All night in the body's earthen chest,
Will of thine arms a pillow make,
And a bolster of thy breast."
Ferideddin Attar wrote the "Bird Conversations," a mystical tale, in
which the birds, coming together to choose their king, resolve on a
pilgrimage to Mount Kaf, to pay their homage to the Simorg. From this
poem, written five hundred years ago, we cite the following passage, as
a proof of the identity of mysticism in all periods. The tone is quite
modern. In the fable, the birds were soon weary of the length and
difficulties of the way, and at last almost all gave out. Three only
persevered, and arrived before the throne of the Simorg.
"The bird-soul was ashamed;
Their body was quite annihilated;
They had cleaned themselves from the dust,
And were by the light ensouled.
What was, and was not,--the Past,--
Was wiped out from their breast.
The sun from near-by beamed
Clearest light into their soul;
The resplendence of the Simorg beamed
As one back from all three.
They knew not, amazed, if they
Were either this or that.
They saw themselves all as Simorg,
Themselves in the eternal Simorg.
When to the Simorg up they looked,
They beheld him among themselves;
And when they looked on each other,
They saw themselves in the Simorg.
A single look grouped the two parties,
The Simorg emerged, the Simorg vanished,
This in that, and that in this,
As the world has never heard.
So remained they, sunk in wonder,
Thoughtless in deepest thinking,
And quite unconscious of themselves.
Speechless prayed they to the Highest
To open this secret,
And to unlock _Thou_ and _We_.
There came an answer without tongue.--
'The Highest is a sun-mirror;
Who comes to Him sees himself therein,
Sees body and soul, and soul and body;
When you came to the Simorg,
Three therein appeared to you,
And, had fifty of you come,
So had you seen yourselves as many.
Him has none of us yet seen.
Ants see not the Pleiades.
Can the gnat grasp with his teeth
The body of the elephant?
What you see is He not;
What you hear is He not.
The valleys which you traverse,
The actions which you perform,
They lie under our treatment
And among our properties.
You as three birds are amazed,
Impatient, heartless, confused:
Far over you am I raised,
Since I am in act Simorg.
Ye blot out my highest being,
That ye may find yourselves on my throne;
Forever ye blot out yourselves,
As shadows in the sun. Farewell!'"
INSPIRATION.
INSPIRATION.
IT was Watt who told King George III. that he dealt in an article of
which kings were said to be fond,--Power. 'Tis certain that the one
thing we wish to know is, where power is to be bought. But we want a
finer kind than that of commerce; and every reasonable man would give
any price of house and land, and future provision, for condensation,
concentration, and the recalling at will of high mental energy. Our
money is only a second best. We would jump to buy power with it, that
is, intellectual perception moving the will. That is first best. But we
don't know where the shop is. If Watt knew, he forgot to tell us the
number of the street. There are times when the intellect is so active
that everything seems to run to meet it. Its supplies are found without
much thought as to studies. Knowledge runs to the man, and the man runs
to knowledge. In spring, when the snow melts, the maple-trees flow with
sugar, and you cannot get tubs fast enough; but it is only for a few
days. The hunter on the prairie, at the right season, has no need of
choosing his ground; east, west, by the river, by the timber, he is
everywhere near his game. But the favorable conditions are rather the
exception than the rule.
The aboriginal man in geology, and in the dim lights of Darwin's
microscope, is not an engaging figure. We are very glad that he ate his
fishes and snails and marrow-bones out of our sight and hearing, and
that his doleful experiences were got through with so very long ago.
They combed his mane, they pared his nails, cut off his tail, set him on
end, sent him to school, and made him pay taxes, before he could begin
to write his sad story for the compassion or the repudiation of his
descendants, who are all but unanimous to disown him. We must take him
as we find him,--pretty well on in his education, and, in all _our_
knowledge of him, an interesting creature, with a will, an invention, an
imagination, a conscience, and an inextinguishable hope.
The Hunterian law of _arrested development_ is not confined to vegetable
and animal structure, but reaches the human intellect also. In the
savage man, thought is infantile; and in the civilized, unequal, and
ranging up and down a long scale. In the best races it is rare and
imperfect. In happy moments it is reinforced, and carries out what were
rude suggestions to larger scope, and to clear and grand conclusions.
The poet cannot see a natural phenomenon which does not express to him a
correspondent fact in his mental experience; he is made aware of a power
to carry on and complete the metamorphosis of natural into spiritual
facts. Everything which we hear for the first time was expected by the
mind; the newest discovery was expected. In the mind we call this
enlarged power Inspiration. I believe that nothing great and lasting can
be done except by inspiration, by leaning on the secret augury. The
man's insight and power are interrupted and occasional; he can see and
do this or that cheap task at will, but it steads him not beyond. He is
fain to make the ulterior step by mechanical means. It cannot so be
done. That ulterior step is to be also by inspiration; if not through
him, then by another man. Every real step is by what a poet called
"lyrical glances," by lyrical facility, and never by main strength and
ignorance. Years of mechanic toil will only seem to do it; it will not
so be done.
Inspiration is like yeast. 'Tis no matter in which of half a dozen ways
you procure the infection; you can apply one or the other equally well
to your purpose, and get your loaf of bread. And every earnest workman,
in whatever kind, knows some favorable conditions for his task. When I
wish to write on any topic, 'tis of no consequence what kind of book or
man gives me a hint or a motion, nor how far off that is from my topic.
Power is the first good. Rarey can tame a wild horse; but if he could
give speed to a dull horse, were not that better? The toper finds,
without asking, the road to the tavern, but the poet does not know the
pitcher that holds his nectar. Every youth should know the way to
prophecy as surely as the miller understands how to let on the water or
the engineer the steam. A rush of thoughts is the only conceivable
prosperity that can come to us. Fine clothes, equipages, villa, park,
social consideration, cannot cover up real poverty and insignificance
from my own eyes, or from others like mine.
Thoughts let us into realities. Neither miracle, nor magic, nor any
religious tradition, not the immortality of the private soul, is
incredible, after we have experienced an insight, a thought. I think it
comes to some men but once in their life, sometimes a religious impulse,
sometimes an intellectual insight. But what we want is consecutiveness.
'Tis with us a flash of light, then a long darkness, then a flash again.
The separation of our days by sleep almost destroys identity. Could we
but turn these fugitive sparkles into an astronomy of Copernican worlds!
With most men, scarce a link of memory holds yesterday and to-day
together. Their house and trade and families serve them as ropes to give
a coarse continuity. But they have forgotten the thoughts of yesterday;
they say to-day what occurs to them, and something else to-morrow. This
insecurity of possession, this quick ebb of power,--as if life were a
thunder-storm wherein you can see by a flash the horizon, and then
cannot see your hand,--tantalizes us. We cannot make the inspiration
consecutive. A glimpse, a point of view that by its brightness excludes
the purview, is granted, but no panorama. A fuller inspiration should
cause the point to flow and become a line, should bend the line and
complete the circle. To-day the electric machine will not work, no spark
will pass; then presently the world is all a cat's back, all sparkle and
shock. Sometimes there is no sea-fire, and again the sea is aglow to the
horizon. Sometimes the Æolian harp is dumb all day in the window, and
again it is garrulous, and tells all the secrets of the world. In June
the morning is noisy with birds; in August they are already getting old
and silent.
Hence arises the question, Are these moods in any degree within control?
If we knew how to command them! But where is the Franklin with kite or
rod for this fluid?--a Franklin who can draw off electricity from Jove
himself, and convey it into the arts of life, inspire men, take them off
their feet, withdraw them from the life of trifles and gain and comfort,
and make the world transparent, so that they can read the symbols of
nature? What metaphysician has undertaken to enumerate the tonics of the
torpid mind, the rules for the recovery of inspiration? That is least
within control which is best in them. Of the _modus_ of inspiration we
have no knowledge. But in the experience of meditative men there is a
certain agreement as to the conditions of reception. Plato, in his
seventh Epistle, notes that the perception is only accomplished by long
familiarity with the objects of intellect, and a life according to the
things themselves. "Then a light, as if leaping from a fire, will on a
sudden be enkindled in the soul, and will then itself nourish itself."
He said again, "The man who is his own master knocks in vain at the
doors of poetry." The artists must be sacrificed to their art. Like the
bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give. What is a man
good for without enthusiasm? and what is enthusiasm but this daring of
ruin for its object? There are thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls;
we are not the less drawn to them. The moth flies into the flame of the
lamp; and Swedenborg must solve the problems that haunt him, though he
be crazed or killed.
There is genius as well in virtue as in intellect. 'Tis the doctrine of
faith over works. The raptures of goodness are as old as history and new
with this morning's sun. The legends of Arabia, Persia, and India are of
the same complexion as the Christian. Socrates, Menu, Confucius,
Zertusht,--we recognize in all of them this ardor to solve the hints of
thought.
I hold that ecstasy will be found normal, or only an example on a higher
plane of the same gentle gravitation by which stones fall and rivers
run. Experience identifies. Shakspeare seems to you miraculous; but the
wonderful juxtapositions, parallelisms, transfers, which his genius
effected were all to him locked together as links of a chain, and the
mode precisely as conceivable and familiar to higher intelligence as the
index-making of the literary hack. The result of the hack is
inconceivable to the type-setter who waits for it.
We must prize our own youth. Later, we want heat to execute our plans:
the good-will, the knowledge, the whole armory of means, are all
present; but a certain heat that once used not to fail refuses its
office, and all is vain until this capricious fuel is supplied. It seems
a semi-animal heat; as if tea, or wine, or sea-air, or mountains, or a
genial companion, or a new thought suggested in book or conversation,
could fire the train, wake the fancy, and the clear perception.
Pit-coal,--where to find it? 'Tis of no use that your engine is made
like a watch,--that you are a good workman, and know how to drive it, if
there is no coal. We are waiting until some tyrannous idea emerging out
of heaven shall seize and bereave us of this liberty with which we are
falling abroad. Well, we have the same hint or suggestion, day by day.
"I am not," says the man, "at the top of my condition to-day, but the
favorable hour will come when I can command all my powers, and when that
will be easy to do which is at this moment impossible." See how the
passions augment our force,--anger, love, ambition! sometimes sympathy,
and the expectation of men. Garrick said, that on the stage his great
paroxysms surprised himself as much as his audience. If this is true on
this low plane, it is true on the higher. Swedenborg's genius was the
perception of the doctrine "that the Lord flows into the spirits of
angels and of men"; and all poets have signalized their consciousness of
rare moments when they were superior to themselves,--when a light, a
freedom, a power came to them, which lifted them to performances far
better than they could reach at other times; so that a religious poet
once told me that "he valued his poems, not because they were his, but
because they were not." He thought the angels brought them to him.
Jacob Behmen said: "Art has not wrote here, nor was there any time to
consider how to set it punctually down according to the right
understanding of the letters, but all was ordered according to the
direction of the spirit, which often went on haste,--so that the
penman's hand, by reason he was not accustomed to it, did often shake.
And, though I could have written in a more accurate, fair, and plain
manner, the burning fire often forced forward with speed, and the hand
and pen must hasten directly after it, for it comes and goes as a sudden
shower. In one quarter of an hour I saw and knew more, than if I had
been many years together at an university."
The depth of the notes which we accidentally sound on the strings of
nature is out of all proportion to our taught and ascertained faculty,
and might teach us what strangers and novices we are, vagabond in this
universe of pure power, to which we have only the smallest key. Herrick
said:--
"'Tis not every day that I
Fitted am to prophesy;
No, but when the spirit fills
The fantastic panicles,
Full of fire, then I write
As the Goddess doth indite.
Thus, enraged, my lines are hurled,
Like the Sibyl's, through the world:
Look how next the holy fire
Either slakes, or doth retire;
So the fancy cools,--till when
That brave spirit comes again."
Bonaparte said: "There is no man more pusillanimous than I, when I make
a military plan. I magnify all the dangers, and all the possible
mischances. I am in an agitation utterly painful. That does not prevent
me from appearing quite serene to the persons who surround me. I am like
a woman with child, and when my resolution is taken, all is forgot,
except whatever can make it succeed."
There are, to be sure, certain risks in this presentiment of the
decisive perception, as in the use of ether or alcohol.
"Great wits to madness nearly are allied;
Both serve to make our poverty our pride."
Aristotle said: "No great genius was ever without some mixture of
madness, nor can anything grand or superior to the voice of common
mortals be spoken except by the agitated soul." We might say of these
memorable moments of life, that we were in them, not they in us. We
found ourselves by happy fortune in an illuminated portion or meteorous
zone, and passed out of it again, so aloof was it from any will of ours.
"'Tis a principle of war," said Napoleon, "that when you can use the
lightning, 'tis better than cannon."
How many sources of inspiration can we count? As many as our affinities.
But to a practical purpose we may reckon a few of these.
1. Health is the first muse, comprising the magical benefits of air,
landscape, and bodily exercise on the mind. The Arabs say that "Allah
does not count from life the days spent in the chase," that is, those
are thrown in. Plato thought "exercise would almost cure a guilty
conscience." Sydney Smith said: "You will never break down in a speech
on the day when you have walked twelve miles."
I honor health as the first muse, and sleep as the condition of health.
Sleep benefits mainly by the sound health it produces; incidentally also
by dreams, into whose farrago a divine lesson is sometimes slipped. Life
is in short cycles or periods; we are quickly tired, but we have rapid
rallies. A man is spent by his work, starved, prostrate; he will not
lift his hand to save his life; he can never think more. He sinks into
deep sleep and wakes with renewed youth, with hope, courage, fertile in
resources, and keen for daring adventure.
"Sleep is like death, and after sleep
The world seems new begun;
White thoughts stand luminous and firm,
Like statues in the sun;
Refreshed from supersensuous founts,
The soul to clearer vision mounts."[5]
A man must be able to escape from his cares and fears, as well as from
hunger and want of sleep; so that another Arabian proverb has its coarse
truth: "When the belly is full, it says to the head, Sing, fellow!" The
perfection of writing is when mind and body are both in key; when the
mind finds perfect obedience in the body. And wine, no doubt, and all
fine food, as of delicate fruits, furnish some elemental wisdom. And the
fire, too, as it burns in the chimney; for I fancy that my logs, which
have grown so long in sun and wind by Walden, are a kind of muses. So of
all the particulars of health and exercise, and fit nutriment, and
tonics. Some people will tell you there is a great deal of poetry and
fine sentiment in a chest of tea.
2. The experience of writing letters is one of the keys to the _modus_
of inspiration. When we have ceased for a long time to have any fulness
of thoughts that once made a diary a joy as well as a necessity, and
have come to believe that an image or a happy turn of expression is no
longer at our command, in writing a letter to a friend we may find that
we rise to thought and to a cordial power of expression that costs no
effort, and it seems to us that this facility may be indefinitely
applied and resumed. The wealth of the mind in this respect of seeing is
like that of a looking-glass, which is never tired or worn by any
multitude of objects which it reflects. You may carry it all round the
world, it is ready and perfect as ever for new millions.
3. Another consideration, though it will not so much interest young men,
will cheer the heart of older scholars, namely, that there is diurnal
and secular rest. As there is this daily renovation of sensibility, so
it sometimes, if rarely, happens that after a season of decay or
eclipse, darkening months or years, the faculties revive to their
fullest force. One of the best facts I know in metaphysical science is
Niebuhr's joyful record that, after his genius for interpreting history
had failed him for several years, this divination returned to him. As
this rejoiced me, so does Herbert's poem "The Flower." His health had
broken down early, he had lost his muse, and in this poem he says:--
"And now in age I bud again,
After so many deaths I live and write;
I once more smell the dew and rain,
And relish versing: O my only light,
It cannot be
That I am he
On whom thy tempests fell all night."
His poem called "The Forerunners" also has supreme interest. I
understand "The Harbingers" to refer to the signs of age and decay which
he detects in himself, not only in his constitution, but in his fancy
and his facility and grace in writing verse; and he signalizes his
delight in this skill, and his pain that the Herricks, Lovelaces, and
Marlows, or whoever else, should use the like genius in language to
sensual purpose, and consoles himself that his own faith and the divine
life in him remain to him unchanged, unharmed.
4. The power of the will is sometimes sublime; and what is will for, if
it cannot help us in emergencies? Seneca says of an almost fatal
sickness that befell him, "The thought of my father, who could not have
sustained such a blow as my death, restrained me; I commanded myself to
live." Goethe said to Eckermann, "I work more easily when the barometer
is high than when it is low. Since I know this, I endeavor, when the
barometer is low, to counteract the injurious effect by greater
exertion, and my attempt is successful."
"To the persevering mortal the blessed immortals are swift." Yes, for
they know how to give you in one moment the solution of the riddle you
have pondered for months. "Had I not lived with Mirabeau," says Dumont,
"I never should have known all that can be done in one day, or, rather,
in an interval of twelve hours. A day to him was of more value than a
week or a month to others. To-morrow to him was not the same impostor as
to most others."
5. Plutarch affirms that "souls are naturally endowed with the faculty
of prediction, and the chief cause that excites this faculty and virtue
is a certain temperature of air and winds." My anchorite thought it "sad
that atmospheric influences should bring to our dust the communion of
the soul with the Infinite." But I am glad that the atmosphere should be
an excitant, glad to find the dull rock itself to be deluged with
Deity,--to be theist, Christian, poetic. The fine influences of the
morning few can explain, but all will admit. Goethe acknowledges them in
the poem in which he dislodges the nightingale from her place as Leader
of the Muses.
MUSAGETES.
"Often in deep midnights
I called on the sweet muses.
No dawn shines,
And no day will appear:
But at the right hour
The lamp brings me pious light,
That it, instead of Aurora or Phœbus,
May enliven my quiet industry.
But they left me lying in sleep
Dull, and not to be enlivened,
And after every late morning
Followed unprofitable days.
"When now the Spring stirred,
I said to the nightingales:
'Dear nightingales, trill
Early, O, early before my lattice,
Wake me out of the deep sleep
Which mightily chains the young man.'
But the love-filled singers
Poured by night before my window
Their sweet melodies,--
Kept awake my dear soul,
Roused tender new longings
In my lately touched bosom,
And so the night passed,
And Aurora found me sleeping;
Yea, hardly did the sun wake me.
At last it has become summer,
And at the first glimpse of morning
The busy early fly stings me
Out of my sweet slumber.
Unmerciful she returns again:
When often the half-awake victim
Impatiently drives her off,
She calls hither the unscrupulous sisters.
And from my eyelids
Sweet sleep must depart.
Vigorous, I spring from my couch,
Seek the beloved Muses,
Find them in the beech grove,
Pleased to receive me;
And I thank the annoying insect
For many a golden hour.
Stand, then, for me, ye tormenting creatures,
Highly praised by the poet
As the true Musagetes."
The French have a proverb to the effect that not the day only, but all
things have their morning,--"_Il n'y a que le matin en toutes choses_."
And it is a primal rule to defend your morning, to keep all its dews on,
and with fine foresight to relieve it from any jangle of affairs, even
from the question, Which task? I remember a capital prudence of old
President Quincy, who told me that he never went to bed at night until
he had laid out the studies for the next morning. I believe that in our
good days a well-ordered mind has a new thought awaiting it every
morning. And hence, eminently thoughtful men, from the time of
Pythagoras down, have insisted on an hour of solitude every day to meet
their own mind, and learn what oracle it has to impart. If a new view of
life or mind gives us joy, so does new arrangement. I don't know but we
take as much delight in finding the right place for an old observation,
as in a new thought.
6. Solitary converse with nature; for thence are ejaculated sweet and
dreadful words never uttered in libraries. Ah! the spring days, the
summer dawns, the October woods! I confide that my reader knows these
delicious secrets, has perhaps
"Slighted Minerva's learned tongue,
But leaped with joy when on the wind the shell of Clio rung."