the eye of the sun the fluid elements of character are supplied;

but the final edification takes place beneath the stars. Awake, we

think, feel, act; sleeping, we _become_. Day feeds our consciousness;

night, out of those stores which action has accumulated, nourishes the

vital unconsciousness, the pure unit of the man. During sleep, the valid

and serviceable experience of the day is drawn inward, wrought upon by

spiritual catalysis, transmitted into conviction, sentiment, character,

life, and made part of that which is to attract and assimilate all

subsequent experience. Who, accordingly, has not awaked to find some

problem already solved with which he had vainly grappled on the

preceding day? It is not merely that in the morning our invigorated

powers work more efficiently, and enable us to reach this solution

immediately _after_ awaking. Often, indeed, this occurs; but there are

also numerous instances--and such alone are in point--wherein the work

is complete _before_ one's awakening: not unfrequently it is by the

energy itself of the new perception that the soft bonds of slumber are

first broken; the soul hails its new dawn with so lusty a cheer,

that its clarion reaches even to the ear of the body, and we are

unconsciously murmuring the echoes of that joyous salute while yet the

iris-hued fragments of our dreams linger about us. The poet in the

morning, if true divine slumber have been vouchsafed him, finds his

mind enriched with sweeter imaginations, the thinker with profounder

principles and wider categories: neither begins the new day where

he left the old, but each during his rest has silently, wondrously,

advanced to fresh positions, commanding the world now from nobler

summits, and beholding around him an horizon beyond that over which

yesterday's sun rose and set. Milton gives us testimony very much in

point:--

"My celestial patroness, who deigns

Her nightly visitation unimplored,

And dictates to me slumb'ring."

Thus, in one important sense, is day the servant of night, action the

minister of rest. I fancy, accordingly, that Marcus Antoninus may give

Heraclitus credit for less than his full meaning in saying that "men

asleep are then also laboring"; for he understands him to signify only

that through such the universe is still accomplishing its ends. Perhaps

he meant to indicate what has been here affirmed,--that in sleep one's

personal destiny is still ripening, his true life proceeding.

But if, as the instance which has been under consideration suggests,

these two principles are of equal dignity, it will follow that the

ability to rest profoundly is of no less estimation than the ability to

work powerfully. Indeed, is it not often the condition upon which great

and sustained power of action depends? The medal must have two sides.

"Danton," says Carlyle, "was a great nature that could rest." Were not

the force and terror of his performance the obverse fact? I do not

now mean, however true it would be, to say that without rest physical

resources would fail, and action be enfeebled in consequence; I mean

that the soul which wants the attitude of repose wants the condition of

power. There is a petulant and meddlesome industry which proceeds from

spiritual debility, and causes more; it is like the sleeplessness and

tossing of exhausted nervous patients, which arises from weakness, and

aggravates its occasion. As few things are equally wearisome, so few are

equally wasteful, with a perpetual indistinct sputter of action, whereby

nothing is done and nothing let alone. Half the world _breaks_ out with

action; its performance is cutaneous, of the nature of tetter. Hence is

it that in the world, with such a noise of building, so few edifices are

reared.

We require it as a pledge of the sanity of our condition, and consequent

wholesomeness of our action, that we can withhold our hand, and

leave the world in that of its Maker. No man is quite necessary to

Omnipotence; grass grew before we were born, and doubtless will continue

to grow when we are dead. If we act, let it be because our soul has

somewhat to bring forth, and not because our fingers itch. We have in

these days been emphatically instructed that all speech not rooted in

silence, rooted, that is, in pure, vital, silent Nature, is

poor and unworthy; but we should be aware that action equally

requires this solemn and celestial perspective, this issue out of the

never-trodden, noiseless realms of the soul. Only that which comes from

a divine depth can attain to a divine height.

There is a courage of withholding and forbearing greater than any other

courage; and before this Fate itself succumbs. Wellington won the

Battle of Waterloo by heroically standing still; and every hour of that

adventurous waiting was heaping up significance for the moment when at

length he should cry, "Up, Guards, and at them !" What Cecil said of

Raleigh, "He can toil terribly," has been styled "an electric touch";

but the "masterly inactivity" of Sir James Mackintosh, happily

appropriated by Mr. Calhoun, carries an equal appeal to intuitive sense,

and has already become proverbial. He is no sufficient hero who in the

delays of Destiny, when his way is hedged up and his hope deferred,

cannot reserve his strength and bide his time. The power of acting

greatly includes that of greatly abstaining from action. The leader of

an epoch in affairs should therefore be some Alfred, Bruce, Gustavus

Vasa, Cromwell, Washington, Garibaldi, who can wait while the iron of

opportunity heats at the forge of time; and then, in the moment of its

white glow, can so smite as to shape it forever to the uses of mankind.

One should be able not only to wait, but to wait strenuously, sternly,

immovably, rooted in his repose like a mountain oak in the soil; for

it may easily happen that the necessity of refraining shall be most

imperative precisely when, the external pressure toward action is most

vehement. Amid the violent urgency of events, therefore, one should

learn the art of the mariner, who, in time of storm lies to, with sails

mostly furled, until milder gales permit him again to spread sail

and stretch away. With us, as with him, even a fair wind may blow so

fiercely that one cannot safely run before it. There are movements with

whose direction we sympathize, which are yet so ungoverned that we lose

our freedom and the use of our reason in committing ourselves to

them. So the seaman who runs too long before the increasing gale has

thereafter no election; go on he must, for there is death in pausing,

though it be also death to proceed. Learn, therefore, to wait. Is there

not many a one who never arrives at fruit, for no better reason than

that he persists in plucking his own blossoms? Learn to wait. Take time,

with the smith, to raise your arm, if you would deliver a telling blow.

Does it seem wasteful, this waiting? Let us, then, remind ourselves that

excess and precipitation are more than wasteful,--they are directly

destructive. The fire that blazes beyond bounds not warms the house,

but burns it down, and only helps infinitesimally to warm the wide

out-of-doors. Any live snail will out-travel a wrecked locomotive, and

besides will leave no trail of slaughter on its track. Though despatch

be the soul of business, yet he who outruns his own feet comes to the

ground, and makes no despatch,--unless it be of himself. Hurry is the

spouse of Flurry, and the father of Confusion. Extremes meet, and

overaction steadfastly returns to the effect of non-action,--bringing,

however, the seven devils of disaster in its company. The ocean storm

which heaps the waves so high may, by a sufficient increase, blow them

down again; and in no calm is the sea so level as in the extremest

hurricane.

Persistent excess of outward performance works mischief in one of two

directions,--either upon the body or on the soul. If one will not

accommodate himself to this unreasonable quantity by abatement of

quality,--if he be resolute to put love, faith, and imagination into

his labor, and to be alive to the very top of his brain,--then the body

enters a protest, and dyspepsia, palsy, phthisis, insanity, or somewhat

of the kind, ensues. Commonly, however, the tragedy is different from

this, and deeper. Commonly, in these cases, action loses height as it

gains lateral surface; the superior faculties starve, being robbed of

sustenance by this avarice of performance, and consequently of supply,

on the part of the lower,--they sit at second table, and eat of

remainder-crumbs. The delicate and divine sprites, that should bear the

behests of the soul to the will and to the houses of thought in the

brain her intuitions, are crowded out from the streets of the cerebral

cities by the mob and trample of messengers bound upon baser errands;

and thus is the soul deprived of service, and the man of inspiration.

The man becomes, accordingly, a great merchant who values a cent, but

does not value a human sentiment; or a lawyer who can convince a jury

that white is black, but cannot convince himself that white is white,

God God, and the sustaining faiths of great souls more than moonshine.

So if the apple-tree will make too much wood, it can bear no fruit;

during summer it is full of haughty thrift, but the autumn, which brings

grace to so many a dwarfed bush and low shrub, shows it naked and in

shame.

How many mistake the crowing of the cock for the rising of the sun,

albeit the cock often crows at midnight, or at the moon's rising, or

only at the advent of a lantern and a tallow candle! And yet what

a bloated, gluttonous devourer of hopes and labors is this same

precipitation! All shores are strown with wrecks of barks that went too

soon to sea. And if you launch even your well-built ship at half-tide,

what will it do but strike bottom, and stick there? The perpetual

tragedy of literary history, in especial, is this. What numbers of young

men, gifted with great imitative quickness, who, having, by virtue of

this, arrived at fine words and figures of speech, set off on their

nimble rhetorical Pegasus, keep well out of the Muse's reach ever

after! How many go conspicuously through life, snapping their smart

percussion-caps upon empty barrels, because, forsooth, powder and ball

do not come of themselves, and it takes time to load!

I know that there is a divine impatience, a rising of the waters of love

and noble pain till they _must_ overflow, with or without the hope of

immediate apparent use, and no matter what swords and revenges impend.

History records a few such defeats which are worth thousands of ordinary

victories. Yet the rule is, that precipitation comes of levity.

Eagerness is shallow. Haste is but half-earnest. If an apple is found

to grow mellow and seemingly ripe much before its fellows on the same

bough, you will probably discover, upon close inspection, that there is

a worm in it.

To be sure, any time is too soon with those who dote upon Never. There

are such as find Nature precipitate and God forward. They would have

effect limp at untraversable distances behind cause; they would keep

destiny carefully abed and feed it upon spoon-victual. They play duenna

to the universe, and are perpetually on the _qui vive_, lest it escape,

despite their care, into improprieties. The year is with them too fast

by so much as it removes itself from the old almanac. The reason is that

_they_ are the old almanac. Or, more distinctly, they are at odds with

universal law, and, knowing that to them it can come only as judgment

and doom, they, not daring to denounce the law itself, fall to the trick

of denouncing its agents as visionaries, and its effects as premature.

The felon always finds the present an unseasonable day on which to be

hanged: the sheriff takes another view of the matter.

But the error of these consists, not in realizing good purposes too

slowly and patiently, but in failing effectually to purpose good at

all. To those who truly are making it the business of their lives to

accomplish worthy aims, this counsel cannot come amiss,--TAKE TIME.

Take a year in which to thread a needle, rather than go dabbing at the

texture with the naked thread. And observe, that there is an excellence

and an efficacy of slowness, no less than of quickness. The armadillo

is equally secure of his prey with the hawk or leopard; and Sir Charles

Bell mentions a class of thieves in India, who, having, through

extreme patience and command of nerve, acquired the power of motion

imperceptibly slow, are the most formidable of all peculators, and

almost defy precaution. And to leave these low instances, slowness

produced by profoundness of feeling and fineness of perception

constitutes that divine patience of genius without which genius does not

exist. Mind lingers where appetite hurries on; it is only the Newtons

who stay to meditate over the fall of an apple, too trivial for the

attention of the clown. It is by this noble slowness that the highest

minds faintly emulate that inconceivable deliberateness and delicacy of

gradation with which solar systems are built and worlds habilitated.

Now haste and intemperance are the Satans that beset virtuous Americans.

And these mischiefs are furthered by those who should guard others

against them. The Rev. Dr. John Todd, in a work, not destitute of merit,

entitled "The Student's Manual," urges those whom he addresses to study,

while about it, with their utmost might, crowding into an hour as much

work as it can possibly be made to contain; so, he says, they will

increase the power of the brain. But this is advice not fit to be given

to a horse, much less to candidates for the graces of scholarly manhood.

I read that race-horses, during the intervals between their public

contests, are permitted only occasionally and rarely to be driven at

their extreme speed, but are assiduously made to _walk_ several hours

each day. By this constancy of _moderate_ exercise they preserve health

and suppleness of limb, without exhaustion of strength. And it appears,

that, were such an animal never to be taken from the stable but to be

pushed to the top of his speed, he would be sure to make still greater

speed toward ruin. Why not be as wise for men as for horses?

And here I desire to lay stress upon one point, which American students

will do well to consider gravely,--_It is a_ PURE, _not a strained and

excited, attention which has signal prosperity._ Distractions, tempests,

and head-winds in the brain, by-ends, the sidelong eyes of vanity, the

overleaping eyes of ambition, the bleared eyes of conceit,--these are

they which thwart study and bring it to nought. Nor these only, but all

impatience, all violent eagerness, all passionate and perturbed feeling,

fill the brain with thick and hot blood, suited to the service of

desire, unfit for the uses of thought. Intellect can be served only by

the finest properties of the blood; and if there be any indocility

of soul, any impurity of purpose, any coldness or carelessness, any

prurience or crude and intemperate heat, then base spirits are sent down

from the seat of the soul to summon the sanguineous forces; and these

gather a crew after their own kind. Purity of attention, then, is the

magic that the scholar may use; and let him know, that, the purer it is,

the more temperate, tranquil, reposeful. Truth is not to be run down

with fox-hounds; she is a divinity, and divinely must he draw nigh who

will gain her presence. Go to, thou bluster-brain! Dost thou think to

learn? Learn docility first, and the manners of the skies. And thou

egotist, thinkest thou that these eyes of thine, smoky with the fires of

diseased self-love, and thronged with deceiving wishes, shall perceive

the essential and eternal? They shall see only silver and gold, houses

and lands, reputes, supremacies, fames, and, as instrumental to these,

the forms of logic and seemings of knowledge. If thou wilt discern the

truth, desire IT, not its accidents and collateral effects. Rest in the

pursuit of it, putting _simplicity of quest_ in the place of either

force or wile; and such quest cannot be unfruitful.

Let the student, then, shun an excited and spasmodic tension of brain,

and he will gain more while expending less. It is not toil, it is morbid

excitement, that kills; and morbid excitement in constant connection

with high mental endeavor is, of all modes and associations of

excitement, the most disastrous. Study as the grass grows, and your old

age--and its laurels--shall be green.

Already, however, we are trenching upon that more intimate relationship

of the great opposites under consideration which has been designated

Rest _in_ Motion. More intimate relationship, I say,--at any rate,

more subtile, recondite, difficult of apprehension and exposition, and

perhaps, by reason of this, more central and suggestive. An example

of this in its physical aspect may be seen in the revolutions of the

planets, and in all orbital or circular motion. For such, it will be

at once perceived, is, in strictness of speech, _fixed and stationary_

motion: it is, as Sir Isaac Newton demonstrated, an exact and equal

obedience, in the same moment, to the law of fixity and the law of

progression. Observe especially, that it is not, like merely retarded

motion, a partial neutralization of each principle by the other, an

imbecile Aristotelian compromise and half-way house between the two;

but it is at once, and in virtue of the same fact, perfect Rest _and_

perfect Motion. A revolving body is not hindered, but the same impulse

which begot its movement causes this perpetually to return into itself.

Now the principles that are seen to govern the material universe are

but a large-lettered display of those that rule in perfect humanity.

Whatsoever makes distinguished order and admirableness in Nature makes

the same in man; and never was there a fine deed that was not begot of

the same impulse and ruled by the same laws to which solar systems are

due. I desire, accordingly, here to take up and emphasize the statement

previously made in a general way,--that the secret of perfection in

all that appertains to man--in morals, manners, art, politics--must

be sought in such a correspondence and reciprocation of these great

opposites as the motions of the planets perfectly exemplify.

It must not, indeed, be overlooked or unacknowledged, that the planets

do not move in exact circles, but diverge slightly into ellipses. The

fact is by no means without significance, and that of an important kind.

Pure circular motion is the type of perfection in the universe as

a _whole_, but each part of the whole will inevitably express its

partiality, will acknowledge its special character, and upon the

frankness of this confession its comeliness will in no small degree

depend; nevertheless, no sooner does the eccentricity, or individuality,

become so great as to suggest disloyalty to the idea of the whole,

than ugliness ensues. Thus, comets are portents, shaking the faith of

nations, not supporting it, like the stars. So among men. Nature is

at pains to secure divergence, magnetic variation, putting into every

personality and every powerful action some element of irregularity

and imperfection; and her reason for doing so is, that irregularity

appertains to the state of growth, and is the avenue of access to higher

planes and broader sympathies; still, as the planets, though not moving

in perfect circles, yet come faithfully round to the same places, and

accomplish _the ends_ of circular motion, so in man, the divergence must

be special, not total, no act being the mere arc of a circle, and yet

_revolution_ being maintained. And to the beauty of characters and

deeds, it is requisite that they should never seem even to imperil

fealty to the universal idea. Revolution perfectly exact expresses only

necessity, not voluntary fidelity; but departure, _still deferential to

the law of the whole_, in evincing freedom elevates its obedience

into fealty and noble faithfulness: by this measure of eccentricity,

centricity is not only emphasized, but immeasurably exalted.

But having made this full and willing concession to the element of

individuality in persons and of special character in actions, we are at

liberty to resume the general thesis,--that orbital rest of movement

furnishes the type of perfect excellence, and suggests accordingly the

proper targe of aspiration and culture.

In applying this law, we will take first a low instance, wherein the

opposite principles stand apart, rather upon terms of outward covenant,

or of mere mixture, than of mutual assimilation. _Man_ is infinite;

_men_ are finite: the purest aspect of great laws never appears in

collections and aggregations, yet the same laws rule here as in the

soul, and such excellence as is possible issues from the same sources.

As an instance, accordingly, of that ruder reciprocation which may

obtain among multitudes, I name the Roman Legion.

It is said that the success of the armies of Rome is not fully accounted

for, until one takes into account the constitution of this military

body. It united, in an incomparable degree, the different advantages

of fixity and fluency. Moderate in size, yet large enough to give the

effect of mass, open in texture, yet compact in form, it afforded to

every man room for individual prowess, while it left no man to his

individual strength. Each soldier leaned and rested upon the Legion,

a body of six thousand men; yet around each was a space in which his

movements might be almost as free, rapid, and individual as though he

had possessed the entire field to himself. The Macedonian Phalanx was a

marvel of mass, but it was mass not penetrated with mobility; it could

move, indeed could be said to have an existence, only as a whole;

its decomposed parts were but _débris_. The Phalanx, therefore, was

terrible, the constituent parts of it imbecile; and the Battle of

Cynocephalae finally demonstrated its inferiority, for the various

possible exigencies of battle, to the conquering Legion. The brave

rabble of Gauls and Goths, on the other hand, illustrated all that

private valor, not reposing upon any vaster and more stable strength,

has power to achieve; but these rushing torrents of prowess dashed

themselves into vain spray upon the coordinated and reposing courage of

Rome.

The same perpetual opposites must concur to produce the proper form and

uses of the State,--though they here appear in a much more elevated

form. Rest is here known as _Law_, motion as _Liberty_. In the true

commonwealth, these, so far from being mutually destructive or

antagonistic, incessantly beget and vivify each other; so that Law

is the expression and guaranty of Freedom, while Freedom flows

spontaneously into the forms of Justice. Neither of these can exist,

neither can be properly _conceived of_, apart from its correlative

opposite. Nor will any condition of mere truce, or of mere mechanical

equilibrium, suffice. Nothing suffices but a reciprocation so active and

total that each is constantly resolving itself into the other.

The notion of Rousseau, which is countenanced by much of the

phraseology, to say the least, of the present day, was, indeed, quite

contrary to this. He assumed freedom to exist only where law is not,

that is, in the savage state, and to be surrendered, piece for piece,

with every acknowledgment of social obligation. Seldom was ever so

plausible a doctrine equally false. Law is properly _the public

definition of freedom and the affirmation of its sacredness and

inviolability as so defined_; and only in the presence of it, either

express or implicit, does man become free. Duty and privilege are one

and the same, however men may set up a false antagonism between them;

and accordingly social obligation can subtract nothing from the

privilege and prerogative of liberty. Consequently, the freedom which is

defined as the negation of social duty and obligation is not true regal

freedom, but is that worst and basest of all tyrannies, the tyranny of

pure egotism, masked in the semblance of its divine contrary. That,

be it observed, is the freest society, in which the noblest and most

delicate human powers find room and secure respect,--wherein the

loftiest and costliest spiritualities are most invited abroad by

sympathetic attraction. Now among savages little obtains appreciation,

save physical force and its immediate allies: the divine fledglings of

the human soul, instead of being sweetly drawn and tempted forth, are

savagely menaced, rudely repelled; whatsoever is finest in the man,

together with the entire nature of woman, lies, in that low temperature,

enchained and repressed, like seeds in a frozen soil. The harsh,

perpetual contest with want and lawless rivalry, to which all

uncivilized nations are doomed, permits only a few low powers, and those

much the same in all,--lichens, mosses, rude grasses, and other coarse

cryptogamous growths,--to develop themselves; since these alone can

endure the severities of season and treatment to which all that would

clothe the fields of the soul must remain exposed. Meanwhile the utmost

of that wicked and calamitous suppression of faculty, which constitutes

the essence and makes the tragedy of human slavery, is equally effected

by the inevitable isolation and wakeful trampling and consequent

barrenness of savage life. Liberty without law is not liberty; and the

converse may be asserted with like confidence.

Where, then, the fixed term, State, or Law, and the progressive term,

Person, or Freewill, are in relations of reciprocal support and mutual

reproduction, there alone is freedom, there alone public order. We were

able to command this truth from the height of our general proposition,

and closer inspection shows those anticipations to have been correct.

But man is greater than men; and for the finest aspect of high laws, we

must look to individual souls, not to masses.

What is the secret of noble manners? Orbital action, always returning

into and compensating itself. The gentleman, in offering his respect to

others, offers an equal, or rather the same, respect to himself; and his

courtesies may flow without stint or jealous reckoning, because they

feed their source, being not an expenditure, but a circulation.

Submitting to the inward law of honor and the free sense of what befits

a man,--to a law perpetually made and spontaneously executed in his

own bosom, the instant flowering of his own soul,--he commands his own

obedience, and he obeys his own commanding. Though throned above all

nations, a king of kings, yet the faithful humble vassal of his own

heart; though he serve, yet regal, doing imperial service; he escapes

outward constraint by inward anticipation; and all that could he rightly

named as his duty to others, he has, ere demand, already discovered, and

engaged in, as part of his duty to himself. Now it is the expression of

royal freedom in loyal service, of sovereignty in obedience, courage in

concession, and strength in forbearance, which makes manners noble. Low

may he bow, not with loss, but with access of dignity, who bows with an

elevated and ascending heart: there is nothing loftier, nothing less

allied to abject behavior, than this grand lowliness. The worm, because

it is low, cannot be lowly; but man, uplifted in token of supremacy, may

kneel in adoration, bend in courtesy, and stoop in condescension. Only a

great pride, that is, a great and reverential repose in one's own being,

renders possible a noble humility, which is a great and reverential

acknowledgment of the being of others; this humility in turn sustains a

higher self-reverence; this again resolves itself into a more majestic

humility; and so run, in ever enhancing wave, the great circles of

inward honor and outward grace. And without this self-sustaining

return of the action into itself, each quality feeding itself from its

correlative opposite, there can be no high behavior. This is the reason

why qualities loftiest in kind and largest in measure are vulgarly

mistaken, not for their friendly opposites, but for their mere

contraries,--why a very profound sensibility, a sensibility, too,

peculiarly of the spirit, not of nerve only, is sure to be named

coldness, as Mr. Ruskin recently remarks,--why vast wealth of good

pride, in its often meek acceptance of wrong, in its quiet ignoring

of insult, in its silent superiority to provocation, passes with

the superficial and petulant for poverty of pride and mere

mean-spiritedness,--why a courage which is not partial, but _total_,

coexisting, as it always does, with a noble peacefulness, with a noble

inaptness for frivolous hazards, and a noble slowness to take offence,

is, in its delays and forbearances, thought by the half-courageous to

be no better than cowardice;--it is, as we have said, because great

qualities revolve and repose in orbits of reciprocation with their

opposites, which opposites are by coarse and ungentle eyes misdeemed to

be contraries. Feeling transcendently deep and powerful is unimpassioned

and far lower-voiced than indifference and unfeelingness, being wont

to express itself, not by eloquent ebullition, but by extreme

understatement, or even by total silence. Sir Walter Raleigh, when at

length he found himself betrayed to death--and how basely betrayed!--by

Sir Lewis Stukely, only said, "Sir Lewis, these actions will not turn to

your credit." The New Testament tells us of a betrayal yet more quietly

received. These are instances of noble manners.

What actions are absolutely moral is determined by application of the

same law,--those only which repose wholly in themselves, being to

themselves at once motive and reward. "Miserable is he," says the

"Bhagavad Gita," "whose motive to action lies, not in the action itself,

but in its reward." Duty purchased with covenant of special delights is

not duty, but is the most pointed possible denial of it. The just man

looks not beyond justice; the merciful reposes in acts of mercy; and

he who would be bribed to equity and goodness is not only bad, but

shameless. But of this no further words.

Rest is sacred, celestial, and the appreciation of it and longing for

it are mingled with the religious sentiment of all nations. I cannot

remember the time when there was not to me a certain ineffable

suggestion in the apostolic words, "There remaineth, therefore, a rest

for the people of God." But the repose of the godlike must, as that of

God himself, be _infinitely_ removed from mere sluggish inactivity;

since the conception of action is the conception of existence

itself,--that is, of Being in the act of self-manifestation. Celestial

rest is found in action so universal, so purely identical with the great

circulations of Nature, that, like the circulation of the blood and the

act of breathing, it is not a subtraction from vital resource, but is,

on the contrary, part of the very fact of life and all its felicities.

This does not exclude rhythmic or recreative rest; but the need of such

rest detracts nothing from pleasure or perfection. In heaven also, if

such figure of speech be allowable, may be that toil which shall render

grateful the cessation from toil, and give sweetness to sleep; but right

weariness has its own peculiar delight, no less than right exercise;

and as the glories of sunset equal those of dawn, so with equal, though

diverse pleasure, should noble and temperate labor take off its sandals

for evening repose, and put them on to go forth "beneath the opening

eyelids of the morn." Yet, allowing a place for this rhythm in the

detail and close inspection even of heavenly life, it still holds true

on the broad scale, that pure beauty and beatitude are found there only

where life and character sweep in orbits of that complete expression

which is at once divine labor and divine repose.

Observe, now, that this rest-motion, as being without waste or loss, is

a _manifested immortality_, since that which wastes not ends not; and

therefore it puts into every motion the very character and suggestion of

immortal life. Yea, one deed rightly done, and the doer is in heaven,

--is of the company of immortals. One deed so done that in it is _no_

mortality; and in that deed the meaning of man's history,--the meaning,

indeed, and the glory, of existence itself,--are declared. Easy,

therefore, it is to see how any action may be invested with universal

significance and the utmost conceivable charm. The smaller the realm and

the humbler the act into which this amplitude and universality of spirit

are carried, the more are they emphasized and set off; so that, without

opportunity of unusual occasion, or singular opulence of natural power,

a man's life may possess all that majesty which the imagination pictures

in archangels and in gods. Indeed, it is but simple statement of fact to

say, that he who rests _utterly_ in his action shall belittle not only

whatsoever history has recorded, but all which that poet of poets,

Mankind, has ever dreamed or fabled of grace and greatness. He shall

not peer about with curiosity to spy approbation, or with zeal to defy

censure; he shall not know if there be a spectator in the world; his

most public deed shall be done in a divine privacy, on which no eye

intrudes,--his most private in the boundless publicities of Nature; his

deed, when done, falls away from him, like autumn apples from their

boughs, no longer his, but the world's and destiny's; neither the

captive of yesterday nor the propitiator of to-morrow, he abides simply,

majestically, like a god, in being and doing. Meanwhile, blame and

praise whirl but as unrecognized cloudlets of gloom or glitter beneath

his feet, enveloping and often blinding those who utter them, but to him

never attaining.

It is not easy at present to suggest the real measure and significance

of such manhood, because this age has debased its imagination, by the

double trick, first, of confounding man with his body, and next, of

considering the body, not as a symbol of truth, but only as an agent in

the domain of matter,--comparing its size with the sum total of physical

space, and its muscular power with the sum total of physical forces. Yet

"What know we greater than the soul?"

A man is no outlying province, nor does any province lie beyond him.

East, West, North, South, and height and depth are contained in his

bosom, the poles of his being reaching more widely, his zenith and nadir

being more sublime and more profound. We are cheated by nearness and

intimacy. Let us look at man with a telescope, and we shall find no star

or constellation of sweep so grand, no nebulae or star-dust so provoking

and suggestive to fancy. In truth, there are no words to say how either

large or small, how significant or insignificant, men may be. Though

solar and stellar systems amaze by their grandeur of scale, yet is true

manhood the maximum of Nature; though microscopic and sub-microscopic

protophyta amaze by their inconceivable littleness, yet is mock manhood

Nature's minimum. The latter is the only negative quantity known to

Nature; the former the only revelation of her entire heart.

In concluding, need I say that only the pure can repose in his

action,--only he obtain deliverance by his deed, and after deliverance

from it? The egotism, the baseness, the partialities that are in our

performance are hooks and barbs by which it wounds and wearies us in the

passage, and clings to us being past.

Law governs all; no favor is shown; the event is as it must be; only he

who has no blinding partiality toward himself, who is whole and one with

the whole, he who is Nature and Law and divine Necessity, can be blest

with that blessedness which Nature is able to give only by her presence.

There is a labor and a rest that are the same, one fact, one felicity;

in this are power, beauty, immortality; by existence as a whole it is

always perfectly exemplified; to man, as the eye of existence, it is

also possible; but it is possible to him only as he is purely man,--only

as he abandons himself to the divine principles of his life: in other

words, this Sabbath remaineth in very deed to no other than the people

of God.

* * * * *

LIGHTS OF THE ENGLISH LAKE DISTRICT.

At the opening of the present century, the Lake District of Cumberland

and Westmoreland was groaned over by some residents as fast losing its

simplicity. The poet Gray had been the first to describe its natural

features in an express manner; and his account of the views above

Keswick and Grasmere was quoted, sixty years since, as evidence of

the spoiling process which had gone on since the introduction of

civilization from the South. Gray remarked on the absence of red roofs,

gentlemen's houses, and garden-walls, and on the uniform character of

the humble farmsteads and gray cottages under their sycamores in the

vales. Wordsworth heard and spoke a good deal of the innovations which

had modified the scene in the course of the thirty years which elapsed

between Gray's visits (in 1767-69) and his own settlement in the Lake

District; but he lived to say more, at the end of half a century, of the

wider and deeper changes which time had wrought in the aspect of the

country and the minds and manners of the people. According to his

testimony, and that of Southey, the barbarism was of a somewhat gross

character at the end of the last century; the magistrates were careless

of the condition of the society in which they bore authority; the clergy

were idle or worse,--"marrying and burying machines," as Southey told

Wilberforce; and the morality of the people, such as it was, was

ascribed by Wordsworth, in those his days of liberalism in politics, to

the state of republican equality in which they lived. Excellent, fussy

Mr. Wilberforce thought, when he came for some weeks into the District,

that the Devil had had quite time enough for sowing tares while the

clergy were asleep; so he set to work to sow a better seed; and we find

in his diary that he went into house after house "to talk religion to

the people." I do not know how he was received; but at this day the

people are puzzled at that kind of domestic intervention, so unsuitable

to their old-fashioned manners,--one old dame telling with wonder, some

little time since, that a young lady had called and sung a hymn to

her, but had given her nothing at the end for listening. The rough

independence of the popular manners even now offends persons of a

conventional habit of mind; and when poets and philosophers first came

from southern parts to live here, the democratic tone of feeling and

behavior was more striking than it is now or will ever be again.

Before the Lake poets began to give the public an interest in the

District, some glimpses of it were opened by the well-known literary

ladies of the last century who grouped themselves round their young

favorite, Elizabeth Smith. I do not know whether her name and fame have

reached America; but in my young days she was the English school-girls'

subject of admiration and emulation. She had marvellous powers of

acquisition, and she translated the Book of Job, and a good deal from

the German,--introducing Klopstock to us at a time when we hardly knew

the most conspicuous names in German literature. Elizabeth Smith was an

accomplished girl in all ways. There is a damp, musty-looking house,

with small windows and low ceilings, at Coniston, where she lived with

her parents and sister, for some years before her death. We know, from

Mrs. Elizabeth Hamilton's and the Bowdlers' letters, how Elizabeth and

her sister lived in the beauty about them, rambling, sketching, and

rowing their guests on the lake. In one of her rambles, Elizabeth sat

too long under a heavy dew. She felt a sharp pain in her chest, which

never left her, and died in rapid decline. Towards the last she was

carried out daily from the close and narrow rooms at home, and laid in a

tent pitched in a field just across the road, whence she could overlook

the lake, and the range of mountains about its head. On that spot now

stands Tent Lodge, the residence of Tennyson and his bride after their

marriage. One of my neighbors, who first saw the Lake District in early

childhood, has a solemn remembrance of the first impression. The tolling

of the bell of Hawkeshead church was heard from afar; and it was tolling

for the funeral of Elizabeth Smith. Her portrait is before me now,--the

ingenuous, child-like face, with the large dark eyes which alone show

that it is not the portrait of a child. It was through her that a large

proportion of the last generation of readers first had any definite

associations with Coniston.

Wordsworth had, however, been in that church many a time, above twenty

years before, when at Hawkeshead school. He used to tell that his mother

had praised him for going into the church, one week-day, to see a woman

do penance in a white sheet. She considered it good for his morals. But

when he declared himself disappointed that nobody had given him a penny

for his attendance, as he had somehow expected, his mother told him he

was served right for going to church from such an inducement. He spoke

with gratitude of an usher at that school, who put him in the way

of learning the Latin, which had been a sore trouble at his native

Cockermouth, from unskilful teaching. Our interest in him at that

school, however, is from his having there first conceived the idea of

writing verse. His master set the boys, as a task, to write a poetical

theme,--"The Summer Vacation"; and Master William chose to add to it

"The Return to School." He was then fourteen; and he was to be double

that age before he returned to the District and took up his abode there.

He had meantime gone through his college course, as described in his

Memoirs, and undergone strange conditions of opinion and feeling in

Paris during the Revolution; had lived in Dorsetshire, with his faithful

sister; had there first seen Coleridge, and had been so impressed by the

mind and discourse of that wonderful young philosopher as to remove to

Somersetshire to be near him; had seen Klopstock in Germany, and lived

there for a time; and had passed through other changes of residence and

places, when we find him again among the Lakes in 1779, still with his

sister by his side, and their brother John, and Coleridge, who had never

been in the District before.

As they stood on the margin of Grasmere, the scene was more like what

Gray saw than what is seen at this day. The churchyard was bare of the

yews which now distinguish it,--for Sir George Beaumont had them planted

at a later time; and where the group of kindred and friends--the

Wordsworths and their relatives--now lie, the turf was level and

untouched. The iron rails and indefensible monuments, which Wordsworth

so reprobated half a century later, did not exist. The villas which stud

the slopes, the great inns which bring a great public, were uncreated;

and there was only the old Roman road where the Wishing-Gate is, or the

short cut by the quarries to arrive by from the South, instead of the

fine mail-road which now winds between the hills and the margin of

the lake. John Wordsworth guided his brother and Coleridge through

Grisedale, over a spur of Helvellyn, to see Ullswater; and Coleridge has

left a characteristic testimony of the effect of the scenery upon him.

It was "a day when light and darkness coexisted in contiguous masses,

and the earth and sky were but one. Nature lived for us in all her

wildest accidents." He tells how his eyes were dim with tears, and

how imagination and reality blended their objects and impressions.

Wordsworth's account of the same excursion is in as admirable contrast

with Coleridge's as their whole mode of life and expression was, from

first to last. With the carelessness of the popular mind in such cases,

the British public had already almost confounded the two men and their

works, as it soon after mixed up Southey with both; whereas they were

all as unlike each other as any three poets could well be.

Coleridge and Wordsworth were both contemplative, it is true, while

Southey was not: but the remarkable thing about Coleridge was the

exclusiveness of his contemplative tendencies, by which one set of

faculties ran riot in his mind and life, making havoc among his powers,

and a dismal wreck of his existence. The charm and marvel of his

discourse upset all judgments during his life, and for as long as his

voice remained in the ear of his enchanted hearers; but, apart from the

spell, it is clear to all sober and trained thinkers that Coleridge

wandered away from truth and reality in the midst of his vaticinations,

as the _clairvoyant_ does in the midst of his previsions, so as to

mislead and bewilder, while inspiring and intoxicating the hearer or

reader. He recorded, in regard to himself, that "history and particular

facts lost all interest" in his mind after his first launch into

metaphysics; and he remained through life incapable of discerning

reality from inborn images. Wordsworth took alarm at the first

experience of such a tendency in himself, and relates that he used to

catch at the trees and palings by the roadside to satisfy himself of

existences out of himself; but Coleridge encouraged this subjective

exclusiveness, to the destruction of the balance of his mind and the

_morale_ of his nature. He was himself a wild poem; and he discoursed

wild poems to us,--musical romances from Dreamland; but the luxury to

himself and us was bought by injury to others which was altogether

irreparable, and pardonable only on the ground that the balance of his

mind was destroyed by a fatal intellectual, in addition to physical

intemperance. In him we see an extreme case of a life of contemplation

uncontrolled by will and unchecked by action. His faculty of will

perished, and his prerogative of action died out. His contemplations

must necessarily be worth just so much the less to us as his mental

structure was deformed,--extravagantly developed in one direction, and

dwarfed in another.

The singularity in Wordsworth's case, on the other hand, is that his

contemplative tendencies not only coexisted with, but were implicated

with, the most precise and vivid apprehension of small realities. There

was no proportion in his mind; and vaticination and twaddle rolled

off his eloquent tongue as chance would have it. At one time he would

discourse like a seer, on the slightest instigation, by the hour

together; and next, he would hold forth with equal solemnity, on the

pettiest matter of domestic economy. I have known him take up some

casual notice of a "beck" (brook) in the neighborhood, and discourse

of brooks for two hours, till his hearers felt as if they were by the

rivers of waters in heaven; and next, he would talk on and on, till

stopped by some accident, on his doubt whether Mrs. Wordsworth gave a

penny apiece or a half-penny apiece for trapped mice to a little girl

who had undertaken to clear the house of them. It has been common to

regret that he held the office of Stamp-Distributor in the District; but

it was probably a great benefit to his mind as well as his fortunes. It

was something that it gave him security and ease as to the maintenance

of his family; but that is less important than its necessitating a

certain amount of absence from home, and intercourse with men on

business. He was no reader in mature life; and the concentration of his

mind on his own views, and his own genius, and the interests of his home

and neighborhood, caused some foibles, as it was; and it might have been

almost fatal, but for some office which allowed him to gratify his love

of out-door life at the same time that it led him into intercourse

with men in another capacity than as listeners to himself, or peasants

engrossed in their own small concerns.

Southey was not contemplative or speculative, and it could only have

been because he lived at the Lakes and was Coleridge's brother-in-law

that he was implicated with the two speculative poets at all. It has

been carelessly reported by Lake tourists that Southey was not beloved

among his neighbors, while Wordsworth was; and that therefore the latter

was the better man, in a social sense. It should be remembered that

Southey was a working man, and that the other two were not; and,

moreover, it should never be for a moment forgotten that Southey worked

double-tides to make up for Coleridge's idleness. While Coleridge was

dreaming and discoursing, Southey was toiling to maintain Coleridge's

wife and children. He had no time and no attention to spare for

wandering about and making himself at home with the neighbors. This

practice came naturally to Wordsworth; and a kind and valued neighbor he

was to all the peasants round. Many a time I have seen him in the road,

in Scotch bonnet and green spectacles, with a dozen children at his

heels and holding his cloak, while he cut ash-sticks for them from the

hedge, hearing all they had to say or talking to them. Southey, on the

other hand, took his constitutional walk at a fixed hour, often reading

as he went. Two families depended on him; and his duty of daily labor

was not only distinctive, but exclusive. He was always at work at home,

while Coleridge was doing nothing but talking, and Wordsworth was

abroad, without thinking whether he was at work or play. Seen from the

stand-point of conscience and of moral generosity, Southey's was the

noblest life of the three; and Coleridge's was, of course, nought.

I own, however, that, considering the tendency of the time to make

literature a trade, or at least a profession, I cannot help feeling

Wordsworth's to have been the most privileged life of them all. He had

not work enough to do; and his mode of life encouraged an excess of

egoism: but he bore all the necessary retribution of this in his latter

years; and the whole career leaves an impression of an airy freedom and

a natural course of contemplation, combined with social interest and

action, more healthy than the existence of either the delinquent or the

exemplary comrade with whom he was associated in the public view.

I have left my neighbors waiting long on the margin of Grasmere. That

was before I was born; but I could almost fancy I had seen them there.

I observed that Wordsworth's report of their trip was very unlike

Coleridge's. When his sister had left them, he wrote to her, describing

scenes by brief precise touches which draw the picture that Coleridge

blurs with grand phrases. Moreover, Wordsworth tells sister Dorothy that

John will give him forty pounds to buy a bit of land by the lake, where

they may build a cottage to live in henceforth. He says, also, that

there is a small house vacant near the spot.--They took that house;

and thus the Wordsworths became "Lakers." They entered that well-known

cottage at Grasmere on the shortest day (St. Thomas's) of 1799. Many

years afterwards, Dorothy wrote of the aspect of Grasmere on her arrival

that winter evening,--the pale orange lights on the lake, and the

reflection of the mountains and the island in the still waters. She

had wandered about the world in an unsettled way; and now she had cast

anchor for life,--not in that house, but within view of that valley.

All readers of Wordsworth, on either side the Atlantic, believe

that they know that cottage, (described in the fifth book of the

"Excursion,") with its little orchard, and the moss house, and the

tiny terrace behind, with its fine view of the lake and the basin of

mountains. There the brother and sister lived for some years in a very

humble way, making their feast of the beauty about them. Wordsworth was

fond of telling how they had meat only two or three times a week; and he

was eager to impress on new-comers--on me among others--the prudence of

warning visitors that they must make up their minds to the scantiest

fare. He was as emphatic about this, laying his finger on one's arm to

enforce it, as about catching mice or educating the people. It was vain

to say that one would rather not invite guests than fail to provide for

them; he insisted that the expense would be awful, and assumed that his

sister's and his own example settled the matter. I suppose they were

poor in those days; but it was not for long. A devoted sister Dorothy

was. Too late it appeared that she had sacrificed herself to aid and

indulge her brother. When her mind was gone, and she was dying by

inches, Mrs. Wordsworth offered me the serious warning that she gave

whenever occasion allowed, against overwalking. She told me that Dorothy

had, not occasionally only, but often, walked forty miles in a day to

give her brother her presence. To repair the ravages thus caused she

took opium; and the effect on her exhausted frame was to overthrow her

mind. This was when she was elderly. For a long course of years, she

was a rich household blessing to all connected with her. She shared her

brother's peculiarity of investing trifles with solemnity, or rather,

of treating all occasions alike (at least in writing) with pedantic

elaboration; but she had the true poet's, combined with the true woman's

nature; and the fortunate man had, in wife and sister, the two best

friends of his life.

The Wordsworths were the originals of the Lake _coterie,_ as we have

seen. Born at Cockermouth, and a pupil at the Hawkeshead school,

Wordsworth was looking homewards when he settled in the District. The

others came in consequence. Coleridge brought his family to Greta Hall,

near Keswick; and with them came Mrs. Lovell, one of the three Misses

Fricker, of whom Coleridge and Southey had married two. Southey was

invited to visit Greta Hall, the year after the Wordsworths settled at

Grasmere; and thus they became acquainted. They had just met before, in

the South; but they had yet to learn to know each other; and there was

sufficient unlikeness between them to render this a work of some time

and pains. It was not long before Southey, instead of Coleridge, was

the lessee of Greta Hall; and soon after Coleridge took his departure,

leaving his wife and children, and also the Lovells, a charge upon

Southey, who had no more fortune than Coleridge, except in the

inexhaustible wealth of a heart, a will, and a conscience. Wordsworth

married in 1802; and then the two poets passed through their share of

the experience of human life, a few miles apart, meeting occasionally on

some mountain ridge or hidden dale, and in one another's houses, drawn

closer by their common joys and sorrows, but never approximating in

the quality of their genius, or in the stand-points from which they

respectively looked out upon human affairs. They had children, loved

them, and each lost some of them; and they felt tenderly for each other

when each little grave was opened. Southey, the most amiable of men in

domestic life, gentle, generous, serene, and playful, grew absolutely

ferocious about politics, as his articles in the "Quarterly Review"

showed all the world. Wordsworth, who had some of the irritability and

pettishness, mildly described by himself as "gentle stirrings of the

mind," which occasionally render great men ludicrously like children,

and who was, moreover, highly conservative after his early democratic

fever had passed off, grew more and more liberal with advancing years.

I do not mean that he verged towards the Reformers,--but that he became

more enlarged, tolerant, and generally sympathetic in his political

views and temper. It thus happened that society at a distance took up

a wholly wrong impression of the two men,--supposing Southey to be an

ill-conditioned bigot, and Wordsworth a serene philosopher, far above

being disturbed by troubles in daily life, or paying any attention to

party-politics. He showed some of his ever-growing liberality, by the

way, in speaking of this matter of temper. In old age, he said that the

world certainly does get on in minor morals: that when he was young

"everybody had a temper"; whereas now no such thing is allowed;

amiability is the rule; and an imperfect temper is an offence and a

misfortune of a distinctive character.

Among the letters which now and then arrived from strangers, in the

early days of Wordsworth's fame, was one which might have come from

Coleridge, if they had never met. It was full of admiration and

sympathy, expressed as such feelings would be by a man whose analytical

and speculative faculties predominated over all the rest. The writer

was, indeed, in those days, marvellously like Coleridge,--subtile in

analysis to excess, of gorgeous imagination, bewitching discourse, fine

scholarship, with a magnificent power of promising and utter incapacity

in performing, and with the same habit of intemperance in opium. By

his own account, his "disease was to meditate too much and observe too

little." I need hardly explain that this was De Quincey; and when I have

said that, I need hardly explain further that advancing time and closer

acquaintance made the likeness to Coleridge bear a smaller and smaller

proportion to the whole character of the man.

In return for his letter of admiration and sympathy, he received an

invitation to the Grasmere valley. More than once he set forth to avail

himself of it; but when within a few miles, the shyness under which in

those days he suffered overpowered his purpose, and he turned back.

After having achieved the meeting, however, he soon announced his

intention of settling in the valley; and he did so, putting his wife

and children eventually into the cottage which the Wordsworths had now

outgrown and left. There was little in him to interest or attach a

family of regular domestic habits, like the Wordsworths, given to active

employment, sensible thrift, and neighborly sympathy. It was universally

known that a great poem of Wordsworth's was reserved for posthumous

publication, and kept under lock and key meantime. De Quincey had so

remarkable a memory that he carried off by means of it the finest

passage of the poem,--or that which the author considered so; and

he published that passage in a magazine article, in which he gave

a detailed account of the Wordsworths' household, connections, and

friends, with an analysis of their characters and an exhibition of their

faults. This was in 1838, a dozen years before the poet's death. The

point of interest is,--How did the wronged family endure the wrong? They

were quiet about it,--that is, sensible and dignified; but Wordsworth

was more. A friend of his and mine was talking with him over the fire,

just when De Quincey's disclosures were making the most noise, and

mentioned the subject. Wordsworth begged to be spared hearing anything

about them, saying that the man had long passed away from the family

life and mind, and he did not wish to disturb himself about what could

not be remedied. My friend acquiesced, saying, "Well, I will tell you

only one thing that he says, and then we will talk of something else. He

says your wife is too good for you." The old man's dim eyes lighted up

instantly, and he started from his seat, and flung himself against

the mantel-piece, with his back to the fire, as he cried with loud

enthusiasm, "And that's _true! There_ he is right!"

It was by his written disclosures only that De Quincey could do much

mischief; for it was scarcely possible to be prejudiced by anything he

could say. The whole man was grotesque; and it must have been a singular

image that his neighbors in the valley preserved in their memory. A

frail-looking, diminutive man, with narrow chest and round shoulders and

features like those of a dying patient, walking with his hands behind

him, his hat on the back of his head, and his broad lower lip projected,

as if he had something on his tongue that wanted listening to,--such was

his aspect; and if one joined company with him, the strangeness grew

from moment to moment. His voice and its modulations were a perfect

treat. As for what he had to say, it was everything from odd comment on

a passing trifle, eloquent enunciation of some truth, or pregnant

remark on some lofty subject, down to petty gossip, so delivered as to

authorize a doubt whether it might not possibly be an awkward effort

at observing something outside of himself, or at getting a grasp of

something that he supposed actual. That he should have so supposed was

his weakness, and the retribution for the peculiar intemperance which

depraved his nature and alienated from their proper use powers which

should have made him one of the first philosophers of his age. His

singular organization was fatally deranged in its action before it could

show its best quality, and his is one of the cases in which we cannot be

wrong in attributing moral disease directly to physical disturbance; and

it would no doubt have been dropped out of notice, if he had been able

to abstain from comment on the characters and lives of other people.

Justice to them compels us to accept and use the exposures he offers us

of himself.

About the time of De Quincey's settlement at Grasmere, Wilson, the

future CHRISTOPHER NORTH, bought the Elleray estate, on the banks of

Windermere. He was then just of age,--supreme in all manly sports,

physically a model man, and intellectually, brimming with philosophy and

poetry. He came hither a rather spoiled child of fortune, perhaps; but

he was soon sobered by a loss of property which sent him to his studies

for the bar. Scott was an excellent friend to him at that time; and so

strong and prophetic was Wilson's admiration of his patron, that he

publicly gave him the name of "The Great Magician" before the first

"Waverley Novel" was published. Within ten years from his getting a

foothold on Windermere banks, he had raised periodical literature to a

height unknown before in our time, by his contributions to "Blackwood's

Magazine"; and he seemed to step naturally into the Moral Philosophy

Chair in Edinburgh in 1820. Christopher North has perhaps conveyed to

foreign, and untravelled English, readers as true a conception of our

Lake scenery and its influences in one way as Wordsworth in another.

The very spirit of the moorland, lake, brook, tarn, ghyll, and ridge

breathes from his prose poetry: and well it might. He wandered alone for

a week together beside the trout-streams and among the highest tarns. He

spent whole days in his boat, coasting the bays of the lake, or floating

in the centre, or lying reading in the shade of the trees on the

islands. He led with a glorious pride the famous regatta on Windermere,

when Canning was the guest of the Boltons at Storrs, and when Scott,

Wordsworth, and Southey were of the company; and he liked almost as well

steering the packet-boat from Waterhead to Bowness, till the steamer

drove out the old-fashioned conveyance. He sat at the stern,

immovable, with his hand on the rudder, looking beyond the company of

journeymen-carpenters, fish- and butter-women, and tourists, with a

gaze on the water-and-sky-line which never shifted. Sometimes a learned

professor or a brother sportsman was with him; but he spoke no word, and

kept his mouth peremptorily shut under his beard. It was a sight worth

taking the voyage for; and it was worth going a long round to see him

standing on the shore,--"reminding one of the first man, Adam," (as was

said of him,) in his best estate,--the tall, broad frame, large head,

marked features, and long hair; and the tread which shook the ground,

and the voice which roused the echoes afar and made one's heart-strings

vibrate within. These attributes made strangers turn to look at him on

the road, and fixed all eyes on him in the ball-room at Ambleside, when

any local object induced him to be a steward. Every old boatman and

young angler, every hoary shepherd and primitive housewife in the

uplands and dales, had an enthusiasm for him. He could enter into the

solemnity of speculation with Wordsworth while floating at sunset on the

lake; and not the less gamesomely could he collect a set of good fellows

under the lamp at his supper-table, and take off Wordsworth's or

Coleridge's monologues to the life. There was that between them which

must always have precluded a close sympathy; and their faults were just

what each could least allow for in another. Of Wilson's it is enough to

say that Scott's injunction to him to "leave off sack, purge, and live

cleanly," if he wished for the Moral Philosophy Chair, was precisely

what was needed. It was still needed some time after, when, though a

Professor of Moral Philosophy, he was seen, with poor Campbell, leaving

a tavern one morning, in Edinburgh, haggard and red-eyed, hoarse and

exhausted,--not only the feeble Campbell, but the mighty Wilson,--they

having sat together twenty-four hours, discussing poetry and wine with

all their united energies. This sort of thing was not to the taste of

Wordsworth or Southey, any more than their special complacencies were

venerable to the humor of Christopher North. Yet they could cordially

admire one another; and when sorrows came over them, in dreary

impartiality, they could feel reverently and deeply for each other. When

Southey lost his idolized boy, Herbert, and had to watch over his insane

wife, always his dearest friend, and all the dearer for her helpless

and patient suffering under an impenetrable gloom,--when Wordsworth was

bereaved of the daughter who made the brightness of his life in his old

age,--and when Wilson was shaken to the centre by the loss of his wife,

and mourned alone in the damp shades of Elleray, where he would allow

not a twig to be cut from the trees she loved,--the sorrow of each moved

them all. Elleray was a gloomy place then, and Wilson never surmounted

the melancholy which beset him there; and he wisely parted with it

some years before his death. The later depression in his case was in

proportion to the earlier exhilaration. His love of Nature and of genial

human intercourse had been too exuberant; and he became incapable of

enjoyment from either, in his last years. He never recovered from an

attack of pressure on the brain, and died paralyzed in the spring of

1854. He had before gone from among us with his joy; and then we heard

that he had dropped out of life with his griefs; and our beautiful

region, and the region of life, were so much the darker in a thousand

eyes.

While speaking of Elleray, we should pay a passing tribute of gratitude

to an older worthy of that neighborhood,--the well-known Bishop of

Llandaff, Richard Watson, who did more for the beauty of Windermere than

any other person. There is nothing to praise in the damp old mansion

at Calgarth, set down in low ground, and actually with its back to the

lake, and its front windows commanding no view; but the woods are the

glory of Bishop Watson. He was not a happy prelate, believing himself

undervalued and neglected, and fretting his heart over his want of

promotion; but be must have had many a blessed hour while planting

those woods for which many generations will be grateful to him. Let

the traveller remember him, when looking abroad from Miller Brow, near

Bowness. Below lies the whole length of Windermere, from the white

houses of Clappersgate, nestling under Loughrigg at the head, to the

Beacon at the foot. The whole range of both shores, with their bays

and coves and promontories, can be traced; and the green islands are

clustered in the centre; and the whole gradation of edifices is seen,

from Wray Castle, on its rising ground, to the tiny boat-houses, each

on its creek. All these features are enhanced in beauty by the Calgarth

woods, which cover the undulations of hill and margin beneath and

around, rising and falling, spreading and contracting, with green

meadows interposed, down to the white pebbly strand. To my eye, this

view is unsurpassed by any in the District.

Bishop Watson's two daughters were living in the neighborhood till two

years ago,--antique spinsters, presenting us with a most vivid specimen

of the literary female life of the last century. They were excellent

women, differing from the rest of society chiefly in their notion that

superior people should show their superiority in all the acts of their

lives,--that literary people should talk literature, and scientific

people science, and so on; and they felt affronted, as if set down among

common people, when an author talked about common things in a common

way. They did their best to treat their friends to wit and polite

letters; and they expected to be ministered to in the same fashion. This

was rather embarrassing to visitors to whom it had never occurred to

talk for any other purpose than to say what presented itself at the

moment; but it is a privilege to have known those faithful sisters, and

to have seen in them a good specimen of the literary society of the last

century.

There is another spot in that neighborhood which strangers look up to

with interest from the lake itself,--Dovenest, the abode of Mrs. Hemans

for the short time of her residence at the Lakes. She saw it for the

first time from the lake, as her published correspondence tells, and

fell in love with it; and as it was vacant at the time, she went into it

at once. Many of my readers will remember her description of the garden

and the view from it, the terrace, the circular grass-plot with its one

tall white rose-tree. "You cannot imagine," she wrote, in 1830, "how I

delight in that fair, solitary, neglected-looking tree." The tree is not

neglected now. Dovenest is inhabited by Mrs. Hemans's then young friend,

the Rev. R.P. Graves; and it has recovered from the wildness and

desolation of thirty years ago, while looking as secluded as ever among

the woods on the side of Wansfell.

All this time, illustrious strangers were coming, year by year, to visit

residents, or to live among the mountains for a few weeks. There was

Wilberforce, spending part of a summer at Rayrigg, on the lake shore.

One of his boys asked him, "Why should you not buy a house here? and

then we could come every year." The reply was characteristic:--that it

would be very delightful; but that the world is lying, in a manner,

under the curse of God; that we have something else to do than to enjoy

fine prospects; and that, though it may be allowable to taste the

pleasure now and then, we ought to wait till the other life to enjoy

ourselves. Such was the strait-lacing in which the good man was forever

trying to compress his genial, buoyant, and grateful nature.--Scott came

again and again; and Wordsworth and Southey met to do him honor. The

tourist must remember the Swan Inn,--the white house beyond Grasmere,

under the skirts of Helvellyn. There Scott went daily for a glass of

something good, while Wordsworth's guest, and treated with the homely

fare of the Grasmere cottage. One morning, his host, himself, and

Southey went up to the Swan, to start thence with ponies for the ascent

of Helvellyn. The innkeeper saw them coming, and accosted Scott with

"Eh, Sir! ye're come early for your draught to-day!"--a disclosure which

was not likely to embarrass his host at all. Wordsworth was probably the

least-discomposed member of the party.--Charles Lamb and his sister once

popped in unannounced on Coleridge at Keswick, and spent three weeks in

the neighborhood. We can all fancy the little man on the top of Skiddaw,

with his mind full as usual of quips and pranks, and struggling with the

emotions of mountain-land, so new and strange to a Cockney, such as he

truly described himself. His loving readers do not forget his statement

of the comparative charms of Skiddaw and Fleet Street; and on the spot

we quote his exclamations about the peak, and the keen air there, and

the look over into Scotland, and down upon a sea of mountains which made

him giddy. We are glad he came and enjoyed a day, which, as he said,

would stand out like a mountain in his life; but we feel that he could

never have followed his friends hither,--Coleridge and Wordsworth,--and

have made himself at home. The warmth of a city and the hum of human

voices all day long were necessary to his spirits. As to his passage at

arms with Southey,--everybody's sympathies are with Lamb; and he

only vexes us by his humility and gratitude at being pardoned by the

aggressor, whom he had in fact humiliated in all eyes but his own. It

was one of Southey's spurts of insolent bigotry; and Lamb's plea for

tolerance and fair play was so sound as to make it a poor affectation in

Southey to assume a pardoning air; but, if Lamb's kindly and sensitive

nature could not sustain him in so virtuous an opposition, it is well

that the two men did not meet on the top of Skiddaw.--Canning's visit to

Storrs, on Windermere, was a great event in its day; and Lockhart tells

us, in his "Life of Scott," what the regatta was like, when Wilson

played Admiral, and the group of local poets, and Scott, were in the

train of the statesman. Since that day, it has been a common thing for

illustrious persons to appear in our valleys. Statesmen, churchmen,

university-men, princes, peers, bishops, authors, artists, flock hither;

and during the latter years of Wordsworth's life, the average number

of strangers who called at Rydal Mount in the course of the season was

eight hundred.

During the growth of the District from its wildness to this thronged

state, a minor light of the region was kindling, flickering, failing,

gleaming, and at last going out,--anxiously watched and tended, but to

little purpose. The life of Hartley Coleridge has been published by his

family; and there can, therefore, be no scruple in speaking of him here.

The remembrance of him haunts us all,--almost as his ghost haunts his

kind landlady. Long after his death, she used to "hear him at night

laughing in his room," as he used to do when he lived there. A peculiar

laugh it was, which broke out when fancies crossed him, whether he was

alone or in company. Travellers used to look after him on the road, and

guides and drivers were always willing to tell about him; and still

his old friends almost expect to see Hartley at any turn,--the little

figure, with the round face, marked by the blackest eyebrows and

eyelashes, and by a smile and expression of great eccentricity. As we

passed, he would make a full stop in the road, face about, take off his

black-and-white straw hat, and bow down to the ground. The first glance

in return was always to see whether he was sober. The Hutchinsons must

remember him. He was one of the audience, when they held their concert

under the sycamores in Mr. Harrison's grounds at Ambleside; and he

thereupon wrote a sonnet,[A] doubtless well known in America. When I

wanted his leave to publish that sonnet, in an account of "Frolics with

the Hutchinsons," it was necessary to hunt him up, from public-house

to public-house, early in the morning. It is because these things are

universally known,--because he was seen staggering in the road, and

spoken of by drivers and lax artisans as an alehouse comrade, that I

speak of him here, in order that I may testify how he was beloved and

cherished by the best people in his neighborhood. I can hardly speak

of him myself as a personal acquaintance; for I could not venture on

inviting him to my house. I saw what it was to others to be subject to

day-long visits from him, when he would ask for wine, and talk from

morning to night,--and a woman, solitary and busy, could not undertake

that sort of hospitality; but I saw how forbearing his friends were, and

why,--and I could sympathize in their regrets when he died. I met him

in company occasionally, and never saw him sober; but I have heard from

several common friends of the charm of his conversation, and the beauty

of his gentle and affectionate nature. He was brought into the District

when four years old; and it does not appear that he ever had a chance

allowed him of growing into a sane man. Wordsworth used to say that

Hartley's life's failure arose mainly from his having grown up "wild

as the breeze,"--delivered over, without help or guardianship, to the

vagaries of an imagination which overwhelmed all the rest of him. There

was a strong constitutional likeness to his father, evident enough to

all; but no pains seem to have been taken on any hand to guard him from

the snare, or to invigorate his will, and aid him in self-discipline.

The great catastrophe, the ruinous blow, which rendered him hopeless, is

told in the Memoir; but there are particulars which help to account for

it. Hartley had spent his school-days under a master as eccentric as he

himself ever became. The Rev. John Dawes of Ambleside was one of the

oddities that may be found in the remote places of modern England. He

had no idea of restraint, for himself or his pupils; and when they

arrived, punctually or not, for morning school, they sometimes found the

door shut, and chalked with "Gone a-hunting," or "Gone a-fishing," or

gone away somewhere or other. Then Hartley would sit down under the

bridge, or in the shadow of the wood, or lie on the grass on the

hill-side, and tell tales to his schoolfellows for hours. His mind was

developed by the conversation of his father and his father's friends;

and he himself had a great friendship with Professor Wilson, who always

stood by him with a pitying love. He had this kind of discursive

education, but no discipline; and when he went to college, he was at the

mercy of any who courted his affection, intoxicated his imagination, and

then led him into vice. His Memoir shows how he lost his fellowship at

Oriel College, Oxford, at the end of his probationary year. He had been

warned by the authorities against his sin of intemperance; and he bent

his whole soul to get through that probationary year. For eleven months,

and many days of the twelfth, he lived soberly and studied well. Then

the old tempters agreed in London to go down to Oxford and get hold of

Hartley. They went down on the top of the coach, got access to his room,

made him drunk, and carried him with them to London; and he was not to

be found when he should have passed. The story of his death is but too

like this.

[Footnote A:

SONNET

TO TENNYSON, AFTER HEARING ABBY HUTCHINSON SING "THE MAY-QUEEN" AT

AMBLESIDE.

I would, my friend, indeed, thou hadst been

here

Last night, beneath the shadowy sycamore,

To hear the lines, to me well known before,

Embalmed in music so translucent clear.

Each word of thine came singly to the ear,

Yet all was blended in a flowing stream.

It had the rich repose of summer dream,

The light distinct of frosty atmosphere.

Still have I loved thy verse, yet never knew

How sweet it was, till woman's voice invested

The pencilled outline with the living hue,

And every note of feeling proved and tested.

What might old Pindar be, if once again

The harp and voice were trembling with his

strain!

]