Evolution of Expression Volume I Part 10

III.

G.o.d! thou art mighty!--at thy footstool bound, Lie gazing to thee Chance, and Life, and Death; Nor in the Angel-circle flaming round, Nor in the million worlds that blaze beneath Is one that can withstand thy wrath's hot breath-- Woe in thy frown--in thy smile, victory!

Hear my last prayer--I ask no mortal wreath; Let but these eyes my rescued country see, Then take my spirit, All-Omnipotent, to thee.

IV.

Now for the fight--now for the cannon-peal-- Forward--through blood and toil, and cloud and fire!

Glorious the shout, the shock, the crash of steel, The volley's roll, the rocket's blasting spire; They shake--like broken waves their squares retire,-- On, them, hussars!--now give them rein and heel; Think of the orphaned child, the murdered sire:-- Earth cries for blood--in thunder on them wheel!

This hour to Europe's fate shall set the triumph seal.

KARL THEODORE KORNER.

SELF-RELIANCE.

1. To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,--that is genius.

Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost, and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato and Milton is that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men, but what THEY thought.

2. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the l.u.s.tre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

3. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.

4. There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried. 5. Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact, makes much impression on him, and another none. This sculpture in the memory is not without pre- established harmony. The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray.

6. We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents. It may be safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so it be faithfully imparted, but G.o.d will not have his work made manifest by cowards. A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise shall give him no peace. It is a deliverance which does not deliver. In the attempt his genius deserts him; no muse befriends; no invention, no hope.

7. Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the Eternal was stirring at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being.

8. And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids pinched in a corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers and benefactors, pious aspirants to be n.o.ble clay under the Almighty effort, let us advance on Chaos and the Dark.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON.

ADAMS AND JEFFERSON.

1. Adams and Jefferson, I have said, are no more. As human beings, indeed, they are no more. They are no more, as in 1776, bold and fearless advocates of independence; no more, as on subsequent periods, the head of the government; no more, as we have recently seen them, aged and venerable objects of admiration and regard.

They are no more. They are dead.

2. But how little is there of the great and good which can die? To their country they yet live, and live forever. They live in all that perpetuates the remembrance of men on earth; in the recorded proofs of their own great actions, in the offspring of their intellect, in the deep engraved lines of public grat.i.tude, and in the respect and homage of mankind. They live in their example; and they live, emphatically, and will live, in the influence which their lives and efforts, their principles and opinions, now exercise, and will continue to exercise, on the affairs of men, not only in their own country, but throughout the civilized world.

3. A superior and commanding human intellect, a truly great man,-- when heaven vouchsafes so rare a gift,--is not a temporary flame, burning bright for awhile, and then expiring, giving place to returning darkness. It is rather a spark of fervent heat, as well as radiant light, with power to enkindle the common ma.s.s of human mind; so that, when it glimmers in its own decay, and finally goes out in death, no night follows; but it leaves the world all light, all on fire, from the potent contact of its own spirit.

4. Bacon died; but the human understanding, roused by the torch of his miraculous mind to a perception of the true philosophy and the just mode of inquiring after truth, has kept on its course successfully and gloriously. Newton died; yet the courses of the spheres are still known, and they yet move on, in the orbits which he saw and described for them, in the infinity of s.p.a.ce.

5. No two men now live--perhaps it may be doubted whether any two men have ever lived in one age,--who, more than those we now commemorate, have impressed their own sentiments, in regard to politics and government, on mankind; infused their own opinions more deeply into the opinions of others; or given a more lasting direction to the current of human thought. Their work doth not perish with them. The tree which they a.s.sisted to plant will flourish, although they water it and protect it no longer; for it has struck its roots deep; it has sent them to the very center; no storm, not of force to burst the orb, can overturn it; its branches spread wide; they stretch their protecting arms broader and broader, and its top is destined to reach the heavens.

6. We are not deceived. There is no delusion here. No age will come, in which the American Revolution will appear less than it is--one of the greatest events in human history. No age will come, in which in it will cease to be seen and felt, on either continent, that a mighty step, a great advance, not only in American affairs, but in human affairs, was made on the 4th of July, 1776. And no age will come, we trust, so ignorant, or so unjust, as not to see and acknowledge the efficient agency of these we now honor, in producing that momentous event.

DANIEL WEBSTER.

THE DEFENCE OF LUCKNOW.

I.

Banner of England, not for a season, O banner of Britain, hast thou Floated in conquering battle or flapt to the battle cry!

Never with mightier glory than when we had reared thee on high, Flying at top of the roofs in the ghastly siege at Lucknow-- Shot through the staff or the halyard, but ever we raised thee anew, And ever upon the topmost roof our banner of England blew.

II.

Frail were the works that defended the hold that we held with our lives-- Women and children among us--G.o.d help them, our children and wives!

Hold it we might--and for fifteen days or for twenty at most.

"Never surrender, I charge you, but every man die at his post!"

Voice of the dead whom we loved, our Lawrence the best of the brave; Cold were his brows when we kissed him--we laid him that night in his grave.

III.

"Every man die at his post!" and there hailed on our houses and halls Death from their rifle bullets, and death from their cannon b.a.l.l.s, Death in our innermost chamber, and death at our slight barricade, Death while we stood with the musket, and death while we stoopt to the spade, Death to the dying, and wounds to the wounded, for often there fell, Striking the hospital wall, crashing through it, their shot and their sh.e.l.l,

IV.

Death--for their spies were among us, their marksman were told of our best, So that the brute bullet broke through the brain that could think for the rest; Bullets would sing by our foreheads, and bullets would rain at our feet-- Fire from ten thousand at once of the rebels that girdled us round; Death at the glimpse of a finger from over the breadth of a street, Death from the heights of the mosque and the palace-- and death in the ground!

V.

Mine? yes, a mine! Countermine! down, down! and creep through the hole, Keep the revolver in hand! You can hear him--the murderous mole.

Quiet! ah! quiet--wait till the point of the pickaxe be through!

Click with the pick, coming nearer and nearer again than before-- Now let it speak, and you fire, and the dark pioneer is no more; And ever upon the topmost roof our banner of England blew.

VI.

Ay, but the foe sprung his mine many times, and it chanced on a day, Soon as the blast of that underground thunder-clap echoed away, Dark through the smoke and the sulphur, like so many fiends in their h.e.l.l-- Cannon-shot, musket-shot, volley on volley, and yell upon yell-- Fiercely on all the defences our myriad enemies fell.

VII.

What have they done? where is it? Out yonder.

Guard the Redan!

Storm at the Water-gate, storm at the Bailey-gate!

storm, and it ran Surging and swaying all round us, as ocean on every side Plunges and heaves at a bank that is daily drowned by the tide-- So many thousands that if they be bold enough, who shall escape?

Kill or be killed, live or die, they shall know we are soldiers and men.

VIII.

Ready! take aim at their leaders--their ma.s.ses are gapped with our grape-- Backward they reel like the wave, like the wave flinging forward again, Flying and foiled at the last by the handful they could not subdue; And ever upon the topmost roof our banner of England blew.

IX.

Handful of men as we were, we were English in heart and in limb, Strong with the strength of the race to command, to obey, to endure, Each of us fought as if hope for the garrison hung but on him-- Still, could we watch at all points? We were every day fewer and fewer.

X.

There was a whisper among us, but only a whisper that pa.s.sed-- "Children and wives--if the tigers leap into the folds unawares, Every man die at his post--and the foe may outlive us at last, Better to fall by the hands that they love, than to fall into theirs."