CONCORD, September 26, 1859.
MR. BLAKE,--I am not sure that I am in a fit mood to write to you, for
I feel and think rather too much like a business man, having some very
irksome affairs to attend to these months and years on account of my
family.[93] This is the way I am serving King Admetus, confound him!
If it were not for my relations, I would let the wolves prey on his
flocks to their bellies' content. Such fellows you have to deal with!
herdsmen of some other king, or of the same, who tell no tale, but in
the sense of counting their flocks, and then lie drunk under a hedge.
How is your grist ground? Not by some murmuring stream, while you lie
dreaming on the bank; but, it seems, you must take hold with your
hands, and shove the wheel round. You can't depend on streams, poor
feeble things! You can't depend on worlds, left to themselves; but
you've got to oil them and goad them along. In short, you've got to
carry on two farms at once,--the farm on the earth and the farm in
your mind. Those Crimean and Italian battles were mere boys'
play,--they are the scrapes into which truants get. But what a battle
a man must fight everywhere to maintain his standing army of thoughts,
and march with them in orderly array through the always hostile
country! How many enemies there are to sane thinking! Every soldier
has succumbed to them before he enlists for those other battles. Men
may sit in chambers, seemingly safe and sound, and yet despair, and
turn out at last only hollowness and dust within, like a Dead Sea
apple. A standing army of numerous, brave, and well-disciplined
thoughts, and you at the head of them, marching straight to your
goal,--how to bring this about is the problem, and Scott's Tactics
will not help you to it. Think of a poor fellow begirt only with a
sword-belt, and no such staff of athletic thoughts! his brains
rattling as he walks and _talks_! These are your prætorian guard. It
is easy enough to maintain a family, or a state, but it is hard to
maintain these children of your brain (or say, rather, these guests
that trust to enjoy your hospitality), they make such great demands;
and yet, he who does only the former, and loses the power to _think_
originally, or as only he ever can, fails miserably. Keep up the fires
of thought, and all will go well.
Zouaves?--pish! How you can overrun a country, climb any rampart, and
carry any fortress, with an army of _alert_ thoughts!--thoughts that
send their bullets home to heaven's door,--with which you can _take_
the whole world, without paying for it, or robbing anybody. See, the
conquering hero comes! You _fail_ in your thoughts, or you _prevail_
in your thoughts only. Provided you _think_ well, the heavens falling,
or the earth gaping, will be the music for you to march by. No foe can
ever see you, or you him; you cannot so much as _think_ of him. Swords
have no edges, bullets no penetration, for such a contest. In your
mind must be a liquor which will dissolve the world whenever it is
dropt in it. There is no universal solvent but this, and all things
together cannot saturate it. It will hold the universe in solution,
and yet be as translucent as ever. The vast machine may indeed roll
over our toes, and we not know it, but it would rebound and be staved
to pieces like an empty barrel, if it should strike fair and square on
the smallest and least angular of a man's thoughts.
You seem not to have taken Cape Cod the right way. I think that you
should have persevered in walking on the beach and on the bank, even
to the land's end, however soft, and so, by long knocking at Ocean's
gate, have gained admittance at last,--better, if separately, and in a
storm, not knowing where you would sleep by night, or eat by day. Then
you should have given a day to the sand behind Provincetown, and
ascended the hills there, and been blown on considerably. I hope that
you like to remember the journey better than you did to make it.
I have been confined at home all this year, but I am not aware that I
have grown any rustier than was to be expected. One while I explored
the bottom of the river pretty extensively. I have engaged to read a
lecture to Parker's society on the 9th of October next.