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Title: Tablets

Author: Amos Bronson Alcott

Release date: July 23, 2011 [eBook #36825]

Language: English

Credits: E-text prepared by David Edwards, Carol Ann Brown, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org)

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E-text prepared by David Edwards, Carol Ann Brown,
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from page images generously made available by
Internet Archive
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TABLETS

BY

A. BRONSON ALCOTT

"For curious method expect none, essays for the most part not being placed as at a feast, but placing themselves as at an ordinary."

Thomas Fuller.

BOSTON
ROBERTS BROTHERS
1868.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1868, by
A. Bronson Alcott,
In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.

  Electrotyped and Printed by
Alfred Mudge & Son,
  No. 34 School St., Boston.

CONTENTS.

BOOK I.—PRACTICAL.

I. THE GARDEN.
page.

1 Antiquity
5

2 Ornaments
11

3 Pleasures
14

4 Orchard
20

5 Sweet Herbs
25

6 Table Plants
28

7 Rations
36

8 Economies
41

9 Rural Culture
48

II. RECREATION.

1 The Fountains
59

2 The Cheap Physician
65

III. FELLOWSHIP.

1 Hospitality
69

2 Conversation
75

IV. FRIENDSHIP.

1 Persons
81

2 Woman
88

3 Family
92

4 Children
95

V. CULTURE.

1 Modern Teaching
103

2 Socratic Dialectic
108

3 Pythagorean Discipline
113

4 Mother Tongue
118

VI. BOOKS.
127

VII. COUNSELS.

1 Religious
139

2 Personal
145

3 Political
148

4 Soul's Errand
151

BOOK II.—SPECULATIVE.

I. INSTRUMENTALITIES.

1 Tendencies
159

2 Method
162

3 Man
166

II. MIND.

1 Ideas
173

2 The Gifts
179

3 Person
181

4 Choice
184

III. GENESIS.

1 Vestiges
189

2 Serpent Symbol
191

3 Embryons
193

4 Temperament
195

IV. METAMORPHOSES.

1 Sleep
201

2 Reminiscence
203

3 Immortality
205

TABLETS

BOOK I

PRACTICAL

"Philosophy, the formatrix of judgment and manners, has the privilege of having a hand in everything."—Montaigne.

I.

THE GARDEN.

"If Eden be on earth at all, 'Tis that which we the country call."

Henry Vaughan.

Illustration: Banner of bird

THE GARDEN

i.—antiquity.

"I never had any desire so strong and so like to covetousness," says Cowley, "as that one which I have had always that I might be master at last of a small house and ample garden, with very moderate conveniences joined to them, and there to dedicate the remainder of my life to the culture of them and the study of nature. Virgil's first wish was to be a wise man, the second to be a good husbandman. But since nature denies to most men the capacity or appetite, and fortune allows but to very few the opportunities or possibility of applying themselves wholly to wisdom, the best mixture of human affairs we can make, are the employments of a country life. It is, as Columella calls it, the nearest neighbor or next in kindred to philosophy. And Varro says the principles of it are the same which Ennius made to be the principles of all nature; earth, water, air, and the sun. There is no other sort of life that affords so many branches of praise to a panegyrist; the utility of it to a man's self, the usefulness or rather necessity of it to all the rest of mankind, the innocence, the pleasure, the antiquity, the dignity."

This wish of the poet's appears to be nearly universal. Almost every one is drawn to the country, and takes pleasure in rural pursuits. The citizen hopes to become a countryman, and contrives to secure his cottage or villa, unless he fail by some reverse of fortune or of character. 'Tis man's natural position, the Paradise designed for him, and wherein he is placed originally in the Sacred Books of the cultivated peoples; their first man being conceived a gardener and countryman by inspiration as by choice.

Gardens and orchards plant themselves by sympathy about our dwellings, as if their seeds were preserved in us by inheritance. They distinguish Man properly from the forester and hunter. The country, as discriminated from the woods, is of man's creation. The savage has no country. Nor are farms and shops, trade, cities, but civilization in passing and formation. Civilization begins with persons, ideas; the garden and orchard showing the place of their occupants in the scale; these dotting the earth with symbols of civility wherever they ornament its face. Thus by mingling his mind with nature, and so transforming the landscape into his essence, Man generates the homestead, and opens a country to civilization and the arts.

In like manner, are the woods meliorated and made ours. Melancholy and morose, standing in their loneliness, we trim them into keeping with our wishes and so adopt them into our good graces, as ornaments of our estates, heraldries of our gentility.

Our human history neither opens in forests nor in cities, but in gardens and orchards whose mythologies are woven into the faith of our race; the poets having made these their chosen themes from the beginning. And we turn, as with emotions of country and consanguinity to the classic pictures of the Paradise, "planted by the Lord God eastward in Eden, and wherein he put the man, whom he had formed to dress and keep it;" where,

"Out of the fertile ground he caused to grow All trees of noblest kind for sight, smell, taste; Groves whose rich trees wept odorous gums and balms, Others whose fruit, burnished with golden rind, Hung amiable,— Flowers of all hue, and without thorn the rose;"—

to this; or, of scarce inferior fame, to the gardens of the Hesperides with their golden apples;—or, to those other

"——gardens feigned Or of revived Adonis, or renowned Alcinous,"

whereof Homer sings:

"Without the hall and close upon the gate A goodly orchard ground was situate Of near ten acres, about which was led A lofty quickset. In it flourished High and broad fruit trees that pomegranates bore; Sweet figs, pears, olives, and a number more Most useful plants did there produce their store, Whose fruits the hardest winter could not kill, Nor hottest summers wither. There was still Fruit in his proper season; all the year Sweet zephyr breathed upon them blasts that were Of varied tempers: these, he made to bear Ripe fruits; these blossoms; pear grew after pear, Apple succeeded apple, grape the grape, Fig after fig; Time made never rape Of any dainty there. A sprightly vine Spread here her roots, whose fruit a hot sunshine Made ripe betimes; there grew another green, Here some were gathering; here some pressing seen; A large allotted several each fruit had, And all th' adorn'd grounds their appearance made In flower and fruit."

Or again to those preferred by the royal guest of Solomon above all other splendors of his court,

"Though she on silver floors did tread, With bright Assyrian carpets on them spread, To hide the metal's poverty; Though she looked up to roofs of gold, And naught around her could behold But silk and rich embroidery, And Babylonian tapestry, And wealthy Hiram's princely dye; Tho' Ophir's starry stones met everywhere her eye, Though she herself and her gay host were drest With all the shining glories of the East,— When lavish art her costly work had done, The honor and the prize of bravery Was by the garden from the palace won; And every rose and lily there did stand Better attired by nature's hand; The case thus judged against the king you see, By one that would not be so rich, though wiser far than he."

So the orchard of Academus suggests the ripest wisdom and most elegant learning of accomplished Greece.

Thus we associate gardens and orchards with the perfect condition of mankind. Gardeners ourselves by birthright, we also mythologize and plant our Edens in the East of us, like our ancestors; the sacredness of earth and heaven still clinging to the tiller of the ground. Him we esteem the pattern man, the most favored of any. His labors have a charming innocency. They yield the gains of a self-respect denied to other callings. His is an occupation friendly to every virtue; the freest of any from covetousness and debasing cares. It is full of honest profits, manly labors, and brings and administers all necessaries; gives the largest leisure for study and recreation, while it answers most tenderly the hospitalities of friendship and the claims of home. The delight of children, the pastime of woman, the privilege of the poor man, as it is the ornament of the gentleman, the praise of the scholar, the security of the citizen, it places man in his truest relations to the world in which he lives. And he who is insensible to these pleasures, must lack some chord in the harp of humanity, worshipping, if he worship, at some strange shrine.

Who loves a garden still his Eden keeps; Perennial pleasures plants, and wholesome harvests reaps.

ii.—ornaments.

In laying out a garden there must be protection from the north winds, and if the hills are wooded thus much is gained for profit as for ornament. Every homestead supposes a wood-lot and forest paths for walking and meditation. So the garden claims some shading down from pasture fields and the wilder scenery skirting it. The orchard is an improvement on the garden, and holds a nobler relation to the house and its occupants. Without suitable ornaments and enclosures, these must be set to the side of the farm solely, not to the house, humanity, nor art. Eyes and feet have their claims along with the hands upon the landscape, beauty and convenience having one mind concerning the best ways of dealing with it. It is clear that art has an interest, and should have its hand, in a good well, wholesome cellar, as in the fertility of the soil, the modesty of the grasses and shrubbery. Alleys are best determined by the nature of the grounds. They have a picturesque effect; so have gates, especially when they open into a wood, or are seen in perspective at the end of an avenue or a lane. Winding paths give pleasing surprises, if accommodated to the grounds, take us by the most attractive route; slopes, swells, irregularities of surface, heightening the pleasure attending the prospect. There are spots, too, that plead for their clump of trees, for a single one, for an alcove, an arbor, a conservatory, for a fence,—structure of some sort, be it ever so plain—and these once there, please the eye as if grown there.

Arbors are especially ornamental. No country residence is furnished without the embellishment of a summer-house. It may be constructed of the simplest stuff grown near at hand in the woods. For one shall not range far in that direction without falling soon upon every curve in the geometry of beauty, as if nature designing to surprise him anticipated his coming, and had grown his materials in the underwood along the lines especially of ancient fence rows, where young pines bent by the lopping of the axe, snow falls, or other accident, in seeking to recover their rectitude, describe every graceful form of curve or spiral suited to his rustic works. These may be combined in ways wonderfully varied; and the pleasure attending the working them into a shapely whole, has charms akin to the composing of poems and pictures. There is a delight, too, in surprising these stags of the woods in their coverts, of which only artists can speak.

Neath hemlocks dark and whispering pines, Wandering he loiters curiously, The forest Muse her searching sense combines To range the shades their cunning curves to see— Brackets grotesque, strange gnarled things, Wreathed rails and balusters in twisted pairs, Rhyming their rival coils for sportful stairs; Scrolls, antlers, volutes—full-armed he brings His fagot sheaf of spoils, and binds; While frolic fancy sylvan serpents finds, And Druid lyres for poet's pleasance strings.

Then for rainy days, one has the choice of books, pen, or handicraft, to vary his pleasures. There is a charm in using tools to him who has cunning in his hands for converting woods to ornamental uses,—the simplest, roughest sticks even,—in setting trellises, hurdles, espaliers for vines,

"——auxiliary poles for hops, Ascending spiral, ranged in meet array;"

in making or mending articles and implements of any kind, for house or grounds, to be objects of interest whenever he views them afterwards.

The eyes have a property in things and territories not named in any title deeds, and are the owners of our choicest possessions. Nor do we dwell in this emblematic world, and call it ours, any part of it, without using them: that is ours which they have assisted the hands in creating. Nature sketches rudely the outlines of her plans on the landscape; 'tis the artist's privilege to fill out and finish these draughts, improving upon her suggestions. Nor is there a spot which does not kindly take ornament, as if its canvas were spread awaiting the finishing touches. And had he a thousand hands, uninterrupted leisure, the taste and genius, what pleasure were comparable to that of devoting them to drawing lines thereon which shall survive him, to enrich every eye beholding them, though it were only in passing! So a good man impresses his image on the landscape he improves, and imparts qualities that perpetuate its occupant to after times.

iii.—pleasures.

"Days may conclude with nights, and suns may rest As dead within the west, Yet the next morn regilds the fragrant east."

I know not how it is with others, to me the spring's invitations are irresistible. I may be scholarly inclined, and my tasks indoors delightful, yet my garden claims me, monopolizing all my morning hours; and I know for me has come the season's summons which I shall not set aside: no, not for studies nor hospitalities which become rivals for my time and attentions. My garden waits; is the civiller host, the better entertainer. Then I have a religion in this business, and duties must waive compliments. My tasks are not postponable during the summer days; if called away from these engagements, I shall first take counsel of my plants for leave of absence, with intent of hastening back. Importunities were impertinent while the spell is on me. Would the sun but shine all night long for my work to continue! Sure of gathering the better crop, I bend to my task, foreseeing the avails of leisure coming in at the close of my autumn rounds.

"Me, let my poverty to ease resign When my bright hearth reflects its blazing cheer, In season let me plant the pliant vine, And, with light hand, my swelling apples rear."

Such toils are wholesome. One cannot afford to dispense with their income of vigor. Then they fill the days with varied business, the mind gliding from head to hands, from hands to head, in pleasing interludes, to pour for him so deep a draught of Lethe, and so refreshing, that the morning breaks only to release the sleeper to begin anew his labors with the old enthusiasm. Even the stiffness of his fatigues promotes rectitude and probity of carriage: his hearty affection for his pursuit, shedding lustre on all he takes in hand. His garden is ever charming, always opportune. He walks there at all hours, at sunrise, noon, nightfall, finding more than he sought in it, each successive visit being as new as the first.

"All living things," says the Bhagavad Gita, "are generated from the bread they eat; bread is generated from rain, rain from divine worship, and divine worship from good works." A creed dealing thus supersensibly with the elements must have fertilizing properties, and bring the gardener to his task little tinctured by noxious notions of any kind. If he fall short of being the reverent naturalist, the devout divine, surrounded thus by shapes of skill, types of beauty, tokens of design, every hue in the chromatic, every device in the symbolic gamut, I see not what shall make him these; nor why Newton, Goethe, Boëhme, should have published their discoveries for his benefit; why it should occur to him to use his eyes at all when he looks through this glass, regards these signatures, views these blooms, these clasping tendrils, laughing leaves, Tyrian draperies, the sympathies of his plants and trees with the weather, their sleep, their thirst for the mists, and worship of the East; as if

Moistures their mothers were, Their fathers flames,

and earth were virtually "wife of heaven," as Homer says.

His is no mere cloud tillage, nor unproductive earth culture. The firmament overhead reflects its lustre in his mind, the mists ascend there from the watered ground beneath, and he sows the mingled sense and sunshine over his fields, enriching both them and himself. He takes account of the double harvest of profits: both rewarding him for his pleasures and painstakings. His faithful counsellor and genial moralist, the ground, holds strict terms with him; nor weeds nor nettles have tales to tell, since they cannot thrive under his shadow. He minds his proper affairs; is industrious, punctual; home keeper, and time keeper no less, taking his tasks diligently as they rise. His work begins with the spring, and continues till winter; nor has he many spare minutes; the slipping away of twelve hours being the loss of a twelvemonth, unless he do that instantly which ought to be done at the moment.

Taking timely counsel of his experience, he adapts his labors to the seasons as they pass; has his eye on sun and soil at once. Nor shall I think the less of his piety, if he be touched a little with that amiable superstition concerning the planetary influences; since it ill becomes him to hold lightly any faith that serves to brighten his affections and establish sweet relationships between himself and natural things. In sympathy with earth and heaven, these conspire for his benefit: all helping to fructify and ripen his crops. It is unlawful to regard them as enemies of human tillage. Gracefully the seasons come round for weaving into his fancy, if not his faith, the old world's ritual as a religion of engagements. He is an ephemeris and weather-glass. He has his signs too, and aspects, his seasons, periods and stints. The months sway him. What if he sympathize with the year as it rolls; take equinoxially his March and September? Will his intermediate times be the less genial in consequence, or his April fail of distilling mystic moods with her fertilizing rains? His winter may come hoar with ideas, and brown October shall be his golden age of orchards and their ambrosia. And as June best displays the garden's freshness, so October celebrates the orchard's opulence, to crown the gardener for his labors. The golden days running fast and full have not run to waste. Orchards and gardens bloom again. He harvests the richer crop these have ripened; bright effluences of the stars, for the feast of thought and the flow of discourse. Having thus "gathered the first roses of spring and the last apples of autumn," he is ready to dispute felicity with the happiest man living, and to chant his pæan of praise for his prosperity:—

The earth is mine and mine the sheaves, I'll harvest all her bounty leaves, Nor stinted store she deals to me, Gives all she has, and gives it free, Since from myself I cannot stir But I become her pensioner: Sun, cloud, flame, atom, ether, sea, Beauteous she buildeth into me, Seasons my frame with flowing sense, Insinuates intelligence; Feeds me and fills with sweet contents, Deals duteously her elements: Dawn, day, the noon, the sunset clear, Delight my eye; winds, woods, my ear, While apple, melon, strawberry, peach, She plants and puts within my reach; Regales with all the garden grows, Whate'er the orchard buds and blows; Lifts o'er my head her sylvan screens, And sows my slopes with evergreens, While odorous roses, mint, and thyme, Steep soul and sense in softer clime; Preserves me when lapsed memory slips Fading in sleep's apocalypse; Surprising tasks and leisures sends, And crowns herself to give me friends; The morn's elixir pours for me, And brims my brain with ecstasy.

Earth all is mine and mine the sheaves, I harvest all her Planter leaves.

iv.—the orchard.

Orchards are even more personal in their charms than gardens, as they are more nearly human creations. Ornaments of the homestead, they subordinate other features of it; and such is their sway over the landscape that house and owner appear accidents without them. So men delight to build in an ancient orchard, when so fortunate as to possess one, that they may live in the beauty of its surroundings. Orchards are among the most coveted possessions; trees of ancient standing, and vines, being firm friends and royal neighbors forever. The profits, too, are as wonderful as their longevity. And if antiquity can add any worth to a thing, what possession has a man more noble than these? so unlike most others, which are best at first and grow worse till worth nothing; while fruit-trees and vines increase in worth and goodness for ages. An orchard in bloom is one of the most pleasing sights the eye beholds; as if the firmament had stooped to the tree-tops and touched every twig with spangles, and man had mingled his essence with the seasons, in its flushing tokens. And how rich the spectacle at the autumnal harvest:

"Behold the bending boughs, with store of fruit they tear, And what they have brought forth, for weight, they scarce can bear."

Apples are general favorites. Every eye covets, every hand reaches to them. It is a noble fruit: the friend of immortality, its virtues blush to be tasted. Every Muse delights in it, as its mythology shows, from the gardens of the Hesperides to the orchard of Plato. A basket of pearmains, golden russets, or any of the choice kinds, standing in sight, shall perfume the scholar's composition as it refreshes his genius. He may snatch wildness from the woods, get shrewdness from cities, learning from libraries and universities, compliments from courts. But for subtlety of thought, for sovereign sense, for color, the graces of diction and behavior, he best betakes himself

"Where on all sides the apples scattered lie, Each under its own tree."

Or to his bins, best, Columella says, when beechen chests, such as senators' and judges' robes were laid in in his day; these to be "placed in a dry place, free from frosts, where neither smoke, nor any thing noisome may come; the fruit spread on sawdust, and so arranged that the fleurets, or blossom ends, may look downwards, and the pedicles, or stalks, upwards, after the same manner as it grew upon the tree; and so as not to touch one another. And better if gathered a little green; the lids of the chests covering them close."

The ancient rustic authors give very little information concerning the apples and pears of their time, thinking them too well known to be described, as an author writing of our time might of ours. Most of them had their names from men who brought them into Italy and there cultivated them, and, "by so small a matter," says Pliny, "have rendered their names immortal."

Phillips thus describes the favorites of his time, most of which we find in our own orchards, and still in good repute:—

"Now turn thine eye to view Alcinous' groves, The pride of the Phœacian isle, from whence, Sailing the spaces of the boundless deep, To Ariconian precious fruits arrived:— The pippin burnished o'er with gold, the moyle Of sweetest honied taste, the fair pearmain, Tempered, like comeliest nymph, with red and white; Nor does the Eliot least deserve thy care, Nor John's apple, whose withered rind, intrenched With many a furrow, aptly represents Decrepit age; nor that from Harvey named, Quick relishing. Why should we sing the thrift, Codling, or Pomroy, or of pimpled coat The russet; the red-streak, that once Was of the sylvan kind, uncivilized, Of no regard, till Scudamore's skilful hand Improved her, and by courtly discipline Taught her the savage nature to forget: Let every tree in every garden own The red-streak as supreme, whose pulpous fruit With gold irradiate, and vermilion spires, Tempting, not fatal, as the birth of that Primeval interdicted plant, that won Fond Eve, in hapless hour, to taste and die."

A quaint old Englishman, writing about orchards, quotes the proverb: "It will beggar a doctor to live where orchards thrive." So Cowley writes:—

"Nor does this happy place only dispense Its various pleasures to the sense, Here health itself doth live, That salt of life which doth to all a relish give; Its standing pleasure and intrinsic wealth, The body's virtue, and the soul's good fortune, health. The tree of life when it in Eden stood, Did its immortal head to heaven rear; It lasted a tall cedar till the flood, Now a small thorny shrub it doth appear, Nor will it thrive too everywhere; It always here is freshest seen, 'Tis only here an evergreen: If, through the strong and beauteous fence Of temperance and innocence, And wholesome labors and a quiet mind, Diseases passage find, They must fight for it, and dispute it hard Before they can prevail; Scarce any plant is growing here, Which against death some weapon does not bear: Let cities boast that they provide For life the ornaments of pride; But 'tis the country and the field That furnish it with staff and shield."

Nor can we spare his praises of budding and grafting from our account:—

"We nowhere art do so triumphant see, As when it grafts or buds a tree; In other things we count it to excel If it a docile scholar can appear To nature, and but imitates her well: It overrules and is her master here: It imitates her Maker's power divine, And changes her sometimes, and sometimes does refine; It does like grace, the fallen tree restore To its blest state of Paradise before; Who would not joy to see his conquering hand O'er all the vegetable world command, And the wild giants of the wood, receive What laws he's pleased to give? He bids the ill-natured crab produce The gentle apple's winy juice, The golden fruit that worthy is Of Galatea's purple kiss; He does the savage hawthorn teach To bear the medlar and the pear; He bids the rustic plum to rear A noble trunk and be a peach; Even Daphne's coyness he does mock, And weds the cherry to her stock, Though she refused Apollo's suit, Even she, that chaste and virgin tree, Now wonders at herself to see That she's a mother made, and blushes in her fruit."

v.—sweet herbs.

"Thick growing thyme, and roses wet with dew, Are sacred to the sisterhood divine."

As orchards to man, so are flowers and herbs to women. Indeed the garden appears celibate, as does the house, without womanly hands to plant and care for it. Here she is in place,—suggests lovely images of her personal accomplishments, as if civility were first conceived in such cares, and retired unwillingly, even to houses and chambers; something being taken from their elegancy and her nobleness by an undue absorption of her thoughts in household affairs. But there is a fitness in her association with flowers and sweet herbs, as with social hospitalities, showing her affinities with the magical and medical, as if she were the plant All-Heal, and mother of comforts and spices. Once the herb garden was a necessary part of every homestead; every country house had one well stocked, and there was a matron inside skilled in their secret virtues, having the knowledge of how her

"Herbs gladly cure our flesh, because that they Have their acquaintance there,"

her memory running back to the old country from whence they first came, and of which they retained the fragrance. Are not their names refreshing? with the superstitions concerning the sign under which they were to be gathered, the quaint spellings;—mint, roses, fennel, coriander, sweet-cicely, celandine, summer savory, smellage, rosemary, dill, caraway, lavender, tanzy, thyme, balm, myrrh; these and many more, and all good for many an ail; sage, too, sovereign sage, best of all—excellent for longevity—of which to-day's stock seems running low,—for

"Why should man die? so doth the sentence say, When sage grows in his garden day by day?"

This persuasion that the things near us, and under our feet, stand in that relationship from some natural affinity they have to our welfare, appears to be most firmly rooted with respect to the medical herbs, whether growing wild in the fields and woods, or about the old homesteads, though the names of most of them are now forgotten. A slight reference to the herbals and receipt books of the last century would show the good uses to which they were applied, as that the virtues of common sense are also disowned, and oftentimes trodden under foot. Certainly, they are less esteemed than formerly, being superseded, for the most part, by drugs less efficacious because less related geographically to our flesh, and not finding acquaintance therewith. Doubtless many superstitions were cherished about them in ancient heads, yet all helpful to the cure. The sweet fennel had its place in the rural garden, and was valued, not as a spice merely, but as a sacred seed, associated with worship, sprigs of it, as of caraway and dill, being taken to the pews, for appetizing the service. So the balm and rue had their sacredness. Pliny commends these natives to every housekeeper. "A good housewife," he says, "goes to her herb garden, instead of a spice shop, for seasonings, and thus preserves the health of her family, by saving her purse." So the poet sends her there, too, for spouse-keeping.

"When Venus would her dear Ascanius keep, A prisoner in the downy bands of sleep, She odorous herbs and flowers beneath him spread, As the most soft and sweetest bed, Not her own lap would more have charmed his head."

vi.—table plants.

The last two centuries have added several plants of eminent virtues to the products of the orchard and garden. The cucumber, the potato, sweet corn, the melon, are the principal acquisitions, especially the last named, for that line of Marvell's—

"Stumbling on melons as I pass,"

must be taken rhetorically, since Evelyn informs us, this fruit had but just been introduced into England from Spain, in the poet's time, and the others but a little before. He says, "I myself remember when an ordinary melon would have sold for five or six shillings. 'Tis a fruit not only superior to all of the gourd kind, but paragon with the noblest of the garden." And of the cucumber, "This fruit, now so universally eaten, was accounted little better than poison within my memory." Columella shows some good ones growing in the Roman gardens:—

"The crooked cucumber, the pregnant gourd, Sometimes from arbors pendant, and sometimes Snake-like, through the cold shades of grass they creep, And from the summer's sun a shelter seek."

Whittier has sung our sweet corn, as Marvell the melon for Old England. But Raleigh declined that service for his new Roanoke plant, the potato, leaving it for the books to give this prose version instead:—"Sir Walter gave some samples of it to his gardener as a fine fruit from Virginia, desiring him to plant them. The roots flowered in August, and in September produced the fruit; but the berries were so different from what the gardener expected, that, in ill-humor, he carried them to his master, asking, if this was the fine fruit which he had praised so highly? Sir Walter either was, or pretended to be ignorant of the matter, and desired the gardener, since that was the case, to dig up the weed and throw it away." It appears, however, that the gardener, who was an Irishman, and had the best of rights to christen it, soon returned with the good parcel of potatoes, from whose thrift his own country was supplied, and in time distributed so widely as almost to supersede the ancient turnips, once the favorite of husbandmen; the more religious of them, Columella tells us, in his time, "sprinkling the seed when they sowed it as if they meant to supply the King, and his subjects also."

The turnip and the bean—this last held sacred by the Greeks, and which Pythagoras honored with a symbol—have lost much of the solid repute they once enjoyed here in New England and elsewhere. Good citizens and loyal republicans were fed chiefly from their stanch virtues, knowing how to prize their independence, and to secure it to their descendants. The great staples were grown on their farms and manufactured into substantial comforts without loss of self-respect. Bread was home-grown, kneaded of fresh flour, ground in the neighborhood; the grain sown in hope, their

"Six months' sunshine bound in sheaves,"

being brought home in thankfulness. The grain harvesting was the pride and praise of the country round, as good to be sung as the Syrian pastoral of Ruth gleaning in the fields of Boaz. But this, and other customs, introduced with the cultivation of wheat into Britain, and brought here by the Puritan planters, are fast fading from memory, and the coming generation will need commentaries on Tusser and Thomson to make plain our reaping-idyl.

As kindles now the blazing East Afield I haste, Eager the sickle's feat to play, Sweeping along the stalked fields my widening way; Vexing the eared spires, Pricked with desires, My golden gavels on the stubble spend, And to the fair achievement every member lend, The laughing breeze my colleague in my forte, While the grave sun beams zealous on the sport. Nor doth penurious gain famish my fist, As earing fast it sheds abundant grist, And gleaning damsels kerchief all they list,— Kindly conceive me friendliest of peers, And glad my brows adorn with yellow ears; The wide-spread field, its sheafed hoard, The lively symbol of their liberal Lord, Whose plenteous crop, and ripe supply Areapéd is of every hand and eye— An opulent shock for poor humanity.

Their garments, too, were home-spun. Every house, the scene of sprightly industry, was Homeric as were the employments in the garden of Alcinous,

"Where to encounter feast with housewifery, In one room, numerous women did apply Their several tasks; some apple-colored corn Ground in fair querns, and some did spindles turn; Some work in looms; no hand least rest receives, But all have motion apt as aspen leaves; And from the weeds they wove, so fast they laid And so thick thrust together thread by thread, That the oil of which the wool had drank its fill, Did with his moisture in bright dews distil."

It was plain wool and flax which they spun and wove thus innocently, nor suspected the web of sophistries that was to be twisted and coiled about the countries' liberties from a coming rival. "The weed which, planted long ago by the kings of Tyre, made their city a great nation, their merchantmen princes, and spread the Tyrian dye throughout the world; of which Solomon obtained a branch, and made his little kingdom the admiration of surrounding nations; of which Alexander sowed the seed in the city to which he gave his name, and Constantine transplanted to Constantinople; which the first Edward sowed on the banks of the Thames, and Elizabeth lived to see blossom through the nourishment which her enlightened mind procured, not only from the original soil of the Levant but from the eastern and newly discovered western world, as well as from the North,"—this famous plant, thus cherished by kings, has now become King, and wields its sceptre over the most cultivated and prosperous nations of the earth; its history for the last half century being more closely woven with civilization, than perhaps any other commodity known to commerce. And whether it shall be woven into robes of coronation or the shroud of freedom, for the freest of Republics, the fortunes of races, the present moment is determining.

Lettuce has always been loyal. Herodotus tells us that it was served at royal tables some centuries before the Christian era, and one of the Roman families ennobled its name with that of Lactucinü. So spinach, asparagus and celery have been held in high repute among the eastern nations, as with us. And the parable of the mustard seed shows that plant was known in Christ's time. The Greeks are said to have esteemed radishes so highly that, in offering oblations to Apollo, they presented them in beaten gold. And the Emperor Tiberius held parsnips in such high repute that he had them brought annually from the Rhine for his table. The beet is still prized, but the carrot has lost the reputation it had in Queen Elizabeth's time, the leaves being used in the head-dresses of the ladies of her court, from whence the epithet applied to the hair is derived.

Peas had scarcely made their appearance at the tables of the court of Elizabeth, "being very rare," Fuller says, "in the early part of her reign, and seldom seen except they were brought from Holland, and these were dainties for ladies, they came so far and cost so dear." Nor did the currant appear much earlier in European gardens, coming first under the name of the Corinthian grape: Evelyn calls the berries Corinths. So the damson took its name from Damascus; the cherry from Cerasus, a city of Pontus; and the peach from Persia. The quince, first known as the Cydonian apple, was dedicated to the goddess of love; and pears, like apples, are from Paradise.

The apple is the representative fruit, and owes most to culture in its ancient varieties of quince, pear, pomegranate, citron, peach; as it comprehended all originally. Of these, pears and peaches have partaken more largely of man's essence, and may be called creations of his, being civilized in the measure he is himself; as are the apple and the grape. These last are more generally diffused over the earth, and their history embraces that of the origin and progress of mankind, the apple being coeval with man; Eve's apple preserving the traditions of his earliest experiences, and the grape appears in connection with him not long after his story comes into clearness from the dimness of the past.

Fruits have the honor of being most widely diffused geographically, grown with the kindliest care, and of being first used by man as food. They still enter largely into the regimen of the cultivated nations, and are the fairest of civilizers; like Orpheus, they tame the human passions to consonance and harmony by their lyric influence. The use of them is of that universal importance that we cannot subsist in any plenty or elegance without them. And everywhere beside the cultivated man grows the orchard, to intimate his refinement in those excellences most befitting his race. The Romans designated the union of all the virtues in the word we render fruit; and bread comes from Pan, the representative of Nature, whose stores we gather for our common sustenance in our pantries. Biography shows that fruit has been the preferred food of the most illuminated persons of past times, and of many of the ablest. It is friendly to the human constitution, and has been made classic by the pens of poets who have celebrated its beauty and excellence.

vii.—rations.

The food of a people may be taken as a natural gauge of their civility. In any scale of the relative virtues of plants, fruits take their place at the top, the grains next, then the herbs, last and lowest the roots. The rule seems this:

Whatever grows above ground, and tempered in the solar ray, is most friendly to the strength, genius and beauty proper to man.

The poet has intimated the law:

"Plants in the root with earth do most comply, Their leaves with water and humidity; The flowers to air draw near and subtilty, And seeds a kindred fire have with the sky."

So the ancient doctrine affirms that the originals of all bodies are to be found in their food, every living creature representing its root and feeding upon its mother; and that from the food chosen, is derived the spirit and complexion of each; persons, plants, animals, being tempered of earth or sun, according to their likings.

Apollo feeds his fair ones, Ceres hers, Pomona, Pan, dun Jove, and Luna pale; So Nox her olives, so swarth Niobe.

It was the doctrine of the Samian Sage, that whatsoever food obstructs divination, is prejudicial to purity and chastity of mind and body, to temperance, health, sweetness of disposition, suavity of manners, grace of form, and dignity of carriage, should be shunned. Especially should those who would apprehend the deepest wisdom and preserve through life the relish for elegant studies and pursuits, abstain from flesh, cherishing the justice which animals claim at man's hands, nor slaughtering them for food nor profit. And, anciently, there existed what is called the Orphic Life, men keeping fast to all things without life, and abstaining wholly from those that had.

And, aside from all considerations of humanity for the animals, genius and grace alike enjoin abstinence from every indulgence that impairs the beauty and order of things. Our instincts instruct us to protect, to tame and transform, as far as may be, the animals we domesticate into the image of gentleness and humanity, and that these traits in ourselves are impaired by converting their flesh into ours. Nor do any pleas of necessity avail. Since the experience of large classes of mankind in different climates shows conclusively that health, strength, beauty, agility, sprightliness, longevity, the graces and attainments appertaining to body and mind, are insured, if not best promoted, by abstinence from animal food. Science, moreover, favors this experience, since it teaches that man extracts his bodily nourishment mediately or immediately from the vegetable kingdom, and thus lives at the cost of the atmosphere, needing not the interfusion of the spirit of beasts into his system to animalize and sustain him. "He feeds on air alone, springs from it, and returns to it again."

A purer civilization than ours can yet claim to be, is to inspire the genius of mankind with the skill to deal dutifully with soils and souls, exalt agriculture and manculture into a religion of art; the freer interchange of commodities which the current world-wide intercourse promotes, spread a more various, wholesome, classic table, whereby the race shall be refined of traits reminding too plainly of barbarism and the beast. "Ye desire from the gods excellent health and a beautiful old age, but your table opposes itself, since it fetters the hands of Zeus."[A]

"Time may come when man With angels may participate and find No inconvenient diet, no too light fare, And, from these corporal nutriments, perhaps, Their bodies may at last turn all to Spirit Improved by tract of time, and winged ascend Ethereal as they; or may at choice Here, or in heavenly Paradises, dwell."

An elegant abstinence is complimentary to any one, as, fed from the virgin essences of the season, his genius, dispositions, tastes, have no shame to blush for, and modestly claim the honor of being well bred. And one's table, like Apelles', may be fitly pictured with the beauty of sobriety on the one side, the deformity of excess on the other, the feast substantial as it is lyrical, praising itself and those who partake; and his guests as ready to compliment him, as Timotheus did Plato, when he said: "They who dine with the philosopher never complain the next morning."

the seer's rations.

Takes sunbeams, spring waters, Earth's juices, meads' creams, Bathes in floods of sweet ethers, Comes baptized from the streams; Guest of Him, the sweet-lipp'd, The Dreamer's quaint dreams.

Mingles morals idyllic With Samian fable, Sage seasoned from cruets, Of Plutarch's chaste table.

Pledges Zeus, Zoroaster, Tastes Cana's glad cheer, Suns, globes, on his trencher, The elements there.

Bowls of sunrise for breakfast Brimful of the East, Foaming flagons of frolic His evening's gay feast.

Sov'reign solids of nature, Solar seeds of the sphere, Olympian viand Surprising as rare.

Thus baiting his genius, His wonderful word Brings poets and sibyls To sup at his board.

Feeds thus and thus fares he, Speeds thus and thus cares he, Thus faces and graces Life's long euthanasies,

His gifts unabated, Transfigured, translated— The idealist prudent, Saint, poet, priest, student, Philosopher, he.

viii.—economies.

"——Much will always wanting be To him who much desires. Thrice happy he To whom the indulgency of heaven, With sparing hand, but just enough has given."

Life, when hospitably taken, is a simple affair. Very little suffices to enrich us. Being, a fountain and fireside, a web of cloth, a garden, a few friends, and good books, a chosen task, health and peace of mind—these are a competent estate, embracing all we need.

"Like to one's fortune should be his expense, Men's fortunes rightly held in reverence."

The country opens the best advantages for these enjoyments. And where one has the privilege of choosing for himself, he prefers the scope for seclusion and society that a homestead implies. For his human satisfactions, he draws upon his dispositions and gifts. His appetites he willingly digs for, nor cares to cherish any that he is ashamed to own. For nobler pleasures he delights to climb. His best estate is in himself. He needs little beside. With good sense for his main portion to make the most of that little, he may well consider Hesiod's opinion of weight:

"The half is better far than whole."

If his house is an ancient one, or ancestral, by so much the stronger are the ties that bind his affections to it; especially if it stand in an orchard, and have a good garden. Even if inconvenient in some respects, he will hesitate about pulling it down in hopes of pleasing himself better in a new one. The genius that repairs an old house successfully may fail in building another. Besides, there were many comforts provided for by our ancestors, who were old Englishmen even here in New England, and knew well what a house was built for, and they built for that, against any odds of counsel or expense. Then 'tis fatal to take time out of a building, which so consecrates it.

An old house, well built, pleases more with the repairs rendered necessary than a costlier new one. There are good points about it which have been proved by a century or two, and these may be adopted as parts for preserving, while any additions may be made for holding the whole in keeping with the orignal design, or as improvements on it. Perhaps there are snug recesses, and window-seats, spacious entries, hospitable stairways, wainscoting, finished summers running across the ceilings, a dry cellar, a good well, fence rows in natural places, shrubbery, which if not well set can be reset in the grounds; an orchard and garden whose mould is infused with the genius of years and humanized for culture. Then the tenement has its genealogy, and belongs to the race who have built into it a history. Trees, too, venerable with age it has, or it could not have been the residence of gentlemen. Outbuildings of any kind, useful or ornamental, have found their proper sites, and meet the eye as if they had always been there. It takes some generations to complete and harmonize any place with the laws of beauty, as these best honor themselves in that fairest of structures, a human mansion; which, next to its occupant, is the noblest symbol of the mind that art can render to the senses. One may spend largely upon it, if he have not ousted his manliness in amassing the money. That is an honest house which has the owner's honor built into its apartments, and whose appointments are his proper ornaments.

Building is a severe schoolmaster, and gets the best and worst out of us, both, before it has done with us. I conclude no man knows himself on terms cheaper than the building of one house at least, and paying for it out of his pains. The proverb says:

"'Tis a sweet impoverishment, and a great waste of gall."

Do we not build ourselves into its foundations, to stand or fall with its beams and rafters, every nail being driven in trouble from sills to roof-tree, and the whole proving often a defeat and disappointment: no one liking it, the builder least of all? One may thank heaven, and not himself, if he do not find

He builded costlier than he knew, Unhoused himself and virtues too,

at the dismission of his carpenters, and occupancy of it. Perhaps the idea of a house is too precious to be cut into shapes of comfort and comeliness on cheaper conditions than this trial of his manliness by the payment of his equanimity as the fair equivalent for the privilege. Nor is this the end of the matter, since it costs many virtues to deal dutifully by his household, by servants—if served by second hands—day by day, and come forth from the stewardship with credit and self-respect.

But a garden is a feasible matter. 'Tis within the means of almost every one; none, or next to none, are so destitute, or indifferent, as to be without one. It may be the smallest conceivable, a flower bed only, yet is prized none the less for that. It is loved all the more for its smallness, and the better cared for. Virgil advises to

——"Commend large fields, But cultivate small ones."

And it was a saying of the Carthaginians, that "the land should be weaker than the husbandman, since of necessity he must wrestle with it, and if the ground prevailed, the owner must be crushed by it." The little is much to the frugal and industrious; and the least most to him who puts that little to loving usury.

"We are the farmers of ourselves, yet may If we can stock ourselves and thrive, repay Much, much good treasure for the great rent day."

'Tis a pity that men want eyes, oftentimes, to harvest crops from their acres never served to them from their trenchers. Civilization has not meliorated mankind essentially while men hold themselves to services they make menial and degrading. Æleas, king of Scythia, was wont to say ingeniously, that "while he was doing nothing, he differed in nothing from his groom," thus discriminating between services proper to freemen and slaves. The humblest labors may ennoble us. Honorable in themselves when properly undertaken, they promote us from things to persons. They give us the essential goods of existence as we deserve and can best enjoy them: order, namely, industry, leisure, of which idleness defrauds, and distraction deprives us. Labor suffices. Putting us, for the time, beyond anxiety and our caprices, it calls into exercise the sentiments proper to the citizen. It softens and humanizes other pleasures. Like philosophy, like religion, it revenges on fortune, and so keeps us by the One amidst the multitude of our perplexities—against reverses, and above want. By making us a party in the administration of affairs, and superior to Fate, it puts into our hands the iron keys for unlocking her wards, and thus gives us to opulence and independence. We become, thereby, the subjects and friends of Saturn, ever known to be a person of so strict justice as he forces none to serve him unwillingly, and has nothing private to himself, but all things in common, as of one universal patrimony. And so, owning nothing, because wanting nothing, he had all things desirable to make life rich and illustrious.

——"This Golden Age Met all contentment in no surplusage Of dainty viands, but, (as we do still,) Drank the pure water of the crystal rill, Fed on no other meats than those they fed— Labor the salad that their stomachs bred."

Labor saves us from the chaos of sloth, the pains of shiftlessness. It sweetens the fountains of our enjoyments; 'tis neighbor to the elements. Coming in from July heats, we taste the sweetness of Pindar's line,

"Water with purest lustre flows,"

of whose zest the idler knows nothing, and which the sensualist soils and spoils. Besides, there are advantages to be gained from intimacy with farmers, whose wits are so level with the world they measure and work in. We become one of them for the time, by sympathy of employment, and get the practical skill and adaptedness that comes from yoking our idealism in their harness of uses. Thus, too, we come to comprehend the better the working classes which minister so largely to the comforts of all men, and are so deserving of consideration for their services. Moreover, this laboring with plain men is the best cure for any foolishness one may have never sounded in the depths of his egotism, or scorn of persons in humbler stations than his own; and the swiftest leap across the gulf yawning between his pride and the humility gracing a gentleman in any walk of life.

ix.—rural culture.

"Nor need the muse to palaces resort, Or bring examples only from the court, The country strives to do our subject right, And gard'ning is the gentleman's delight."

I consider it the best part of an education to have been born and brought up in the country; the arts of handicraft and husbandry coming by mother wit, like the best use of books, the language one speaks. There is virtue in country houses, in gardens and orchards, in fields, streams and groves, in rustic recreations and plain manners, that neither cities nor universities enjoy. Nor is it creditable to the teaching that so few college graduates take to husbandry and rural pursuits. Held subordinate to thought, as every calling should be, these promote intellectual freshness and moral vigor. They have been made classic by the genius of antiquity; are recreations most becoming to men of every profession and rank in life:—

"Books, wise discourse, garden and fields, And all the joys that unmixed nature yields."

Rural influences seem to be most desirable, if not necessary, for cherishing the home virtues, especially in a community like ours, where, by prejudices of tradition, we seek culture more through books and universities than from that closer contact with men and things to which newer communities owe so much, which agriculture promotes, and for which the classic authors chiefly deserve to be studied.

Men follow what they love, and the love of rural enjoyments is almost universal. Every one likes the country whose tastes are cultivated in the least, and who enjoys what is primitive and pure. The citizen tires of city pleasures. He soon finds that there is no freedom comparable to that which the country affords; for though he dwell in the city for advantages of libraries, and social entertainments, he seeks the country for inspiration when these lose their attractions, his spirits as his friendships, crave refreshment and renewal.

"Who in sad cities dwell, Are of the green trees fully sensible."

We see how this appetite declares itself in the general swarming during the summer season from the cities to the suburban towns, if not to the hill countries, for the freedom, the health, found there; and how to gratify and meet the demand for more natural satisfactions, our Guide Books have become, not only the most attractive geographies of the territories therein described, but works of taste, combining some of the choicest illustrations of poetry and prose in our literature: sketches of such scenes and parties are sure of an eager reading. The rustic books, too, are beginning to be inquired after; translations of the ancient authors, which bring the sentiment of the originals within the grasp of the plainest minds. And we look forward to the time, when, according to the recommendation of Cowley and Milton,—poets who did so much for the culture of their time,—these authors will be studied in our schools and universities, as Virgil and Horace have been so long, for cultivating the love of nature, of rural pursuits, beauty of sentiment, the graces of style, without an acquaintance with which, the epithet of a liberal and elegant culture were misapplied on any graduate. Nor need the students be restricted to Greek and Roman pastoral poets, when some of our own authors have given charming examples of treating New England life and landscape in their pages. A people's freshest literature springs from free soil, tilled by free men. Every man owes primary duty to the soil, and shall be held incapable by coming generations if he neglect planting an orchard at least, if not a family, or book, for their benefit.

"Agriculture, for an honorable and high-minded man," says Xenophon, "is the best of all occupations and arts by which men procure the means of living. For it is a pursuit that is most easy to learn and most pleasant to practise; it puts the bodies of men in the fairest and most vigorous condition, and is far from giving such constant occupation to their minds as to prevent them from attending to the interests of their friends or their country. And it affords some incitement to those who pursue it to become courageous, as it produces and sustains what is necessary for human life without the need of walls or fortresses. A man's home and fireside are the sweetest of all human possessions."

I have always admired the good sense and fine ambition of a friend of mine, who, on quitting College, with fair prospects of winning respect in any of the learned professions, chose rather to step aside into the quiet retreat of a cottage, and there give himself to the pleasures and duties of cultivating his family and grounds. And this he did from a sense of its suitableness to promote the best ends and aims; esteeming his gifts and accomplishments due to pursuits which seemed the natural means of securing self-respect and independence. His first outlay was moderate—a sequestered field, on which he erected a comfortable dwelling, planned for convenience and hospitality. His grounds were laid out and planted with shrubbery, the slopes dotted with evergreens and shapely trees. A nursery was set; a conservatory, with suitable outbuildings and ornaments. As he gave himself personally to the work, everything prospered that he touched. A few years' profits paid for his investment, and his thrift soon enabled him to add an adjoining orchard to his first purchase. And so successful was his adventure, that his most sceptical neighbors, the old farmers, confessed him to be the better husbandman; his gold was ruddier than theirs; his fields the neater. Nor did our Evelyn disgrace social engagements. His friendships were kept in as good plight as his grounds. He was none the worse citizen for being the better neighbor and gentleman they found him to be, nor the less worthy of the honors of his college. "'Tis impossible that he who is a true scholar, and has attained besides the felicity of being a good gardener, should give jealousy to the State in which he lives." Civilization has a deeper stake in the tillage of the ground than in the other arts, since its roots are fast planted therein, and it thrives only as this flourishes. Omit the garden, degrade this along with the orchard to mere material uses, treat these as of secondary importance, and the State falls fast into worldliness and decay.

"Oh blessed shades! oh gentle, cool retreat From all the immoderate heat In which the frantic world does burn and sweat! This does the Lion-star, Ambition's rage; This Avarice, the Dog-star's thirst assuage; Everywhere else their fatal power we see, They make and rule man's wretched destiny; They neither set, nor disappear, But tyrannize o'er all the year,— Whilst we ne'er feel their heat nor influence here. The birds that dance from bough to bough, And sing above in every tree, Are not from fears and cares more free, Than we who muse or toil below, And should by right be singers too. What Prince's quire of music can excel That which within this shade does dwell? To which we nothing pay or give? They, like all other poets, live Without reward or thanks for their obliging pains; 'Tis well if they become not prey: The whistling winds add their less ardent strains, And a grave bass the murmuring fountains play. Nature does all this harmony bestow; But, to our plants, arts, music, too, The pipe, theorbo, and guitar, we owe, The lute itself, which once was green and mute; When Orpheus struck the inspired lute The trees danced round and understood, By sympathy, the voice of wood."

Methinks I see great Dioclesian walk In the Salonian garden's noble shade, Which by his own imperial hands was made; I see him smile, methinks, as he does talk With the ambassadors, who come in vain To entice him to a throne again. "If I, my friends," said he, "should to you show All the delights that in these gardens grow, 'Tis likelier much that you should with me stay, Than 'tis that you should carry me away; And trust me not, my friends, if every day I walk not here with more delight Than ever, after the most happy fight, In triumph to the capitol I ride, To thank the gods, and to be thought myself almost a god."

Do we ask, on viewing the rural pictures which the Pastoral Poets afford us,—Whither is our modern civilization tending? What solid profits has it gained on the state of things they describe, seeing the primitive virtues and customs, once enjoyed by our ancestors, are fading,—the generosity, the cheer, the patriotism, the piety, the republican simplicity and heartiness of those times? Machinery is fast displacing the poetry of farm and fireside; the sickle, the distaff, the chimney-piece, the family institution, being superseded by prose powers; and, with their sway, have come slavery, pusillanimity, dishonor. I know there are reconciling compensations for all risks of revolution. For while the Demos thus takes his inch, Divinity secures his ell; so the garment of mankind comes the fuller from the loom in this transfer of labors. The fig leaf thus cunningly woven, costs fair honors, nevertheless, and we covet in our hearts the florid simplicity of times of sturdier virtues and unassailable integrity.[B]

Illustration: Flower with leaves

[A] Grillis having been transformed from a beast into a man, used to discourse with his table companions, about how much better he fed while in that state than his present one, since he then took instinctively what was best for him, avoiding what was hurtful; but now, he said, though endowed with reason and natural knowledge to guide him in the selection, he yet seemed to have fallen below the beast he was, since he found he liked what did not like him, and took it, moreover, without shame.

[B] Evelyn draws a lively picture of those old times, though not without sadness at the contrast with his own. "The style and method of life are quite changed as well as the language, since the days of our ancestors, simple and plain as they were, courting their wives for their modesty, frugality, keeping at home, good housewifery, and other economical virtues then in reputation. And when the young damsels were taught all these at home in the country at their parents' houses; the portion they brought being more in virtue than money, she being a richer match than any one who could bring a million and nothing else to commend her. The presents then made when all was concluded, were a ring, a necklace of pearls, and perhaps the fair jewel, the paraphernalia of her prudent mother, whose nuptial kirtle, gown and petticoat, lasted as many anniversaries as the happy couple lived together, and were at last bequeathed with a purse of old gold, as an heir-loom to her granddaughter. The virgins and young ladies of that golden age, put their hands to the spindle, nor disdained the needle; were obsequious and helpful to their parents, instructed in the management of the family, and gave presage of making excellent wives. Their retirements were devout and religious books, their recreations in the distillery and knowledge of plants, and their virtues for the comfort of their poor neighbors, and use of the family, which wholesome diet and kitchen physic preserved in health. Nor were the young gentlemen, though extremely modest, at all melancholy, or less gay and in good humor. They could touch the lute and virginal, sing

"Like to the damask rose,"

and their breath was as sweet as their voices. Then things were natural, plain and wholesome; nothing was superfluous, nothing necessary wanting. Men of estate studied the public good, and gave examples of true piety, loyalty, justice, sobriety, charity; and the good of the neighborhood composed most differences. Laws were reasons, not craft; men's estates were secure: they served their generation with honor, left patrimonial estates improved to a hopeful heir, who, passing from the free school to the college, and thence to Inns of Court, acquainting himself with a competent tincture of the laws of his country, followed the example of his worthy ancestors. And if he travelled abroad, it was not to count steeples, and bring home feather and ribbon and the sins of other nations, but to gain such experience as rendered him useful to his Prince and his countrymen upon occasion, and confirmed him in the love of both of them above any other. Hospitality was kept up in town and country, by which the tenants were enabled to pay their landlords at punctual day. The poor were relieved bountifully, and charity was as warm as the kitchen, where the fire was perpetual."

II.

RECREATION.

"Thou who wouldst know the things that be, Bathe thy heart in the sunrise red, Till its stains of earthly dross are fled."

Goethe.

Illustration: Banner with beetle

RECREATION.

i.—the fountains.

Nature is wholesome. Without her elixirs daily taken we perish of lassitude and inanity. The fountains must be stirred to their depths and their torrents sent bounding along their sluices, else we sink presently into the pool of inertia, victims of indecision and slaves of fate. "Thy body, O well disposed man, is a meadow through which flow three hundred and sixty-five rivulets." Every pulse pushes nature's quaternion along life's currents recreating us afresh; the morn feeding the morn, Memnon's music issuing from every stop, as if the Orient itself had sung.

Nature is virtuous. Imparting sanity and sweetness, it spares from decay, giving life with temperance and a continency that keeps our pleasures chaste and perennial. Nothing short of her flowing atmosphere suffices to refill our urns. Neither books, company, conversation,—not Genius even, the power present in persons, nature's nature pouring her floods through mind,—not this is enough. Nature is the good Baptist plunging us in her Jordan streams to be purified of our stains, and fulfil all righteousness. And wheresoever our lodge, there is but the thin casement between us and immensity. Nature without, mind within, inviting us forth into the solacing air, the blue ether, if we will but shake our sloth and cares aside, and step forth into her great contentments.

As from himself he fled, Possessed, insane, Tormenting demons drove him from the gate: Away he sped, Casting his woes behind, His joys to find, His better mind.

'Tis passing strange, The glorious change, The pleasing pain!

Recovered, Himself again Over his threshold led, Peace fills his breast, He finds his rest; Expecting angels his arrival wait.

If we cannot spin our tops briskly as boys do theirs, the wailers may chant their dirges over us. Enthusiasm is existence; earnestness, life's exceeding great reward. How busy then, and above criticism. Our cup runs over. But a parted activity, divorcing us from ourselves, degrades our noblest parts to the sway of the lowest and renders our task a drudgery and shame. For what avails, if while one's mind hovers about Olympus, his members flounder in Styx, and he is drawn asunder in the conflict? Let the days deify the days, the work the workman, giving the joyous task that leaves pleasant memories behind, and ennobles in the performance:

Tasked days Above delays; Hours that borrow Speed of the morrow, Light from sorrow: Business bate not, Want nor wait not, Doubt nor date not; Life from limb forbid to sever, Recreate in rapt endeavor.

We come as a muse to our toil and find amusement in it; to a taskmaster whose company never tires. 'Tis life, the partaking of immortality. A day lived so, glorifies all moments afterwards. Long postponed, perhaps, the hours wearisome, till broke this immortal morning with engagements that time can complete never, nor compel, and whose importunity outlasts the hours.

Sleep, too, having the keys of life in its keeping. How we rise from its delectable divinations with eyes sovereign and anointed for the day's occupations. All our powers are touched with flame, all things are possible. But last night, the world had come to an end; the floods ebbed low, as if the fates were reversing the torch. How we blazed all the morning, to be cinders yesternight. Then came the god to re-kindle our faded embers, the Phœnix wings her way to meet the rising dawn and embrace the young world once more. Sleep took the sleep out of us. From forth the void there rises a roseate morn upon us.

The flattering East her gates impearled, We hunt the morning round the world.

Nor is a day lived if the dawn is left out of it, with the prospects it opens. Who speaks charmingly of nature or of mankind, like him who comes bibulous of sunrise and the fountains of waters?

"Mornings are mysteries, the first world's youth, Man's resurrection, and the future's bud Shown in their birth; they make us happy, Make us rich."

Rise in the morning, rise While yet the streaming tide Flames o'er the blue acclivities, And pours its splendors wide; Kindling its high intent Along the firmament, Silence and sleep to break, Imaginations wake, Ideas insphere And bring them here. Loiter nor play In soft delay; Speed glad thy course along The orbs and globes among, And as yon toiling sun Attain thy high meridian: Radiant and round thy day;— Speed, speed thee on thy way.

"Every day is a festival, and that which makes it the more splendid is gladness. For as the world is a spacious and beautiful temple, so is life the most perfect institution that introduces us into it. And it is but just that it should be full of cheerfulness and tranquillity." Our dispositions are the atmosphere we breathe, and we carry our climate and world in ourselves. Good humor, gay spirits are the liberators, the sure cure for spleen and melancholy. Deeper than tears, these irradiate the tophets with their glad heavens. Go laugh, vent the pits, transmuting imps into angels by the alchymy of smiles. The satans flee at the sight of these redeemers. And he who smiles never is beyond redemption. Once clothed in a suit of light we may cast aside forever our sables. Our best economist of this flowing estate is good temper, without whose presidency life is a perplexity and disaster. Luck is bad luck and ourselves a disappointment and vexation. Victims of our humors, we victimize everybody. How the swift repulsions play: our atoms all insular, insulating; demonized, demonizing, from heel to crown; at the mercy of a glance, a gesture, a word, and ourselves overthrown. Equanimity is the gem in Virtue's chaplet and St. Sweetness the loveliest in her calendar. "On beholding thyself, fear," says the oracle. Only the saints are sane and wholesome.

ii.—the cheap physician.

"That which makes us have no need Of physic, that's physic indeed. Hark, hither, reader, wilt thou see Nature her own physician be? Wilt see a man all his own wealth, His own music, his own health,— A man whose sober soul can tell How to wear her garments well: Her garments that upon her sit, As garments should do, close and fit; A well-clothed soul that's not oppressed, Nor choked with what she should be dressed; A soul sheathed in a crystal shrine, Through which all her bright features shine, As when a piece of wanton lawn, A thin, aerial veil is drawn O'er beauty's face, seeming to hide, More sweetly shows the blushing bride: A soul, whose intellectual beams No mists do mask, no lazy streams: A happy soul that all the way To heaven rides in a summer's day? Wouldst see a man whose well-warmed blood Bathes him in a genuine flood,— A man whose tuned humors be A seat of rarest harmony? Wouldst see blithe looks, fresh cheeks beguile Age; wouldst see December smile? Wouldst see nests of new roses grow In a bed of reverend snow? Warm thought, free spirits flattering Winter's self into a spring? In sum, wouldst see a man that can Live to be old, and still a man Whose latest and most leaden hours Fall with soft wings, stuck with soft flowers; And when life's sweet fable ends, Soul and body part like friends; No quarrels, murmurs, no delay, A kiss, a sigh,—and so away,— This rare one, reader, wouldst thou see? Hark within, and thyself be he."

Illustration: Two griffins

III.

FELLOWSHIP.

"Health is the first good lent to men, A gentle disposition then, Next competence by no by ways, Lastly with friends to enjoy one's days."

Herrick.

Illustration: Banner of two birds

FELLOWSHIP.

i.—hospitality.

Evelyn writes of the manners and architecture of his times: "'Tis from the want of symmetry in our buildings, decorum in our houses, that the irregularity of our humors and affections may be shrewdly discerned." But not every builder is gifted with the genius and personal qualities to harmonize the apartments to the dispositions of the inmates. I confess to a partiality for the primitive style of architecture commended by Evelyn, and question whether in our refinements on these we have not foregone comforts and amenities essential to true hospitality. What shall make good to us the ample chimney-piece of his day, with the courtesies it cherished, the conversation, the cheer, the entertainments? Very welcome were the spacious yards and hospitable door-knockers on those ancestral mansions, fast disappearing from our landscape, supplanted by edifices and surroundings more showy and pretentious; yet, with all their costliness, looking somewhat asquint on the visitor, as if questioning his right to enter them; and, when admitted, seem unfamiliar, solitary, desolate, with their elaborate decorations and furnishings. Can we not build an elegant comfort, convenience, ease, into the walls and apartments, rendering the mansion an image of the nobilities becoming the residence of noblemen? To what end the house, if not for conversation, kindly manners, the entertainment of friendships, the cordialities that render the house large, and the ready receptacle of hosts and guests? If one's hospitalities fail to bring out the better qualities of his company, he fails of being the noble host, be his pretensions what they may. Let him entertain the dispositions, the genius, of his guests, the conversation being the choicer banquet; for, without baits for these, what were the table but a manger, alike wanting in elegancy as in hospitality, and the feast best taken in silence as an animal qualification, and no more.

What solitude like those homes where no home is, no company, no conversation, into which one enters with dread, and from which he departs with sadness, as from the sight of hostile tribes bordering on civilization, strangers to one another, and of mixed bloods! \Civility has not completed its work if it leave us unsocial, morose, insultable. Sympathy wanting, all is wanting; its personal magnetism is the conductor of the sacred spark that lights our atoms, puts us in human communion, and gives us to company, conversation, and ourselves.

"Oh wretched and too solitary, he Who loves not his own company; He'll find the weight of it many a day, Unless he call in sin and vanity, To help to bear it away."

The surest sign of age is loneliness. While one finds company in himself and his pursuits, he cannot be old, whatever his years may number.

Perhaps those most prize society who find the best in solitude, being equal to either; strong enough to enjoy themselves aside from companies they would gladly meet and repay by a freedom from prejudices and scruples in which these share and pride themselves, yet whose exclusiveness thrusts them out of their own houses and themselves also.

"It ever hath been known, They others' virtues scorn who doubt their own."

If solitude makes us love ourselves, society gives us to others, peopling what were else a solitude. It takes us out of ourselves as from a multitude to partake of closer intimacies and satisfactions. Alone and apart, however well occupied, we lose the elasticity and dignity that come from sympathy with the aims and prospects of others. Nor has any been found equal to uninterrupted solitude. Our virtues need the enamel of intercourse. Exalting us above our private piques, prejudices, egotisms, into the commonwealth of charities, good company makes us catholic, courteous, sane; we retire from it with a new estimate of ourselves and of mankind. If intercourse have not this wholesome effect, it is dissipating and best shunned. Nor is fellowship possible without a certain delicacy and respect of diffidence. There hides a natural piety in this personal grace, while nothing good comes of brass, from whose embrasures there vollies forth but impudence, insolence, defiance. But the more influential powers are attended by a bashful genius, and step forth from themselves with a delicacy of boldness alike free from any blemishes of egotism or pretence. Nor do we accept as genuine the person not characterized by this blushing bashfulness, this youthfulness of heart, this sensibility to the sentiment of suavity and self-respect. Modesty is bred of self-reverence. Fine manners are the mantle of fair minds. None are truly great without this ornament. A fine genius has the timidity, the graces of a virgin nature, whose traits are as transparent in the boldest flights of imagination as discernible in the stateliest tread of reason, the play of fancy: a pleasing hesitancy, a refrain, setting off the more boldly by such graceful carriage, the natural graces due to beauty and truth; and bearing down all else by its charming persuasions.

Affinities tell. Every one is not for every one; nor any one good enough to flatter or scorn any; the kindly recognition being due to the meanest; even the humblest conferring a certain respect by his call. Yet one might as properly entertain every passing vagary in the presence chamber of his memory as every vagrant visitor seeking his acquaintance. Introductions are of small account. What are one's claims, a glance detects; if ours, he stays, and house and heart are his by silent understanding. If not ours, nor we his, the way is plain. He leaves presently as a traveller the innkeeper's door, an inmate for his meal only and the night.

The heroic bearing is always becoming. Egotists of the amiable species, one kindly considers. But the sour malcontents, devastators of one's time and patience,—what to do with such? Summon your fairest sunshine forthwith: give your visitor's humors no quarters from the shafts; smite him with the kindly radiance for dissipating his melancholy, and so send him away the wholesomer, the sweeter for the interview, if not a convert to the sun's catholicism, the courtesies due to civility and good fellowship. So when X, your worst sample approaches, meet him blandly at your door, and ask him civilly to leave his dog outside. But if he persist in bringing him along into your parlor, never hesitate on setting the cur forthwith upon his master though you should find him at your throat straightways. It were giving your visitor the warmest reception possible under the circumstances, and an interview very memorable to all parties. One need not fear dealing his compliments short and significant on the occasion; the deer running down the dogs for a wonder.

Does it seem cold and unhandsome, this specular survey of persons? Yet all hearts crave eyes whereby to measure themselves. And what better foil for one's egotism than this reflection of himself in the mirror of another's appreciation? The frank sun withholds his beams from none for any false delicacy. Nor till one rejoices in being helped to discern excellence in another, desiring to comprehend and compliment his own therein, is he freed from the egotism that excludes him from the best benefits one can bestow. Happy if we have dissolved our individualism in the fluent affections, and so made intercourse possible and delightful between us.

"We have three friends most useful to us; a sincere friend, a faithful friend, a friend that hears every thing, examines what is told him, and speaks little. But we have three also whose friendship is pernicious; a hypocrite, a flatterer, and a great talker. Contract friendship with the man whose heart is upright and sincere, who loves to learn and can teach you something in his turn. And in what part of the world soever thou chance to spend thy life, correspond with the wisest and associate with the best."

ii.—conversation.

Good humor, flowing spirits, a sprightly wit, are essentials of good discourse. Add genial dispositions, graceful elocution, and to these accomplishments diffidence as the flower of the rest. There can be no eloquence where these are wanting. Any amount of sense, of logic, matter, leaves the discourse incomplete, interest flags, and disappointment ensues. None has command of himself till he can wield his powers sportfully, life sparkling from all his gifts and taking captive alike speaker and hearer, as they were docile children of his genius and surprised converts for the moment. "And I," says Socrates, "through my youth often change my mind, but looking to you and apprehending that you speak the things that are divine, I think so too." If one cannot inspire faith in what he says, no arts avail. Earnestness, sincerity, are orators whose persuasions are irresistible; they hold all gifts in fusion, magnetize, divinize, harmonize all. Good conversation is lyrical: a pentecost of tongues, touching the chords of melody in all minds, it prompts to the best each had to give, to better than any knew they had, what none claims as his own, as if he were the organ of some invisible player behind the scenes. What abandonments, reserves, which no premeditation, no cunning could have checked or called forth. What chasms are spanned with a trope, what pits forded, summits climbed, prospects commanded, perspectives gained,—the tour of the spheres made at a glance, a sitting; the circle coming safely out of the adventure. All men talk, few converse; of gossip we have enough, of argument more than enough, rhetoric, debate—omit these, speak from the heart to the heart underlying all differences, and we have conversation. For disputing there is the crowd; for ruminating, the woods; the clubs for wit and the superficial fellowship.

Companionableness comes by nature. For though culture may mellow and refine, it cannot give the flush of nobility to the current wherein ride our credentials for the posts of persuasion and of power. We meet magically, and pass with sounding manners; else encounter repulses, strokes of fate; temperament telling against temperament, precipitating us into vortices from which the nimblest finds no escape. We pity the person who shows himself unequal to the occasion; the scholar, for example, whose intellect is so exacting, so precise, that he cannot meet his company otherwise than critically; cannot descend to meet, through the senses or the sentiments, that common level where intercourse is possible with most. We pity him the more, who, from caprice or confusion can meet through these only. Still more, the case of him who can meet neither as sentimentalist nor idealist, or, rather, not at all in a human way. Intellect interblends with sentiment in the companionable mind, wit with humor. We detain the flowing tide at the cost of lapsing out of perception into memory, into the limbo of fools. Excellent people wonder why they cannot meet and converse. They cannot. No. Their wits have ebbed away, and left them helpless. Why, but because of hostile temperaments, states of animation? The personal magnetism finds no conductor. One is individual, the other is individual no less. Individuals repel. Persons meet. And only as one's personality is sufficiently overpowering to dissolve the other's individualism, can the parties flow together and become one. But individuals have no power of the sort. They are two, not one, perhaps many. Prisoned within themselves by reason of their egotism, like animals, they stand aloof, are separate even when they touch; are solitary in any company, having none in themselves. But the freed personal mind meets all, is apprehended by all, by the least cultivated, the most gifted; magnetizes all; is the spell-binder, the liberator of every one. We speak of sympathies, antipathies, fascinations, fates, for this reason.

Illustration: Leaf scroll

IV.

FRIENDSHIP.

"So great a happiness do I esteem it to be loved, that I really fancy every blessing both from gods and men ready to descend spontaneously upon him who is loved."—Xenophon.

Illustration: Banner with swans

FRIENDSHIP.

i.—persons.

It was a charming fancy of the Pythagoreans to exchange names when they met that so they might partake of the virtues each admired in the other. And knowing the power of names they used only such as were musical and pleasing. The compliment thus bestowed upon the sentiment of friendship is most deserved, and suggestive of the magic of its influence at every age, throughout every period of our existence; our life, properly speaking, opening with the birth of fancy and the affections, and maintaining its freshness only as we are under their sway. A friendship formed in childhood, in youth,—by happy accident at any stage of rising manhood,—becomes the genius that rules the rest of life. What aspirations it awakens! what prospects! To what advantages, adventures, sacrifices, successes, does it not lead its votaries! What if these early unions are sometimes less tempered with discretion than those formed later, if they maintain their freshness and open out sure prospects of an endless future? He surely has no future who is without friends to share it with him, and is wasting an existence meant to give him that assurance. With this sentiment there comes every felicity into the breasts of those who partake of it. How large the dividend of delight! how diffusive! We are the richer for every outlay. We dip our pitchers in these fountains to come away overspilling with satisfaction. And had we a thousand friends, every spring within us would gush forth at the touch of these wands of tenderness, and the days pass as uncounted moments in their company.

"O friend, the bosom said, Through thee alone the sky is arched, Through thee the rose is red; All things through thee take nobler form, And look beyond the earth, And is the millround of our fate A sunpath in thy worth: Me, too, thy nobleness has taught To master my despair; The fountains of my hidden life, Are through thy friendship fair."

How handsome our friends are! Say they were not moulded at the celestial potteries, we paint them fair behind the plain exterior they wear to indifferent eyes, and as they appear in our gallery of enamels. For who has not seen the plainest features light with a beauty the eyes had not conceived at the rise of a tender sentiment? a lively thought, the recollection of a noble deed, effacing every trace of ancestral meanness; the friend we love all there without blemish or spot, the image we clasp to our breast and cannot forget.

Spectral and cold, indeed, were life surveyed from the senses alone, not from the soul, wanting the enthusiasm that persons inspire, the faith which exalts us above ourselves, giving us friends to love, and a God to adore. We enter heaven through the gates of friendship. 'Tis by some supreme fellowship that we complete ourselves, and are united to our kind.

I esteem friendship the fairest as the eldest of religious faiths, being the worship of the unseen through the seen, and excusing many superstitions coloring the need of a personal object of worship. The love and service rendered to persons symbolizes love and service due the Supreme Person; and he must be pronounced deficient in piety who fails of winning the noblest of victories,—a friend. A need of the heart, the best of our life is embosomed in others, much of it taken upon trust in some one or more whom we call by tender names, and whose words accost us with persuasions irresistible. How affectionately one name is pronounced throughout a revering Christendom, because it symbolizes man's friend,—that fairest word in the human vocabulary.

"Fair flowery name, in none like thee And thy nectareal fragrancy, Hourly there meets A universal synod of all sweets, By whom it is defined thus: That no perfume May yet presume To pass for odoriferous, But such alone whose sacred pedigree Can prove itself some kin, sweet name, to thee."

We crave objects abreast and above us. And are bereft of ourselves without such. Friends are the leaders of the bosom, being more ourselves than we are, and we complement our affections in theirs. The passionless laws that sway our unseen Personality are not made lovely to us till thus clothed in human attributes and brought near to our hearts, person embracing person. Not some It in our friends, but the sentiment that transfigures the It into Him, into Her,—this alone makes them ours personally and beloved. Theists in our faith, we pay our vows to the Friend in our friend, thus becoming personally One with the Three, and alone no longer.

Nor elsewise man shall fellow meet, In public place, in converse sweet, In holy aisles, at market gate, In learning's halls, or courts of state, Nor persons properly shall find, Save in the commonwealth of Mind; Fair forms herein their souls intrude, Peopling what else were solitude.

Persons are love's world. Our Paradise is too fair to be planted out of our breasts. We chase the fleeing beauty all our lives long;

"Nor is there near so brisk a fire In fruition, as desire; The niggard sense, too poor for bliss, Pays us but dully with what is."

On, onwards, ever onwards are we led. Our Edens abreast of us journeying with ever-opening prospects in the distance.

the chase.

O'er earth and seas, In sunshine, shade, Blest Beauty crossed, Nor stopt nor stayed, Nor temples took, Nor idols hewed, Apart she dwelt In solitude.

In solitude, Heart said: "Where find the maid? My bride's a fugitive, From sight doth live, And hearts are hunters of the game, Pursuers of the same Through every passing form, The Beauty that all eyes do seek, All eyes do but deform; The love our faithless lips would speak Dies on the listless air, Nature befriends us not, Nor hearthside doth prepare In all her ample plot; Life's but illusion, Cunning confusion; Flings shadows pale about our path, She shadow is, and nothing hath; Eyes are divorced from seeing, Hearts cloven clean from being; My bride I cannot find, My love I cannot bind; The thousand fair ones of our sphere, Fond, false ones all, nor mine, nor dear; The Paradise I would surprise, From all my following flies, And I'm a thousand infidelities; There's none for me In all I see; Surely the Fair One bides not here, Where dwells she, where, in any sphere?"

"In any sphere?" Love whispered: "Where, where, if not here? Here in thy breast the maiden find, Ideas sole imparadise the mind; Here heart's hymeneals begin, Here's ours and only ours housed here within: Through parting gates of human kind Enter thou blest the Unseen Mind."

ii.—woman.

"Virtue sure Were blind as fortune, should she choose the poor Rough cottage man to live in, and despise To dwell in woman's stately edifice; Woman's approved the fairer sex, and we Mean men repent our pedigree. Why choose the father's name, when we may take The mother's a more honor'd blood to make, Woman's of later, though of nobler birth, For she of man was made, man made of earth, The son of dust, and though her sin did breed His fall, again she raised him in her seed; Who had he not her blest creation seen, An Anchorite in Paradise had been."

Pythagoras said that only good things were to be predicted of women, since they were the mothers of ornaments, of conversation and of confidence, and that he who invented names, perceiving that women were adapted to piety and friendship, gave to each of their ages the name of some Deity—to a maiden, Core, or Proserpine, to a bride Nymphe, to a mother, Mater, to a grandmother, according to the Dorian dialect, Maia. And in accordance with the like persuasion the oracles were always unfolded into light by women. Tacitus tells us that the Northern nations also held women in high esteem, "believing ladies had something divine about them." And this faith has descended to men of the Saxon name, the best regarding her as endowed with magical properties, the type of the highest culture the advanced nations have attained. Endowed with magnetic gifts; by necessity of sex, a realist and diviner, she lives nearest the cardinal facts of existence, instinct with the mysteries of love and fate; a romance ever attaching itself to her name and destiny. Entering the school of sensibility with life, she seizes personal qualities by a subtlety of logic overleaping all deductions of the slower reason; her divinations touching the quick of things as if herself were personally part of the chemistry of life itself. We cannot conceive her as distinct, distant, unrelated, she seems so personal, concrete, so near; yet can never come quite up to her discernments, nor gainsay their delicacy and truthfulness. Then constancy, fidelity, fortitude, kindness, gratitude, grace, courtesy, discretion, taste, conversation, the adornments of life, were bare names without the splendor of illustration of which the history of the sex affords so many brilliant examples. It seems as if in moulding his world the Creator reserved his choicest work till the last, and consummated his art in her endowments. Shall our sex confess to some slight in not having been mingled more freely of her essence, that so we too might have had access to the crypts into which she is privileged by birthright to enter? Hers is the way of persuasion, of service, forbearance:

"If thou dost anything confer that's sweet, In me a grateful relish it shall meet, But if thy bounties thou dost take away, The least repining word I will not say."

As there was only solitude till she brought company, conversation, civility, so stooping still to conquer, she is fast gaining ascendancy over passions and prejudices that have held her subservient and their victim. Can we doubt the better rule will be furthered indefinitely by a partnership in power thus intimate and acknowledged by States? What ideal republics have fabled, ours is to be. Nor need we fear the boldest experiments which the moral sense of the best women conceive and advocate. Certainly liberty is in danger of running into license while woman is excluded from exercising political as well as social restraint upon its excesses. Nor is the state planted securely till she possess equal privileges with man of forming its laws and taking a becoming part in their administration. No jury of men, however honorable or wise, are equal to pronounce upon questions relating to woman; questions involving considerations that concern the whole structure, not only of society, but of humanity itself. The public morals are insecure till the family is chastely planted, the state guarded by the continency of its male members.

A man defines his standing at the court of chastity by his views of women. He cannot be any man's friend nor his own if not hers. Either nature dealt coldly by him in his descent, else he is the victim of vices which his passions have inflamed till they have their own way with him.

"They meet but with unwholesome springs, And summers which infectious are; They hear but when the mermaid sings, And only see the falling star Who ever dare Affirm no woman chaste and fair."

The very name of woman becomes soiled if we seek to be related to her by the coarse ties of appetite, instead of the tender threads of affection, the charm of ideas. There are pleasures for keeping as enjoying,—for using delicately, the zest lasting long, the more affluent when tasted with moderation and seldom.

"Who can to love more rich gift make Than to love's self, for love's own sake? Love, that imports in every sense delight, Is fancied in the soul, not appetite: Why love among the virtues is scarce known Is that love is them all contract in one."

iii.—family.

"How fruitful may the smallest circle grow When we the secret of its culture know."

Here is room enough, however humble and unfurnished, for the most expansive friendships, the purest delights, the noblest labors; for where women are, there open forth all possibilities of culture.

Here high o'er head of spiteful fate, Jove cradles safe the ideal state.

"A married life is most beautiful. For what other thing can be such an ornament to a family as the association of husband and wife? For it must not be said that sumptuous edifices, walls covered with pictures, and piazzas adorned with stones,—so admired by those who are ignorant of the Good; nor yet painted windows, myrtle walks; nor anything else which is the subject of astonishment to the stupid,—are the ornaments of a family. But the beauty of a household consists in the conjunction of man and wife who are united to each other by destiny, are consociated to the gods who preside over nuptials, births, and houses; and who accord, indeed, with each other, and have all things in common as far as to their bodies, or rather their souls themselves;—who exercise a becoming authority over their house and servants, are properly solicitous about the education of their children and pay an attention to the necessaries of life, which is neither expensive nor negligent, but moderate and appropriate. For what can be better and more excellent, as the most admirable Homer says,

'Than when at home the husband and the wife Unanimously live.'"

the goblet.

I drank delights from every cup, Arts, institutions, I drank up; Athirst, I quaffed life's flowing bowls, And sipped the flavors of all souls.

A sparkling cup remained for me, The brimming fount of Family; This I am still drinking, Since, to my thinking, Good wine beads here, Flagons of cheer, Nor laps the soul In Lethe's bowl.

Wine of immortal power Into my chalice now doth pour; Prevailing wine, Juice of the Nine, Flavored of sods, Vintage of gods; Joyance benign This wondrous wine Ever at call;— Wine maddening none, Wine saddening none, Wine gladdening all, Makes love's cup ruddier glow, Genius and grace its overflow.

I drained the drops of every cup, Times, institutions I drank up: Still Beauty pours the enlivening wine, Fills high her glass to me and mine; Her cup of sparkling youth, Of love first found, and loyal truth: I know, again I know, Her fill of life and overflow.

When I find my friends are not of the same age as when I first knew them, I may conclude myself, not them, to be decaying and losing flavor. Still youth and innocency are the sole solvents of all doubts and infidelities; the faiths of women and children in friendship, ever fresh demonstrations of life's sufficiency and imperishableness. Families never die, since they trace their pedigree to Adam the First, who is of immortal ancestry. First suckled at our mother's breast our faiths survive all subsequent modifications; embrace the friendships we form, and color the whole of life. Our intellectual creed may change; temperament, calling, social position, fortune, sect, may phrase differently the delightful lay she sang to us—its tone still lingers in the memory of our affections, holding the heart loyal, and if trusted to the end takes us triumphantly through life. "Ever the feminine leadeth us on." Every prospect the mother gains is soon commanded by her children: our comforts and satisfactions life-long having the voice and countenance of woman.

iv.—children.

"Heaven lies about us in our infancy."

Our notion of the perfect society embraces the family as its centre and ornament. Nor is there a paradise planted till the children appear in the foreground to animate and complete the picture. Without these, the world were a solitude, houses desolate, hearts homeless; there were neither perspectives, nor prospects; ourselves were not ourselves, nor were there a future for us:

In their good gifts we hopeful see The fairer selves we fain would be.

Socrates comprised all objects of his search in

"Whate'er of good or ill can man befall In his own house,"

rightly conceiving this to be the seminary of the virtues and foundation of states. There it stands, the ornament of the landscape, and for the human hospitalities: we cannot render it too attractive. Let it be the home of beauty, the haunt of affection, of ideas. Let its chambers open eastward admitting the sunshine for our own and children's sake. Do they not covet the clear sky, delighting in the blue they left so lately, nay cannot wholly leave in coming into nature, whereof they are ever asking news? These gay enthusiasts must run eagerly, and never have enough of it. How soon the clouds clear away from their faces! How sufficient they are to the day, and the joy it brings them! Their poise and plenitude rebuke us.

"Happy those early days when I Shined in my angel infancy; Before I taught my soul to wound My conscience with a sinful sound, Or taught my soul to fancy aught But a white celestial thought, Or had the black art to dispense A several sin to every sense, But felt through all this fleshly dress Bright shoots of everlastingness."

Charming pictures these bright boys, confiding girls, as full of promise to themselves as we were at their age; are still, if faithful to the beautiful vision. Why else should the flame pale as we come up into life, we pleasing ourselves nor others more, perhaps despair of maintaining the virtues we espoused so eagerly in our youth? Must we

"When we've enjoyed our ends then lose them, And all our appetites be but as dreams To laugh at in our ages?"

If this fresh score of years did not deceive us, shall a life of threescore, with its deeper glances into the mystery, lead us to doubt the longevity of a sentiment of whose imperishableness that life itself is the best evidence we need ask? Are we to be left orphans when taken from nature's arms, robbed of all that made life desirable before? Nature cared for us; Persons failed us, and all unawares we lapsed out of our paradise, its gates barred against us.

"I cannot reach it; and my striving eye Dazzles at it, as at eternity. Were now that chronicle alive, Those white designs which children drive, And the thoughts of each harmless hour, With their content too in my power, Quickly would I make my path even, And by mere playing go to heaven.

Dear harmless age, the short, swift span Where weeping virtue parts with man; Where love without lust dwells, and bends What way we please, without self-ends: An age of mysteries! which he Must live twice that would God's face see; Where angels guard, and with it play, Angels, which foul men drive away."

'Tis sad to consider how long time is consumed in wiping away the stains which had been insinuated into the breast during these earlier years and up to coming manhood,—to what we call the maturity of our powers. Life is too much for most. So much of age, so little youth; living for the most part in the moment, and dating existence by the memory of its burdens. Men think they once were not, and fear the like fate may overtake them, as if time were older than their minds. 'Tis because we always were that we cannot trace our beginnings to the atheism of no-being and resolve ourselves into nothing. Children save us. Rather are we saved by remaining children, as Christ said.

Have we forgotten how things looked to us when we were young; how the dull world the old people lived in seemed to us? 'Twas not ours, nor their dry theism; and our fresh hearts whispered reverently:

"Is not your paradise an Inferno? Please never name it. While in Heaven I speak not of it: I hum that song to myself. Will you spoil my paradise too? Come with me, come, and I will show you Elysium; I know all about it; I am not deceived. I feel it to be solid, safe. It makes good its pledges always. I have a home of all delights—am admitted when I please, while you seem vagabonds and woebegones, bereft of friends, the Friend of friends. Am I to quit my present satisfactions for your promised joys. Unkind! this taking me from my paradise, unless you conduct me to a happier."

V.

CULTURE.

"O for the coming of that glorious time, When, prizing knowledge as their noblest wealth And best protection, liberal states shall own An obligation on their part to teach Them, who are born to serve her and obey; Binding themselves by statute to secure For all the children whom their soil maintains The rudiments of letters; and to inform The mind with moral and religious truth Both understood and practised—so that none However destitute, be left to drop By timely culture unsustained, or run Into a wild disorder; or be forced To drudge through life without the aid Of intellectual implements and tools; A savage horde among the civilized, A servile band among the lordly free."

Wordsworth.

Illustration: Thistles

CULTURE.

i.—modern teaching.

Saxon Alfred decreed that every man who had so much as two hides of land, should bring up his children to learning till they were fifteen years of age at least, that they might be religious and live happily; else, he said, they were but beasts and sots, dangerous to themselves and the state. And the state's true glory lies in its calling forth into fullest exercise and giving scope and right direction to the gifts of its children; seeking out especially and fostering the best born as they rise, and training these for educators of the coming generations. The Parent of parents, the guardian of all gifts born into it, society should neglect none, sequester none from places and honors to which they are entitled by birthright of genius or acquirement. Every child, the gifted by divine right, is sent to cherish and redeem the race; whom to neglect or divert from its aim were base oversight and abuse of the race itself. Far too noble, too precious be any to be used for ends merely secondary, secular, and thus spoiled for their own and God's intents.

Yet simple as this duty seems, society with all its aims and appliances, has not as yet attained the refinement of culture needful to the receiving of a child into its bosom, and of educating it to the full demands of its endowments. With the child comes the seed of states; the family being the nursery of the citizen, the measure of a people's civilization. As the homes, so the state; as the parents, so the children. Nor has society fathered its functions till all children, befriended from the first, are fashioned into the image each is capable of attaining. Other goods are but aids to this end; all are necessary for educating the human being, since the child is the summary of all gifts, and the most precious of all trusts committed to the state for trial and training.

Yet still the decease of gifts follows fast on their birth, and parents are oftener called beside the bier of these children of the sun than to their nuptials or coronation. They hold their jubilees in weeds rather; and the untimeliness of genius is the tragedy of life as of letters. Amidst the sickliness and wane of things, neither poet nor saint survives his laurel for more than a day. Far from treating the human being with anything like the subtlety and skill displayed by the ancient masters, we wait for the first hint of an institution for training youth into the fulness of their powers, by the genial touch of sensibility, the magnetism of thought. Left instead to the superficial culture of the sects, the traditions of the elders, the guidance of worldlings, they slide soon into vague conjectures, run adrift on the sea of doubt, the shoals of expediency, bereft of faith in themselves as in things unseen and ideal.

"See gifted youths rush out to feed on whims; Fashion craves their hours, low hopes their aim, To win not noble women for their brides, But titled slaves, heirs to some teasing caste, For beauty without culture seems mere show; As if great nature laid not on her tints With more contrivance than the brush of art; Or schools where grammars hide the place of sense, And shallow stammering drowns the native voice."

Not letters but life chiefly educate if we are educatable. But experience follows oftenest too late for most and too distant from the work to help us directly without an interpreter to assist in making timely use of it. Fortunate will it be, if by instinct and mother wit we take life at first hand, converting it forthwith into thought and habit. Character comes of temperament far more than of acquirement. And the most that culture performs is the drawing forth, fashioning and polishing the natural gifts. But we cannot create what is not inborn. A fine brain is a spiritual endowment, as from the head of Jove sprang Minerva. Centuries of culture pass into pure power; piety and genius are parents of piety and genius. But less discriminating than were the ancient carvers in wood and ivory, who, when they had an order for a head of Hermes, or any ordinary god even, searched carefully for substances adapted to receive the proper form, states attempt to fashion saints and rulers out of any materials that chance brings to hand. Omitting mind, or overriding it in our haste to come at immediate and superficial results, we ignore ideas and principles altogether. Aiming at little we attain little. For while our country opens the freest scope for the exercise of the higher gifts of genius and character, we cherish these but feebly in our public or private training. The highest prizes held forth to youth are not only beneath the aims of a noble ambition, but the stimulus for their attainment is wanting. Even in New England, culture is external, provincial; neglectful of the better parts of body and mind; behind the old countries, that of the ancient states. We cram the memory with the lore of foreign tongues, the understanding with a medley of learning, leaving fancy, imagination, the moral sentiment, mainly to shift for themselves—the forming of the manners, motives, aims and aspirations. Then what substitutes have we, for the falconry, archery, the hunting, fishing, of earlier and what we deem barbarous times? Yet these were sports, heroic and wholesome, giving a national coloring and strength of character: the wrestling too, throwing the quoit, and other manly games, horsemanship, boating, swimming, were a natural gymnastic for body and mind. War also had its advantages. So the plays and games were schools of genius and valor: the people were refined by contact with the refinements of the best citizens, the guardians of public taste and honor providing hereby a polite and manly culture suited to the needs of the state. Education extended into the age of ripe maturity. Nor was the disciple committed to himself till he became the master. And through life he was prompted by incentives of virtue and fame. The state was venerable, ennobled as it was by the genius and services of great men; great men earning honorably their renown by teaching.

'Tis noble minds who noble men create, And they who have great manners form mankind.

Happy the man who wins the confidence of the rising youth of his time. He becomes priest and professor elect without degrees of synods or universities. He shapes the future of the next generation as of the succeeding. A noble artist he cherishes visions of excellence not easily impersonated or spoken. His life and teachings are studies for high ideals.

ii.—socratic dialectic.

The highest end of instruction is to discipline and liberalize mind and character by familiarizing the thoughts with those of the learned and wise. Character is inspired by admiration of character, intellect by participating in intellect. The masters form masters. And had I the choice of my class, I would put Plato's works at once into its hands. And, for a beginning,—say the Alcibiades of the earlier Dialogues. I know of no discipline under the care of a thoughtful instructor so fitting for educating the reason, quickening the moral sense, refining the sensibilities, fashioning the manners, ennobling the character, as exercises in the Socratic dialectic: opening the whole armory of gifts, it sharpens and polishes these for the victories of life. The youth who masters Plato wins fairly his degree alike in humanity and divinity. He has the key to the mysteries, ancient and modern.[C]

Take the following as an example of the pure dialectic method as of metaphysic;

"In what way, asks Socrates, may we attain to know the soul itself with the greatest clearness? for when we know this, it seems we shall know ourselves. Now, in the name of the gods, whether are we not ignorant of the right meanings of that Delphic inscription just now mentioned, 'Know thyself?'"

Alcibiades. What meaning? what have you in your thoughts, Socrates, when you ask the question?

Socrates. I will tell you what I suspect this inscription means, and what particular thing it advises us to do. For a just resemblance of it is, I think, not to be found wherever one pleases, but in only one thing, the sight.

Alcibiades. How do you mean?

Socrates. Consider it jointly with me. Were a man to address himself to the outward human eye, as it were some other man; and were he to give it this counsel, "See yourself," what particular thing should we suppose that he advises the eye to do? Should we not suppose that it was to look at such a thing as that the eye by looking at it, might see itself?

Alcibiades. Certainly we should.

Socrates. What kind of thing then do we think of by looking at which we see things at which we look, and at the same time see ourselves?

Alcibiades. 'Tis evident, Socrates, that for this purpose we must look at mirrors and other things of like kind.

Socrates. You are right. And has not the eye itself, with which we see, something of the same kind belonging to it?

Alcibiades. Most certainly it has.

Socrates. You have observed then, that the face of the person who looks in the eye of another person, appears visible to himself in the eye of the person opposite to him, as in a mirror. And we therefore call this the pupil, because it exhibits the image of that person who examines it.

Alcibiades. What you say is true.

Socrates. The eye beholding an eye and looking in the most excellent part of it in that which it sees, may thus see itself?

Alcibiades. Apparently so.

Socrates. But if the eye look at any other part of the man, or at anything whatever, except what this part of the eye happens to be like, it will not see itself.

Alcibiades. It is true.

Socrates. If therefore the eye would see itself, it must look in an eye, and in that place of the eye, too, where the virtue of the eye is naturally seated; and the virtue of the eye is sight.

Alcibiades. I am aware that it is so.

Socrates. Whether then is it not true, my friend Alcibiades, that the soul if she know herself, must look at soul, and especially at that place in the soul in which wisdom, the virtue of the soul, is ingenerated, and also at whatsoever else this virtue of the soul resembles?

Alcibiades. To me, Socrates, it seems true.

Socrates. Do we know of any place in the soul more divine than that which is the seat of knowledge and intelligence?

Alcibiades. We do not.

Socrates. This, therefore, in the soul resembles the divine nature. And a man, looking at this, and realizing all that which is divine and God and wisdom, would gain the most knowledge of himself.

Alcibiades. It is apparent.

Socrates. And to know one's self we acknowledge to be wisdom.

Alcibiades. By all means.

Socrates. Shall we not say, therefore, that as mirrors are clearer, purer, and more splendid than that which is most analogous to a mirror in the eye, in like manner, God is purer and more splendid than that which is best in our soul?

Alcibiades. It is likely, Socrates.

Socrates. Looking therefore at God, we should make use of him as the most beautiful mirror, and among human concerns we should look at the virtue of the soul, and thus by so doing shall we especially see and know our very self.

Alcibiades. Yes.

And yet knowing the fascinations that beset gifted young men, one might say to them at parting, as Socrates did to the accomplished Alcibiades, when the latter intimated that he would begin thenceforward to cultivate the science of justice:

"I wish you may persevere. But I am terribly afraid for you; not that I in the least distrust the goodness of your disposition; but perceiving the torrent of the times, I fear you may be borne away with it, in spite of your own resistance and all my endeavors in your aid."

iii.—pythagorean discipline.

Let us see, too, how wisely the great master Pythagoras went to his work.

"He prepared his disciples for learning by many trials; for he did not receive into the number of his associates any who came to him till he had subjected them to various examinations. In the first place, he inquired after what manner they associated with their parents and relations generally; next, he surveyed their unreasonable laughter, their silence, their speaking when it was not proper; and farther, still, what were their desires, their intimacies with their companions, their conversation; how they employed their leisure time, and what were the subjects of their joy and grief. He likewise surveyed their form, their gait, gestures and whole motion of their body, their voice, complexion and physiognomy, considering all these natural indications to be the manifest signs of the unapparent manners of the soul.

Having thus subjected them to this scrutiny, he next suffered them to pass a good while seemingly unobserved by him, that he might the better judge of each one how he was disposed towards stability and a love of learning, and whether he was sufficiently fortified against the flatteries of popularity and false honor and glory. After this, he advised such to maintain a long silence, that he might observe how far they were disposed towards continence in speech, and that most difficult of all victories—the victory over the tongue. Thus practically he made trial of their aptitudes to be educated, for he was as anxious that they should be modest and discreet, as that they should not speak unadvisedly. He likewise directed his attention to every other particular, such as whether they were astonished at the outbreaks of immoderate passion and desire. Nor did he superficially consider how they were affected by these; or whether they were contentious or ambitious, or how they were disposed as to friendship and strife. And if on his surveying all these particulars accurately, they appeared to him endued with worthy manners, he next directed his attention to their facility in learning and memory; first whether they were able to follow what was said with rapidity and perspicuity; and in the next place, whether a certain love and temperance attracted them to the disciplines by which they were taught; whether they loved to learn and to be governed; also how they were disposed as to gentleness, which he called elegance of manners; conceiving all ferocity of temper as hostile to his mode of education. For impudence, shamelessness, intemperance, slothfulness, slowness of learning, unrestrained licentiousness, disgrace and the like, are attendants of savage manners, but the contrary of these are gentleness and mildness.

Of food he held that whatsoever obstructs divination should be shunned. And that the juvenile age should make trial of temperance—this being alone of all the virtues alike adapted to youths and maidens, and comprehends the good both of body and mind, and also the desire for the most excellent studies and pursuits. Boys he thought were especially dear to divinity, and he exhorted women to use words of good omen through the whole of life, and to endeavor that others may predict good things of them. He paid great attention to the health of body and mind, using unction and the bath often, wrestling, leaping with weights in the hands, also pantomimes with a view to strengthening the body, selecting for this purpose opposite exercises.

Music he thought contributed greatly to health, as well as to purifying the heart and manners, and he called it a medicine when he so used it, conceiving that each faculty had its particular melody. He placed in the middle a player on the lyre, and seated around him were those who were able to sing. And when the person struck the lyre, they sang certain pæans, through which they were sure to be delighted, and to become orderly and graceful, and he had melodies devised as remedies against the passions, as anger, despondency, complaint, inordinate desire and the rest, which afforded the greatest relief to these distempers of the soul. He likewise used dancing, walking and conversation.

Rulers, who received their country from the multitude of citizens as a common deposit, were to transmit it faithfully to their posterity as a hereditary possession; their language was to be such as to render them worthy of belief without an oath. And as parents, they were so to manage their domestic affairs as to make the government of them the object of deliberate choice, being kindly disposed towards their offspring, as they were the only animals that were susceptible of moral obedience. And they were to associate with their wives as companions for life, being mindful that other compacts were engraved on tablets and pillars, but those with wives were inserted in children, and that they should endeavor to be beloved by them, not through nature alone, of which they were not the causes, but through choice; for this was voluntary beneficence; they remembering, also, that they received their wives from the vestal hearth with libations, and brought them home as if they were suppliants of the gods themselves.

By orderly conduct and temperance, they were to be examples both to their families and the city in which they lived, revering beautiful and worthy manners, expelling sluggishness from all their actions, opportunity being the chief good in all. Separation of parents and children from one another was the greatest of injuries both to themselves and the State. Youths and virgins were to be educated in labor and exercises conducing to health, using food convenient thereto, and in a temperate and tolerant life. Of things in human life, there were many in which to be late conversant was best. A boy was to be so educated and fed, as not to have the desires awakened till the nuptial hour. Parents benefited their children prior to their birth, and were the causes of their good conduct afterwards. Hence the children owed them as many thanks as a dead man would owe to him who should be able to restore him back to life. And they were to associate with one another in such a manner as not be in a state of hostility, and be easily reconciled after any disputes, exhibiting a modesty of behavior to their elders, benevolent dispositions towards parents and love and regard to all deserving these. All who aspired after true glory, were to be such in reality as they wished to appear to be to others. The most pure and unadulterated character was that of him who gave himself to the contemplation and practice of the most beautiful things, and was a lover as well as student of wisdom.

It was by disciplines and inventions like these that he sought to heal and purify the soul, to revive and save its divine part, and thus conduct to the intelligible One its divine Eye, which is better worth saving than ten thousand corporeal eyes: since by its sight alone when thus strengthened and clarified, the truth pertaining to all beings is clearly perceived."

iv.—mother tongue.

"Let foreign nations of their language boast What fine variety each tongue affords, I like our language as our men and coast, Who cannot dress it well want wit not words."

"Great, verily," says Camden, "was the glory of our tongue before the Norman conquest, in this, that the old English could express most aptly all the conceptions of the mind in their own speech without borrowing from any."

We still draw from the same wells of meaning as did Chaucer and Camden; the language, by additions from foreign sources, as by native growth, having now become the most composite of any; it is the one we speak, and affect to teach. If we have few masters, it is because we yet cultivate other tongues at its cost. Scholars praise the exceeding richness and beauty of the best writers of the age of Elizabeth, but fail to inform us by what happy chances, whether by force of genius altogether, or more natural methods of study, the language and literature came to its prime in that period. Meanwhile it were not amiss for us to listen to the great authors and teachers of those golden days when our tongue had the sweep and splendor, the force, depth, accuracy, the grace and flexibility proper to its genius and idiom, if we may learn from these authorities by what method they attained to their proficiency in its use; instructors of Princes, as they were, and inspirers of those who made the literature.

Roger Ascham—Queen Elizabeth's school-master—proposed after teaching the common rudiments of grammar to begin a course of double translation, first from Latin into English, and shortly after from English into Latin, correcting the mistakes of the student and leading to the formation of a classical style, by pointing out the differences between the re-translation and the original, and explaining their reasons. "His whole system is built upon the principle of dispensing as much as possible with the details of grammar, and he supports his theory by a triumphant reference to its practical effects, especially as displayed in the case of Queen Elizabeth, whose well known proficiency in Latin, he declares to have been obtained without grammatical rules, after the very simplest had been mastered."

Sir Philip Sidney, whose opinions are of the highest importance in these matters, speaking in his "Defence of Poesie," says:

"Another will say that English wanteth grammar. Nay, truly, it hath that praise that it wants not grammar; for grammar it might have, but needs not, being so easie in itselfe and so void of those cumbersome differencies of cases, genders, moods and tenses, which I think was a piece of the tower of Babylon's curse, that a man should be put to schoole to learn his mother tongue. But for the uttering sweetly and properly the conceit of the minde which is the end of speech, that it hath equally with any other tongue in the world."[D]

Milton, to whom, next to Shakespeare our tongue owes most, and who spent much time in compiling an English Dictionary, writes in one of his Italian Letters:

"Whoever in a state, knows how to form wisely the manners and men and to rule them at home and in war, by excellent institutions, him in the first place above all others I should esteem worthy of honor. But next to him, the man who strives in maxims and rules the method and habit of speaking and writing derived from a good age of the nation, and as it were to fortify the same round with a kind of wall, the daring to overleap which a law only short of that of Romulus should be used to prevent. Should we choose to compare the two in respect to utility, it is the former alone that can make the social existence of the citizens just and holy, but it is the latter that makes it splendid and beautiful, which is the next thing to be desired. The one, as I believe, supplies a noble courage and intrepid counsels against an enemy invading the territory; the other takes to himself the task of extirpating and defeating by means of a learned detective police of ears, and a light-infantry of good authors, that barbarism which makes large inroads upon the minds of men and is a destructive intestine enemy to genius. Nor is it to be considered of small importance what language, pure or corrupt, a people has, or what is their customary degree of propriety in speaking it—a matter which oftener than once was the salvation of Athens. Nay, as it is Plato's opinion, that, by a change in the manner and habit of dress, serious commotions and mutations are portended in a commonwealth, I, for my part, would rather believe that the fall of that city, and low and obscure condition, followed on the general vitiation of its usage in the matter of speech. For let the words of a country be in part unhandsome and offensive in themselves, in part debased by wear, and wrongly uttered, and what do they declare but by no light indication, that the inhabitants of that country are an indolent, idly-yawning race, with minds already prepared for any amount of servility? On the other hand, we have never heard that any empire, any state, did not flourish in at least a middling degree as long as its liking and care for its language lasted."

Devotees of grammatical studies have not been distinguished for any very remarkable felicities of expression. If we consult our experience we shall find that we owe much to the home dialect, the school, the books we read, the letters we write; to our fellowships, the practice of such living speakers and writers as chance threw in our way, our habits of thinking, observations of life and things, the cultivation of the sensibilities, imagination, the common sense, more than all else besides. A man's speech is the measure of his culture; a graceful utterance the first born of the arts.

Nature is the armory of genius. Cities serve it poorly; books and colleges at second hand; the eye craves the spectacle of the horizon, of mountain, ocean, river and plain, the clouds and stars: actual contact with the elements, sympathy with the seasons as these rise and roll. And whoever will strike bold strokes for institutions and literature, must be often afoot with nature and thought in his eye for grasping the select rhetoric for his theme.

Illustration: Design of a mask

[C] "It might be thought serious trifling," says the accomplished Bishop Berkeley, "to tell my readers that the greatest of men had ever a high esteem of Plato, whose writings are the touchstone of a hasty and shallow mind, whose philosophy has been the admiration of ages; which supplied patriots, magistrates and lawgivers to the most flourishing states, as well as fathers of the church and doctors of the schools. Albeit, in these days, the depths of that old learning are rarely fathomed. And yet it were happy for these lands if our young nobility and gentry, instead of modern maxims would imbibe the notions of the great men of antiquity. But in these loose times many an empty head is shook at Aristotle and Plato, as well as the Holy Scriptures. Certainly, where a people are well educated, the art of piloting a state is best learned from the writings of Plato."

[D] "We learn languages," says Luther, "much better by way of mouth at home, in the street, than out of books. Letters are dead words; the utterances of the mouth, are living words, which in writing can never stand forth so distinct and excellent, as the soul of man bodies them forth through the mouth. Tell me where was there ever a language, which men could learn to speak with correctness and propriety by the rules of grammar. Yet let none think or conclude from all this, that I would reject the grammars altogether."

VI.

BOOKS.

"As great a store Have we of books as bees of herbs, or more, And the great task to try them, know the good, To discern weeds and judge of wholesome food, Is a rare scant performance."

Daniel.

Illustration: Banner with bee

BOOKS.

Good books, like good friends, are few and chosen; the more select the more enjoyable; and like these are approached with diffidence, nor sought too familiarly nor too often, having the precedence only when friends tire. The most mannerly of companions, accessible at all times, in all moods, they frankly declare the author's mind, without giving offence. Like living friends they too have their voice and physiognomies, and their company is prized as old acquaintances. We seek them in our need of counsel or of amusement, without impertinence or apology, sure of having our claims allowed. A good book justifies our theory of personal supremacy, keeping this fresh in the memory and perennial. What were days without such fellowship? We were alone in the world without it. Nor does our faith falter though the secret we search for and do not find in them will not commit itself to literature, still we take up the new issue with the old expectation, and again and again, as we try our friends after many failures at conversation, believing this visit will be the favored hour and all will be told us. Nor do I know what book I can well spare, certainly none that has admitted me, though it be but for the moment and by the most oblique glimpse, into the mind and personality of its author; though few there are that prefer such friendly claim to one's regard, and satisfy expectation as he turns their leaves. Our favorites are few; since only what rises from the heart reaches it, being caught and carried on the tongues of men wheresoever love and letters journey.

Nor need we wonder at their scarcity or the value we set upon them; life, the essence of good letters as of friendship, being its own best biographer, the artist that portrays the persons and thoughts we are, and are becoming. And the most that even he can do, is but a chance stroke or two at this fine essence housed in the handsome dust, but too fugitive and coy to be caught and held fast for longer than the passing glance; the master touching ever and retouching the picture he leaves unfinished.

"My life has been the poem I would have writ, But I could not both live and utter it."

I find books like persons more attractive as they are the more suggestive, more mythical and difficult to render at once to the senses, and enjoy them the more for this blending of nature with mind,—the text sparkling with the author's personality. What is thus implied is more gracefully delivered than if written literally; it piques then the fancy more and calls the higher gifts into play; and an author best serves me who, speaking alike to imagination and reason, arms with figures apt for occasions, thus pluming the genius for discourse. And the like may be said of the dictionaries: opened at hazard in lively moods, the columns become charged with thought, as if each word were blood-wise and fleshed with meaning. Again, books professing system and completeness are wont to be dry and unprofitable save for their facts and inferences; truth the flowing essence of things, the substance of being, accosting the mind most gracefully as a flowing form, fixed for the moment of passing only in the mind's eye, and is studied to best advantage rather in books of biography and poetry than of history or science, wherein the personality is oftenest lost in abstractions of fact. Reading, like conversation, is an idealism most profitable as it calls imagination into play, and thus leads forth all other gifts.

Books of table-talk have this advantage over most others; being the best companions for the moment, they can be taken up and laid down without loss, and when sensible are best whetstones for the wits. With the essayists, the poets, books of letters and lives, one's library were always alive and inviting. Good for moments these are always good: we may open by chance, dip anywhere, read in any order, begin at the last paragraph and read backward as well; obvious consecutiveness being of less consequence. Nor do I find the logic the worse when thus seemingly broken and obscure, since each paragraph is a unit standing apart yet all related in the perspective which the reader commands. We could not spare from our galaxy the great essayists and moralists, Pliny, Plutarch, Xenophon, Plato, Epictetus, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Montaigne, Bacon, Sir Thomas Browne Cowley, Coleridge, and the rest; each delineating in his proper way that antique faith in man and the world, which being one and universal in essence, unites all mankind. We know the history of these pieces of life, these experiences recorded for us by their inspired authors, as if themselves were scribes of the spirit and committed it to letters for our especial benefit.

Any library is an attraction. And there is an indescribable delight—who has not felt it that deserves the name of scholar—in mousing at choice among the alcoves of antique book-shops especially, and finding the oldest of these sometimes newest of the new, fresher, more suggestive than the book just published and praised in the reviews. Nor is the pleasure scarcely less of cutting the leaves of the new volume, opening by preference at the end rather than title-page, and seizing the author's conclusions at a glance. Very few books repay the reading in course. Nor can we excuse an author if his page does not tempt us to copy passages into our common places, for quotation, proverbs, meditation, or other uses. A good book is fruitful of other books; it perpetuates its fame from age to age, and makes eras in the lives of its readers.

One must be rich in thought and character to owe nothing to books, though preparation is necessary to profitable reading; and the less reading is better than more;—book-struck men are of all readers least wise, however knowing or learned.

"Books cannot make the mind, Which we must bring apt to be set aright, Yet do they rectify it in that kind And touch it so as that they turn that way Where judgment lies. And though we may not find The certain place of truth, yet do they stay And entertain us near about the same, And give the soul the best delight that may Encheer it most, and make our spirits enflame To thoughts of glory and to worthy deeds."

Moreover for gifts, what so gracefully bestowed as fitting books conveying what no words of the giver could convey? Were the history of the few books of the heart published, what more enduring compliment would this confer on their authors! Perhaps the finest books have least fame and find but a few choice readers. 'Tis high praise bestowed on an author that his book is taken up with love and expectation, we coming to his page again and again without disappointment. To be enjoyable a book must be wholesome like nature, and flavored with the religion of wisdom.

Books of letters bring the reader nearest to the life and personality of the writer:

"For more than kisses letters mingle souls, For then friends absent meet."

Written with this advantage of perspective, the epistle is oftentimes more acceptable than were the interview, more discreet and opportune, since committing ourselves to the writing with a kind of reserved abandonment, if I may thus characterize our mood, which in conversation we might naturally overleap, we give that only in which another may modestly sympathize and share—so shading our egotism as to tell all about ourselves with the delicacy of self-respect without wounding that of others. Epistolary correspondence is the most difficult and delicate of all composition. And this perhaps accounts for the few books of the kind in our or any language; and the best of these mostly written by women who give themselves heartily to sentiment. One may think himself fortunate if the gift be his, and his experience find expression in his correspondence. Perhaps the diary has this advantage over letters; we make it our confidant committing to its leaves what we would not to another; sure of the sacred trust being kept for us. And the most interesting biographies are composed largely of these. The more autobiographical the more attractive. The keeping of a journal is an education. Let every one try his hand at one and begin young. If it get the best of his hours and an autobiography out of him, neither his time has been misspent nor has he lived in vain. A life worth living is worth recording. To what end lives any, if he fail of getting apparent order at least into it; living in a manner worthy of celebrity? Life were poor enough that does not organize the chaos and bring the joy of creation, pronouncing it and all things good, excellence ever falling naturally into order and melody. Let one value above all literary fame the gift of seizing and portraying his privatest thought,—the homely furnitures and primogenitures,—and if but partially successful consider himself as having attained the fairest laurels the muse has to bestow. As the best fruits of the season fall latest and keep the longest, so those of a lifetime; and fortunate is he whose genius thus gathers his choicest samples housed carefully in a book for any who may relish their flavor.

One cannot be well read unless well seasoned in thought and experience. Life makes the man. And he must have lived in all his gifts and become acclimated herein to profit by his readings. Living at the breadth of Shakspeare, the depth of Plato, the height of Christ, gives the mastery, or if not that, a worthy discipleship. Life alone divines life. We read as we live; the book being for us the deeper or the shallower as we are. If read from the reason, it answers to the reason, but fails of finding imagination, the moral sentiment, the affections, fails of making valid its claims upon the deepest instincts of the heart,—those critics of inspiration and interpreters,—all books owing their credibility to the fact of being written from, and addressed to these, as eye-witnesses and sponsors. Mothers of our mothers we are ever at their teats. Most owe more to tradition than to culture or literature; the best of literature as of nurture, being still largely tinctured with tradition. Our debt to the Hebrew scriptures has been greater doubtless than to any literature hitherto accessible to us of the Saxon stock; greater than to all foreign literatures besides. And now the instincts prompt thoughtful minds as never before to explore the prime sources and drink freely at the fountains.

"Are mouldy records now the living springs, Whose healing waters slake the thirst within? Oh! never yet hath mortal drank A draught restorative That well'd not from the depths of his own soul."

Very desirable it were since the gates of the East are now opening wide and giving the free commerce of mind with mind, to collect and compare the Bibles of the races for general circulation and careful reading. For still out of the Theban night rays the light of our day and blends with all our thinking and doing—China, Egypt, Assyria, Persia, Palestine, Greece, Rome, Britain—the christendom and world of to-day.

Why nibbling always where Ye nothing fresh can find Upon those rocks?

Lo! meadows green and fair! Come pasture here your mind, Ye bleating flocks.

VII.

COUNSELS.

"Counsel is not so sacred a thing as praise, since the former is only useful among men, but the latter is for the most part reserved for the gods."—Pythagoras.

Illustration: Banner with butterfly

COUNSELS.

i.—religious.

"Who shapes his Godhead out of flesh or stone, Knows not a God; but he who lives like one."

Know, that seeing you, I divine your gods also. Why name them then one by one so sentimentally and so often? Being yours individually, so unmistakably in your image, surely none needs question or desire them. A thousand thanks if you will lisp never a syllable more about them. As I treat them civilly by my silence, why persist thus pertinaciously in thrusting their claims upon my attention and then questioning my piety for not christening them? O! rare respecting silence, deep is the religion that fathoms thine; speaking most reverently when deepest, and divining mysteries that none names devoutly. What if the sacred name were the silent syllable in the saint's devotions, and he

"One of the few, who in his town Honors all preachers, is his own? Sermons ne'er hears, or not so many As leaves no time to practise any?— Hears, ponders reverently, and then His practice preaches o'er again. His parlor sermons rather are Those to the eye than to the ear; His prayers taking price and strength Not from their loudness nor their length: His murmurs have their music too, Ye mighty pipes, as well as you; Nor yields the noblest nest Of warbling seraphim to the ears of love A choicer lesson, than the joyful breast Of some poor panting turtle dove."

One sometimes thinks silence for a century were most worshipful since speech babbles so badly. Has not harlequin in bands and book played out his part the world over?—the drawl of sacred names been heard till sacred names seem profane, and it were devout to fall into silence about them more eloquent than any speeches about sanctity? If infidelity, indifference, scepticism, sweep secretly the breadth and depths of Christendom, 'tis but the binding spell of these superstitions about the name of One whom the love and admiration of all good men hold precious and will not let perish from love and remembrance.

What were Christ Jesus' life and gospel sweet, If not in loving hearts he fix his holy seat?

If one's life is not worshipful, no one cares for his professions. Piety is a sentiment: the more natural it is, the wholesomer. Nor is there piety where charity is wanting. "If one love not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen." None are deceived as to the spirit of their acquaintances: the instinct of every village, every home, intimates true character. We recognize goodness wherever we find it. 'Tis the same helpful influence, beautifying the meanest as the greatest service by its manners, doing most when least conscious, as if it did it not.

"A man's best things are nearest him, Lie at his feet; It is the distant and the dim That we are sick to greet."

Let us have unspoken creeds and these quick and operative. I wish mine to be so, for though it embosoms doctrines fit to shine in words, it seems most becoming to publish truths thus vital by example rather, sentiments so private shrinking from the frost of distrust, the heat of controversy. Personal in their traits and colored with individual hues, they court the confidences of silence, and are unspeakable.

One needs but brighten his eyes to look deep into the depths of his heart and settle all disputes. Enlarge by a thought our view, exalt it by a sentiment, we find all men of our creed; or, far better, superior to party or creed. The uprise of an idea, perception of a principle, makes many one and inseparable. The liberal mind is of no sect; it shows to sects their departures from the ideal standard, and thus maintains pure religion in the world. But there are those whose minds, like the pupil of the eye, contract as the light increases. 'Tis a poor egotism that sees only its own image reflected in its vision. "Only as thou beest it thou seest it." How differently the different sects interpret the scriptures, each according to its light and training! I imagine our Bible is more loosely read, least understood of any book in the English tongue: conceive a fresh generation coming to its perusal as to a volume just issued in modern type from a popular bookstore and reviewed in the journals. How better acquit ourselves to the Bibles of the world than by fairly measuring our private convictions with their spirit and teachings? Let us first acquaint ourselves with these Records of Revelation before we claim for ours the merit of being the only inspired volume; ourselves the favored people—as if the Truth were a geographical resident dwelling in our neighborhood only.

When thou approachest to The One, Self from thyself thou first must free, Thy cloak duplicity cast clean aside, And in the Being's Being Be.

One does not like to disturb the faith of his neighbors, yet cannot speak truly on religious themes without touching the sensibilities of the weak, and sometimes wounding where he sought sympathy and support. It takes a good man to speak tenderly of matters of faith and practice in which good people have been bred, their hearts being prompt to feel and act without questioning the head. Precious souls, if not overwise, or strong for reform; the weak saints being as formidable impediments as the strong sinners, both blocking the ways to amendment. But temperament, inborn tendencies, predispositions, determine one's cast of thinking or no-thinking, and go far to shape his religious opinions. Our instincts, faithfully drawn out and cherished by purity of life, lead to Theism as their flower and fruit. If swayed by the senses we are natural Pantheists, at best idolaters and unbelievers in the Personal Mind. The passions prevailing, incline us to Atheism, or some superstition ending in scepticism, and indifference to all religious considerations.

"Some whom we call virtuous, are not so In their whole substance, but their virtues grow But in their humors, and at seasons show.

For when through tasteless, flat humility, In dough-baked men some harmlessness we see, 'Tis but his phlegm that's virtuous and not he.

So is the blood sometimes: whoever ran To danger unimportuned, he was then No better than a sanguine, virtuous man.

So cloistered men, who, on pretence of fear All contributions to this world forbear, Have virtue in melancholy, and only there.

Spiritual, choleric critics, who in all Religions find fault, and forgive no fall, Have through their zeal virtue but in their gall.

We're thus but parcel gilt, to gold we're grown When virtue is our soul's complexion— Who knows his virtue's name or place has none."

ii.—personal.

Persist in being yourself, and against fate and yourself. Faith and persistency are life's architects, while doubt and despair bury all under the ruins of any endeavor. You may pull all your paradises about your ears save your earliest; that is to be yours sometime. Strive and have; still striving till striving is having. We mount to heaven mostly on the ruins of our cherished schemes, finding our failures were successes. Nor need we turn sour if we fail to draw the prizes in life's lottery. It were the speck in the fruit, the falling of our manliness into decay. These blanks were all prizes had we the equanimity to take them without whimpering or discontent. The calamities we suffer arise not from circumstances chiefly, but from ourselves. If the dose is nauseous or bitter, 'tis because we are, else it were not drank off with the disgust we manifest. Sweet, bitter or sour,—we taste one thing in everything tasted, and that is ourselves. Could each once be clean delivered of himself how salutary were all things and sufficing. "'Tis in morals as in dietetics, one cannot see his fault till he has got rid of it."

Only virtue is fame; nor is it forward in sounding its own praises, being sure that merit never sleeps untold, nor dies without honors. It cannot: once lived and whispered ever so faintly in private places, it publishes itself in spite of every concealment and sometime blazes its fame abroad by myriads of trumpets. The light trembling in the socket of bashfulness, or hidden under the bushel of misapprehension, or inopportunity, flames forth at fitting moment, irradiates the world thereafter forever, streaks the dawn, as a visitation of the day-spring from on high.

It is as ignoble to go begging conditions as to go begging bread. If too feeble, too proud or unapt to create these, one may make up his mind to dispense with any advantage that power on that side of life confers. Not a circumstance, like the animal whose place in nature is determined, but a creator of circumstances, man brings to his help freedom, opportunity, art, to build a world out of the world in harmony with his wants. If his occupation is spoiling him 'tis the dictate of virtue as of prudence, to quit it for one that in maintaining shall enrich him also. He must be a bad economist who squanders himself on his maintenance; wasting both his days and himself. His gifts are too costly for such cheap improvidence. One's character is the task allotted him to form, his faculties the implements, his genius the workman, life the engagement, and with these gifts of nature and of God, shall he fail to quarry forth from his opportunities a man for his heavenly task-master? "The wise man does not submit to employments which he may undertake, but accommodates and lends himself to them only."

Nor is any man greatest standing apart in his individualism; his strength and dignity come by sympathy with the aims of the best men of the community of which he is a member. Yet whoever seeks the crowd, craving popularity for propping repute, forfeits his claim to reverence and expires in the incense he inhales. The truly great stand upright as columns of the temple whose dome covers all, against whose pillared sides multitudes lean; at whose base they kneel in times of trouble. Stand fast by your convictions and there maintain yourself against every odds. One with yourself, you are one with Almighty God, and a majority against all the world:

Vox priva, vox Dei.

iii.—political.

"To God, thy country, and thyself be true, If priest and people change, keep thou thy guard."

Both conformity and nonconformity are alike impracticable. When the conformist can stay clean in his conformity, the nonconformist come clean out of his nonconformity, it will be time to plead self-consistency. Nor let any stay to make proselytes. I have never known the followers of either to come clean out of themselves even, but casting their tributes to expediency or authority, surrender unreservedly to party or sect and sink the man. Born free into free institutions, it behooves all to preserve that freedom unimpaired, neither intimidated nor bribed by persons or parties: see that these take nothing of theirs with consent, least of all that which gives consent its dignity and worth,—one's integrity. Good men should not obey bad laws too well, lest bad men taking courage from the precedent, disobey good ones.

"Know there's on earth a yet auguster thing, Veiled though it be, than President or King."

The honorable man prefers his privilege of standing uncommitted to parties when these fail to represent the whole of honor and justice for the state. But when politics become attractive by being principled, senates and cabinets the legislators and executives of justice and common rights, servants of the High Laws, then, as an honorable man and faithful citizen, he is won to the polls to cast a pious and patriotic suffrage for having affairs administered through the best men, whom best men promote to offices to which their virtues give dignity and distinction. There are times nevertheless in one's history when abstinence from this first privilege of a freeman and republican, seems a duty best performed in its non-performance, the true means of preserving self-respect, by standing magnanimously as a protest for the right against the wrong—a vote less on the wrong side of a mixed issue, being as two cast on the right side, the silent significance of a name known as the representative of honor and justice, showing where lies the wrong and the shame—the blush of a defeat on the cheek of an ill-gotten victory. Of no party properly, a good man votes by his virtues for mankind, too just to be claimed by any unless to save it from dishonor.

At best the state's polity is deliberative, ruling the right as far as is practicable under the circumstances. Of mixed elements, it contents itself with mixed results,—the best permitted under the mixed conditions. But the statesman may not compromise principle for the sake of accommodating legislation to suit the interests of party. If he ride that horse too fearlessly, he is sure to be overthrown. General intelligence interposes the effective check upon political ambition and carries forward state affairs. But if, unequal to self-government, the people have attained to that sense of freedom and no more, which renders liberty a snare, then the state stumbles towards a despotism, call the rule by any fine name you please. No greater calamity can befall a people than that of deliberating long on issues imperilling liberty; any impotency of indecision betraying a lapse into slavery from which the gravest deliberative wisdom cannot rescue them. Knowingly to put on the yoke and wear it restively meanwhile, were a servitude that only slavery itself can cure.

Where sleep the gods There mob-rule sways the state, Treason hath plots and fell debate, Brother doth brother darkly brand, Few faithful midst sedition's storm do stand, The whole of virtue theirs to stay the reeling land.

"States are destroyed, not so much from want of courage as for want of virtue, and the most pernicious of all ignorance is, when men do not love what they approve; written laws being but images of, or substitutes for those true laws which ought to be present in every human soul through a perfect insight into good."

the soul's errand.

"Go, Soul, the Body's guest, Upon a thankless errand; Fear not to touch the best, The truth shall be thy warrant; Go, since all else must die, And give all else the lie.

Go tell the Court it glows And shines like rotten wood; Go tell the Church it shows What's good, but does not good: If Court and Church reply, Give Court and Church the lie.

Tell Potentates they live Acting, but base their actions; Not loved, unless they give, Nor strong, save by their factions: If Potentates reply, Give Potentates the lie.

Tell men of high condition, That rule affairs of state, Their purpose is ambition, Their practice chiefly hate: And if they do reply, Then give them all the lie.

Tell those that brave it most, They beg for more by spending; Who, in their greatest cost, Seek nothing but commending: And if they make reply, Spare not to give the lie.

Tell Zeal it lacks devotion; Tell Love it is but lust; Tell Time it is but motion; Tell Help it is but dust: And wish them no reply, For thou must give the lie.

Tell Age it daily wasteth; Tell Honor how it alters; Tell Beauty that it blasteth; Tell Favor that she falters: And as they do reply, Give every one the lie.

Tell Wit how much she wrangles In fickle points of niceness; Tell Wisdom she entangles Herself in over niceness; And if they do reply Then give them both the lie.

Tell Physic of her boldness; Tell Skill it is pretension; Tell Charity of coldness; Tell Law it is contention; And if they yield reply, Then give them all the lie.

Tell Fortune of her blindness; Tell Nature of decay; Tell Friendship of unkindness; Tell Justice of delay; And if they do reply, Then give them still the lie.

Tell Arts they have no soundness, But vary by esteeming; Tell Schools they lack profoundness And stand too much on seeming: If Arts and Schools reply, Give Arts and Schools the lie.

Tell Faith it's fled the city; Tell how the country erreth; Tell manhood, shakes off pity, Tell Virtue least preferreth; And if they do reply, Spare not to give the lie.

So when thou hast, as I Commanded thee, done blabbing; Although to give the lie Deserves no less than stabbing; Yet stab at thee who will, No stab the soul can kill."

Illustration: Two fish

TABLETS

BOOK II

SPECULATIVE

"Philosophy is one of the richest presents that man ever received from heaven, being that which raises the mind into the contemplation of eternal things, and is the science which of all others affords the most agreeable entertainment."—Evelyn.

I.

INSTRUMENTALITIES.

"The age, the present times, are not To snudge in, and embrace a cot; Action and blood now get the game, Disdain treads on the peaceful name: Who sits at home, too, bears a load Greater than those that gad abroad."

Henry Vaughan.

Illustration: Banner with mythical characters

INSTRUMENTALITIES.

i.—tendencies.

Our time is revolutionary. It drifts strong and fast into unitarianism and the empire of ideas. All things are undergoing reform and reconstruction; the fellowship of all souls intent on laying broad and deep the foundations of the new institutions. The firm of Globe Brothers & Co., prospers in both hemispheres, every citizen being a partner in the concern. The nations are leagued together on the basis of mutual assistance, finding the old alliances founded on force and fear to be insecure; the people seeing it best to be friends and copartners in conducting the world's affairs;—trade the natural knot tying them by the coarser wants only; world-politics their bond of union and prosperity. No longer playing independent parts safely, they co-operate and conspire for the common welfare, interposing such checks as each individually requires for his security. Ruling is conducted not by legislation nor diplomacy, but by social and commercial inter-communication; every man opening out for himself the sphere suited to his gifts, and taking his thinking and doing into head and hands as a loyal man and citizen. Power is stealing with a speed and momentum unprecedented from the few to the many; is played out on a theatre world-wide, whole populations taking part in affairs; the distance once separating extremes being bridged; middle men with human sympathies and broad common-sense taking the lead and setting the old pretensions aside. A daring realism overleaping the old barriers gives government into the hands of the whole people, rulers being their servants, not masters; presidents and kings the representatives of ideas and paying loyal homage to these crowned heads; the old virtues of reverence for man, fidelity to principle, so venerable and sacred in private stations, seeking reappearance in public life.

If once the great, the wise, were in the minority, and none dreamed of reason becoming popular, reason is fast becoming republicanized; from being the exclusive property of the few is diffusing itself universally as the common possession of the multitude.

Imperial thought now holds her powerful sway, And drives the peoples on their prosperous way.

The freshest, best thoughts of the best minds of all times are claimed by the community; itself the awakened critic and prompter of the best; all thirsting for information,—world-wisdom,—and drinking off eagerly the lore of centuries. Knowledge everywhere diffused is accessible to all, rolls with the globe, dashes against the shores of every sea, delves the caverns, climbs the hill-tops with sun and moon, for the common benefit. If Hesiod wrote for his times that

"Riches are the soul of feeble men,"

our time is fast translating his line practically:

Riches are the hand of able men;

Capitalists holding kings and presidents in check while playing the better game of civilization, equalizing indirectly by legislative philanthropies the extremes—every man's needs being taken as drafts drawn by Providence on opulence, to be honored at sight:

"Stewards of the gods alone Are we; have nothing of our own Save what to us the gods commit, And take away when they see fit."

Once all crimes were capital and punished with death. Now this Draconian code has been so meliorated and softened by the diffusion of mercy and humanity as to take life for life only; is pleading powerfully for the abolition of the death-penalty altogether.

The sects are losing their monopoly in the heavenly luminary, closing no longer their brazen cope of darkening doctrines on the religious horizon to vitiate the social and political morals of mankind. The faiths of the cultivated nations are being revised, Christendom itself drifting with irresistible speed and momentum into a world-religion, commensurate with the advancing thought of advancing minds everywhere. As the Greeks received their Gods from Egypt and Phœnicia, Rome hers from Greece, and we ours from Rome, Judea and Britain, by the law of interfusion we are ripening into a cosmopolitan faith, with its Pantheon for all races.

ii.—method.

Ours were a trivial time if busied in building solely from the senses in facts of understanding, having nothing ideal to enshrine. Without symbols, peoples perish. Things must be exalted into some fair image of mind, the senses and gifts magnetized to body forth thoughts; the eye beholding these in what the hands fashion. Ideas supplement and symbolize facts: the field of realities lying behind unseen; the paddock of the common sense being but an enclosure within the immeasurable spaces of which thought is royal ranger,—owner of domains far larger and richer than these confine or survey, ideal estates which only mind can claim; quarries out of which nature itself is hewn, eye and hand are shapen. Head and hand should go abreast with thought. If the age of iron and bronze has been welding chains and fetters about the forehead and limbs, here, too, is the Promethean thought, using the new agencies let loose by the Dædalus of mechanic invention in the service of soul as of the senses. Having recovered the omnipotence in nature, the omnipresence, graded space, tunnelled the abyss, joined ocean and land by living wires, stolen the chemistry of the solar ray, made light our painter, the lightning our runner, discovered the polar axis, set matter on fire, thought is pushing its inquiries into the hitherto unexplored regions of man's personality, for whose survey and service every modern instrumentality lends the outfit and means—facilities ample, unprecedented—new instruments for the new discoveries—new eyes for the new spectacles. Using no longer contentedly the fumbling fingers of the old circuitous logic, the genius takes the track of the creative thought,—intuitively, cosmically, ontologically. A subtler analysis is finely discriminated, a broader synthesis generalized from the materials accumulated in the mind during the centuries, the globe's contents being gathered in from all quarters, the Book of Creation illustrated anew, and posted to date. The new calculus is ours. An organon alike serviceable to metaphysician and naturalist—whereby things answer to thought, facts are resolved into truths, images into ideas, matter into mind, power into personality, man into God; the One soul in all souls revealed as the Creative Spirit pulsating in all breasts, immanent in all atoms, prompting all wills, and personally embosoming all persons in one unbroken synthesis of Being.[E]

"It has hitherto, unhappily, been the misfortune of the mere materialist, in his mania for matter on the one hand and dread of ideas on the other, to invert this creative order, and thus hang the world's picture as a man with his heels upwards"—a process conducting of necessity to conclusions as derogatory to himself as to Nature's author. Assuming matter as his basis of investigation, force as father of thought, he confounds faculties with organs, life with brute substance, piles his atom atop of atom, cements cell on cell, in constructing his column, sconce mounting sconce aspiringly as it rises, till his shaft of gifts crown itself surreptitiously with the ape's glorified effigy, as Nature's frontispiece and head—life's atomy with life omitted altogether, man wanting. Contrarywise reads the ideal naturalist the book of lives. Opening at Spirit, and thence proceeding to ideas, he finds their types in matter, life unfolds itself naturally in organs, faculties begetting forces, mind moulding things substantially, its connections and interpendencies appear in series and degrees as he traces the leaves, thought the key to originals, man connexus, archetype, and classifier of things; he, straightway, leading forth abreast of himself the animated creation from the chaos,—the primeval Adam naming his mates, himself their ancestor, contemporary and survivor.[F]

iii.—man.

"Imago Dei in animo; mundi, in corpore."

Man is a soul, informed by divine ideas, and bodying forth their image. His mind is the unit and measure of things visible and invisible. In him stir the creatures potentially, and through his personal volitions are conceived and brought forth in matter whatsoever he sees, touches, and treads under foot, the planet he spins.

He omnipresent is, All round himself he lies, Osiris spread abroad, Upstaring in all eyes: Nature his globed thought, Without him she were not, Cosmos from chaos were not spoken, And God bereft of visible token.

A theometer—an instrument of instruments—he gathers in himself all forces, partakes in his plenitude of omniscience, being the Spirit's acme, and culmination in nature. A quickening spirit and mediator between mind and matter, he conspires with all souls, with the Soul of souls, in generating the substance in which he immerses his form, and wherein he embosoms his essence. Not elemental, but fundamental, essential, he generates elements and forces, perpetually replenishing his waste;—the final conflagration a current fact of his existence. Does the assertion seem incredible, absurd? But science, grown luminous and transcendent, boldly declares that life to the senses is a blaze refeeding steadily its flame from the atmosphere it kindles into life, its embers the spent remains from which rises perpetually the new-born Phœnix into regions where flame is lost in itself, and light is its resolvent emblem.[G]

"Thee, eye of heaven, the great soul envies not, By thy male force is all we have, begot."

"This kindles the fire which exists in every thing, is received by every thing. While it sheds a full light, it is itself hidden. Its presence is unknown, unless some material be given to induce the exertion of its power. It is invisible, as well as unquenchable; and it has the faculty of transforming into itself every thing it touches. It renovates every thing by its vital heat, it illumines every thing by its flashing beams; it can neither be confined nor intermingled; it divides and yet is immutable. It always ascends, it is constantly in motion; it moves by its own will and power, and sets in motion every thing around it. It has the power of seizing, but cannot itself be grasped. It needs no aid. It increases silently and breaks forth in majesty upon all. It generates, it is powerful, invisible, and omnipotent. If neglected, its existence might be forgotten, but on friction being applied, it flashes out again like the sword from its scabbard, shines resplendently by its own natural properties, and soars into the air. Many other powers may yet be noticed as belonging to it. For this reason theologians have asserted that all substances being formed of fire, are thus created as nearly as possible in the image of God."

Illustration: Flower

[E] "Truth can be known by the thinking reason. It has been known by speculative thinkers scattered through the ages. Their systems exist and may be mastered. Their differences are not radical, but lie rather in the mode of exposition—the point of departure, the various obstacles overcome, and the character of the technique used. Their agreement is central and pervading. The method of speculative cognition is to be distinguished from that of sensuous certitude, and from the reflection of the understanding by the exhaustive nature of its procedure. It considers its subject in a universal manner and its steps are void of all arbitrariness.

In order to detect a speculative system, ask the following questions of it: 1. "Is the highest principle regarded as a fixed, abstract, and rigid one, or as a concrete and self-moving one?" 2. "Is the starting point of the system regarded as the highest principle, and the onward movement of the same merely a result deduced analytically; or is the beginning treated as the most abstract and deficient, while the final result is the basis of all?" In other words, "Is the system a descent from a first principle or an ascent to one?" This will detect a defect of the method, while the former question, (1,) will detect defects in the content or subject matter of the system."—William T. Harris.

[F] "There are four modes of knowledge which we are able to acquire in the present life:

1. The first of these results from opinion, by which we learn that a thing is, without knowing the why; and this constitutes that part of knowledge which was called by Aristotle and Plato, erudition; and which consists in moral instructions for the purpose of purifying ourselves from immoderate desires.

2. But the second is produced by the sciences, which from establishing certain principles as hypotheses, conduct to necessary conclusions whereby we arrive at the knowledge of the why, as in the mathematical sciences, but at the same time are ignorant with respect to the principles of these conclusions, because they are merely hypothetical.

3. The third species of knowledge is that which results from Plato's dialectic; in which by a progression through ideas, we arrive at the first principles of things, and at that which is no longer hypothetical, and thus dividing some things and analyzing others, by producing many things from one, and one from many.

4. But the fourth species is still more simple than this; because it no longer uses analyses or compositions, but whole things themselves by intuition, and becomes one with the object of its perception; and this energy is the Divine Reason, which Plato speaks of, and which far transcends other modes of knowledge."—Thomas Taylor.

[G] "Man feeds upon air, the plant collecting the materials from the atmosphere and compounding them for his food. Even life itself, as we know it, is but a process of combustion, of which decomposition is the final conclusion. Through this combustion all the constituents return back into air, a few ashes remaining to the earth from whence they came. But from these embers, slowly invisible flames arise into regions where our science has no longer any value."—Schleiden.

II.

MIND.

"But all the Gods we have are in The Mind, By whose proportions only we redeem Our thoughts from out confusion, and do find The measure of ourselves and of our powers, And that all happiness remains confined Within the kingdom of this breast of ours, Without whose bounds all that we look on lies In others' jurisdiction, others' powers, Out of the circuit of our liberties."

Daniel.

Illustration: Banner with grasshopper

MIND.

i.—ideas.

The Ancients had a happy conception of mind in their Pantheon of its Powers. They fabled these as gods celestial, mundane, infernal, according to their several prerogatives and uses. It appears their ideal metaphysic has not as yet been surpassed or superseded altogether, as the classic mythology still holds its high place in modern thought and the schools as a discipline and culture. And for the reason that thought is an Olympian, and man a native of the cloudlands, whatever his metaphysical pretensions. It is only as we sit aloft that we oversee the world below and comprehend aright its drift and revolutions. Ixion falling out of the mist, which he illicitly embraced, is the visionary mistaking images for ideas, and thus paying the cost in his downfall. Plumage, wings or none, imagination or understanding, the fledged idea or the footed fact, the fleet reason or slow—these distribute mankind into thinkers or observers. Only genius combines the double gifts in harmonious proportions and interplay, possessing the mind entire, and is a denizen of both hemispheres. The idealist is the true realist, grasping the substance and not its shadow. The man of sense is the visionary or illusionist, fancying things as permanencies, and thoughts as fleeting phantoms. A Ptolemaist in theory, and earth-bound, he fears to venture above his terra firma into the real firmament whereinto mind is fashioned to spring, and command the wide prospect around.

"Things divine are not attained by mortals who understand body merely, But only those who are lightly armed arrive at the summit."

Thought is the Mercury; and things are caught on the wing, and by the flying spectator only. Nature is thought in solution. Like a river whose current is flowing steadily, drop displacing drop, particle following particle of the passing stream, nothing abides but the spectacle. So the flowing world is fashioned in the idealist's vision, and is the reality which to slower wits seems fixed in space and apart from thought, subsisting in itself. But thought works in the changing and becoming, not in the changed and become; all things sliding by imperceptible gradations into their contraries, the cosmos rising out of the chaos by its agency. Nothing abides; all is image and expression out of our thought.

So Speech represents the flowing essence as sensitive, transitive; the word signifying what we make it at the moment of using, but needing life's rounded experiences to unfold its manifold senses and shades of meaning.[H] Definitions, however precise, fail to translate the sense. They confine in defining; good for the occasion, but leaps in the dark; at best, guesses at the meanings we seek; parapets built in the air, the lighter the safer; mere ladders of sound, whose rounds crumble as we tread. We write as we speak. The silence bars away the sense, closing shape and significance from us. Here is the mind facing its image the world, and wishing to see the reflection at a glance, a trope. No. The world is but the symbol of mind, and speech a mythology woven of both. Each thing suggests the thought imperfectly, and thought is translatable only by thought. Our standards are ideas, those things of the mind and originals of words.

Thought's winged hand, Marshals in trope and tone The ideal band. Genius alone Holds fast in eye The fleeing God— Brings Beauty nigh— Senses descry Footsteps he trod, Figures he drew, Shapes old and new, The fair, the true, In soul and sod.

Nature is thought immersed in matter, and seen differently as viewed from the one or the other. To the laborer it is a thing of mere uses; to the scholar a symbol and a muse. The same landscape is not the same as seen by poet and plowman. It stands for material benefit to the one, immaterial to the other. The artist's point of view is one of uses seen as means of beauty, that being the complement of uses. His faculties handle his organs; the hands, like somnambulists, playing their under parts to ideas; these, again, serving uses still higher. The poet, awakened from the sleep of things, beholds beauty in essence and form, being thus admitted to the secret of causes, the laws of pure Being.

The like of Persons. Every one's glass reflects his bias. If the thinker views men as troglodytes—like Plato's groundlings, unconscious of the sun shining overhead; men of the senses, and mere makeweights—they in turn pronounce him the dreamer, sitting aloof from human concerns, an unproductive citizen and waste power in the world. Still, thought makes the world and sustains it; atom and idea alike being its constituents. Nor can thought, from its nature, at once become popular. It is the property and delight of the few fitted by genius and culture for discriminating truth from adhering falsehood, and of setting it forth in its simplicity and truth to the understandings of the less favored. Apart by pursuit from the mass of mankind, or at most taking a separate and subordinate part in affairs that engage their sole attention, the thinker seems useless to all save those who can apprehend and avail themselves of his immediate labors; and the less is he known and appreciated as his studies are of lasting importance to his race. Yet time is just, and brings all men to the side of thought as they become familiar with its practical benefits, else the victory were not gained for philosophy, and wisdom justified in him of her chosen children.

Ideas alone supplement nature and complement mind. Our senses neither satisfy our sensibility nor intellect. The mind's objects are mind itself; imagination the mind's eye, memory the ear, ideas of the one imaging the other, and the mind thus rounding its history. And hence the pleasurable perspective experienced in surveying our personality from obverse sides in the landscape of existence—culture, in its inclusive sense, making the tour of our gifts, and acquainting us with ourselves and the world we live in. All men gain a residence in the senses and the family of natural things; few come into possession of their better inheritance and home in the mind—the Palace of Power and Personality. Sons of earth rather by preference, and chiefly emulous for their little while of its occupancy, its honors, emoluments, they here pitch their tents, here plant fast their hopes, and roll through life they know not whither.

ii.—the gifts.

Instinct is the fountain of Personal power, and mother of the Gifts. With instinct there may be an embryo, but sense must be superinduced to constitute an animal—memory, moral sentiment, reason, imagination, personality, to constitute the man. The mind is the man, not the outward shape: all is in the Will. The animal may mount to fancy in the grade of gifts; but reason, imagination, conscience, choice—the mediating, creative, ruling powers—the personality—belong to man alone. But not to all men, save in essence and possibility. Man properly traverses the hierarchy of Powers—spiritual, intellectual, moral, natural, animal—their full possession and interplay enabling him to hold free colloquy with all, giving the whole mind voice in the dialogue. Thus:

Asking for
The Who? | Will | responds, | The Person.
The Ought? | Conscience | " | The Right.
The How? | Imagination | " | The Idea.
The Why? | Reason | " | The Truth.
The Thus? | Fancy | " | The Image.
The Where? | Understanding | " | The Fact.
The When? | Memory | " | The Event.
The Which? | Sense | " | The Thing.
The What? | Instinct | " | The Life.

In accordance with this gradation of gifts, man and animals may be classified as to their measures of intelligence respectively; instinct being taken as the initial gift and prompter of the rest in their order of genesis, growth and adaptability: man alone, when fully unfolded in harmony, being capable of ranging throughout the entire scale.[I]

Thus:

Illustration: Brain

Class
I. | Instinct, Sense, Memory, Understanding, Fancy, Reason, Imagination, Conscience, Personality.
II. | Instinct, Sense, Memory, Understanding, Fancy, Reason, Imagination, Conscience.
III. | Instinct, Sense, Memory, Understanding, Fancy, Reason, Imagination.
IV. | Instinct, Sense, Memory, Understanding, Fancy, Reason.
V. | Instinct, Sense, Memory, Understanding, Fancy.
VI. | Instinct, Sense, Memory, Understanding.
VII. | Instinct, Sense, Memory.
VIII. | Instinct, Sense.

Man is
Spiritual as he | experiences | Personality, Thought
Moral | " | Choice, Conscience.
Intellectual | " | Imagination, Reason.
Natural | " | Fancy, Understanding.
Brute | " | Memory, Sense.
Demonic | " | Appetite, Passion.

Nature does not contain the Personal man. He is the mind with the brute omitted, or, conversely, the animal transfigured and divinized by the Spirit. It is a slow process; long for the individual, longeval for the race. Centuries, millenniads elapse, mind meanwhile travailing with man, the birth arrested for the most part, or premature, the translation from germ to genius being supernatural, thought hardly delivered from spine and occiput into face and forehead, the mind uplifted and crowned in personality.

Pure mind alone is face, Brute matter surface all; As souls immersed in space, Ideal rise, or idol fall.

iii.—person.

The lapsed Personality, or deuce human and divine, has played the prime part in metaphysical theology of times past, as it does still. But rarely has thought freed itself from the notion of duplicity, triplicity, and grounded its faith in the Idea of the One Personal Spirit, as a pure theism, and planted therein a faith and cultus. If we claim this for the Hebrew thought, as it rose to an intuition in the mind of its inspired thinker, it passed away with him; since Christendom throughout mythologizes, rather than thinks about his attributes; is divided, subdivided into sects, schools of doctrine; each immersed so deeply in its special individualism as to be unable to rise to the comprehension of the Personal One. Nor, considering the demands mind makes upon the senses,—these inclining always to idolatry,—is it surprising that this spiritual theism, seeking its symbols in pure thought, without image graven or conceived, should find any considerable number of followers. Yet a faith less supersensuous and ideal, any school of thought, code of doctrine, creed founded on substance, force, law, tradition, authority, miracle, is a covert superstition, ending logically in atheism, necessity, nihilism, disowning alike personality, free agency. Nature is sufficient for the creature, but person alone for man, without whose immanency and inspirations, man were heartless and worshipless. The Person wanting all is wanting. For where God is disembosomed, spectres rule the chaos within and without.[J]

"Make us a god," said man: Power first the voice obeyed, And soon a monstrous form Its worshippers dismayed; Uncouth and huge, by nations rude adored, With savage rites and sacrifice abhorred.

"Make us a god," said man: Art next the voice obeyed, Lovely, serene, and grand, Uprose the Athenian maid: The perfect statue, Greece with wreathed brows, Adores in festal rites and lyric vows.

"Make us a god," said man: Religion followed art, And answered, "Look within; Find God in thine own heart— His noblest image there, and holiest shrine, Silent revere—and be thyself divine."

iv.—choice.

Heaven hell's pit copes: Nor fathoms any sin's abyss, or clambers out, Save by the steps his choice hath delved.

The gods descend in the likeness of men, and ascending transfigure the man into their Personal likeness. Descending below himself he debases and disfigures this image; as by choice he leaps upwards, so by choice he lapses downwards. Yet, while free to choose, he sinks himself never beneath himself absolutely, his beneath subsisting by his election only. His choices free or fetter, elevate or debase, deify or demonize his humanity. Superior to all forces is the Spirit within, doing or defying his determinations, ever holding him fast to the consequences. Obeying its dictates or disobeying, frees or binds. It has golden chains for the good, for others iron. Love is its soft, yet mighty curb; freedom its easy yoke; fate its fetter.

Nor man in evil willingly doth rest, Nor God in good unwillingly is blest.

There is no appeal from the decisions of this High Court of Duty in the breast. The Ought is the Must and the Inevitable. One may misinterpret the voice, may deliberate, disobey the commandment, but cannot escape the consequences of his election. The deed decides. Nor is the Conscience appeased till sooner or later our deserts are pronounced—The welcome "well done," or the dread "depart."

"'Tis vain to flee till gentle mercy show Her better eye. The further off we go The swing of justice deals the mightier blow."

Only the repenting consciousness of freedom abused restores the lost holiness, redeems from the guilty lapse—the sin that in separating us from the One, revealed the fearful Doubleness within, opening the yawning pit down which we stumbled, to become the prey of the undying worm.

"Meek love alone doth wash our ills away."

And with love enough, knowledge were useless. It comes in defect of love. Exhaustless in its sources, love supersedes knowledge, being the proper intellect of spirit and spring of intuition—God being very God, because his love absorbs all knowledge and contains his Godhead. Knowing without loving is decease from love, and lapse from pure intellect into sense. Knowledge is not enough. The more knowledge, the deeper the depths left unsounded, the more exacting our faith in the certainty of knowing. Our faith feels after its objects, if haply by groping in the darkness of our ignorance we may fathom its depths, and find ourselves in Him who is ever seeking us. "Although no man knoweth the spirit of a man save The Spirit within him, yet is there something in him that not even man's spirit knoweth."

"WHO placed thee here, did something then infuse Which now can tell thee news."

Illustration: Flower

[H]

| CATEGORIES OF SPEECH,
| being:
Flowing, |  | Fixed,
Subjective. |  | Objective.
i. | iii. | ii.
Actions, | Participles, | Things,
Verbs. |  | Nouns.
| iv.
| Qualities,
| Adverbs, Adjectives.
| v.
| Relations,
| Prepositions, Conjunctions, Pronouns.

[I] "One would think nothing were easier for us than to know our own mind, discern what was our main scope and drift, and what we proposed to ourselves as our end in the several occurrences of our lives. But our thoughts have such an obscure, implicit language, that it is the hardest thing in the world to make them speak out distinctly; and for this reason the right method is to give them voice and accent. And this, in our default, is what the philosophers endeavor to do to our hand, when, holding out a kind of vocal looking-glass, they draw sound out of our breast, and instruct us to personate ourselves in the plainest manner."—Lord Shaftesbury.

[J] "The first principle of all things is Living Goodness, armed with Wisdom and all-powerful Love. But if a man's soul be once sunk by evil fate or desert, from the sense of this high and heavenly truth into the cold conceit that the original of all lies either in shuffling chance or in the stark root of unknowing nature and brute necessity, all the subtle cords of reason, without the timely recovery of that divine torch within the hidden spirit of his heart, will never be able to draw him out of that abhorred pit of atheism and infidelity. So much better is innocency and piety than subtle argument, and sincere devotion than curious dispute. But contemplations concerning the dry essence of the Godhead have for the most part been most confusing and unsatisfactory. Far better is it to drink of the blood of the grape than to bite the root of the grape, to smell the rose than to chew the stalk. And blessed be God, the meanest of men are capable of the former, very few successful in the latter; and the less, because the reports of those that have busied themselves that way have not only seemed strange to most men, but even repugnant to one another. But we should in charity refer this to the nature of the pigeon's neck than to mistake and contradiction. One and the same object in nature affords many different aspects. And God is infinitely various and simple; like a circle, indifferent whether you suppose it of one uniform line, or an infinite number of angles. Wherefore it is more safe to admit all possible perfections of God than rashly to deny what appears not to us from our particular posture."—Henry More.

III.

GENESIS.

"Had man withstood the trial, his descendants would have been born one from another in the same way that Adam—i. e., mankind—was, namely, in the image of God; for that which proceeds from the Eternal has eternal manner of birth."—Behmen.

Illustration: Banner with beetle

GENESIS.

i.—vestiges.

Boehme, the subtilest thinker on Genesis since Moses, conceives that nature fell from its original oneness by fault of Lucifer before man rose physically from its ruins; and moreover, that his present existence, being the struggle to recover from nature's lapse, is embarrassed with double difficulties by defection from rectitude on his part. We think it needs no Lucifer other than mankind collectively conspiring, to account for nature's mishaps, or man's, since, assuming man to be nature's ancestor, and nature man's ruins rather, himself were the impediment he seeks to remove; nature being the child of his choices, corresponding in large—or macrocosmically—to his intents. Eldest of creatures, the progenitor of all below him, personally one and imperishable in essence, if debased forms appear in nature, these are consequent on man's degeneracy prior to their genesis. And it is only as he lapses out of his integrity, by debasing his essence, that he impairs his original likeness, and drags it into the prone shapes of the animal kingdom—these being the effigies and vestiges of his individualized and shattered personality. Behold these upstarts of his loins, everywhere the mimics jeering at him saucily, or gaily parodying their fallen lord.

"Most happy he who hath fit place assigned To his beasts, and disafforested his mind; Can use his horse, goat, wolf, and every beast, And is not ape himself to all the rest."

It is man alone who conceives and brings forth the beast in him that swerves and dies. Perversion of will by mis-choice precipitates him into serpentine form, duplicated in sex,

"Parts of that Part which once was all."

'Tis but one and the same soul in him, entertaining a dialogue with himself, that is symbolized in the Serpent, Adam, and the woman; nor needs there fabulous "Paradises Lost or Regained," for setting in relief this serpent symbol of temptation, this Lord or Lucifer in our spiritual Eden:

"First state of human kind, Which one remains while man doth find Joy in his partner's company; When two, alas! adulterate joined, The serpent made the three."

ii.—serpent symbol.

Better is he who is above temptation, than he who, being tempted, overcomes, since the latter but suppresses the evil inclination stirring in his breast which the former has not. Whoever is tempted has so far sinned as to entertain the tempting lust within, betraying his lapse from singleness or holiness. The virtuous choose, are virtuous by choice; the holy, being one, deliberate not—their volitions answering spontaneously to their desires. It is the cleft personality, or other within, which seduces the Will, and is the Adversary and Deuce we become individually, and impersonate in the Snake.

Chaste love's a maid, Though shapen as a man.

But one were an Œdipus to expound this serpent mythology; whereby is symbolized the mysteries of genesis, and of The One rejoining man's parted personality, and thus recreating mankind. Coeval with flesh, the symbol appears wherever traces of civilization exist; a remnant of it in the ancient Phallus worship having come to us disguised in our Mayday dance. Nor was it confined to carnal knowledge merely. The serpent symbolized divine wisdom, also; and it was under this acceptation that it became associated with those "traditionary teachers of mankind whose genial wisdom entitled them to divine honors." An early Christian sect, called Ophites, worshipped it as the personation of natural knowledge. So the injunction, "Be ye wise as serpents and harmless as doves," becomes the more significant when we learn that seraph in the original means a serpent; cherub, a dove. And these again symbolize facts in osteological science as connected with the latest theories of the vertebrated cranium,[K] which view Nature as ophiomorphous—a series of spines, crowned, winged, webbed, finned, footed in structure—set erect, prone, trailing, as charged with life in higher potency or lower; man, holding the sceptre of dominion as he maintains his inborn rectitude, or losing his prerogative as lapsed from his integrity—hereby debasing his form and parcelling his gifts away in the prone shapes distributed throughout nature's kingdoms. Or, again as aspiring for lost supremacy, he uplift and crown his fallen form with forehead, countenance, speech,—thus liberating the genius from the slime of its prone periods, and restoring it to rectitude, religion, science, fellowship, the ideal arts.

"Unless above himself he can Erect himself, how poor a thing is man."

iii.—embryons.

"The form is in the archetype before it appears in the work, in the divine mind before it exists in the creature."

As the male impregnates the female, so mind charges matter with form and fecundity; the spermatic world being life in transmission and body in embryo; the egg a genesis and seminary of forms, the kingdoms of animated nature sleeping coiled in its yolk, and awaiting the quickening magnetism that ushers them into light. Herein the human embryon unfolds in series the lineaments of all forms in the living hierarchy, to be fixed at last in its microcosm, unreeling therefrom its faculties into filamental organs, spinning so minutely the threads, "that were it physically possible to dissolve away all other members of the body, there would still remain the full and perfect figure of a man. And it is this perfect cerebro-spinal axis, this statue-like tissue of filaments, that, physically speaking, is the man."[L] The mind contains him spiritually, and reveals him physically to himself and his kind. Every creature assists in its own formation, souls being essentially creative and craving form.

"The creature ever delights in the image of the Creator; And the soul of man will in a manner clasp God to herself; Having nothing mortal, she is wholly inebriated of God; For she glories in the harmony under which the human body exists."

Throughout the domain of spirit desire creates substance wherein all creatures seek conjunction, lodging and nurture. Nor is there anything in nature save desire holding substances together, all things being dissolvable and recombinable in this spiritual menstruum.

"'Tis the blossom whence there blows Everything that lives and grows; It doth make the heavens to move And the sun to burn in love: The strong to weak it seeks to yoke, And makes the ivy climb the oak, Under whose shadows lions wild, Softened thereby grow tame and mild. It all medicine doth appease, It burns the fishes in the seas, Not all the skill its wounds can stanch, Not all the sea its thirst can quench: It did make the bloody spear Once a leafy coat to wear, While in his leaves there shrouded lay Sweet birds for love that sing and play; And of all the joyful flame, Bud and blossom this we name."

iv.—temperament.

Temperament is a fate, oftentimes, from whose jurisdiction its victims hardly escape, but do its bidding herein, be it murder or martyrdom. Virtues and crimes are mixed in one's cup of nativity, with the lesser or larger margin of choice. Unless of chaste extraction, his regeneration shall be wrought with difficulty through the struggling kingdom of evil into the peaceful realm of good. Blood is a destiny. One's genius descends in the stream from long lines of ancestry, from fountains whence rose Adam the first and his Eve. The oldest and most persistent of forces, if once ennobled by virtue and refined by culture, it resists base mixtures long, preserving its purity and power for generations. All gifts descend in the torrent; all are mingled in the ecstasy, as purity or passion prevail; genius being the fruit of chaste conjunctions, brute force of adulterous—the virgin complexions or the mixed.[M]

"Our generation moulds our state, Its virtues, vices, fix our fate; Nor otherwise experience proves, The unseen hands make all the moves, If some are great, and some are small, Some climb to good, some from good fortune fall,— Not figures these of speech,—forefathers sway us all.

Me from the womb the midnight muse did take, She clothed me, nourished, and mine head With her own hands she fashioned; She did a cov'nant with me make, And circumcised my tender soul, and thus she spake: 'Thou of my church shalt be, Hate and renounce (said she) Wealth, honour, pleasure, all the world for me. Thou neither great at court, nor in the war, Nor at th' exchange shalt be, nor at the wrangling bar, Content thyself with the small barren praise, That neglected verse does raise.'

She spake, and all my years to come Took their determined doom: Their several ways of life, let others choose, Their several pleasures let them use, But I was born for love and for a muse.

With fate what boots it to contend? Such I began, such am, and so shall end: The star that did my being frame Was but a lambent flame; Some light indeed it did dispense, But less of heat and influence.

No matter, poet, let proud fortune see That thou canst her despise no less than she does thee; Why grieve thyself or blush to be As all the inspired tuneful seers, And all thy great forefathers were from Shakspeare to thy peers."

Yet, biassed by temperament as we may be, whether for good or for evil, such measure of freedom is ours, nevertheless, as enables us to free ourselves from its tendencies and temptations. In the breast of each is a liberating angel, at whose touch, when we will it persistently, the doors of our dungeon fly open and loose their prisoner.

[K] "Spix, in his 'Cephalogenesis,' aids Oken's theory of the spinal cranium in endowing the artist's symbol of the cherub with all that it seemed to want before that discovery; namely: with a thorax, abdomen and pelvis, arms, legs, hands and feet."—Owen.

[L] "Thou hast possessed my reins, thou hast covered me in my mother's womb. My substance was not hid from thee when I was made in a secret place, and there curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth: there thine eyes did see my substance yet being imperfect: and in thy Book were all my members written, which in continuance were fashioned when as yet there was none of them."—Psalm cxxxix: 13, 15, 16.

[M] Boehme thus classifies and describes the temperaments:

"Lapsing out of her innocency, man's soul enters into a strange inn or lodging, wherein he is held sometime captive as in a dungeon, wherein are four chambers or stories, in one of which she is fated to remain, though not without instincts of the upper wards (if her place be the lowest) and hope of finding the keys by which she may ascend into these also. These chambers are the elements of his constitution, and characterized as the four temperaments or complexions, namely:

I. The melancholic or earthy. II. The phlegmatic or aqueous. III. The choleric or fiery. IV. The sanguine or ethereal.

I. The splenetic or melancholic partakes of the properties of the earth, being cold, dark, and hungry for the light. It is timid, incredulous, empty, consuming itself in corrosive cares, anxieties and sorrows, being sad when the sun shines, and needs perpetual encouragement. Its color is dark.

II. The phlegmatic being nourished from the earth's moisture, is inclined to heaviness; is gross, effeminate, dull of apprehension, careless, indifferent. It has but faint glimpses of the light, and needs much inculcation from without. Its color is brown.

III. The choleric is of the fiery temper, inclined to violence, wrath, obstinacy, irreverence, ambition. It is impulsive, contentious, aspires for power, and authority. It is greedy of the sun, and glories in its blazing beams. Its color is florid.

IV. The sanguine, being tempered of ether, and the least imprisoned, is cheerful, gentle, genial, versatile, naturally chaste, insinuating, searching into the secret of things natural and spiritual, and capable of divining the deepest mysteries. It loves the light, and aspires toward the sun. Its complexion is fair."

IV.

METAMORPHOSES.

"Generation is not a creation of life, but a production of things to sense, and making them manifest. Neither is change death, but a hiding of that which was."—Hermes Trismegistus.

Illustration: Banner of two birds

METAMORPHOSES.

i.—sleep.

Life is a current of spiritual forces. In perpetual tides, the stream traverses its vessels to vary its pulsations and perspectives of things, receding from forehead and face into cerebellum and spine, to be replenished night by night from these springs of vigor. The Genius trims our lamps while we sleep. It plumbs us by day and levels us by night. Here recumbent as at nature's navel, her energies flood the spirits with puissance, restoring tone and tension for the coming day's occupations. Then what varying scenes rise to fancy's eye, while the mind lapses out of the globe of thought, the house of the senses, into the palaces of memory through the gate of dreams! Under the sway of occult forces we partake of preternatural insights, having access to sources of information unopened to us in our wakeful hours. Vast systems of sympathies, antedating and extending beyond our mundane experiences, absorb us within their sphere, relating us to other worlds of life and light; as if stirred by the nocturnal impulse we climbed the empyrean, still crediting the superstition of our affinities with the starry orbs—

"Eternal fathers of whate'er exists below."

Or, pursuing our peregrinations, we plunge suddenly into the abyss of origins, transformed for the moment into slumbering umbilici, skirting the shores of our nativity; or, ascending spine-wise, traverse the hierarchy of gifts. How we grope strangely! Seeking the One amidst the many, we lose ourselves in finding the One we lost. We enter bodies of our bodies, souls of our soul, successively; each organ our prisoner, we in turn the prisoner of each, till by chance the bewildered occupant recover the key to the wards of his apartments, and forth issues into the haunts of his consciousness, the world of natural things. For never is the sleep so profound, the dream so distracting, as to obliterate all sense of the personality,—despite these vagaries of the night, these opiates of the senses, memory sometime dispels the oblivious slumber, and recovers for the mind recollections of its descent and destiny. Some reliques of the ancient consciousness survive, recalling our previous history and experiences.[N]

ii.—reminiscence.

"Heaven's exile straying from the orb of light."

And but for our surface and distracted lives,—lived here for the most part in the senses,—we should have never lost the consciousness of our descent into mortality, nor have questioned our resurrection and longevity. But as in descending, all drink of oblivion—some more, some less—it happens that while all are conscious of life, by defect of memory, our recollections are various concerning it; those discerning most vividly who have drank least of oblivion, they more easily recalling the memory of their past existence. Ancients of days, we hardly are persuaded to believe that our souls are no older than our bodies, and to date our nativity from our family registers, as if time and space could chronicle the periods of the immortal mind by its advent into the flesh and decease out of it.

"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; The soul that rises with us, our life's star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar; Not in entire forgetfulness, Nor yet in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God who is our home."

None of us remember when we did not remember, when memory was nought, and ourselves were unborn. Memory is the premise of our sensations, it dates our immortality. Nestling ever in the twilight of our earliest recollections, it cradles our nativity, canopies our hopes, and bears us babes, out of our bodies as into them; opening vistas alike into our past and coming existence. The thread of our experiences, it cannot be severed by any accidents of our mortality; time and space, earliest found and last to leave us, fading and falling away as we pass into recollections which these can neither date nor confine—the smiles that welcomed, the tears that dismiss us, being of no age, nor place nor time.

"O love! thou makest all things even In earth and heaven: Finding thy way through prison bars Up to the stars: Or true to the Almighty plan That out of dust created man, Thou lookest in a grave, to see Thine immortality."

iii.—immortality.

If immortality inhere in objects known by us, these surely are persons; the ties of kindred being the liveliest, most abiding of any; our faith in the impossibility of being sundered forever, remaining unshaken to the last, and surviving all changes that our bodies may undergo.

"Deep love, the godlike in us, still believes Its objects are immortal as itself."

'Tis not our bodies that contain us but our souls. None beholds with bodily eyes the apparition of his person, sees and survives the ghost he provokes. The perturbed spirits alone linger about the tombs—dead before they die, dead burying their dead—comfortless because these are bereft of bodies, flesh being all of them they ever knew.[O]

Moreover, the insatiableness of our desires asserts our personal imperishableness. Yearning for full satisfactions while balked of these perpetually, we still prosecute our search for them, our faith in their attainment remaining unshaken under every disappointment. Our hope is eternal as ourselves—a never ending, still beginning quest of our divinity. Infinite in essence, we crave it in potence. The boundlessness and elasticity of the mind, its power of self-recovery, uprise from temporary obstructions self-imposed, or from temperament, are assurances made doubly sure of our soul's infinitude and longevity. So the lives of empires, of men of genius and sanctity, are grand illustrations of its heroic strife for the largest freedom, the widest sway,—of instincts striving within, which these pent confines of time and space can neither subjugate nor appease.

"Take this, my child," the father said, "This globe I give thy mind for bread;" Eager we seize the proffered store, The bait devour—then ask for more.

"Everything aspires to its own perfection and is restless till it attain it, as the trembling needle till it find its beloved north. And the knowledge of this is innate as is the desire, else the last had been a torment and needless importunity. Nature shoots not at rovers. Even inanimate things, while ignorant of their perfection, are carried towards it by a blind impulse. But that which conducts them knows. The next order of beings have some sight of it, and man most perfectly till he touch the apple." Our delights suckle us life long, our desires being memories of past satisfactions, and we here but sip pleasures once tasted to satiety. The more exquisite our enjoyments, the more transient; the more eagerly sought, the more elusive. We cannot come out of our paradise, nor stay in it contentedly, the gates of bliss closing on opening.

"E'en as the amorous needle joys to bend To her magnetic friend, Or as the greedy lover's eyeballs fly At his fair mistress' eye, Eager we kindle life's illumined stuff, Can tire, nor tease, nor kindle it enough."

Still heaven is, our hearts affirm against every disappointment; and whether behind or before us, as memory or as hope, 'tis to be ours,—our port and resting place sometime in the stream of ages.

"All before us lies the way; Give the past unto the wind; All before us is the day, Night and darkness are behind.

Eden with its angels bold, Love and flowers and coolest sea, Is less an ancient story told Than a glowing prophecy.

In the spirit's perfect air, In the passions tame and kind, Innocence from selfish care, The real Eden we shall find.

When the soul to sin hath died, True and beautiful and sound, Then all earth is sanctified, Upsprings paradise around.

From the spirit-land, afar All disturbing force shall flee; Stir, nor toil, nor hope shall mar Its immortal unity."

[N] "'Tis well known that according to the sense of antiquity, these two considerations were always included in that one opinion of the soul's immortality—namely; its pre-existence as well as its post existence. Neither were there ever any of the ancients before christianity, that held the soul's future permanency after death, who did not likewise assert its pre-existence,—they clearly perceiving that if it was once granted that the soul was generated, it could never be proved but that it might be also corrupted. And therefore the asserters of its immortality commonly began here—first, to prove its pre-existence, proceeding thence afterwards to establish its permanency after death."—Cudworth.

[O] Let us remember that immortality signifies a negative, or not having of mortality, and that a positive term is required by which to express a change, since nature teaches that whatever is, will abide with the being it is, unless forced out of it by something positive. And as it appears that man's soul has these grounds in her which make all visible things to be perishable, it is obvious that his soul is immortal and the cause of mortality itself.—Sir Kenelm Digby.

Messrs. Roberts Brothers' Publications.

THE LAYMAN'S BREVIARY. A Selection for Every Day in the Year. Translated from the German of Leopold Schefer, by Charles T. Brooks. In one square 16mo. volume, bevelled cloth, gilt edges. Price, $2.50. A cheaper edition. Price, $1.50.

"The 'Layman's Breviary' will adorn drawing-room centre-tables, boudoirs, library nooks; it will be a favorite travelling companion, and be carried on summer excursions to read under trees and on verandas. For every day of the year there are thoughts, counsels, aspirations—many of them Oriental in tone, or patriarchal in spirit; there are delineations of nature, pure utterances of faith; each page contains fresh and earnest expressions of a poetic, believing, humane soul—often clad in exquisite language. It is eminently a household book, and one to be taken up and enjoyed at intervals."—Boston Transcript.

"Each poem is in itself a sermon; not of dry, theological dogmas, but the love and care of the Infinite, the yearning and outreaching of the human to grasp the divine. It is a book not to be lightly read and carelessly tossed aside, but to be studied daily until the lessons it conveys are learned, and its comforting words written on every heart. Of the author's religious opinions we know nothing; what creed he subscribes to we cannot tell; but we do know that he is a true worshipper of God, and lover of his fellow-men. This book should be on every table; all households should possess it; we cannot too highly recommend it to the notice of all. It has been truly said, that 'these blooming pictures of Nature, praising the love, the goodness, the wisdom of the Creator and His work, form in truth a poetical book of devotion for the layman whom the dogma does not satisfy—a breviary for man.'"—The Wide World.

MY PRISONS. Memoirs of Silvio Pellico. With an Introduction by Epes Sargent, and embellished with fifty Illustrations from drawings by Billings. One square 12mo. volume, bevelled cloth, gilt edges. Price, $3.50. A cheaper edition. Price, $2.00.

"Some thirty-five years ago the publication of "My Prisons, Memoirs of Silvio Pellico," first appealed to the sympathies of the Italian people. The history of a martyr to freedom is always entertaining, and the pathos and beauty which surround the narrative in question have always kept alive the interest of all intelligent nations. It ranks, therefore, deservedly high in biographical literature. The present edition is a very superior one, and is introduced by Epes Sargent, who vigorously reviews the despotism of Austria in the incarceration of Pellico, and the changes which have since occurred in European politics."—Chicago Evening Journal.

"The story is simply told, for adventures like those of the author need no graces of style or highly wrought figures. The book has a charm which few novels possess; indeed, one can hardly believe that it is true, and that so few years have passed since men of noble birth and fine culture were condemned to suffer for years in prison on account of their political opinions."—Boston Transcript.

☞ Mailed, post paid, to any address, on receipt of the price, by the Publishers.

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