Choice Specimens of American Literature, and Literary Reader Part 30

Accustomed to the infinite wit and exhuberant richness of his writings, his talk is still an amazement and a splendor scarcely to be faced with steady eyes. He does not converse,--only harangues. It is the usual misfortune of such marked men (happily not one invariable or inevitable) that they cannot allow other minds room to breathe and show themselves in their atmosphere, and thus miss the refreshment and instruction which the greatest never cease to need from the experience of the humblest.

Carlyle allows no one a chance, but bears down all opposition, not only by his wit and onset of words, resistless in their sharpness as so many bayonets, but by actual physical superiority, raising his voice and rushing on his opponent with a torrent of sound. This is not the least from unwillingness to allow freedom to others; on the contrary, no man would more enjoy a manly resistance to his thought; but it is the impulse of a mind accustomed to follow out its own impulse as the hawk its prey, and which knows not how to stop in the chase. Carlyle, indeed, is arrogant and overbearing, but in his arrogance there is no littleness or self-love: it is the heroic arrogance of some old Scandinavian conqueror,--it is his nature, and the untamable impulse that has given him power to crush the dragons. You do not love him, perhaps, nor revere, and perhaps, also, he would only laugh at you if you did; but you like him heartily, and like to see him the powerful smith, the Siegfried, melting all the old iron, in his furnace till it glows to a sunset red, and burns you if you senselessly go too near. He seemed to me quite isolated, lonely as the desert; yet never was man more fitted to prize a man, could he find one to match his mood. He finds such, but only in the past. He sings rather than talks. He pours upon you a kind of satirical, heretical, critical poem, with regular cadences, and generally catching up near the beginning some singular epithet, which serves as a _refrain_ when his song is full, or with which as with a knitting-needle he catches up the st.i.tches, if he has chanced now and then to let fall a row. For the higher kinds of poetry he has no sense, and his talk on that subject is delightfully and gorgeously absurd; he sometimes stops a minute to laugh at it himself, then begins anew with fresh vigor; for all the spirits he is driving before him seem to him as Fata Morgana; ugly masks in fact, if he can but make them turn about, but he laughs that they seem to others such dainty Ariels. He puts out his chin sometimes till it looks like the beak of a bird, and his eyes flash bright instinctive meanings like Jove's bird; yet he is not calm and grand enough for the eagle: he is more like the falcon, and yet not of gentle blood enough for that either. He is not exactly like anything but himself, and therefore you cannot see him without the most hearty refreshment and goodwill, for he is original, rich, and strong enough to afford a thousand faults; one expects some wild land in a rich kingdom.

His talk, like his books, is full of pictures, his critical strokes masterly; allow for his point of view, and his survey is admirable. He is a large subject; I cannot speak more nor wiselier of him now, nor needs it; his works are true, to blame and praise him, the Siegfried of England, great and powerful, if not quite invulnerable, and of a might rather to destroy evil than legislate for good. At all events, he seems to be what Destiny intended, and represents fully a certain side; so we make no remonstrance as to his being and proceeding for himself, though we sometimes must for us.

=_Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1809-._= (Manual, p. 520.)

From "The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table."

=_211._= CONSEQUENCES OF EXPOSING AN OLD ERROR.

Did you never, in walking in the fields, come across a large flat stone which had lain, n.o.body knows how long, just where you found it, with the gra.s.s forming a little hedge, as it were, all round it, close to its edges,--and have you not, in obedience to a kind of feeling that told you it had been lying there long enough, insinuated your stick, or your foot, or your fingers, under its edge, and turned it over as a housewife turns a cake, when she says to herself, "It's done brown enough by this time?" What an odd revelation, and what an unforeseen and unpleasant surprise to a small community, the very existence of which you had not suspected, until the sudden dismay and scattering among its members produced by your turning the old stone over! Blades of gra.s.s flattened down, colorless, matted together, as if they had been bleached and ironed; hideous crawling creatures, some of them coleopterous or h.o.r.n.y-sh.e.l.led,--turtle-bugs one wants to call them; some of them softer but cunningly spread out and compressed like Lepine watches; (Nature never loses a crack or a crevice, mind you, or a joint in a tavern bedstead, but she always has one of her flat pattern live timekeepers to slide into it;) black, glossy crickets, with their long filaments sticking out like the whips of four-horse stage-coaches; motionless, slug-like creatures, young larvae, perhaps more horrible in their pulpy stillness than even in the infernal wriggle of maturity. But no sooner is the stone turned and the wholesome light of day let upon this compressed and blinded community of creeping things, than all of them which enjoy the luxury of legs--and some of them have a good many--rush round wildly, b.u.t.ting each other and everything in their way, and end in a general stampede for underground retreats from the region poisoned by sunshine. _Next year_ you will find the gra.s.s growing tall and green where the stone lay; the ground-bird builds her nest where the beetle had his hole; the dandelion and the b.u.t.tercup are growing there, and the broad fans of insect-angels open and shut over their golden disks, as the rhythmic waves of blissful consciousness pulsate through their glorified being.

--The young fellow whom they call John saw fit to say, in his very familiar way,--at which I do not choose to take offence, but which I sometimes think it necessary to repress,--that I was coming it rather strong on the b.u.t.terflies.

No, I replied; there is meaning in each of those images, the b.u.t.terfly as well as the others. The stone is ancient error. The gra.s.s is human nature borne down and bleached of all its color by it. The shapes which are found beneath are the crafty beings that thrive in darkness, and the weaker organisms kept helpless by it. He who turns the stone over is whosoever puts the staff of truth to the old lying incubus, no matter whether he do it with a serious face or a laughing one. The next year stands for the coming time. Then shall the nature which had lain blanched and broken, rise in its full stature and native hues, in the sunshine. Then shall G.o.d's minstrels build their nests in the hearts of a new-born humanity. Then shall beauty--Divinity taking outlines and color--light upon the souls of men as the b.u.t.terfly, image of the beautified spirit rising from the dust, soars from the sh.e.l.l that held a poor grub, which would never have found wings, had not the stone been lifted.

You never need think you can turn over any old falsehood without a terrible squirming and scattering of the horrid little population that dwells under it.

=_212._= PLEASURES OF BOATING.

I dare not publicly name the rare joys, the infinite delights, that intoxicate me on some sweet June morning, when the river and bay are smooth as a sheet of beryl-green silk, and I run along ripping it up with my knife-edged sh.e.l.l of a boat, the rent closing after me like those wounds of angels which Milton tells of, but the seam still shining for many a long road behind me. To lie still, over the Flats, where the waters are shallow, and see the crabs crawling and the sculpins gliding busily and silently beneath the boat,--to rustle in through the long harsh gra.s.s that leads up some tranquil creek,--to take shelter from the sunbeams under one of the thousand-footed bridges, and look down its interminable colonnades, crusted with green and oozy growths, studded with minute barnacles, and belted with rings of dark muscles, while overhead, streams and thunders that other river, whose every wave is a human soul flowing to eternity as the river below flows to the ocean,--lying there moored unseen, in loneliness so profound that the columns of Tadmoor in the Desert could not seem more remote from life,--the cool breeze on one's forehead, the stream whispering against the half-sunken pillars,--why should I tell of these things, that I should live to see my beloved haunts invaded and the waves blackened with boats as with a swarm of water-beetles? What a city of idiots we must be, not to have covered this glorious bay with gondolas and wherries, as we have just learned to cover the ice in winter with skaters!

From "The Guardian Angel."

=_213._= THE UNSPOKEN DECLARATION.

Myrtle had, perhaps, never so seriously inclined her ear to the honeyed accents of the young pleader. He flattered her with so much tact, that she thought she heard an unconscious echo through his lips of an admiration which he only shared with all around him. But in him he made it seem discriminating, deliberate, not blind, but very real. This it evidently was which had led him to trust her with his ambitions and his plans,--they might be delusions, but he could never keep them from her, and she was the one woman in the world to whom he thought he could safely give his confidence.

The dread moment was close at had. Myrtle was listening with an instinctive premonition of what was coming,--ten thousand mothers and grandmothers, and great-grandmothers, and so on, had pa.s.sed through it all in preceding generations, until time readied backwards to the st.u.r.dy savage who asked no questions of any kind, but knocked down the primeval great-grandmother of all, and carried her off to his hole in the rock, or into the tree where he had made his nest. Why should not the coming question announce itself by stirring in the pulses, and thrilling in the nerves, of the descendant of all these grandmothers?

She was leaning imperceptibly towards him, drawn by the mere blind elemental force, as the plummet was attracted to the side of Schehallien. Her lips were parted, and she breathed a little faster than so healthy a girl ought to breathe in a state of repose. The steady nerves of William Murray Bradshaw felt unwonted thrills and tremors tingling through them, as he came nearer and nearer the few simple words with which he was to make Myrtle Hazard the mistress of his destiny. His tones were becoming lower and more serious; there were slight breaks once or twice in the conversation; Myrtle had cast down her eyes.

"There is but one word more to add," he murmured softly, as he bent towards her--

A grave voice interrupted him. "Excuse me, Mr. Bradshaw," said Master Byles Gridley, "I wish to present a young gentleman to my friend here. I promised to show him the most charming young person I have the honor to be acquainted with, and I must redeem my pledge. Miss Hazard, I have the pleasure of introducing to your acquaintance my distinguished young friend, Mr. Clement Lindsay."

From "Currents and Counter Currents."

=_214._= MECHANISM OF VITAL ACTION.

But if the student of nature and the student of divinity can once agree that all the forces of the universe, as well as all its power, are immediately dependent upon its Creator,--that He is not only omni_potent_ but omni_movent_,--we have no longer any fear of nebular theories, or doctrines of equivocal generation, or of progressive development....

We begin then by examining the general rules which the Creator seems to have prescribed to His own operations. We ask, in the first place, whether He is wont, so far as we know, to employ a great mult.i.tude of materials, patterns, and forces, or whether He has seen fit to accomplish many different ends by the employment of a few of these only.

In all our studies of external nature, the tendency of increasing knowledge has uniformly been to show that the rules of creation are simplicity of material, economy of inventive effort, and thrift in the expenditure of force. All the endless forms in which matter presents itself to us, are resolved by chemistry into some three-score supposed simple substances, some of these perhaps being only modifications of the same element. The shapes of beasts and birds, of reptiles and fishes, vary in every conceivable degree; yet a single vertebra is the pattern and representation of the framework of them all, from eels to elephants.

The ident.i.ty reaches still further,--across a mighty gulf of being,--but bridges it over with a line of logic as straight as a sunbeam, and as indestructible as the scymitar-edge that spanned the chasm, in the fable of the Indian Hades. Strange as it may sound, the tail which the serpent trails after him in the dust, and the head of Plato, were struck in the die of the same primitive conception, and differ only in their special adaptation to particular ends. Again, the study of the movements of the universe has led us, from their complex phenomena, to the few simple forces from which they flow. The falling apple and the rolling planet are shown to obey the same tendency. The stick of sealing-wax which draws a feather to it, is animated by the same impulse that convulses the stormy heavens. These generalizations have simplified our view of the grandest material operations, yet we do not feel that creative power and wisdom have been shorn of any single ray, by the demonstrations of Newton, or of Franklin. On the contrary, the larger the collection of seemingly heterogeneous facts we can bring under the rule of a single formula, the nearer we feel that we have reached towards the source of knowledge, and the more perfectly we trace the little arc of the immeasurable circle which comes within the range of our hasty observations, at first like the broken fragments of a many-sided polygon, but at last as a simple curve which encloses all we know, or can know, of nature. To our own intellectual wealth, the gain is like that of the over-burdened traveller, who should exchange hundred-weights of iron for ounces of gold. Evanescent, formless, unstable, impalpable, a fog of uncondensed experiences hovers over our consciousness like an atmosphere of uncombined gases. One spark of genius shoots through it, and its elements rush together and glitter before us in a single translucent drop. It would hardly be extravagant to call Science the art of packing knowledge.

=_John William Draper,[52] 1810-._=

From the "Human Physiology."

=_215._= TRUTHS IN THE ANCIENT PHILOSOPHIES.

It is not my intention to enter on an examination, or even enumeration, of ancient philosophical opinions, nor to show that many of the doctrines which have been brought forward within the last three centuries existed in embryo in those times. It may, however, be observed that, in the midst of much error, there were those who held just views of the various problems of theology, law, politics, philosophy, and particularly of the fundamental doctrines of natural science, the const.i.tution of the solar system, the geological history of the earth, the nature of chemical forces, the physiological relations of animals and plants.

It is supposed by many, whose attention has been casually drawn to the philosophical opinions of antiquity, that the doctrines which we still retain as true came to the knowledge of the old philosophers, not so much by processes of legitimate investigation as by mere guessing or crude speculation, for which there was an equal chance whether they were right or wrong; but a closer examination will show that many of them must have depended on results previously determined or observed by the Africans or Asiatics, and thus they seem to indicate that the human mind has undergone in twenty centuries but little change in its manner of action, and that, commencing with the same data, it always comes to the same conclusions. Nor is this at all dependent on any inherent logic of truth. Very many of the errors of antiquity have re-appeared in our times. If the Greek schools were infected with materialism, pantheism, and atheism, the later progress of philosophy has shown the same characters. To a certain extent, such doctrines will receive an impression from the prevailing creeds, but the arguments which have been appealed to in their favor have always been the same. The distinction between these heresies in ancient and modern times lies chiefly in the grosser characters which they formerly a.s.sumed, arising partly from the reflected influence of the existing mythology, and partly from the imperfections of exact knowledge. Even the errors of early antiquity are venerable. We must judge our predecessors by the rules by which we hope posterity will judge us, making a generous allowance for the imperfections of reason, the infirmities of character, and especially for the prejudices of the times. To have devoutly believed in the existence of a human soul, to have looked forward to its continuing after the death of the body, to have expected a future state of rewards and punishments, and to have drawn therefrom, as a philosophical conclusion, the necessity of leading a virtuous life--these, though they may be enveloped in a cloud of errors, are n.o.ble results of the intellect of man.

[Footnote 52: Distinguished as an author in chemistry and physiology, and as a philosophical historian: a native of England, but long a professor in New York University.]

From "Thoughts on the Future Civil Policy of America."

=_216._= PROSPECTIVE INFLUENCES OF THE REPUBLIC.

Now, when, we consider the position of the American continent,--its Atlantic front looking upon Europe, its Pacific front looking upon Asia,--when we reflect how much Nature has done for it in the wonderful river system she has bestowed, and how varied are the mineral and agricultural products it yields, it would seem as if we should be constrained by circ.u.mstances to carry out spontaneously in practical life the abstract suggestions of policy.... Great undertakings, such as the construction of the Pacific Railroad, pressed into existence by commercial motives and fostered for military reasons, will indirectly accomplish political objects not yielding in importance to those that are obvious and avowed.

A few years more, and the influence of the great republic will resistlessly extend in a direction that will lead to surprising results.... The stream of Chinese emigration already setting into California is but the precursor of the flood that is to come. Here are the fields, there are the men. The dominant power on the Pacific Ocean must necessarily exert a controlling influence in the affairs of Asia.

The Roman empire is regarded, perhaps not unjustly, as the most imposing of all human political creations. Italy extended her rule across the eastern and western basins of the Mediterranean Sea, from the confines of Parthia to Spain. A similar central, but far grander, position is occupied by the American continent. The part.i.tions of an interior and narrow sea are replaced by the two great oceans. But, since history ever repeats itself, the maxims that guided the policy of Rome in her advance to sovereignty are not without application here. Her mistakes may be monitions to us.

A great, a h.o.m.ogeneous, and yet an active people, having strength and security in its political inst.i.tutions, may look forward to a career of glory. It may, without offense, seek to render its life memorable in the annals of the human race.

=_James Russell Lowell, 1810-._= (Manual, pp. 503, 520.)

From "Among my Books."

=_217._= NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO.

I have little sympathy with declaimers about the Pilgrim Fathers, who look upon them all as men of grand conceptions and superhuman foresight.

An entire ship's company of Columbuses is what the world never saw. It is not wise to form any theory and fit our facts to it, as a man in a hurry is apt to cram his traveling-bag, with a total disregard of shape or texture. But perhaps it may be found that the facts will only fit comfortably together on a single plan, namely, that the fathers did have a conception (which those will call grand who regard simplicity as a necessary element of grandeur) of founding here a commonwealth on those two eternal bases of Faith and Work; that they had, indeed, no revolutionary ideas of universal liberty; but yet, what answered the purpose quite as well, an abiding faith in the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of G.o.d; and that they did not so much propose to make all things new, as to develop the latent possibilities of English law and English character by clearing away the fences by which the abuse of the one was gradually discommoning the other from the broad fields of natural right. They were not in advance of their age, as it is called, for no one who is so can ever work profitably in it; but they were alive to the highest and most earnest thinking of their time.

=_218._= From an "Essay on Dryden."