Diluvian spirit, or Deucalion shroud, Dew-cloth, dream drapery, And napkin spread by fays, Spirit of lakes and seas and rivers, Sea-fowl that with the east wind Seek'st the shore, groping thy way inland, By whichever name I please to call thee, Bear only perfumes and the scent Of healing herbs to just men's fields.
I am amused with the manner in which Quarles and his contemporary poets speak of Nature,—with a sort of gallantry, as a knight of his lady,—not as lovers, but as having a thorough respect for her and some title to her acquaintance. They speak manfully, and their lips are not closed by affection.
"The pale-faced lady of the black-eyed night."
Nature seems to have held her court then, and all authors were her gentlemen and esquires and had ready an abundance of courtly expressions.
Quarles is never weak or shallow, though coarse and untasteful. He presses able-bodied and strong-backed words into his service, which have a certain rustic fragrance and force, as if now first devoted to literature after having served sincere and stern uses. He has the pronunciation of a poet though he stutters. He certainly speaks the English tongue with a right manly accent. To be sure his poems have the[498] musty odor of a confessional.
How little curious is man, Who hath not searched his mystery a span, But dreams of mines of treasure Which he neglects to measure, For threescore years and ten Walks to and fro amid his fellow men O'er this small tract of continental land, His fancy bearing no divining wand.
Our uninquiring corpses lie more low Than our life's curiosity doth go; Our most ambitious steps climb not so high As in their hourly sport the sparrows fly.
Yonder cloud's blown farther in a day Than our most vagrant feet may ever stray.
Surely, O Lord, he hath not greatly erred Who hath so little from his birthplace stirred.
He wanders through this low and shallow world, Scarcely his bolder thoughts and hopes unfurled, Through this low wallèd world, which his huge sin Hath hardly room to rest and harbor in.
Bearing his head just o'er some fallow ground, Some cowslip'd meadows where the bitterns sound, He wanders round until his end draws nigh, And then lays down his aged head to die.
And this is life! this is that famous strife!
His head doth court a fathom from the land, Six feet from where his grovelling feet do stand.
What is called talking is a remarkable though I believe universal phenomenon of human society. The most constant phenomenon when men or women come together is talking. A chemist might try this experiment in his laboratory with certainty, and set down the fact in his journal.
This characteristic of the race may be considered as established. No doubt every one can call to mind numerous conclusive instances. Some nations, it is true, are said to articulate more distinctly than others; yet the rule holds with those who have the fewest letters in their alphabet. Men cannot stay long together without talking, according to the rules of polite society. (As all men have two ears and but one tongue, they must spend the extra and unavoidable hours of silence in listening to the whisperings of genius, and this fact it is that makes silence always respectable in my eyes.) Not that they have anything to communicate, or do anything quite natural or important to be done so, but by common consent they fall to using the invention of speech, and make a conversation, good or bad. They say things, first this one and then that. They express their "opinions," as they are called.
By a well-directed silence I have sometimes seen threatening and troublesome people routed. You sit musing as if you were in broad nature again. They cannot stand it. Their position becomes more and more uncomfortable every moment. So much humanity over against one without any disguise,—not even the disguise of speech! They cannot stand it nor sit against it.
Not only must men talk, but for the most part must talk about talk,—even about books, or dead and buried talk. Sometimes my friend expects a few periods from me. Is he exorbitant? He thinks it is my turn now.
Sometimes my companion thinks he has said a good thing, but I don't see the difference. He looks just as he did before. Well, it is no loss. I suppose he has plenty more.
Then I have seen very near and intimate, very old friends introduced by very old strangers, with liberty given to talk. The stranger, who knows only the countersign, says, "Jonas—Eldred," giving those names which will make a title good in a court of law. (It may be presumed that God does not know the Christian names of men.) Then Jonas, like a ready soldier, makes a remark,—a benediction on the weather it may be,—and Eldred swiftly responds, and unburdens his breast, and so the action begins. They bless God and nature many times gratuitously, and part mutually well pleased, leaving their cards. They did not happen to be present at each other's christening.
Sometimes I have listened so attentively and with so much interest to the whole expression of a man that I did not hear one word he was saying, and saying too with the more vivacity observing my attention.
But a man may be an object of interest to me though his tongue is pulled out by the roots.
* * * * * Men sometimes do as if they could eject themselves like bits of pack-thread from the end of the tongue.
* * * * * Scholars have for the most part a diseased way of looking at the world.
They mean by it a few cities and unfortunate assemblies of men and women, who might all be concealed in the grass of the prairies. They describe this world as old or new, healthy or diseased, according to the state of their libraries,—a little dust more or less on their shelves.
When I go abroad from under this shingle or slate roof, I find several things which they have not considered. Their conclusions seem imperfect.
* * * * * As with two eyes we see and with two ears we hear, with the like advantage is man added to man. Making no complaint, offering no encouragement, one human being is made aware of the neighboring and contemporaneous existence of another. Such is the tenderness of friendship. We never recognize each other as finite and imperfect beings, but with a smile and as strangers. My intercourse with men is governed by the same laws with my intercourse with nature.
* * * * * Buonaparte said that the three-o'clock-in-the-morning courage was the rarest, but I cannot agree with him.[499] Fear does not awake so early.
Few men are so degenerate as to balk nature by not beginning the day well.
* * * * * I hold in my hands a recent volume of essays and poems, in its outward aspect like the thousands which the press sends forth, and, if the gods permitted their own inspiration to be breathed in vain, this might be forgotten in the mass, but the accents of truth are as sure to be heard on earth as in heaven. The more I read it the more I am impressed by its sincerity, its depth and grandeur. It already seems ancient and has lost the traces of its modern birth. It is an evidence of many virtues in the writer. More serenely and humbly confident, this man has listened to the inspiration which all may hear, and with greater fidelity reported it.
It is therefore a true prophecy, and shall at length come to pass. It has the grandeur of the Greek tragedy, or rather its Hebrew original, yet it is not necessarily referred to any form of faith. The slumbering, heavy depth of its sentences is perhaps without recent parallel. It lies like the sward in its native pasture, where its roots are never disturbed, and not spread over a sandy embankment.
On fields o'er which the reaper's hand has passed, Lit by the harvest moon and autumn sun, My thoughts like stubble floating in the wind And of such fineness as October airs, There, after harvest, could I glean my life, A richer harvest reaping without toil, And weaving gorgeous fancies at my will, In subtler webs than finest summer haze.
In October the air is really the fine element the poets describe.[500] The fields emit a dry and temperate odor. There is something in the refined and elastic air which reminds us of a work of art. It is like a verse of Anacreon or a tragedy of Æschylus.
* * * * * All parts of nature belong to one head, as the curls of a maiden's hair.
How beautifully flow the seasons as one year, and all streams as one ocean!
* * * * * I hate museums; there is nothing so weighs upon my spirits. They are the catacombs of nature. One green bud of spring, one willow catkin, one faint trill from a migrating sparrow would set the world on its legs again. The life that is in a single green weed is of more worth than all this death. They are dead nature collected by dead men. I know not whether I muse most at the bodies stuffed with cotton and sawdust or those stuffed with bowels and fleshy fibre outside the cases.
Where is the proper herbarium, the true cabinet of shells, and museum of skeletons, but in the meadow where the flower bloomed, by the seaside where the tide cast up the fish, and on the hills and in the valleys where the beast laid down its life and the skeleton of the traveller reposes on the grass? What right have mortals to parade these things on their legs again, with their wires, and, when heaven has decreed that they shall return to dust again, to return them to sawdust? Would you have a dried specimen of a world, or a pickled one?
Embalming is a sin against heaven and earth,—against heaven, who has recalled the soul and set free the servile elements, and against the earth, which is thus robbed of her dust. I have had my right-perceiving senses so disturbed in these haunts as to mistake a veritable living man for a stuffed specimen, and surveyed him with dumb wonder as the strangest of the whole collection. For the strangest is that which, being in many particulars most like, is in some essential particular most unlike.
* * * * * It is one great and rare merit in the old English tragedy that it says something. The words slide away very fast, but toward some conclusion.
It has to do with things, and the reader feels as if he were advancing.
It does not make much odds what message the author has to deliver at this distance of time, since no message can startle us, but how he delivers it,—that it be done in a downright and manly way. They come to the point and do not waste the time.
* * * * * They say that Carew was a laborious writer, but his poems do not show it. They are finished, but do not show the marks of the chisel. Drummond was indeed a quiddler, with little fire or fibre, and rather a taste _for_ poetry than a taste _of_ it.
* * * * * After all, we draw on very gradually in English literature to Shakespeare, through Peele and Marlowe, to say nothing of Raleigh and Spenser and Sidney. We hear the same great tone already sounding to which Shakespeare added a serener wisdom and clearer expression. Its chief characteristics of reality and unaffected manliness are there.
The more we read of the literature of those times, the more does acquaintance divest the genius of Shakespeare of the in some measure false mystery which has thickened around it, and leave it shrouded in the grander mystery of daylight. His critics have for the most part made their [_sic_] contemporaries less that they might make Shakespeare more.
The distinguished men of those times had a great flow of spirits, a cheerful and elastic wit far removed from the solemn wisdom of later days. What another thing was fame and a name then than now! This is seen in the familiar manner in which they were spoken of by each other and the nation at large,—_Kit_ Marlowe, and _George_ (Peele), and _Will_ * * * * * We pass through all degrees of life from the least organic to the most complex. Sometimes we are mere pudding-stone and scoriæ.
* * * * * The present is the instant work and near process of living, and will be found in the last analysis to be nothing more nor less than digestion.
Sometimes, it is true, it is indigestion.
* * * * * Daniel deserves praise for his moderation, and sometimes has risen into poetry before you know it. Strong sense appears in his epistles, but you have to remember too often in what age he wrote, and yet that Shakespeare was his contemporary. His style is without the tricks of the trade and really in advance of his age. We can well believe that he was a retired scholar, who would keep himself shut up in his house two whole months together.
* * * * * Donne was not a poet, but a man of strong sense, a sturdy English thinker, full of conceits and whimsicalities, hammering away at his subject, be it eulogy or epitaph, sonnet or satire, with the patience of a day laborer, without taste but with an occasional fine distinction or poetic phrase. He was rather _Doctor_ Donne, than the _poet_ Donne.
His letters are perhaps best.
* * * * * Lovelace is what his name expresses,—of slight material to make a poet's fame. His goings and comings are of no great account. His taste is not so much love of excellence as fear of failure, though in one instance he has written fearlessly and memorably.
* * * * * How wholesome are the natural laws to contemplate, as gravity, heat, light, moisture, dryness. Only let us not interfere. Let the soul withdraw into the chambers of the heart, let the mind reside steadily in the labyrinth of the brain, and not interfere with hands or feet more than with other parts of nature.
* * * * * Thomson was a true lover of nature and seems to have needed only a deeper human experience to have taken a more vigorous and lofty flight.
He is deservedly popular, and has found a place on many shelves and in many cottages. There are great merits in "The Seasons"—and the almanac.
In "Autumn:"— "Attemper'd suns arise, Extensive harvests hang the heavy head.
Rich, silent, deep, they stand."
The moon in "Autumn:"— "Her spotted disk, Where mountains rise, umbrageous dales descend, Void of its flame, and sheds a softer day.
Now through the passing cloud she seems to stoop, Now up the pure cerulean rides sublime.
* * * * * The whole air whitens with a boundless tide Of silver radiance, trembling round the world."
My friend, thou art not of some other race and family of men;—thou art flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone. Has not nature associated us in many ways?[501] Water from the same fountain, lime from the same quarry, grain from the same field compose our bodies. And perchance our elements but reassert their ancient kindredship. Is it of no significance that I have so long partaken of the same loaf with thee, have breathed the same air summer and winter, have felt the same heat and cold, the same fruits of summer have been pleased to refresh us both, and thou hast never had a thought of different fibre from my own?[502] Our kindred, of one blood with us. With the favor and not the displeasure of the gods, we have partaken the same bread.
* * * * * It is hard to know rocks. They are crude and inaccessible to our nature.
We have not enough of the stony element in us.
* * * * * It is hard to know men by rumor only. But to stand near somewhat living and conscious. Who would not sail through mutiny and storm farther than Columbus, to reach the fabulous retreating shores of some continent man?
* * * * * My friend can only be in any measure my foe, because he is fundamentally my friend; for everything is after all more nearly what it should rightfully be, than that which it is simply by failing to be the other.
* * * * * It [friendship] cannot be the subject of reconciliation or the theme of conversation ever between friends. The true friend must in some sense disregard all professions of friendship and forget them.
* * * * * It is as far from pity as from contempt. I should hesitate even to call it the highest sympathy, since the word is of suspicious origin and suggests suffering rather than joy. It was established before religion, for men are not friends in religion, but over and through it; and it records no apostasy or repentance, but there is a certain divine and innocent and perennial health about it.
* * * * * Its charity is generosity, its virtue nobleness, its religion trust. We come nearer to friendship with flowers and inanimate objects than with merely affectionate and loving men. It is not for the friend to be just even,—at least he is not to be lost in this attribute,—but to be only a large and free existence, representative of humanity, its general court. Admirable to us as the heavenly bodies, but like them affording rather a summer heat and daylight,—the light and fire of sunshine and stars,—rather than the intense heats and splendors which our weakness and appetite require.
* * * * * Yesterday I skated after a fox over the ice. Occasionally he sat on his haunches and barked at me like a young wolf. It made me think of the bear and her cubs mentioned by Captain Parry, I think. All brutes seem to have a genius for mystery, an Oriental aptitude for symbols and the language of signs; and this is the origin of Pilpay and Æsop. The fox manifested an almost human suspicion of mystery in my actions. While I skated directly after him, he cantered at the top of his speed; but when I stood still, though his fear was not abated, some strange but inflexible law of his nature caused him to stop also, and sit again on his haunches. While I still stood motionless, he would go slowly a rod to one side, then sit and bark, then a rod to the other side, and sit and bark again, but did not retreat, as if spellbound. When, however, I commenced the pursuit again, he found himself released from his durance.
Plainly the fox belongs to a different order of things from that which reigns in the village. Our courts, though they offer a bounty for his hide, and our pulpits, though they draw many a moral from his cunning, are in few senses contemporary with his free forest life.
* * * * * To the poet considered as an artist, his words must be as the relation of his oldest and finest memory, and wisdom derived from the remotest experience.
* * * * * I have thought, when walking in the woods through a certain retired dell, bordered with shrub oaks and pines, far from the village and affording a glimpse only through an opening of the mountains in the horizon, how my life might pass there, simple and true and natural, and how many things would be impossible to be done there. How many books I might not read!
* * * * * Why avoid my friends and live among strangers? Why not reside in my native country?
* * * * * Many a book is written which does not necessarily suggest or imply the phenomenon or object to explain which it professes to have been written.
* * * * * Every child should be encouraged to study not man's system of nature but nature's.
* * * * * Giles Fletcher knew how to write, and has left English verses behind.
He is the most valuable imitator of the Spenserian stanza, and adds a moral tone of his own.
TO A MARSH HAWK IN SPRING There is health in thy gray wing, Health of nature's furnishing.
Say, thou modern-winged antique, Was thy mistress ever sick?
In each heaving of thy wing Thou dost health and leisure bring, Thou dost waive disease and pain And resume new life again.
Man walks in nature still alone, And knows no one, Discovers no lineament nor feature Of any creature.
Though all the firmament Is o'er me bent, Yet still I miss the grace Of an intelligent and kindred face.
I still must seek the friend Who does with nature blend.
Who is the person in her mask, He is the friend I ask; Who is the expression of her meaning, Who is the uprightness of her leaning, Who is the grown child of her weaning.
We twain would walk together Through every weather, And see this aged Nature Go with a bending stature.
The centre of this world, The face of Nature, The site of human life, Some sure foundation And nucleus of a nation, At least, a private station.
It is the saddest thought of all, that what we are to others, that we are much more to ourselves,—avaricious, mean, irascible, affected,—we are the victims of these faults. If our pride offends our humble neighbor, much more does it offend ourselves, though our lives are never so private and solitary.
* * * * * If the Indian is somewhat of a stranger in nature, the gardener is too much a familiar. There is something vulgar and foul in the latter's closeness to his mistress, something noble and cleanly in the former's distance. Yet the hunter seems to have a property in the moon which even the farmer has not. Ah! the poet knows uses of plants which are not easily reported, though he cultivates no parterre. See how the sun smiles on him while he walks in the gardener's aisles, rather than on the gardener.
* * * * * Not only has the foreground of a picture its glass of transparent crystal spread over it, but the picture itself is a glass or transparent medium to a remoter background. We demand only of all pictures that they be perspicuous, that the laws of perspective have been truly observed.
It is not the fringed foreground of the desert nor the intermediate oases that detain the eye and the imagination, but the infinite, level, and roomy horizon, where the sky meets the sand, and heavens and earth, the ideal and actual, are coincident, the background into which leads the path of the pilgrim.
* * * * * All things are in revolution; it is the one law of nature by which order is preserved, and time itself lapses and is measured. Yet some things men will do from age to age, and some things they will not do.
"Fisherman's Acct. for 1805[503] Began March 25 cts.
Dd Mr. Saml Potter 2 qts W I 3/ 1 lb sugar 10d $0.64 One Cod line 5/ 84 May first Qt rum ½ lb Sugar 1/5d 22 16 To a Line for the Sceene 3/ 0.50 June 5th 1805 Settled this acct by Recev.g Cash in Full $8.82½ How many young finny contemporaries of various character and destiny, form and habits, we have even in this water! And it will not be forgotten by some memory that we _were_ contemporaries. It is of _some_ import. We shall be some time friends, I trust, and know each other better. Distrust is too prevalent now. We are so much alike! have so many faculties in common! I have not yet met with the philosopher who could, in a quite conclusive, undoubtful way, show me _the_, and, if not _the_, then how _any_, difference between man and a fish. We are so much alike! How much could a really tolerant, patient, humane, and truly great and natural man make of them, if he should try? For they are to be understood, surely, as all things else, by no other method than that of sympathy. It is easy to say what they are not to us, _i. e._, what we are not to them; but what we might and ought to be is another affair.
* * * * * In the tributaries the brook minnow and the trout. Even in the rills emptying into the river, over which you stride at a step, you may see small trout not so large as your finger glide past or hide under the bank.
* * * * * The character of this [the horned pout], as indeed of all fishes, depends directly upon that of the water it inhabits, those taken in clear and sandy water being of brighter hue and cleaner and of firmer and sweeter flesh. It makes a peculiar squeaking noise when drawn out, which has given it the name of the minister or preacher.
* * * * * The bream is the familiar and homely sparrow, which makes her nest everywhere, and is early and late.
The pickerel is the hawk, a fish of prey, hovering over the finny broods.
The pout is the owl, which steals so noiselessly about at evening with its clumsy body.
The shiner is the summer yellowbird, or goldfinch, of the river.
The sucker is the sluggish bittern, or stake-driver.
The minnow is the hummingbird.
The trout is the partridge woodpecker.
The perch is the robin.[504] * * * * * We read Marlowe as so much poetical pabulum. It is food for poets, water from the Castalian Spring, some of the atmosphere of Parnassus, raw and crude indeed, and at times breezy, but pure and bracing. Few have so rich a phrase! He had drunk deep of the Pierian Spring, though not deep enough, and had that fine madness, as Drayton says, "Which justly should possess a poet's brain."
We read his "Dr. Faustus," "Dido, Queen of Carthage," and "Hero and Leander," especially the last, without being wearied. He had many of the qualities of a great poet, and was in some degree worthy to precede Shakespeare. But he seems to have run to waste for want of seclusion and solitude, as if mere pause and deliberation would have added a new element of greatness to his poetry. In his unquestionably fine, heroic tone it would seem as if he had the rarest part of genius, and education could have added the rest. The "Hero and Leander" tells better for his character than the anecdotes which survive.
I fain would stretch me by the highway-side, To thaw and trickle with the melting snow, That mingled soul and body with the tide I too might through the pores of Nature flow,[505] Might help to forward the new spring along, If it were mine to choose my toil or day, Scouring the roads with yonder sluice-way throng, And so work out my tax on _Her_ highway.
* * * * * Yet let us thank the purblind race Who still have thought it good With lasting stone to mark the place Where braver men have stood.
In Concord, town of quiet name I've seen ye, sisters, on the mountain-side, When your green mantles fluttered in the wind; I've seen your footprints on the lake's smooth shore, Lesser than man's, a more ethereal trace; I have heard of ye as some far-famed race, Daughters of gods, whom I should one day meet, Or mothers, I might say, of all our race.
I reverence your natures, so like mine Yet strangely different, like but still unlike.
Thou only stranger that hast crossed my path, Accept my hospitality; let me hear The message which thou bring'st.
Made different from me, Perchance thou'rt made to be The creature of a different destiny.
I know not who ye are that meekly stand Thus side by side with man in every land.
When did ye form alliance with our race, Ye children of the moon, who in mild nights Vaulted upon the hills and sought this earth?
Reveal that which I fear ye cannot tell, Wherein ye are not I, wherein ye dwell Where I can never come.
What boots it that I do regard ye so?
Does it make suns to shine or crops to grow?
What boots [it] that I never should forget That I have sisters sitting for me yet?
And what are sisters?
The robust man, who can so stoutly strive, In this bleak world is hardly kept alive.
And who is it protects _ye_, smooths _your_ way?
We can afford to lend a willing ear occasionally to those earnest reformers of the age. Let us treat them hospitably. Shall we be charitable only to the poor? What though they are fanatics? Their errors are likely to be generous errors, and these may be they who will put to rest the American Church and the American government, and awaken better ones in their stead.
Let us not meanly seek to maintain our delicate lives in chambers or in legislative halls by a timid watchfulness of the rude mobs that threaten to pull down our baby-houses. Let us not think to raise a revenue which shall maintain our domestic quiet by an impost on the liberty of speech. Let us not think to live by the principle of self-defense.
Have we survived our accidents hitherto, think you, by virtue of our good swords,—that three-foot lath that dangles by your side, or those brazen-mouthed pieces under the burying hill which the trainers keep to hurrah with in the April and July mornings? Do our protectors burrow under the burying-ground hill, on the edge of the bean-field which you all know, gorging themselves once a year with powder and smoke, and kept bright and in condition by a chafing of oiled rags and rotten stone?
Have we resigned the protection of our hearts and civil liberties to that feathered race of wading birds and marching men who drill but once a month?—and I mean no reproach to our Concord train-bands, who certainly make a handsome appearance—and dance well. Do we enjoy the sweets of domestic life undisturbed, because the naughty boys are all shut up in that whitewashed "stone-yard," as it is called, and see the Concord meadows only through a grating.
No, let us live amid the free play of the elements. Let the dogs bark, let the cocks crow, and the sun shine, and the winds blow!
Ye do commend me to all virtue ever, And simple truth, the law by which we live.
Methinks that I can trust your clearer sense And your immediate knowledge of the truth.
I would obey your influence, one with fate.
There is a true march to the sentence, as if a man or a body of men were actually making progress there step by step, and these are not the mere _disjecta membra_, the dispersed and mutilated members though it were of heroes, which can no longer walk and join themselves to their comrades.
They are not perfect nor liberated pieces of art for the galleries, yet they stand on the natural and broad pedestal of the living rock, but have a principle of life and growth in them still, as has that human nature from which they spring.[506] * * * * * It is a marvel how the birds contrive to survive in this world. These tender sparrows that flit from bush to bush this evening, though it is so late, do not seem improvident, [but appear] to have found a roost for the night. They must succeed by weakness and reliance, for they are not bold and enterprising, as their mode of life would seem to require, but very weak and tender creatures. I have seen a little chipping sparrow, come too early in the spring, shivering on an apple twig, drawing in its head and striving to warm it in its muffled feathers; and it had no voice to intercede with nature, but peeped as helpless as an infant, and was ready to yield up its spirit and die without any effort. And yet this was no new spring in the revolution of the seasons.
* * * * * Our offense is rank, it smells to heaven. In the midst of our village, as in most villages, there is a slaughterhouse, and throughout the summer months, day and night, to the distance of half a mile, which embraces the greater part of the village, the air [is] filled with such scents as we instinctively avoid in a woodland walk; and doubtless, if our senses were once purified and educated by a simpler and truer life, we should not consent to live in such a neighborhood.
* * * * * George Melvin, our Concord trapper, told me that in going to the spring near his house, where he kept his minnows for bait, he found that they were all gone, and immediately suspected that a mink had got them; so he removed the snow all around and laid open the trail of a mink underneath, which he traced to his hole, where were the fragments of his booty. There he set his trap, and baited it with fresh minnows. Going again soon to the spot, he found one of the mink's fore legs in the trap gnawed off near the body, and, having set it again, he caught the mink with his three legs, the fourth having only a short bare bone sticking out.
When I expressed some surprise at this, and said that I heard of such things but did not know whether to believe them, and was now glad to