The Voice of Science in Nineteenth-Century Literature Part 20

O for thy voice to soothe and bless!

What hope of answer, or redress?

Behind the veil, behind the veil.

CROSSING THE BAR

Sunset and evening star, And one clear call for me!

And may there be no moaning of the bar, When I put out to sea,

But such a tide as moving seems asleep, Too full for sound and foam, When that which drew from out the boundless deep Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bell, And after that the dark!

And may there be no sadness of farewell, When I embark;

For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place The flood may bear me far, I hope to see my Pilot face to face When I have crost the bar.

GEORGE MEREDITH

LUCIFER IN STARLIGHT[12]

On a starred night Prince Lucifer uprose.

Tired of his dark dominion, swung the fiend Above the rolling ball in cloud part screened, Where sinners hugged their spectre of repose.

Poor prey to his hot fit of pride were those.

And now upon his western wing he leaned, And now his huge bulk o'er Afric's sands careened, And now the black planet shadowed Arctic snows.

Soaring through wider zones that p.r.i.c.ked his scars With memory of the old revolt from Awe, He reached a middle height, and at the stars, Which are the brain of heaven, he looked, and sank.

Around the ancient track marched, rank on rank, The army of unalterable law.

WILLIAM E. HENLEY

INVICTUS

Out of the night that covers me, Black as a pit from Pole to Pole, I thank whatever G.o.ds may be For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circ.u.mstance I have not winced nor cried aloud; Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is b.l.o.o.d.y but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears Looms but the Horror of the Shade; And yet the menace of the years Finds and still finds me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll: I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul.

THOMAS HARDY

NEW YEAR'S EVE[13]

"I have finished another year," said G.o.d, "In gray, green, white, and brown; I have strewn the leaf upon the sod, Sealed up the worm within the clod, And let the last sun down."

"And what's the good of it?" I said.

"What reasons made you call From formless void this earth we tread, When nine-and-ninety can be read Why nought should be at all?

"Yea, Sire; why shaped you us, 'who in This tabernacle groan'?

If ever a joy be found herein, Such joy no man had wished to win If he had never known!"

Then he: "My labors--logicless-- You may explain; not I: Sense-sealed I have wrought, without a guess That I evolved a Consciousness To ask for reasons why.

"Strange that ephemeral creatures who By my own ordering are, Should see the shortness of my view, Use ethic tests I never knew, Or made provision for!"

He sank to raptness as of yore, And opening New Year's Day Wove it by rote as theretofore, And went on working evermore In his unweeting way.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

CIVILIZATION[14]

A certain degree of progress from the rudest state in which man is found,--a dweller in caves, or on trees, like an ape,--a cannibal, and eater of pounded snails, worms, and offal,--a certain degree of progress from this extreme, is called Civilization. It is a vague, complex name, of many degrees. n.o.body has attempted a definition. M. Guizot, writing a book on the subject, does not. It implies the evolution of a highly-organized man, brought to supreme delicacy of sentiment, as in practical power, religion, liberty, sense of honor, and taste. In the hesitation to define what it is, we usually suggest it by negations. A nation that has no clothing, no iron, no alphabet, no marriage, no arts of peace, no abstract thought, we call barbarous. And after many arts are invented or imported, as among the Turks and Moorish nations, it is often a little complaisant to call them civilized.

Each nation grows after its own genius, and has a civilization of its own.

The Chinese and j.a.panese, though each complete in his way, is different from the man of Madrid or the man of New York. The term imports a mysterious progress. In the brutes is none; and in mankind to-day the savage tribes are gradually extinguished rather than civilized. The Indians of this country have not learned the white man's work; and in Africa, the negro of to-day is the negro of Herodotus. In other races the growth is not arrested; but the like progress that is made by a boy "when he cuts his eye-teeth," as we say,--childish illusions pa.s.sing daily away, and he seeing things really and comprehensively,--is made by tribes.

It is the learning the secret of c.u.mulative power, of advancing on one's self. It implies a facility of a.s.sociation, power to compare, the ceasing from fixed ideas. The Indian is gloomy and distressed when urged to depart from his habits and traditions. He is overpowered by the gaze of the white, and his eye sinks. The occasion of one of these starts of growth is always some novelty that astounds the mind, and provokes it to dare to change. Thus there is a Cadmus, a Pytheas, a Manco Capac at the beginning of each improvement--some superior foreigner importing new and wonderful arts, and teaching them. Of course, he must not know too much, but must have the sympathy, language, and G.o.ds of those he would inform. But chiefly the sea-sh.o.r.e had been the point of departure to knowledge, as to commerce. The most advanced nations are always those who navigate the most. The power which the sea requires in a sailor makes a man of him very fast, and the change of sh.o.r.es and population clears his head of much nonsense of his wigwam.

Where shall we begin or end the list of those feats of liberty and wit, each of which feats made an epoch of history? Thus, the effect of a framed or stone house is immense on the tranquillity, power, and refinement of the builder. A man in a cave or in a camp, a nomad, will die with no more estate than the wolf or the horse leaves. But so simple a labor as a house being achieved, his chief enemies are kept at bay. He is safe from the teeth of wild animals, from frost, sunstroke, and weather; and fine faculties begin to yield their fine harvest. Invention and art are born, manners and social beauty and delight. 'Tis wonderful how soon a piano gets into a log-hut on the frontier. You would think they found it under a pine-stump. With it comes a Latin Grammar--and one of those tow-head boys has written a hymn on Sunday. Now let colleges, now let senates, take heed! for here is one who, opening these fine tastes on the basis of the pioneer's iron const.i.tution, will gather all their laurels in his strong hands.

When the Indian trail gets widened, graded, and bridged to a good road, there is a benefactor, there is a missionary, a pacificator, a wealth-bringer, a maker of markets, a vent for industry. Another step in civility is the change from war, hunting, and pasturage to agriculture.

Our Scandinavian forefathers have left us a significant legend to convey their sense of the importance of this step. "There was once a giantess who had a daughter, and the child saw a husbandman ploughing in the field.

Then she ran and picked him up with her finger and thumb, and put him and his plough and his oxen into her ap.r.o.n, and carried them to her mother, and said, 'Mother, what sort of a beetle is this that I found wriggling in the sand?' But the mother said, 'Put it away, my child; we must begone out of this land, for these people will dwell in it.'" Another success is the post-office, with its educating energy augmented by cheapness and guarded by a certain religious sentiment in mankind; so that the power of a wafer or a drop of wax or gluten to guard a letter, as it flies over sea, over land, and comes to its address as if a battalion of artillery brought it, I look upon as a fine metre of civilization.

The division of labor, the multiplication of the arts of peace, which is nothing but a large allowance to each man to choose his work according to his faculty,--to live by his better hand,--fills the State with useful and happy laborers; and they, creating demand by the very temptation of their productions, are rapidly and surely rewarded by good sale: and what a police and ten commandments their work thus becomes! So true is Dr.

Johnson's remark that "men are seldom more innocently employed than when they are making money."

The skillful combinations of civil government, though they usually follow natural leadings, as the lines of race, language, religion, and territory, yet require wisdom and conduct in the rulers, and in their result delight the imagination. "We see insurmountable mult.i.tudes obeying, in opposition to their strongest pa.s.sions, the restraints of a power which they scarcely perceive, and the crimes of a single individual marked and punished at the distance of half the earth."

Right position of woman in the State is another index. Poverty and industry with a healthy mind read very easily the laws of humanity, and love them; place the s.e.xes in right relations of mutual respect, and a severe morality gives that essential charm to woman which educates all that is delicate, poetic, and self-sacrificing, breeds courtesy and learning, conversation and wit, in her rough mate; so that I have thought a sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good women.

Another measure of culture is the diffusion of knowledge, overrunning all the old barriers of caste, and, by the cheap press, bringing the university to every poor man's door in the newsboy's basket. Sc.r.a.ps of science, of thought, of poetry, are in the coa.r.s.est sheet, so that in every house we hesitate to burn a newspaper until we have looked it through.

The ship, in its latest complete equipment, is an abridgment and compend of a nation's arts: the ship steered by compa.s.s and chart,--longitude reckoned by lunar observation and by chronometer,--driven by steam; and in wildest sea-mountains, at vast distances from home,--