THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES GIFT OF Ted Barrett THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY Need there groan a world in anguish just to teach us sympathy? R. BROWNING THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY REMINISCENCES IN ESSAY AND VERSE AUTHOR OF " PALMS AND JULIAN B. ARNOLD . 033 BOSTON MARSHALL JONES COMPANY MDCCCCXX COPYRIGHT-I920-BY MARSHALL JONES COMPANY THE PLIMPTON PRESS NORWOOD MASS U 8 A A To my Wife MY UNFAILING SOURCE OF SYMPATHY I DEDICATE THESE WRITTEN THOUGHTS PREFACE Haras non numero nisi serenas Shadows of our years go drifting by, Across the lawns of memory, where lie Leaves long fallen, whispering as they fly Of an eternal Sun. Shadows of our moods, seeking to belie The braver path and guide our steps awry. Rive, them with smiles; knowing in yonder sky Reigneth the Sun. Shadows of our souls which would deny That flowers grow by rain. Ah, cease to sigh At ills beneficent. Lift faces high, Kissed by the Sun. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGB I. IN THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY . 1 II. WHEN SYMPATHY WALKS DELICATELY 8 III. THE GAMUT OF SYMPATHY . . 13 IV. IN THE GARDEN OF LIFE ... 18 V. THE ASSURANCE OF GENIUS . . 20 VI. OUR MAGIC CARPETS .... 32 VTI. THE ASCENSION OF SONG ... 38 VIII. RHEIMS CATHEDRAL .... 47 IX. THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOON 50 X. WHEN THE WORLD WAS YOUNG . 56 XI. KNOWLEDGE 65 XII. BEGINNING OUR YEAR ... 69 XIII. THE VEIL OF ASTARTE ... 75 XIV. THE BROOK OF REVELATIONS . . 84 XV. A PARABLE 88 XVI. A ROMANY PROPHET .... 91 XVII. WHERE LIFE AND DEATH ARE NEIGHBORS 97 XVin. THE MORNING SIGH OF MEMNON. 103 XIX. LIGHT AND SHADOW .... 108 XX. BY HIM WHO SLEEPS AT PmiuE 117 XXI. PLAY Our THE GAME ... .128 be THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY i IN THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY The secret sympathy, The silver link, the silken tie, Which heart to heart and mind to mind In body and in soul can bind. IN our welded language there are words, which, through long and careless usage, have acquired a variety of meanings ; while others show a native insularity, rigidly keeping to themselves. This is partly due to the in herent disposition of words, for all words have their individual temperaments and not only in their features but in their traits betray their parentage, and their bringing-up. Who, for instance, would venture to trifle with the gra cious but severe aloofness of the word home? It was born in an Aryan tribe, to whose body- politic the family unit was the soul, and it has never forgotten its lonely childhood in the glades of Gothic forests. Around its wild cradle were ranged highly developed civilizations striv- [ 1 J THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY ing for unification and the mastery of the world. To them the widening State was home. The thought implied by this fair-haired Gothic word could find no closer synonym on Roman lips than the dark-haired word domus as if a house were necessarily a home and Rome has bequeathed to the modern Spaniard only the word hogar (a hearth), while French lips cam ouflage the idea under the expression chez nous. Many words display this reservation of char acter, and like Caesar s wife must ever be above suspicion. Other words are bolder. They go forth into the world and become accomplished in new uses, helping men to convey their thoughts in clearer ways ; while others sink to levels so base that one sorrows to see or hear them. These latter were once able assistants of the mind, but they have suffered wrong by those who set them to unworthy tasks or crippled them and have lost their birthright. Occasionally a word grows frivolous. It becomes a buffoon, as in the modern misusage of "blooming" which bars it from sedate service. Only with extreme diffi dence would one now hail the "blooming Spring" or invite his associates to "Up and follow him to win a blooming bride." [ 2 ] IN THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY In another category altogether are some words, patrician in their origin and born to destinies of power and helpfulness. Among them we may always recognize the title of this essay ; a word having great possessions yet ever bounteous to the poor. Since its birth in Greece forty centuries ago it has inherited much abstract thought and embraced many meanings. But they have always been generous and big-hearted. How should it be otherwise with a word that was born of such parentage as Syn and Pathos, with feeling? Whatever limi tations this word may once have had, it has none now. For each of us it infers the founda tion of compassionate thoughts and deeds. If there were truth in the adage that the purpose of a coat is to cover a multitude of sins, we may balance the equation by asserting that a cloak of sympathy covers countless graces. Like the rays of the sun which seem only to lighten the world in the daytime but live in the dark heart of coal or in the closed flower in its midnight sleep, so sympathy, in its variant phases, is the basic cause of nearly all our kindlier attitudes of mind. Indeed it would be difficult to aim, even distantly, at the fulfillment of that com plex commandment "thou shalt love thy neigh- [ 3 ] THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY bor as thyself" if evolution had not saturated us with sympathetic knowledge of what our neighbor asks. Some years ago in London at one of those salons where gather, by a sort of mental capil lary attraction, the men and women famous in current history, I overheard an exquisite use of this word sympathy in its broader sense. I was conversing with the author of The Light of Asia, when our hostess naively asked him, "In which of all the many lands you have visited did you find and bring away your pretty manners?" "Madame, if I have any such possessions other than in your kind belief, I did not need to seek them in travel ; I found them nearer your self." "Then you shall tell me where this mag netized spot may be, and my children shall play there, for the benefit of posterity." "Truly it is a playground for children as well as for those grown up. But seriously, if I tell you, you will not betray my secret, will you?" "Indeed I will not." "Very well. When I was a little boy I went to a school, still flourishing, which was kept by [ 4 ] IN THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY a lady; and there I learnt a number of things which have been useful to myself and I trust to others." "Oh, do tell me her name, you said you would." "Yes, but you will not tell?" "No indeed I will not ; I promise, except that my children shall certainly go there. You could not mind that I am sure?" "Madame, they will go there I know, having so sweet a mother. The school was kept by Dame Sympathy." How much is hidden beneath that word. It had been the talisman of a long and varied career and had carried its wearer into the hearts of millions of men. Yet it was confided as a secret, for sympathy is curiously shy. Demurely it takes by-paths to its goal rather than the crowded roads, and is ever diffident of letting the left hand know what the right hand doeth. Its nature is so ; but probably past centuries of narrow dogma, wherein more gen erous ideas expressed themselves covertly, have helped to ingrain in men the habit of hiding their feelings. Like the Spartan boy bearing the fox in his bosom, the wounds of sympathy had, in past ages, often to be borne in silence. THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY Can anyone imagine that above the blood- lust which hovered like some foul miasma over the gladiatorial displays of Rome there did not ascend a radiant mist of sympathetic thoughts ; radiant as the arc of promise, misty as the eyes of Eon weeping for her slain Memnon? The Vestal virgins might turn their thumbs downwards dooming the fallen to death, but many a gentler wish went forth to spare, lead ing to a dawn when the Coliseum should be remembered only as a madness of the night. So must it have been with many a dark page of history. Even a modern crowd is sometimes sphinx-like in betraying its real leanings until some sudden spark fires the impulse of its sym pathies. And like the crowd, the individual too often wears an impassive mask, disguising the evolving soul. We hail the event which tears from us or from others the shadows of this mask, and shows the light shining in the eyes of the heart. Truth dwelleth not alone at the bottom of her well. But the writing on faces is not for all to read. A charming story was told by John Ruskin to show how blind may be even the most sympathetic eyes. He was traveling in a rail way car and had taken his seat opposite a man [ 6 ] IN THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY whose features distressed him by their plain ness and even harsh lines. Presently his fellow traveler dropped his paper, and the great es sayist picked it up and handed it back to him. As he did so his companion thanked him with such a smile that inwardly Ruskin said "Merci ful gods, what a glorious face ; and what a fool I was." THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY II WHEN SYMPATHY WALKS DELICATELY The more we know, the better we forgive, Who er feels deeply, feels for all who live. A NOTABLE quality of sympathy is its proneness to walk delicately. It has been said that the sympathy which con tains a vestige of pity is not true sympathy, and the phrase aptly indicates a desire to go about its compassionate business as quietly as possible. Like the violet it hastens to solace the hurts of winter, But hides the while under tender leaves Which must spread broad in other suns, and lift In later lives a crowned head to the sky. In the anxiety which sympathy displays not to be recognized it will screen its identity, or like Victor Hugo, when his little granddaughter was put into the closet for some delinquency, it will wait until the stern authorities are not looking and then slip a box of chocolates into [ 8] SYMPATHY WALKS DELICATELY the wrong-doer s hand. For sympathy is an incorrigible contravener of the law. This solicitude of sympathy to escape atten tion may be illustrated in the following recol lection. The scene is a dinner party in London about twenty-five years ago. Amongst the guests was John Ruskin, whom the cultured public knows as a great critic, and the sub merged world knew as a man who gave his fortune away in charities. Ruskin had been saying that it was a mistake to give alms at random, and that men should imitate the gods and help only those who helped themselves. It was inevitable that Olympus, thus invoked, should hear and protest ; and the bolt of Zeus fell in this wise. Opposite Ruskin was sitting the editor of a great London newspaper, wielding in those days probably as large a measure of influence in British affairs as any Cabinet minister. With a grave face, but humorous twinkle in his eyes, he turned to our host saying: "What Mr. Ruskin alleges as the creed of charity is possibly practiced by some, happily not by many, certainly not by himself. If I may be temporarily shielded from the arrows of such a contestant, I will relate a little story [ 9 ] THE SCHOOL OP SYMPATHY which may support my denial of his assertion and induce him to cry with Benedict A mir acle, our hands against our hearts. "Some years ago there was heard in one of our magistrate s courts a case affecting wide interests, sordid in its details but so important in its bearings that it drew to that minor court many men whose studies led them to take note of such things. There were, of course, sundry smaller eases to be dealt with before the cause celebre; the pitiful flotsam and jetsam of a great city washed into these magisterial eddies on the morning tide. "Amongst the onlookers, thus induced to visit this clearing-house of sorrow, were two men seated together in the well of the court, keenly observant of all that passed before them. The minor cases were swiftly disposed of; drunken ness, thefts, and the many discords of life; when a final delinquent was placed on the pris oner s stand, a fine young fellow endowed by nature to be the builder of gladness for himself and others, but now ragged, blear-eyed and corrupted with evil communications. The charge against him was that of knocking his wife down and grievously assaulting her in a fit of drunkenness. With the abruptness of [ 10 ] SYMPATHY WALKS DELICATELY justice thus dispensed the only witness was at once called his wife. She took her place in the grim scene, a mere child in years, with her pretty face full of suppressed tears; and like some graceful animal caught in the hunter s snare she gazed frightenedly at those around her, the magistrate and the unknown crowd, and then her eyes timidly sought the prisoner s box and met his ! "Who may know what thoughts of anger filled her heart when she stepped into the wit ness box ; but neither heart nor face had anger in them now. Behind the tearful eyes there was a tenderness which lit their sadness and bade her heart forgive this her Calvary. Vaguely she heard her name called by the official of the court, and her evidence demanded. In silence she continued to look towards the place where stood the man she loved. "Then the magistrate asked, Is it true that the prisoner knocked you down, and treated you so violently and badly? Do not be afraid; tell me. "The gentleness of the tone awakened her from mental vales where love was blind with its own tears to the realities around her to be transmuted by that love. For with an utter C 11 ] THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY abandonment of fear she suddenly stretched out her arms, crying, Oh, no, no, no, Sir, it is not true; he could not really mean to hurt me. It is not true ; give him back to me. "And the wise magistrate gave him back to her. "But in the well of that court one of the two watchers of this scene whispered to the other, Friend, you are the editor of a great news paper. Start a subscription for that pair. Set them up in a clean and happy life ; so shall the good God bless you. Here is my contribu tion to the fund you will collect. "Kind host, the man who started that fund which has given to that pair of lovers a useful and glad life in one of Britain s great colonies was Mr. Ruskin ; I was only the editor, the in strument of a creed more gracious than the one he offered just now as the mask which sympathy ofttimes holds before her face." [ 12 ] THE GAMUT OF SYMPATHY ni THE GAMUT OF SYMPATHY There is in souls a sympathy with sounds And as the mind is pitched the ear is pleased. SYMPATHIES which are aroused in us by scenes, colors, sounds and scents afford food for thought. I once took some care to ascertain what colors were preferred by lead ing thinkers and artists of our time, and the results were curiously indicative of the chooser s mind. Several poets and men of science loved the clearer tints of yellow. The author of the Light of Asia had an Oriental passion for all colors, but rapturously praised, "the melted gold of the morning sun, the yellow sheen of the Buddhist robe, the ochre of a waving field of wheat." The accepted color of intellectuality was strong in the sympathetic thoughts of such men. With novelists and dramatists I found that deep reds were favorite tints. The late Charles Reade saw life phrased "in the carmines of the [ 13 ] THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY setting sun," Clark Russell sensed it "in the pinks with which the dawn paints the sky,"while a popular lady novelist, Mrs. Lynn Lynton, gave me quite a lecture on the pageantry of history which to her eyes was conjured forth upon the sight of purple; "That royal, regnant purple," she said, "which is the color of the robes of princes, the imperial border of the toga, the gift of the sea-gods who gave pearls to queens but the treasure of the shells of Tyre and Sidon to kings." Of sounds the sympathetic powers seem still more subtle, and reach higher than the realms of mundane music. With some this gift is but slightly developed. Others are so responsive that sounds for them have close affinities with color vibrations and their ears are almost as sensitive as microphones. I have heard a noted violinist, Signer Romane, stop in the middle of an important solo because the almost inaudible rumble of a distant carriage marred the con cord between himself and his violin. The same msestro told me that being overtaken by a storm he sought shelter in a barn, and whilst there was so impressed by the majesty of the thunder that he took his violin from its case and sought to reproduce the rolling tones. At last attain- THE GAMUT OF SYMPATHY ing success he cried exultantly, "I have it, I have it ; now I can talk with God." The famous operatic singer, Madam Gomez, confided to me that there were certain notes in her voice which could never be happily wedded to French, and other notes which obstinately refused to speak in English, but that it had always been a delight to her to sing from her heart the vowels of Italian. Such instances are, perhaps, the expressions of physical enjoyment experienced by musicians in the exercise of their art, rather than expositions of sympathy. There are sounds, however, which reach us not always by the ear; delicate notes finding re sponsive vibrations in our inmost souls which wake far memories or bear us to the skies upon the rhythm of eternal harmonies. And scents! Why have the poets, in their multitude of odes and sonnets, conspired to omit all mention of the nose? Lorenzo de Medici was as original in poesy as in the man agement of Florentine politics when he wrote of Nencia, Her eyes! and twixt them comes the winsome nose With proud pink nostrils like the pits in a rose. The nose is by no means negligible. Many [ 15 ] THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY people are extremely sensitive to perfumes. The incense-laden air of a cathedral, the smell of pines and woodlands, or the scented gratitude of field and hedgerow when rain has fallen strike chords in their inner consciousness. Memories long dormant are aroused, or past scenes re called by some chance encounter with a par ticular odor. Persons with artistic tempera ments are especially susceptible to perfumes, as if there were some sympathetic association be tween the appreciation of beauty and the vi brations set up by these elusive and delicate aromas. For myself I occasionally pass within the magic sway of some scent which instan taneously wafts me to lands wherein I wandered long years ago. Wood smoke mingled with the breath of the sea, and what else I know not, bears me away to the Fjords of Norway; or the dust of a country road trembling in the sunbeams of a summer-day and charged with the pollen of clover, will whisper "Your feet tread again the sands of Egypt, and the Lord of thy Heaven is Ammon." Verily the field of sympathy has no boun dary. Ultimately, it may prove to be the subtlest law of growth, boundless as infinitude, continuing as eternity, more omnipotent than [ 16 ] THE GAMUT OP SYMPATHY the faith which moveth mountains. No depths beneath us, no sanctuaries above deter it. Downward it carries us beyond the wraiths of earliest forms of life held in archean granites ; down to the buried silt of primal oceans grieved with such weight of superincumbent hills that out of pressure and dull pain this ooze evolves as marble, tinted as the mists of sunrise. Upward our sympathy has endless range. Upon the wings of the young-eyed soul it mounts unfettered. Across the silver-atolled wastes of heaven it voyages unchallenged. With the spiral of the moving stars it climbs to that far vortex of time and space where dwells the brooding Power of Good. For surely if the lowest note in the cosmic scale entreats sym pathy of us shall not the highest ask it also? If, as a law of physics, it be true that a child stamping on its nursery floor sets in motion vibrations which are sensed by the farthest planet of our system, shall not the forces fo cused in sympathy aid not only all that is but also Him? THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY IV IN THE GARDEN OF LIFE PRIVATE GEORGE HUBBS, late of the Ypres sector, lay a-dying in the base hospital. "Do you think, Nurse, that there is any chance for me?" he asked. And the Nurse, aware of his approaching death, an swered, "Yours is a serious case but the Doctor never loses hope, nor would he wish you to do so." "I was not thinking of my body, Nurse. I saw the White Christ walking in the trench an hour before I got my ticket to the West and I will obey the Great Doctor and hope. Will you give me one of those flowers to to take with me?" WHAT THE FLOWER SAID TO PRIVATE HUBBS And She supposing Him the Gardener; Fool, as if God s Son, Cares for the flowers that are done. Ah! But He cares; And in the garden of His heart [ 18] IN THE GARDEN OF LIFE The humblest life finds tendence, and its part Is spaced, wherein it grows towards beauty. He watcheth How the Sower s hands Scatter the souls of men amid the lands Each in its fitting clime and time Seedlings of Heaven, linking harvests past and yet to be Clad in their husks and shells, Discarded ere the full bloom tells The guerdon of a season s life, And gain of strife. He knoweth The needs of all within that garden wide And guardeth each. Ever what best betide That He bestoweth: Sending fair winds, the beat of angel wings, Filled with the hope that brings A zest to effort. Using the tears of life, like rain From passing clouds, to teach The buds of aspiration, seek and gain The sun-lit kiss of God. He lifteth The drooping stem; the tendril sees And guides its weakling arms to heights above The tangled growths; And where the light and sunshine promise love Their small hands setteth. From weeds and briars His garden frees: Protecting and persuading till the tears Of storms are past, and each life rears Its heart of gold to face the golden Sun And smile in beauty toward the Light: Ah ! But He cares. [ 19 ] THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY V THE ASSURANCE OF GENIUS What is genius but deep feeling Waken d by passion, to revealing? GENIUS has much conscience but little morality. Like the prism thrown upon a wall by the chance moving of a glass it enthralls us with the display of its own in timacy with light ; yet in nowise will it endure obstruction. In the realms of its own expres sion, whether of science, of literature or of art, fear is as foreign to its purpose as insincerity, but it suffers sorely under the conventionalities which constrain those who climb on lowlier paths. Biography sparkles with instances, for by grace divine the cycles of mankind s dark ness have been lit by a myriad wayward stars of genius whose light evades the law of vibra tory waves and is both instant and continuing. To the constellation that shone above my natal hour I turn my mental telescope and watch a single star, the late Sir Edwin Arnold. Some acquaintance with the assurance of his genius may not alone exemplify the title of this inadequate sketch but also prove of interest. It [ 20 ] THE ASSURANCE OF GENIUS may be said of most men that they are moulded by their environment and of a few that they bend their environment to themselves. In a marked degree the author of The Light of Asia belonged to the latter type. Reared in that atmosphere of dogmatic beliefs and dull con servatism which obtained in the homes of Eng lish country squires of the Victorian era, his earliest instincts freed him from its thralldom, and steeped his mind with tales of the enchanted lands of Asia. A pentecostal gift of tongues descended upon him. As a child he invested in a bilingual Greek and Latin testament, teaching himself to follow in those languages the epistles in his village church. Then he purchased a Hebrew grammar, learning a page of it each day until he could read the Talmud in the vernacular. Other languages were as readily acquired, until in the course of years he was eloquent in twenty. But always he had, in Elizabeth s phrase, foul scorn of grammars. Often he would say, "We learn the tender strength of language at our mother s knee and grow to love its beauty and revere its power. Then from the shadows of life creeps forth an assassin who stabs it in the back, and his name is Grammarian. If you must wrong language by [ 21 ] THE SCHOOL, OF SYMPATHY listening to the cold analysis of grammar do so, but as soon as may be throw the grammar over the garden wall and get back to some master writer of the tongue you would learn and follow him with a dictionary." Truly a rebellious scholar. So in poetry his orbit was elliptic. He lisped in numbers for the numbers came, and his earlier poems brought him into literary inti macy with Victor Hugo, Emerson, Swinburne and others of the galactic plane he traversed. But his first public triumph (an instructive in stance of the assurance of genius) occurred on his taking the Newdigate prize at Oxford with his poem, The Feast of Belshazzar. According to the Oxford custom it was recited by the author in the Sheldonian Theatre and its unusual vigor and wealth of expression at once secured for it wide acknowledgment. But in the circles of scholarship its erudition ap peared so remarkable that the Wise Men of the University sought from the young poet infor mation concerning the sources of the Akkadian and Babylonian names which add such racial colour to the verses. In complimenting him on the word-picture which he had painted of the fall of the Chaldean power one of his interro- [ 22 ] THE ASSURANCE OF GENIUS gators quoted the lines: No lack of goodly company was there, No lack of laughing eyes to light the cheer; From Dara trooped they, from Daremma s grove The suns of battle and the moons of love; From where Arrissa s silver waters sleep To Imla s marshes and the inland deep; From pleasant Calah and from Sittacene The horseman s captain and the harem s queen. To the conclave of learned Dons he suavely answered that the scattered nature of his read ings forbade his remembering at the moment the actual sources of these references. But in after years he confessed to the writer of this tribute to his brilliant if unconventional mind that he coined all these Chaldean names to suit the scanning of his lines. It was worthy of a David Chatterton thus to beard the Assyriologists in their den. This poem made its impress also upon the mind of a young actor, afterwards to be known to fame as Sir Henry Irving. Of the many recitative pieces in his repertoire this remained his favorite, and it formed the initial link in an enduring friendship between the author and its gifted interpreter. During the residence of the poet in Japan he wrote for Irving the Samurai tragedy of Adzuma; sending the play to me to [23 ] THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY arrange for its public rendering at the Lyceum. But in the conversations which I had with Irving on this matter we encountered numerous technical difficulties connected with the trans planting to the boards of a London theatre a work so oriental in thought and setting, and the dramatic death of Irving at Bradford abruptly terminated our efforts towards its production. Amongst those also present at the first read ing of the Feast of Belshazzar in the Sheldonian Theatre was Benjamin Disraeli, then just rising to fame and destined to become as the Earl of Beaconsfield and Premier of Great Britain one of the great figures of the Victorian age. On being introduced to the hero of the day the future Prime Minister said, in his somewhat florid diction, "Young Sir, I congratulate you. The heights of Parnassus call you; other heights call me. In the years that are coming both of us will answer to their summons, and from the benches of Literature and State we will wave again our salutations of this day." Verily the assurance of genius has at times the vision of prophecy. The pen of the young author was destined to prove a potent helper to the policies of Disraeli; and on the brows of [24] THE ASSURANCE OF GENIUS both these men was written the ultimate ful fillment of the promise to renew their saluta tions. It happened in this wise. Long afterwards when the nations of the world awaited anxiously the outcome of certain intricate and dangerous negotiations arising from the errors of the Con gress of Berlin there came a day when the bal ancing of the conflicting national interests hung upon the decision which would be pronounced at the impending opening of Parliament. Upon the wording of the "speech from the throne" which would open the deliberations of Parlia ment depended in large measure whether the dogs of war could be held in leash or whether they must be loosed and make a shambles of Europe. Two nights before the fateful date I was dining with Sir Edwin discussing the omens, for as the editor of the leading London newspaper and one of the keenest judges of his country s mood, no man was more eminently fitted to act as oracle at this hour. So must have thought the all-powerful Prime Minister, Lord Beaconsfield, for in the midst of our con versation a messenger arrived from Downing Street inviting Sir Edwin to draft the history- making speech which should proclaim to the [25 ] THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY world the British policy and still the storm. Clear was the vision which had foreseen the day when from the benches of Literature and State these two men, so different in temperaments yet so conscious of their innate strength, would wave again their salutations. In the paths of travel the assurance of genius bore our subject unscathed by field and flood. Touristdom was to him an abomination, and he objected to taking the same road twice if an alternative way might be found; but once en voyage no untoward circumstance could affect his serene temper. It was my privilege to wander with him in many countries, and always he fulfilled his axiom that the man who does not live in heart a boy never was born one. I have seen him supremely at home in a native mule cart on the frontiers of Morocco ; saluting the viking-gods as he sailed his fishing smack through the angers of the North Sea ; quoting Tacitus as his authority for the building of a log hut on the marge of a fjord in Norway; sitting cross-legged in an Aleppo shop the whilst he discussed politics with a malignant and unturbaned Turk; seated at the campfire of a Bedaween village after our dahabeah had been wrecked on the Nile; tramping through [26] THE ASSURANCE OF GENIUS Wales with a couple of donkeys which we had commandeered to carry our knapsacks ; and in a score of other abnormal situations none of which might disturb the assurance of his phil osophy. As a conversationalist he was, of course, noted for his brilliancy and depth, but always there lurked in his phrases some surprise, some happy radio-quality which saw profoundly, lit keenly, and straightway upset accepted the ories. His wit had a rapier suddenness but ever carried a button at its point lest it should hurt. I do not think that anyone ever knew him to utter an ungracious comment of earth or sky or sea or anything that therein is. On one occasion I recollect that his fellow guests were laughing at the vagaries of dudes and mashers, and someone invited the opinion of the grave but kindly poet. He answered simply, "If a young gentleman thinks that it is the right thing to walk abroad with a large expanse of shirt front and an assertive diamond glistening in its midst if he really thinks that this is the right thing to do, and does it ; how sweet of him!" In graver style he would courteously but logically defend large theories. To the too [27 ] THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY sweeping demand of the late W. E. Gladstone, "Of course, Sir Edwin, you will grant that Europe was appointed for the Christians," I heard him reply, "Certainly, but on one con dition." "And what may be your condition?" asked Gladstone. "That you will grant that Asia was appointed for whom shall we say, Buddhists, Brahmins, Moslems, Shinto-wor shippers?" "By no means can I grant you that." "Then, Mr. Gladstone, I fear that I cannot accept your major premises." Nor was his pen less ready than his speech. He scattered verses as a steel turning lathe showers its sparks. Countless graceful and un published poems of his lie perdu in birthday volumes and autograph collections, while the hotel books of every land contain his variorum notce in witty and pertinent poesy. Thought with him clothed itself instantly in apt expres sion. I once handed him an evening newspaper, pointing out a paragraph which mentioned that Mr. Colman, of mustard fame, had just been knighted. Taking a pencil from his pocket he wrote on the margin of the paper without a moment s hesitation, Oh, new-made Knight of Colman s mustard, The meaning of this badge we see, [28 ] THE ASSUEANCE OF GENIUS How many a knight who fought and blustered, Hath wept and yielded meeting thee. To the usual accessories of a man of letters he was wholly indifferent. His books were mainly composed in the unconsidered trifles of time. They assisted to bind together the ac tivities of a life built of large affairs. The Light of Asia, in its first rough condition, was written in odd minutes on the backs of en velopes, the margins of newspapers and his shirt cuffs. If his pencil broke or the quill pen grew moody he turned it round and dipping the blunt end into the ink pot would proceed uncon cernedly with the composition. In the absence of any such implement I have heard him re mark, "What, no pen? well, bring me the kitchen poker." Books gathered unto him as cosmic dust settles upon our whirling planet; but though he absorbed literature, he would seldom read a book twice, and he gave away his libraries as fast as they accumulated. At the shrines of art, science, literature and scholarship he worshipped as an adept, yet to no dogmas would he subscribe, nor yield to prejudices. The wonder and charm of his versatility was that it gave no impression of feverish willingness, no sense of unnatural [ 29 ] THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY strain. He passed easily and joyously from one of his manifold intellectual activities to an other without apparent fatigue and with a temper of imperturbable sweetness. Let me close this brief sketch of one who showed so well the assurance of genius, by re calling a walk with him amid the ruins of the Acropolis at Athens. It had been one of those typical midwinter days of the JEgean coasts when the sunlight lies lovingly upon the altars of ancient Greece and the shadows of the cy press trees speak of her modern sorrows. Wan dering amongst some stone-work, tumbled by cannon shot in the war with Turkey, the poet chanced to see, peering at him from beneath a broken capital, the skull of a Turk. Seating himself upon a fallen column and using the white surface of the cranium as his tablet, he wrote, without effort or erasure, the noted "Dedication to a Skull," which ends with the lines : Call not me a thing of the clod! The Parthenon owned no such plan! Man made that temple for a God, God made these temples for a man! Handing to me the skull thus inscribed (I had it mounted as a vase) he picked up a piece [ 30] THE ASSURANCE OF GENIUS of stone, some fragment cast down by time or siege from the Acropolis, and prompted doubt less by its shape, proceeded to carve it with the chisel in a pocket knife, producing in little time an excellent replica of the helmeted head of Pallas Athene. As the shadows of evening lengthened he sketched, upon the fly-leaf of a book, the temple-crowned Acropolis, and at a later date, transformed this sketch into a large oil-painting, a masterful and sympathetic ren dering of the scene, with the dark foreground of modern Greece contrasted against the white and ghostly temples enthroned upon the rock of the Acropolis, canopied by a cloud-flecked sky from which the silver orb of Diana peeped in watchful guidance of her daughters. No es todo plata que reluce. Recently I sent this picture to be cleaned and the dismayed expert notified me that the moon had incontinently come off in the cleaning! It had proved to be merely a torn disc of white paper pasted at the edge of a cloud, some after-thought of the artist seeking to give to his work the touch which seemed to him lacking. Ah, well; the moon, though a thing of beauty, is subject to eclipse, but the assurance of genius is a joy forever. [ 31 ] THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY VI OUR MAGIC CARPETS Our thoughts are boundless as our souls are free. BYROH TO each of us at birth is given a magic carpet, swifter and more wondrous than any described by Shahrazad. On the looms of thought it is woven; its woof is spun from memories, its warp is made from the many- hued skein of imagination. Summoned by the mental process of intent or by some uncon trolled and momentary reminiscence it bears us instantly away. Its knowledge of all paths by land and sea and air grows with our own learn ing and experiences, yet in no wise is it bound by limitations save the retarding weight of our own doubts. No frontiers bar its passage; no distance daunts it ; nor does it grant us time to consider the marvel of its speed and faithfulness. We think of some scene, some condition, and [ 32 ] OUR MAGIC CARPETS straightway we are there, environed by the colors, sounds and movements pertinent to the place. What is not true to the circumstances of our quest dies upon the rushing wind of swift passage, for our magic carpet derives its movement from a thought and jettisons all that is not of it. No possession in life is more gracious to each of us than this. It acknowledges neither wealth nor poverty. It obeys the bidding of the cripple as readily as the summons of the strong. It is the unfailing associate of childhood, the remind ful comforter of old age, the inexhaustible teacher of our years of action. How else should the artist sense the depths of his unpainted canvas ; or the sculptor see the contours of his statue in the rough-hewn block of marble; or the dramatist fill his empty stage with living figures ; or the novelist witness the episodes of his unwritten story; or the historian recall the smoke of burning cities sacked by the foe, the smiling landscape of prosperous days, the clash and havoc of war and the solemn conclaves of peace. Nay more ; the artist, sculptor, drama tist, novelist and historian may bear us to the realms of their conducting thoughts. They point the path which we may follow, for all true [ 33 ] THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY works of art are their own sufficient guide books. It has been my privilege to travel thus on carpets magical with many of the master pilots of my time in the fields of science, literature, art and geographical discovery. The late Sir William Crookes used to bring to my father s house his half completed inventions, and as a boy, my soul breathless with expectation, I watched him perfect his radiometer and in later years those delicate instruments which wrested secrets from the quiet lips of Nature. I have sat in studios whilst some of the notable pic tures of the age were painted, such as "The Roll Call" by Elizabeth Thompson. I have assisted in the organization of the expeditions which enabled Sir Henry M. Stanley to map the heart of Africa, and the late George Smith to excavate the buried cities of Assyria. I have been an intimate witness of the writing of many famous books, like The Light of Asia, which today enrich our libraries. And ever at a sign from the master of tool, brush, pencil or pen, as the mahout wields his ankus, our magic carpets have borne us on the winds of science beyond the murky atmospheres of earth to the sun-starred meadows of light, or carried us [ 34 ] OUR MAGIC CARPETS from peaceful studios to the grim battlefields of the Crimea, or transformed the sombre fur nishings of a London home to the green and golden sward beneath the Bodi tree where sat the supreme and gentle Teacher of India. Perhaps the most striking instance that I can recall of the mind being, in Milton s phrase, "its own place," was evidenced for me in the writing of The Voyage of Ithobal, by the late Sir Edwin Arnold. That book, it will be re membered, describes in verse the adventures of certain Phoenicians who undertook, at the com mand of Pharoah Neco of Egypt, the first re corded circumnavigation of Africa. The account is given by Herodotus who states, in his terse, quaint style, that "the Phoenicians, setting out from the Red Sea, navigated the Southern Sea; when autumn came, they went ashore and sowed the land, by whatever part of Libya they happened to be sailing, and waited for the harvest; and having reaped the corn, they put to sea again. When two years had thus passed, in the third, having doubled the Pillars of Hercules, they arrived in Egypt, and related that as they sailed round Libya, they had the Sun on their right hand." Of this voyage, the poet builds the detailed [35 ] THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY story. It was his last work and was dictated when illness had rendered him totally blind. Nevertheless, with the inward vision which is ours when we travel upon our magic carpets, he describes the preparation of the expedition on the shores of the Red Sea and follows its fortunes around the continent of mystery until the worn oars of his Phoenician sailors are shipped and the ragged sails of their boats flap triumphant at the Nile s mouth. Each fea ture of the immense coast line is explored ; the different tribes are accurately portrayed ; their greetings to the mariners are interpreted from the viewpoint of those who worshipped Baal and Astarte; strange animals and birds move across the pages of the poem ; and all its world is clothed with the variant verdure of Africa. It is not so much a book as a canvas painted with words ; a changeful scape of land and sea, an epitome of African color, sound and life. So true is its sympathy with the setting that when Sir Henry M. Stanley quietly entered the library of the blind poet and heard him dictating some passages descriptive of the Swahili coast, he laid his hand upon the shoulder of his friend and said, "Arnold, it is you, not I, who know that land so well," and [ 36 ] OUR MAGIC CARPETS the poet answered as simply, "Stanley, I have learned that the eyes are keenest when they look within." Oh, Shahrazad, gracious guide in many an enchanted land, boast not of your magic carpets, for each of us possesses one. THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY VII THE ASCENSION OF SONG Now the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne were nine and ever they sing of the deeds of gods and men. HESIOD Then sang Deborah, I will sing praises unto the Lord God of Israel, Before whom the earth trembled, yea, trembled when He went st forth. The heavens and the clouds dropped water; And Kishon, the ancient river Kishon, swept them away; Even the kings who fought by the waters of Megiddo. Their horsehoofs were broken by means of the prancings. Oh my soul, Thou hast trodden down strength. Awake, awake, Deborah, awake, awake, Utter a Song. CAN we not still hear the song of Deborah, as, forgetting bodily weariness in her elation, she leads the cymbal players be fore her battle-torn and victorious Israelites? Who would seek the faint emotions which, like will-o -the-wisps, flicker o er the shallows of modern fiction, when from the cliffs of time reverberate echoes of episodes enshrined in song such as hers ; songs which have stirred, and for aeons will stir, the imagination of nations? [ 38 ] THE ASCENSION OF SONG For had not Jabin, who reigned in Hazor, threatened to make a wilderness of Israel, and to that end had sent the captain of his hosts, one Sisera, with nine hundred chariots of iron and warriors in number as the sands of the sea? Dire was the need of the hour, yet whither should Israel turn? And one said, "There is a woman liveth under the palm-tree by Ramah and her name is Deborah. Let us go unto her. Peradventure she shall aid us, for she hath strange knowledge of the hearts of men." So they sent unto Deborah and she arranged with Barak an am buscade by the stony little stream of Kishon. And, behold, a storm arose whereby Kishon was turned into a raging torrent, which swept away the nine hundred chariots of iron and their horsemen and the men-at-arms of Jabin. And it came to pass that Sisera, the mighty captain, fled on foot from the lost battle to the tent of one Heber, a nomad of the Kenite tribe. Now Heber was absent that day attentive to the bleatings of his flocks, seeking precarious grazing in these unsettled times ; and Jael, his wife, was in charge of his honour and his tent. And Jael met the fleeing Sisera and proffered him guesthood, giving him, in token of good [39 ] THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY faith, as is the custom of the desert, milk from her own hands and butter in a lordly dish and she set a mantle over him; and, to the eternal shame of all the children of Ishmael, she slew him even as he slept. So Deborah led down from the mountain side her horde of wild warriors. Slow was their progress for they were burdened with much booty, "yea, to every man a damsel or two and a prey of divers colours of needlework on both sides, meet for the necks of them that take the spoil." And all the air was filled with the rumbling of the dying storm, with the neighing of horses, with the lowing of cattle, with the discordance of musical instruments, with the shouting of the victors ; whilst in the van, heard above the hubbub, like the motif of a frenzied orchestra, a woman crieth, The earth trembled before Thee. The clouds dropped water. Their horsehoofs were broken by means of the prancings. Oh, my soul, awake, Awake, awake, Deborah, Utter thy Song. In the galaxy of poesy thy song, Deborah, and such as thine, shall live. For is not the importance of song in the national and social [ 40 ] THE ASCENSION OF SONG life of all races attested by the chroniclers of every history. It is a truism to say that we care not who makes the laws of a land provided we may make its songs. The former are merely the dress of the body, changing with country and season ; the latter are the enduring memory, the beating heart and the nervous system. Countless thousands of men adjust their collars each morning with an assurance to the listening air that for "Bonnie Annie Laurie" they would lay them down and die ; yet how few would ven ture to assist the recalcitrant collar stud with a quotation from Chitty on contracts or Black- stone s commentaries? If an adage may be said to be the wisdom of one on the lips of many, do not these popular lyrics spring from our hearts with the sentiments and sympathies not only of our race but in large measure of mankind. Ofttimes they come charged with whispers to our subconscious selves, fraught with associa tions which transform the words to beads of a musical rosary, tinted with scenic recollections that enframe the song, chorused with voices of another life, scented with perfumes lingering amid the dried rose leaves of memory. Perhaps a personal reminiscence serving as example may be forgiven. When I was about [ 41 ] THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY twelve years old I possessed a voice so notable that it inflicted upon me the penalty of singing the solos to anthems in my college chapel and elsewhere. So befell it that I was in attendance at a certain stately Church of England when the bishop of the diocese was present and a congregation of over a thousand persons had gathered. The anthem chosen for the occasion was "As pants the hart for cooling streams so longeth my soul for Thee, oh, God" ; and in the immense choir I stood, a lonely little boy, to sing the magnificent solo of that anthem. I remember, as though it were yesterday, how the organ poured upon the air the power and grace of its theme, like the sweep of a cascade fretted with sparkling spray. Then came the moment for my solo, and another world claimed me. I forgot the church, the bishop, the people and myself. I could only think of that thirsty hart and its unquenchable longing. Into my interpretation of the appeal I flung my soul and, all unwitting of the earth, I watched my treble pass upwards amid the pillars and rafters of the church in a mist of prayer, as it were the ascending smoke of Abel s altar. "Like as the hart desireth desireth de- sireth the water brooks." High and higher sped [ 42 ] THE ASCENSION OF SONG in boyish treble the words, mystic, earnest, vis ible; until, suddenly, I became aware that the bass-solo had joined me; that his message had climbed to mine; that his grand voice outstrid- ing the pealing notes of the organ, had hurled aloft the words "So longeth longeth longeth my soul after Thee, oh, God." And still singing, well-nigh unconsciously, I watched the two voices mingle, the boy s and the man s, and the two songs entwine in a garland of vocal roses. Up, up, up beyond the carven capitals of the nave, beyond the ancient rafters and the groined roof; out, out, out into the blue sky where the summer clouds joined their lacery to the moving spiral of our song ; upward and on ward sped the olden message, the ache of the heart for utmost knowledge, essenced in prayer, winged with music, buoyed by the organ tones, purged by space and time until it merged in the myriad sympathetic vibrations which tremble as a glory around the ultimate source of thought. I am no musician ; but, in truth, I think that Polyhymnia, the Muse of sacred song, stooped down that day from her bowers on Mount Olympus and kissed an earthly boy. On another occasion "The Three Fishers" crystallized for me from vague solutions of the C 43 ] THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY mind into a gem laden with hidden lights. It was a moonlight night at Cromer on the east coast of England. The fishing boats of that quaint harbour were about to put forth into the North Sea, and the ceremony of blessing the fleet, alas now falling into disuse, was to be performed. The pastor of the little port, for in those days Cromer was but a humble place, stood at the end of the jetty and pronounced a few brave and simple words, such as men value at the edge of dangerous callings. Then in the hush of the night, with only the ripple of the sea for accompaniment, a lady, famous in the realms of song, sang "The Three Fishers." Out, far out upon the waters floated her lovely voice. The brown sails of the fishing smacks, rocking on the bosom of the awaiting tide, curtesied to its phrasings. The moon tarried amid her attendant clouds. The sea birds glided noiselessly upon their wings lest any mo tion of theirs should mar the grace of her, who Uttered such dulcet and harmonious breath That the rude sea grew civil at her song, And certain stars shot madly from their spheres To hear the sea-maid s music. Now and again some song, like a divine tuning note, awakes the souls of men. None [ 44 ] THE ASCENSION OF SONG may preknow the fortunate hour or the elected means. How should Ruget de Lisle have fore seen the destiny of his "Chant de Guerre," as it was first named; the "Marseillaise" as it is called today. The story goes that he wrote both the words and the air in a fit of patriotic excitement after a public dinner, and well may this be so, for the inadequacy and bombast of the words are only saved from merited extinc tion by the stirring melody and its inspired adaptation to the service of its theme. Yet to this martial tune the heart of a noble nation has throbbed for a century, and millions of men have marched to death as to the dawn of day. It seems to be a psychological law that great moments in the lives of nations beget notable and inspiring songs. So in the American Civil War, out of the flame and agonies of that time was born the superb battle hymn, "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord." So also in the stress and tension of the Boer war, when the pent thoughts of a race, which is readily moved inwardly but outwardly is in flexible in self control, sought for expression, suddenly "airy and excellent the proem came" in Kipling s Recessional, "Lest We Forget." In the same spirit America produced during [ 45 ] THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY the late war the unmellifluous strain "Over There," which, although hardly of an enduring type, unquestionably played a not inconsider able part in drawing to her banners the earnest service of her manhood and womanhood. Considered in its evolution from humble be ginnings to beatitude, perhaps the most re markable of recent songs is "Tipperary," which in a few years passed from its inception as a music-hall ditty to the abode of the gods. In its words and air it belongs to the lowliest sys tem of things. Its generic place might be classed amongst the invertebrates of music, having relationship with the sponges of the Archean rocks or with the foraminifera ; yet in its swift transition it has attained to a spirit ual sphere whence its echoes must bring tears to the eyes of angels. In the red fields of the great struggle it grew from nothingness to sub limity. To its tones millions of brave men gathered from lands far scattered amid the seven seas and marched at its bidding to hard ships, wounds and death, upholding the torches of Light against the sinister flags of Darkness. Today none may hear it with covered head, for it has passed in the golden aura of its associa tions into the glory and the Ascension of Song. [ 46 ] RHEIMS CATHEDRAL VIII RHEIMS CATHEDRAL Amid the dust and falling debris the wounded were hastily removed from the stricken Cathedral. WAK NEWS A MORN in Spring ; Lifting the mists of sleep from silent towers Where Clovis, grim, implacable, was crowned King of the Franks. Its young light showers A rain of golden beams on littered ground, On arch uncarved, on column rising high To swelling roof where master-masons cry Commands to busy builders; and the place Echoes Christ s creed And Labour s need "Into Thy hands, O God! so may our work find grace." A Summer s Noon, Paints with its glowing brush embattled Rheims ; THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY Gilding the armed hosts, whose banners proud Herald the Maid of Arc. Her spirit seems To fall in sunlight o er the acclaiming crowd Bordering her path to where, on either hand, The Chivalry and Church of France now stand, Tend ring to Charles a crown ; to God a race; While choristers intone "Not us ; To Thee alone ; Into Thy hands, O God! so may our land find grace." An Eve in Autumn, Sets with crimson stains on clouding sky, Cast not by sun but fires which tell The wrath and wrack of men. Wild lightnings fly, Bringing their thunders in the bursting shells, Which scatter death ; e en to the wounded mid the straw Spread in God s sanctuary ruined, resonant with war, [ 48 ] BHEIMS CATHEDRAL, Its altars desolate, save where, with lifted face, One to death near Murmurs in prayer, "Into Thy hands, O God! so may our souls find grace." THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY IX THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOON As out of the crucifixion of One arose Mary, so out of the crucifixion of all the world has arisen all Woman hood. IF truth hides in the cynicism that the part of Woman is to inspire Man with ideals and then prevent him from carrying them out, it might be urged that he never wholly compre hends his teacher. As the sons of Ammon, men circle their father s golden throne each year and learn his behests in the glare of day; but long time agone, to the daughters of Isis, their goddess-mother whispered her counsel, "Show to man only the half of thy soul." Consistent in her teaching the Moon ex emplifies her advice with a radiance that dazzles and with shadows that perplex. No object in the heavens has more tenderly encouraged man s intellectual growth than the Moon, nor is there one that has left him enmeshed in deeper wonderments. The ancient records show intimacy with her moods but seemingly de- [ 50 ] THE OTHEB SIDE OF THE MOON spaired of exacter definition. The astronomers of those distant days counted her steps across the clouds; noted her ingoings and outgoings; calculated the period which it occupied her ladyship to turn her face from profile and from the full to profile again; yet withal they dubbed her "the orb of mystery." Nevertheless the data thus gained served men through number less centuries as the basis of their calendar and enabled them to fix their civic reckonings, so that they called her, Me the Measurer. And from that Sanskrit name were evolved the deriv atives mensis, month, and Moon. From palace tower and temple pylon, the wise men of the East nightly watched her path across the spangled floor of heaven, and like courtiers at the passing of a queen, laid their petitions at her feet. Nor were their question ings neglected, for down the silver wires of her rays came many a gracious answer which since has crystallized as myth. Yet still she told not all. The half of her soul was hidden. Why, asked they, was her waywardness reflected in mankind, whilst she, the mutable yet passion less, showed always the same changeless face? Nor was it until many centuries had passed that later wise men learned through the mazes [ 51 ] THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY of complex mathematics, that barely six-tenths of the lunar surface has ever been seen by us. Through changes and moods her face remains sphinx-like in immobility. To what purpose also, asked they, does the Mother of the Night fill the minds of men with strange imaginings? And in a symbol was her answer given. Do you not see how the faint bow of the new Moon suggests its future full ness by a delicate rim of gold traced against the sky; completeness of desire in a shining bubble. So builds she ever in our hearts the fairest castles of light which seem as verities. Nor until a Galileo had come might we under stand that this circlet of gold is not of her making, but of ours. It is due to the light falling from the Sun on the Earth and reflected to the Moon. Some little touch of pride dwells here for us. To an observer on the Moon our Earth would present a surface more than ten times as large as the Moon offers, so that the light reflected from the Earth is ten times stronger and by its own reflection traces this luminous edge. If to our eyes the beauty of the silver Moon slipping between the white clouds passes the wit of a Shelley to describe, may we imagine what our Earth in its tinted [ 52 ] THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOON glory would seem to this consort of the giver of light, whom we have chained to our chariot and call our satellite. And again these wise ones of the ancient towers sought to chart the wanderings of the Moon across the star-marked wilderness of sky. With each great age of astronomy the calcu lations approached nearer to accuracy. Asia handed down to Greece her accumulated ob servations, so that Hipparchus was able to work out that which is ungallantly known as the eccentricity of the lunar orbit. Yet he was conscious that in some illusive particulars his deductions were incorrect. Thereupon Ptolemy took up the threads and disentangled the celes tial knot still further by discovering what is known as the errors of evection. Still, with feminine evasiveness, the pathway of the Moon was found to differ from its computation. So Tycho Brahe essayed the problem and gave us the lunar variations ; and afterward Newton and Laplace continued the long investigations which might be open to an indictment for in delicacy were they not prompted by an admira tion so respectful and sincere. Yet, withal, the Moon eludes us. We know not half the true inwardness of this sentinel, [ 53 ] THE SCHOOL, OF SYMPATHY silent and still. We describe her whims with satisfied precision, but like the radiant coquette that she is, she smiles behind her fan of clouds and steeps us in new witcheries. It used to be thought that she was cold; a thing icy and without heart. Yet here also we are in error, for it would seem that she is far otherwise ; especially in her sunny moods. Has not a learned astronomer written that under Stefan s law of radiation her temperature dur ing a certain observation must have been nearly at boiling point in order that the noted amount of heat could have been radiated? Let none, therefore, wrong the Moon again by calling her cold, for her attitude towards us, if not in decorously warm, is obviously often of quite affectionate temperature. Hail then, Orb of Motherhood; Me, the prompter of Akkadian philosophies; Astarte, guider of Phosnician prows ; Isis, giver of the dawn; Hathor, conductress from the Halls of Amenti; Diana of the Ephesians; Hail. Too well have thy daughters of Earth sustained thy teachings ever willing to be partly under stood, unwilling to yield more. Through un counted ages men have gathered ideals from thee and from thy daughters and have warped [ 54 ] THE O T H E B, SIDE OF THE MOON and wasted them for lack of vision. Be these things of the past. As ruined fanes, once built in pride are transformed by the alchemy of thy silver rays into palaces beyond our utmost dreaming, so in the passion of our wishfulness to learn, we invoke thee to transmute our errors into grace, and to shine forgivingly upon the path whereby thy daughters and thy sons must climb together to the eternal light. THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY X WHEN THE WORLD WAS YOUNG And the evening and the morning were the first day. GENESIS AS a crystal holds a drop of that ocean upon the bosom of which the primal morning dawned, so in many of our fables and expressions of speech we recognize the imprisoned thought of our far ancestors. Large was their sympathy though their science small. In later ages the pure light of the stars shines in the Chaldean epic of "Gilgamash"; the forest-clad gorges of the Himalayas are pictured in the Vedantic story; the dancing waves fling their spray across the pages of the Sagas; and all Nature finds her mirror in the myths of Greece. But to the earliest races of mankind belonged the inestimable privileges of moulding our concepts of things, material and sublime; and time has set the moulding beyond the power of later knowledge to wholly alter. Creation was as a Sphinx, propounding riddles too hard for answer, and measureless was the [ 56 ] WHEN THE WOE.I/D WAS YOUNG sea of perplexity whereon man s questing ar gosies voyaged towards an understanding of the heavens and earth and all that therein is. The latent riches of the world shimmered as distant shore lines in the haze of the centuries to come ; the energies of nature were as fearful and perilous rocks; the elementary facts of modern science were reefs uncharted, indicated only by the white surf of consequence breaking restlessly upon shoals, hidden and mysterious. Yet how splendid the opportunities of those who moved under the opening eyelids of the world s dawn; how intuitive the sympathy which framed their picturesque, if erroneous, explanations of the problems which confronted them ; how transcendent their discoveries. They were the first that ever burst into those silent seas. Slowly their immediate needs, limited by environment, but spurred by each achievement, prompted progress. Fire, the red flower which bites those who would pluck it, became their servitor. Speech, struggling from the inco herence of individual effort to the accepted utterance of the tribe, evolved until subtle gradations of tone and combination resulted in ever-widening vocabulary. Music passed from barbaric sounds to ordered rhythm until it [ 57 ] THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY caught the notes of Pan and joined the eternal anthem. Art, unkempt in its infancy as the wild sources which gave it birth, ran laughing amid the flowers with beauty shining in its youthful eyes. And all life yielded its lessons and its treasures until, from experience to ex perience, knowledge came though wisdom lingered. Beyond the conquered world lay realms un conquerable; the wastes of the firmament and the wonders of cosmic force. Appalling must have seemed the puzzles presented to our earliest thinkers by such contrasting phe nomena as the fiery pathway of the sun and the cool starflecked sky of night ; the moving terror of the lightning and the stillness of the frozen lake; the immobile peaks and the drifting clouds ; the sensuous warmth of summer and the icy shroud of winter; the wayward moon and the whispers of the rushing winds. Little cause for surprise is there that our nursery tales and daily phrases, our names for the days of the week and for the dispositions of men and women, still reflect the awe with which our for bears worshipped at the altars of the unknown gods, until a braver vision transmuted the base metal of dread to the gold of a more promising, [ 58 ] WHEN THE WORLD WAS YOUNG if but half-sensed kinship in the vast scheme, seen and unseen, of the universe. Doubtless curiosity has ever been the incen tive from observation to deduction, but always the impatience of our minds outstrips our knowledge. Even in modern science this rule holds true, as when the writer as a boy watched Sir William Crooks perfect that delicate in strument, the radiometer, and heard him pro nounce that the movement of its fans, balanced in a vacuum, was due to the direct transforma tion of light into motion. Long afterward he knew that the spinning of the talc vanes was dependent on thermal action; and from this beginning developed the theory of radiant matter, or matter in a fourth state, which led to the electronic theory. So when the world was young, man, fearless of error and seeking only the immediate and least obscure solution to some riddle of nature, did not hesitate to create a story which would serve to explain the matter in such terms as his own mind could compass. The ruder his degree of civilization the simpler would be its form, although its grace might surpass more erudite substitutes in later ages, and hold our remembering speech in thrall. His philosophy had at once the dar- [ 59 ] THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY ing and the limitations of youth. Yet if it was his soul that spoke then his words should live through the long centuries and become the mental scenery of a religion or the folk lore of a race. It was probably in this way that the skies were mapped in times of yore into weird con figurations of men, women and beasts. Races far removed from each other recognized the same shapes indicated by groups of stars. Within historic periods the wild bushman of Van Diemens Land and the artistic Greek saw alike the dancing feet of seven sisters in the Pleiades ; and, though so far apart and of such different culture, both the Australian and the Hellene thought of Castor and Pollux as brothers. The North American Indians dis cerned the shambling gait of a bear in the con stellation of Ursus Major; and most of the Zodiacal signs may be shown to have existed under their present designations, or in kindred forms, in widely separate lands for untold ages. Indeed the stars have been the source of many of our cherished symbols and superstitions, which, in various disguises, press in with the throng of customs which find acceptance at our modern festivals. Not always, however, would [ 60 ] WHEN THE WOKLD WAS YOUNG it be wise or charitable to strip the mask from off the wizened features of some of these per sisting wraiths. Unspeakable crudities and cruel usages of long forgotten rites lurk in the laughter of apparently innocent observances. With some of these it is safe to be familiar, with others it were folly to be wise. It might even enhance the expectations of some young lady to know that when she curtseys to the new moon, and turns thrice around, and then spits over her left shoulder, she is making in her curtseys the pre-Akkadian prostrations to an ancient form of Astarte, the Spirit of Fertility ; and that in turning thrice she rejoins the very questionable dances which fair ancestors of hers were wont to indulge in around the altars of the Earth s Fecundity; and that in spitting over her left shoulder she adds to her other graces by assisting to drive away the demons which supposedly object to such ceremonials. Most of these remembrances deal with the attributes of the Sun and Moon and long since have retreated to the ruder regions of the earth. In some northern races the Moon is still viewed as a girl who has had her face spotted and scarred by hot ashes which the Sun, in a violent temper, threw at her. Courtesy forbids that we [ 61 ] THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY should see here the unhappy suggestion of what might happen in an Eskimo hut; rather may we merely note an incident in the domestic re lations of the Sun and Moon as mates. For in the earliest religions the Sun and Moon are always personified and generally viewed as the regnant and all-powerful pair. Their manners, as portrayed in myth, may be royal but they are not invariably models for mortals to copy, and seldom are they represented as having lived happily ever after. Amongst the indigenous tribes of India the pre-historic story ran that the Sun married the Moon, whose beauty was greater than all her rival stars. Alas, she proved faithless, and so the Sun cut her up into fragments, only relenting when he saw how lovely was the quarter Moon. Thereupon he allowed her to build herself up to the full, and every month he watches with pride the process and then in anger destroys her again. Nothing visible or heard or vaguely sensed in heaven or earth lacked its due chronicle in the early efforts of men to explain the environ ment of their lives. The ceaseless conflict be tween light and shadow; the destiny of all shown daily in the promise of dawn, the strength of noon and the decay of eve; the [ 62 ] WHEN THE WORLD WAS YOUNG colours of the stars; the movements of the planets ; the terrors induced by eclipses, comets, and meteorites ; the changeful winds and the beneficence of the rain; the flaming arrows of the lightning and the angry voice of thunder; the cold of winter and the bounty of summer; the mastery of fire and the service of water ; the marvel of birth and the dread of death ; all find their portion in these endeavors to express the complex grammar of the universe. Then dawns our prosaic age, wherein the fashion is to snatch the veil from every passing figure in the pageantry of time. Nothing may escape research; no illusion may claim rever ence by reason of its white hair. In the lab oratory of knowledge the book of Genesis lies upon the dissecting table; the atomic theory has shared the fate dreaded by Lamb for the Equator and lost respect ; no star so distant but is constrained to tell its composition. Nor might mythology avoid the common destiny, and in the process of its examination many a kingly fable has been dethroned; stories which seemingly were founded upon the eternal hills have fallen into dust ; nomenclature and adages have proved as bright and enduring as gems. A nursery rhyme may transpire to have had [ 63 ] THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY its origin in some celestial truth wrapped in metaphor when the world was in its swaddling clothes. On the other hand some honoured myth, apparently occult in its teaching, may have no greater claim to our respect than a passing interest in its historical application to the election of a Tribune of Rome for which occasion it was invented. Much that glitters in tradition is made of base alloy, yet much comes down to us weighted with truth from days misty with distance, but, in the morning of our world, clear as the eyes which looked into the wonders of heaven and earth and read their messages with brave simplicity. KNOWLEDGE XI KNOWLEDGE THERE is an hour at the zenith of a summer s day when Nature rests. Its law is silence; beneath its spell all life is hushed. The birds rest their tuneful throats, the insects fold their wings of tinted velvet and prismatic gossamer, the glad trees sleep, the rushes at the margin of the mere forget to whis per the secrets told them in the Grecian tale. In the glades of a primeval wood in Northern Michigan, wrapped in the quiet of this en chanted hour, the shadows were bending east ward. From the brazier of warm earth an ascending incense from flower and scented fern filled the aisles of the leafy cathedral, but the worshippers were invisible and unheard save for the murmur of small winged things couched in their myriad beds of green. In such environment dull seem the pages of philosophy and the volume in my hand grew heavy. Its lines began to melt and merge as the variant grasses of a field accept one pattern of light and shadow from the passing clouds. But the mind of man may never rest, awake or [ 65 ] THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY asleep, and struggling to concentrate again upon the page I read, "Now Socrates went up to Delphos and asked of the oracle, Of all knowledge which is the highest? And the oracle gave answer, Know thyself. Straightway my thoughts bore me to the altars of the Delphic oracle whereat it seemed that I was witness of my own initiation as one who sought the Knowledge of the Self. Thence voyaged I to the Nile and in the dark recesses of pyramid and pylon heard the teachers of Hermetic writings expound to the living the ritual of the dead. Thence passed I to the shrines of Indus, where white-robed Brahmins intoned the Vedantic law, "All knowledge dwells in the knowledge of thyself." Some priestly voice, lifted in fervor and echoing amongst the trees, broke then my reveries, and I saw beneath a neighboring fern where the golden light was tangled with the drifting shadows, crouching forms, the fairies of our youth, petal-clad, stamen-armed and capped with floral bells. For awhile they watched me. Anon one of the bolder, perchance a chieftain in the ranks of elfdom, advanced and cried, "Obey the woodland law." And my book slipped from my hand and I slept. [ 66] KNOWLEDGE Awake in Asphodel? No this must be Some vale of fairyland, or Pan-loved glade Where Shepherd pipes to Shepherdess in Arcady Under the willows; and the light and shade Weave golden nets around their feet To trip young hearts if time be missed, Or laughter s music stop. Could one but meet The dwellers of these dales, and they would list, Twere well to ask of what realms are these lands, And by what path one best might rise To yonder hill-top, where the wreathing mist Enwraps a mystic city built as an eyrie Of the gods; white-pinnacled beneath the canopy Of sky, like some translucent Din Perched on the heights in Dante s scheme Of life s embattlements. So in my dream I thought: and, with unguided steps set forth To climb the steep, encountering many a fall On treacherous ground, and stumble by the way, Till where the slopes had end, an outer wall Grafted on crag and precipice bade stay My further trespass. On the mountain crest Betwixt the restless earth and quiet firmament Loomed the fair city, distant, white, Veiling the stars in its own light As Pharos of a harbour the far quest Of proffered peace; the peace of Knowledge blest And task accomplished. [ 67 ] THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY Yet were my steps Stayed by the circuit of its walls, Fivefold and separate, rings of stone Winding implacable, immense, alone, Conjoint in purpose; massive bands Forged on the mountain s brow by God s own hands To be its diadem. Void of fault, In grim alignment ranged the mighty walls, Towered and buttressed to withstand assault By storm or man, or Time, That silent conqueror, who plans with Fate, Using for arms the sunbeam and night s rime The heat and hurricane, the patterned-lace Of dew, summoning from space The tireless legions of his Djins To fashion ruins for his chair of state; His sceptre swaying elements; his robe the winds; His ministers the hours, whose breath Was theirs unborn, passing undying into death. And I did mark That in the circuit of each stony zone A single gate was set, like Cyclop s eye, Pond rous with brazen plates which shone Red in the fading light; Their sentinel Eternity. None there was to swing The gates of Knowledge open, and my call Echoed from frieze and bastion, turret and wall, Peopling the silence with voices answering, "Ask in thine self, there is no other Entering in." [ 68 ] BEGINNING OUS YEAH Life is not dated merely by years. Events are some times the best calendars. BEACONSFDSIJ). SWEET are the uses of anniversaries. Life is milestoned with these recurring dates which claim, in passing, a sigh, a smile, a thought of pride, a gleam of hope. They serve to draw our attention to the distance traveled, bidding us forget our weariness and gaze with courage upon the heights ahead. Some of these milestones are off the beaten road and are encountered only in the strayings of the individual. They belong to our personal calendars. Where they lie in the shadows of time they are weatherworn, o ergrown with the lichens of years, screened by tangled growths of ferns and grasses, bowered in flowers strewn by the forgiving hands of God upon our memories that sleep. Their inscriptions are difficult to decipher. Others that stand out in the full glare of day and the dusty spacings of the wider path are clear, too clear perchance, as [ 69 ] THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY though they found renewed engraving from the eyes of the heart. Most of the notable milestones of time, how ever, are for the guidance of all ; and insistently ask notice from the hurrying crowd of hu manity. Of these none proffer wiser counsel than the festival of the new year, radiating to the minds of all an impulse towards universal good will. From its incised face, white with the light of grace, rays beat upon our lives, which lift to heaven wreathing clouds of thoughts enwrapping the world in an atmos phere of kindness, flecked with tear-laden clouds. If thoughts were visible, how complex would seem the maze of mental messages pro jected at the close of each year. Yet rightly considered there is little reason to adopt a fixed date for the expression of good will or for the celebration of an era professing the Christian code of morals. Our year can have no true beginning or end. Time, as gen erally regarded, consists of periods defined by expediency hours, days, weeks, months, years, cycles concentric circles, the lesser contained within the next larger measure. And since each of us may commence the drawing of a circle at whatsoever distance from the centre BEGINNING OUR YEAB seemeth good, it follows that no moment of time can truly possess a fixed nature. Throughout the ages, men have differed in the commencing point of their measurements of time. The year which begins for us on the first day of January is then already well advanced in some countries, while in others the people have scarcely begun to prepare for its advent. With more justification than can be urged in support of our own arrangement of the cal endar, the Egyptians, Phoenicians and Persians began their year at the autumnal equinox, ap proximately on the twenty-first of September. The Greeks moved on a quarter of a year and commenced the drawing of their annual circle at the winter solstice, the twenty-first of Decem ber. About the middle of the fifth century before Christ it occurred to the Athenians that it would be more comfortable to start all cal culations from the middle of the summer rather than the middle of the winter, and so, by a simple process of law, and a public notice in cised on a rock on the Martian hill, the year found itself beginning on the twenty-first of June instead of the twenty-first of December. The ancient Romans saw no just cause for this change and with the obstinacy of their [71 ] THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY race continued to celebrate the beginning of the year on the twenty-first of December. But the accumulating errors in their calendar gradually brought about such confusion in the official festivals that the whole matter was submitted to the astronomers obeying the nod of Caesar, with the result that the year awoke one fine Roman morning to find itself beginning on the first day of January. Paganism had difficulty, however, in trans ferring its lares et penates to its successor, and Christianity required over fifteen centuries be fore any agreement could be arrived at con cerning the day when the New Year ought to commence its career. The Christians of the early centuries stoutly maintained that the cor rect date was the twenty-fifth of March, and very valiantly, if a little impetuously, they fought in street and temple in support of their theories. The idea was probably due to the fact that the Jewish ecclesiastical year began with the spring equinox, and thus coincided with the story of the gospels. But the Saxons had their own opinions on the subject, and re solved to combine the celebration of the birth of Christ with the birth of the year, observing both on the twenty-fifth of December. BEGINNING OUR YEAR At the Norman conquest of England, William the Conqueror was crowned on the first of Jan uary, and his attendant bishops, aware that the emperors of Rome had observed this date as New Year s day, advised its adoption, and for several centuries it was adhered to. Later England reverted to the views of the rest of Christendom and commenced her official New Year on the twenty-fifth of March. Still later the Gregorian calendar (1582) rectified the an nual measurement of time and restored the first of January to its position as the New Year s day. This edict was accepted by most of the Catholic nations, while those countries which hold to the Julian calendar, such as Russia, and Greece, still celebrate the New Year twelve days later than ourselves. Such is the brief but complicated story of the adoption of our New Year s day. Its graceful custom of giving gifts on that date has an equally far-reaching history. The month of January takes its name from the Latinium god Janus, to whom the Romans were wont to offer sacrifices and gifts at the festival of his month, and to garland his statue with flowers. Con sequently, when the calendar of Caesar enacted that the year should commence on the day which [ 73 ] THE SCHOOL OP SYMPATHY had for centuries been devoted to the feast of Janus, the idea of giving gifts was extended from the god to his worshippers, and Romans bestowed upon their friends and neighbors small offerings in the name of Janus. These gifts were called strena, from the branches of vervain gathered in the sacred grove of Strenua, the goddess of strength a word still surviving in the French phrase for New Year s day, le jour d etrennes. It is obvious, therefore, that, save for com pliance with civic and clerical conveniences, there is no true ending or beginning to a year. Each day is equally entitled to be viewed as its opening. Nor may any year grow old, for it is ever like the houris of paradise, beauteous and young, offering us its gifts of fuller oppor tunity and endowed with the eternal benediction. THE VEIL OF ASTARTE XIII THE VEIL OF ASTARTE WITH reflected glory from the Sun, made red by the mists of Earth, the cult of Baal encrimsoned the path whereby men stumbled through the centuries to nobler philosophies ; its fierce teachings softened somewhat by the willingness of man to woo the favors of Astarte, the moon-goddess. These balanced opposites, male and female, strength and grace, are derivatives of prehistoric types of worship ; and the rayed influence of their gold and silver beams lit the creeds of Egypt, Persia, Crete, Greece, and Rome. Not even the Jewish lore, most conservative of spiritual con cepts, could avoid the thralldom of these orbs of heaven, and in sympathy with the times of its evolving literature we find Samson (i.e. Shamesh, the Sun-god) forfeiting his strength, made manifest in the luxuriant locks of the [ 75 ] THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY solar corona, to the betraying shears of De lilah (i.e. The Twilight) ; while nigh to the walls of the sacred Jerusalem proudly stood "the high places which Solomon, the king of Israel, had builded for Astoreth." For many generations the study of the Bible had filled western minds with pictures of the magnificence of the cults and achievements of the Babylonian and Phoenician civilizations, yet not until the nineteenth century was serious attention given to resuscitating the evidences of Chaldean traditions. Christianity had accepted the Hebraic writings as its architectural plan and to suggest an examination of the founda tions was viewed as an unnecessary and possibly adverse criticism of the structure. Wherefore disturb the dust of ages? Were not all these matters sufficiently written in the books of the kings of Israel? But motion is the permeating and encom passing law of the universe ; else The Ultimate were synonymous with stagnation and the in finite manifestations of an afar and unthinkable Origin would be as green scum upon the idle mill pond of creation. So came it to pass that despite the covert protests of dogma and the objections of entrenched orthodoxy a new-born [ 76 ] THE VEIL OF ASTAETE race of analytical miners delved into the litera ture of the Orient ; and the excavators of dead empires went forth to dig. Maspero and his compeers uncovered the monuments of the Pharaohs, while Champollion, guided by the trilingular Rosetta stone, translated the hiero glyphs with which they were emblazoned, and bade the mummied lips of Egypt speak their story. Renan analyzed the Semitic traditions, Max Miiller and others traced the wanderings of the Aryans and the origins of the Vedic writings ; and from a hundred lands the children of the far-spread West retraced the centuries, coming again to learn from the Mother East. Nor might the buried secrets of Western Asia be longer ignored. Amongst the pioneers of this renaissance must always be remembered Botta and Layard, who drew the sand-shrouds from the mound graves of Kuyunjik and its buried sisters, and showed us Assyria in her zenith. Once more the Tigris and Euphrates bore upon their waters the effigies of Baby lonian kings who erstwhile were as myths to us. Strange gods of Akkad ascended thrones in our museums, from whence they stared with stony eyes at modern crowds whose knees were un bent before them, while children undismayed, [ 77 ] THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY played around their attendant bulls of Bashan. Sheltered from London fogs beneath glass cases, and labelled like novels in a book-store, were ranged the state documents and libraries of Assyrian kings; cylinders and tiles and tablets of clay delicately incised with texts in cuneiforms, offering us the contracts, love letters, laws, epics, maps, and astronomical cal culations written in days when Nimrud "glo ried and drank deep." But, like the dumb figures of the gods whom they invoked, these clay volumes still withheld their messages from the few scholars who struggled to decipher their forgotten script. Of those who sought to give speech again to the lifeless tongue of Chaldea none were more persistent or deserve higher place than George Smith. As far back as 1867 he had translated the arrow-head writing on a Babylonian tile which mentioned an eclipse of the Sun, and this fortunate allusion enabled the astronomers to fix the date of the inscription. Again in 1872 he achieved universal reputation by his trans lation of the Chaldean account of the Deluge. Portions of the chronicle were missing, but its similarity with the biblical story at once awakened general interest, and the art of print- THE VEIL OF A S T A R T E ing became the servitor of the original Chaldean scribe by reproducing in facsimile his incised tablets in nearly every magazine and paper in the world. The writer well remembers the earnest face and short strong frame of George Smith as he bent over some engraved tile of Sargon or Sen nacherib at the British Museum, and how the grey eyes would light with triumph when he had pieced together the broken fragments of a difficult line and found his interpretation held reference to a name or incident of historic im portance. At such moments he seemed the in carnated spirit of an Assyrian handling his materials with the tenderness and exactitude which men are wont to use who do enduring things. The new field of literary research thus opened so appealed to the scholarship and editorial in stincts of Sir Edwin Arnold that in January 1873 he arranged with George Smith that the latter should take charge of an expedition to excavate the mounds of Nimrud near the city of Mosul, and other sites in ancient Assyria, at the expense of the Daily Telegraph of Lon don. Many weeks were occupied in preparing this expedition and providing its stores and [ 79 ] THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY special instruments for modern methods of ex cavation. When all was ready the Turkish ambassador in London informed us, at the eleventh hour, that it would be essential to ob tain a firman direct from the Sultan, since objections had been raised by the Sublime Porte to any further excavations in Mesopotamia. The Turks were convinced that the Giaour had knowledge of vast wealth hidden in these mounds of rubbish and they obdurately refused to allow the proposed enterprise to go forward unless they received their share of the gold and silver to be unearthed. Nothing daunted, Edwin Arnold resolved to travel to Constantinople and beard the viziers in their den. The journey down the Danube and through the Balkan States was full of in terest, and after those interminable delays which are the salt of all Oriental negotiations, the object of our pilgrimage was accomplished. Whether it was the eloquence of the poet, or his ability as a man of affairs, or his undertak ing to hand over to the Sublime Porte all the gold and jewels which might be discovered matters little now ; the Sultan relented and gave us a firman to dig where and when and how we liked, with special clauses to the effect that we [ 80] THE VEIL OP ASTAETE were to retain all the stones and bricks which our spades might turn out, provided that the Sublime Porte should retain all the gold and silver discovered. It would be invidious to ask which party to the contract was conscious of the better deal. The Sultan smiled triumph antly, and perhaps a little in pity, for doth not the Prophet ordain that thou shalt be lenient with those whom Allah hath bereft of reason? The expedition was a complete success. Nineveh and other famous sites had their shrouds of sand and rubble removed, and Nemesis in the shape of George Smith carried their kings, in granite and basalt, into cap tivity in London. The missing fragments of the Chaldean story of the Deluge were recov ered, and the museums of Europe and America were enriched with Babylonian treasures of art and literature. Silver and gold found we none, to the astonishment and discomfiture of the Sultan and his wise viziers, but such as the sands of time had to give us they gave with generous hands. I recall that amongst the sifted rubbish filling a palace passageway was hiding a broken ring of bronze to which was still attached an exquisite cameo of Alexander [ 81 ] THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY the Great cut in carnelian. So delicate in skill and sympathetic in its treatment was this por trait of the Macedonian genius that my ad miration was unbounded, and George Smith set it upon my finger saying, "The Greek who lost this ring would wish you to wear it for him." For the sake of those who are interested in psychological research, I may permit myself here to relate the last meeting of Edwin Arnold and George Smith. During the summer of 1878 the latter was continuing his excavations at Kouyunjik on the Tigris, on behalf of the British Museum, when he was prostrated by fever. He was carried to Aleppo where he died on the nineteenth of August. Now on that day Edwin Arnold, wholly unaware of the illness of his friend, was walking down the Strand, in London, and saw George Smith a few feet away from him looking into the window of a shop at the corner of Arundel Street. Stepping quickly forward to express his surprise and pleasure at the unexpected meeting, he observed his friend pass round the corner and disappear. This corner of the shop was entirely faced with clear glass and devoid of doors. Consequently this sudden disappearance of the absolutely dis tinct vision was as inexplicable as had been its [ 82 ] THE VEIL OF ASTARTE appearance. Nor did the solution of the prob lem arrive until he reached home and found awaiting him there a telegraphic message stat ing that George Smith had died that day of fever in Aleppo. THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY XIV THE BROOK OF REVELATIONS BESIDE a path which girds a hill In Greece lingers an ancient shrine, Broken and desolate ; its altars rifted, Scattered with dead leaves, drifted By remembering winds. Beneath its ruined portal an old man rested, White haired and wrinkled; Belike some Priest forgot By Death s quiet reapers in the fields of Time. Or Sage whose lot Twas to serve oracles. And, as chance straws Upon the stream of life meet and obey, In sympathy, the call which draws Each to the other, I left the modern day Which glared upon the path, and passed To where the old man sat within the shade Of centuries dead. [ 84 ] THE BROOK OF REVELATIONS Our greetings given The past usurped the present. Nor speak Would he of upstart races, Hun and Turk, But led our discourse unto days when Greek Was sung to Dian, and Pan did lurk Among the reeds. We spoke of Hesiod And his pageantry of gods ; of quests Odyssian; of the embattled ranks which trod Before the gates of Troy; of Pluto s guests; Of Ena, bringing from the underworld Her gift, each springtime, of the fairy flowers Which winter hides ; of Danae s golden showers ; And that strange fable of Narcissus, So wrapt in love of his own beauty That love of others and life s duty Were all forgot and, at a look, He sprang to his own image in the brook. "So runs the tale," my friend asserted, "But tales do ofttimes miss the sense, or feint At facts, misleading men, and Truth per verted Leaves judgment false. Twas life, not death That came, when, prone beside the stream. [ 85 ] THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY Narcissus gazed upon its mirror and therein Descried his inner strife." "Is it not so?" I asked, "That his own face, so often praised in song, Bereft the sight by its own beauty?" "Son, they have told thee wrong. Faultless it was in seeming; alas, that mask should be So false in semblance ; for I was he, The fair Narcissus, son of Cephissus and Liriope, Foremost in Thesbian grace. "Yet not my face It was which then I saw reflected, Borne on the moving stream Beneath my wondering eyes, But to my soul s surprise, The sequence of the lives that I had lived ; Lives filled with powers neglected; Many and base and loveless ; stretching far Into the ages gone. Each life did pass Before me in pictured revelation, distinct [ 86 ] THE BROOK OF REVELATIONS Like profiled cameo standing white Against its ground of blue, instinct With the feebleness and slight Of days amiss and aright. "And, in that moving glass Of Truth, twas shown how poor a thing Narcissus was ; how graceless, false in ring, How most unfair his soul looked in the stream Of life. And from the dream Of that clear sight, fraught with its past, I learnt the aim of life, and that at last Narcissus should be fair. THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY XV A PARABLE SHE stood, like Rebekah at the well; a woman of the nomad Arabs, clad in the blue burnous worn by her race. Over her head was thrown, with careless grace, a fold of her garment screening part of the face ; empha sizing the beauty of her dark eyes, pensive be neath the smooth, brown forehead. Where water had splashed from o er-filled pitchers the ground was russet colored, and trodden level by innumerable bare feet. Farther off the sur face was sun-bleached and seamed with gaping cracks, in and out of which glided the green and mottled lizards. At a few paces grew two palms, in the loom of whose leaves was woven a trembling fabric of golden light and sepia shadow, cast over woman and well. Overhead stretched the infinite blue of Egypt s sky. As I approached I noted that the woman sought to pour water into a trough for the benefit of two thirsty goats, but the vessel proving too heavy to be handled in this manner [ 88 ] A PARABLE by such slight arms as hers, the privilege fell to me of helping her; and whilst the animals drank, we spoke of the mute gratitude of beasts for service rendered. "If my intuition speaketh true, my sister, to you are known only the thoughts which are born from gentleness." "Not so, brother," answered this daughter of the desert, "I have known other thoughts, but Allah is merciful. Remembered are his teach ings. Twas little time ago my husband and I quarreled, and in my anger I spoke to him in words that had been madness if used at any other time; aye, and were madness, for is not anger always madness? And in his rage he seized me by the wrist so hard that the impress of his fingers left a blue bracelet stamped around my wrist. It was not a bruise or time would have lessened it, nor did it hurt, save in my heart. I told him not of this badge of re proof which I wore upon my wrist ; nor confided I in any. But Allah sees all. "Three days agone I was coming hither with an empty pitcher when I met two men quarrel ing over the profit on a bag of dates. From words they came to threats and from threats to blows. [ 89 ] THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY "There was none to help so I laid my pitcher down, and ran between the quarrelers, imploring them to remember that only the dogs of the street fought thus, and that Allah gave reason to men that they might arrange in fair ways their disputes. The men tried to push me aside, but I would not go, and held my place between them; and the delay won them to laughter and friendliness again. "Brother, the end of my story shall answer your thought of me. The men went on their way together. I refound and filled my pitcher, and with glad feet returned to the village. There, as I lifted the pitcher from my head, the burnous slipped from off my arm, and be hold the badge of anger upon my wrist, worn so many days, had gone; my arm had for gotten ; only my heart remembered. Allah sees all." A EOMANY PROPHET XVI A ROMANY PROPHET And this our life, . . . Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones. As You LIKE IT IN every object dwells the still small voice which sympathy may hear. A picture, statue, vase convey to us the subtle mes sages entrusted to them by their creators ; how should a leaf, a flower, a crystal be less eloquent? Sometimes the object speaks of itself and in our inmost selves we listen; sometimes it stirs our memories to responding tones which join the echoes of days agone; sometimes it wakes the superconsciousness which is latent in each of us. I remember an exceptionally intelligent workman engaged in fixing supports to the cover of an Egyptian sarcophagus refusing to continue at his task because of the strange voices he heard when at work inside this tomb. On another occasion I handed to a friend a small terra-cotta lamp of the age of the crusades. It had just been excavated from an [ 91 ] THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY old site in Malta, and forthwith he gave me, psychometically, the story of this humble shard with details so dramatic and clear that they led to other interesting discoveries. Amongst many similar instances I have known a lady to suffer keen anguish and to ask protection from "a sea of angry faces and shaken fists and straw and blood and knives" when quite unwittingly she had taken into her hand a ring worn by Marie Antoinette at her execution. These thoughts are suggested by a small slab of peacock marble which the writer uses as a paper-weight. It was picked up near a Chris tian shrine amid the Etruscan hills and now with mute insistence bids my pen pay homage to its place of origin. The mental scene is therefore Italian where the brown-roofed houses of Siena cling to their terraced slopes like rocks jutting from a cascade of peat-colored water, bordered by verdant banks and flecked with a foam of blossoms. Here, about forty years ago, a young English lady, then studying sing ing under a noted Italian maestro and since famous on the operatic stages of England and America, was wandering through the by-ways of this town of Tuscany, and had sought tem porary shelter from the glare of the noonday [92 ] A EOMANY PROPHET sun beneath a wayside arbor of vine-clad trellis work. On one side of this shady refuge stood a broken shrine dedicated to Our Lady and on the other side trickled into its stone basin a small fountain. The girl had not rested long in this place when a man clad in the Italian peasant s style, with cloak thrown over the shoulder and a brilliant kerchief tied around his neck, ap proached. In dress he was an Italian but in speech and features he belonged to the wander ing family of the Gypsies, whose colloquial name of the Egyptians links them with the ancient cult of divination. After fulfilling his duties to the spiritual and physical man by bending in salutation to the shrine, and drink ing at the fountain, he addressed the girl. Their conversation led to the golden sunlight, and from thence to the systems of other worlds which the stars denote, and how the prayers and aims of men must find somewhere in the starry vault the responses sought. Ultimately the Gypsy asked her if she truly wished to know what the stars had to tell her; and half in curiosity and half for adventure s sake she promised to meet this wandering child of the Romany clan beneath the shrine of Our [ 93 ] THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY Lady when the sky was dark and its script clear to read. Accordingly at the appointed hour she left the silent streets of the town and found her way to the lonely shrine; no longer the jealous focus of the Sun but bathed in the light of the Moon and its choir of attendant stars. The Gypsy was already there busily drawing with his staff sundry figures in the dust of the ground, while every now and then he would look upward at the sky and apparently bring back therefrom some note to add to his hieroglyphs or find cause to erase some sign not in harmony with his thoughts. After watching him some time she drew near, and he acknowledged her presence with a quiet gesture but continued silently his reading of the heavens and his writing in the dust. At length, his calculations ended, he studied them intently. Then, carefully obliterating all that he had written, he approached the wondering girl and spoke. "Madonna, thy life will shine with the bright ness of the stars above, yet thy brightness must be short-lived. It will be the brightness of a shooting-star that calls the world to notice. The gift of song is thine. Numberless are the A E O M A N Y PROPHET men and women who will come to hear thee sing, and in their hearts they will love thee. Yet there shall be one amongst them who loves thee most. He will be thy husband, and to him thou shalt bear three children; one shall die as a child, one shall die in a far land where palm trees grow, and the third shall dwell in a land where the snows are deep. "Not many are the years of thy wifehood, for the waters of the sea shall swallow him and his ship, and scarcely shall be known the place of his burial beneath the great waters. And thou shalt hide thy sorrows in thine art of song, and rapidly shalt thou attain fame and friends and wealth. "But thy course is then run. Thy last song shall kill thee. Even as thy hearers are ac claiming thy genius, thy light shall end in death, in the seventeenth year from this hour." The entire prophecy, given in this strange way, beneath the watchful stars was fulfilled in every particular. The lady became a famous singer. She married the captain of an English ship which lies "full fathoms deep" with all her crew beneath the waters of the Atlantic. She bore him three children; one of whom died in infancy, another died in India; and the third [ 95 ] THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY lives in America "where the snows are deep." Soon after the tragic death of her husband, when singing before an audience in England, she broke a blood vessel and died the same night, in the flower of her youth and fame, and in the exact year foretold by the picturesque seer, who, like Archimedes of Syracuse, used the sands as his writing board. Be quiet, little paper-weight; have I not faithfully set down your message? DEATH AND LIFE ARE NEIGHBORS XVII WHERE DEATH AND LIFE ARE NEIGHBORS Then God waked, and it was morning, Matchless and supreme. All Heaven seemed adorning Earth in its esteem. OVER the sleeping Nile hangs Egypt s night spangled with a myriad stars. Dimly we discern the mudbank to which we are moored, and the adjoining plain, bor dered by the western desert hills. Across the broad river lies the tourist-burdened Luxor, now restful amid its palms and temples ; and beyond are the ghostly shapes of Karnak, scattered upon its embracing sands, wind-driven from Arabian steeps. Under the prow of our daha- beah the ripples are whispering secrets which the river learned in the land of Cush and the far wilds of Abyssinia. The silence is the si lence of things dead and forgotten ; for Savak, the crocodile-god, whose robe of state is the [ 97 ] THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY darkness, and whose ministers are the gods of the underworld, holds nocturnal court. Hush! was that the cry of some priest of Ammon, scaped from his mummy-case hidden in a lonely tomb of yonder Lybian cliffs? Above our mast it sounded and now passes on soft wings towards the monoliths of Thebes, "proud city of No, the jackals and owls shall make their dwellings in thy palaces." In its flight it has disturbed the dogs of the near-by village, and their discordant protest, rising from solo to chorus, sinks, too slowly, back to solo and silence. Spirit or owl it knew the limi tations of the night, for over the black ridge of the eastern hills a greenish light shows in the sky. It is the false dawn, the wolf s tail, as the Arabs call it, and warns men to prepare for the coming day. Slowly it dies, and the dark settles once more o er the land, and upon eyelids dreaming of Cheops and his Pyramids, or Rameses smiting Hittites. Egypt sleeps. Again the sky lightens in tints of pinks and mauves ; shyly at first, and then in bolder reds and yellows, painting the desert in rosy chromes. Savak and his hosts of the dark are in retreat back to the underworld; his rear- [ 98 ] DEATH AND LIFE ARE NEIGHBORS guard stealing away in shadow of hill and temple, while Ra, the new-born sun, mounts in his chariot to the fields of heaven to greet his father Osiris, and to pour his life-giving rajs upon the world. Upon the deck of our dahabeah the Arab sailors, with faces turned to Mecca, are making the seven prostrations and beseeching protec tion through the day. From the village come trooping the wives and maidens with water- pitchers balanced on their heads. Chattering they descend the pathway to the shore, and stand ankle-deep in the stream, helping one an other to fill and lift their ponderous vessels ; and then move homewards in statuesque poses. The bank so quiet a few moments ago grows populous with brown-faced men intent upon our doings ; with large-eyed wondering babies ; with goats inquisitive and dogs in search of uncon- sidered trifles ; while overhead the kites make up for noiseless wings by strident screamings. Awakened Egypt is astir. We ride through the village streets and among its dust heaps, passing to the fields which its good folk cultivate. It appears as though we were moving upon an enormous checker-board, divided into innumerable squares [ 99 ] THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY of alternate brown arable and luxuriant crops of dourah, beans and lentils. The squares are separated by channels embanked about a foot above the level of the ground, down which run rills of water lifted from the river bj the workers of the shadoofs or the patient buffaloes turning sakir wheels. Lovely are these fields in the lights of morn, carpeted with blossoming crops, and framed by lisping rivulets emprisoned within channels of chocolate-colored soil. Where the life-giving water passes all is green and tender ; and where it has been denied the skin of nature is cracked and sore; aching beneath the relentless sun. Agape with thirst its seamed surface is dan gerous to the rider, yet offers refuge to innu merable lizards which slip into the fissures at our approach. From verdant places white ibis mourn the days when temples were raised to Thoth, the ibis-headed scribe of the gods ; and flights of quail, those fat and querulent burghers of the fields, rise protestingly from disturbed councils; while palm-doves and the crested hoopees play hide and seek amongst the flowering beans, and bee-eaters dart past in flashes of burnished copper. It is the realm of Life. [ 100 ] DEATH AND LIFE ARE NEIGHBORS With an abruptness emphasized by contrast, we emerge upon the desert, supreme in desola tion. It is the domain of Death ; the shroud of mummied Egypt. In its grim folds, grey with the ages, are wrapped the dead of ancient Thebes. These wastes of sand, stretching away to the Lybian hills, form one vast grave. The ground we ride upon is littered with bones and shreds of mummy cloths and fragments of bitumized-flesh that were, perchance, long since, part of some fair maid in the court of Sethi, or formed the muscle of a soldier, far-travelled in lands he had aided to subdue. The wind dis creetly smooths again the winding sheet of dust which the hoofs of our animals had disturbed. The place is filled with voices and every object tells of the living past. If your soul is so at tuned you may listen to the laughter of her whom we thought a maid of Sethi s court, and hear the wheels of her lover s chariot bearing her back to the river from some ceremony; or softly comes the chant of singers leading Pharaoh and his courtiers to the temple; or again the wailing of hired mourners, the neigh ing of horses, and the murmur of the crowd, crying, as they did for Jacob, "This indeed was a great mourning." The whole space vibrates THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY with suggestion until some trivial incident of the present breaks the spell, and only the desert is about us. It is the forecourt of Egypt s eternal home, motionless, save where the undying sun makes dance the air which treads upon the burning sands. [ 102 ] THE MORNING SIGH OF MEMNON XVIII THE MORNING SIGH OF MEMNON The voice of the god might be most nearly compared to the tender music of a harpstring. PAUSANIAS AWHILE ago as we rode from a village of the Theban plain into the western desert, we passed from the fields of the living to the graves of the dead. Often I have stood upon this dividing line between the abundant life and fertility nurtured by the Nile and the implacable, yellow desert where all is death. The small lizards which have their home amid the verdant crops wear liveries of brilliant green, whereas their cousins who dwell a few feet away in the desert are clad in sombre browns and yellows. Woe be to the lizard who crosses from one environment to the other. In stantly the sharp eyes of some kite, wheeling in the nether blue, perceive the green lizard on the desert, or the yellow trespasser amid the greenery of the fields, and straightway upon whirring wings descendeth kismet. It is not well to lightly cross the frontiers of life and death unless some knowledge is possessed of conditioned needs. [ 103 ] THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY In the center of this Theban plain, betwixt the life-giving river and the forebiding Lybian cliffs, appear the famed colossi of Amenhotep; two seated figures, dominating immediate space and thought. The hugeness of their stature each seated figure is sixty-five feet in height is magnified by the waste around, and solitude adds immeasurably to their dignity. What mean these giants, petrified upon lonely thrones? What message stays unspoken on their lips? It should be worthy asking, for in pose and place they are kings of more than the wilderness, regnant in a realm real although of the past. The erudite in Egyptology tell us that the warrior Pharaoh Amenhotep of Thebes erected these two statues of himself; that they were originally monoliths of breccia and sat before the pylon of a temple long since dis mantled; that the more northerly of the two was partly destroyed by an earthquake in 27 B. C. and the upper part thrown down; that the Roman Emperor Septimus Severus restored the statue with blocks of sandstone in 170 A. D. ; and that ancient travellers referred in their writings to the northern statue as Mem- non. How insufficient sounds so terse a de scription. It reads like the catalogue of some [ 104 ] THE MORNING SIGH OF M E M N O N dealer in antiquities rather than an effort to hearken to the voice of these kingly figures who grant us audience. It were fitting to approach prepared. Let us therefore recall who Memnon was, and why ancient travellers bestowed his name upon one of these statues. In the pages of the blind poet of Attica we find related the encounter between Achilles and Memnon, the king of the Ethi opians, before the walls of Troy. After brave words and mutual defiance, they fight and Memnon is killed. Then cometh Eos, his mother, who carries his body from the field and mourns his loss so passionately that Zeus, moved by her tears, awakens the dead Memnon and bestows upon him the gift of immortality. In the course of time this story came to have two renderings. To the Greek unversed in re ligious subtleties, Memnon was simply a great warrior who came from the far East and was slain in the Trojan war. He was, however, re puted to have possessed such superb physique and beauty that he became a favorite subject for picturing on vases and armor, whereon he was generally represented as black, being an Ethiopian. But to the cultured Greek the legend spoke [ 105 ] THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY more deeply. The tears of Eos were not the tears of a mortal. Eos was the Dawn, and her son, Memnon, could be no other than the Light of Day. Each morning, therefore, his mother wept for his absence, and her tears are seen by men as the early dew-drops. The son of the Dawn might vanish for a time, as the night shrouds the day, but he could not be destroyed. He was immortal. Born in the East, the land of the rising Sun, the dewdrops fall from the eyes of the watching Dawn until she sees her son lift his awakened head above the world and run his course across the heavens to the west. Passing to Egypt the Greeks were instructed in the cult of Osiris and Isis, and how the Sun- god Ra nightly conquered the powers of dark ness and came anew each morning to an eager world. With minds nursed on these legends, and intuitively conscious of their meanings, our wandering Greeks visited the Theban nome, and there learnt from the priests that a curious phenomenon had been discovered in connection with the more northerly of the colossal figures of Amenhotep. It had been noticed that every morning when the rays of the rising sun touched the statue it gave forth musical sounds like soft meanings or the twang of a harp-string. In [ 106 ] THE MORNING SIGH OP MEMNON keenest sympathy with Nature and prone to see in every unexplained movement and sound the presence of the unseen gods, the Greeks in stantly ascribed this responsiveness of the statue to the morning Sun as the voice of the Spirit of Day. To them it was the reborn light, answering the maternal greeting of Eos. Gradually, as Grecian poesy was wedded to the involved Egyptian teachings, "the morning sigh of Memnon" became one of the accepted oracles of the world. Probably the sounds given forth by the statue were due to the pass age of air through the porous stone, caused by the sudden change of temperature at sun rise; although the modern traveller may watch, as did the writer, an Arab climb the monolith and produce dull and unconvincing tones from a sonorous stone which lies hidden in its chest. But to the ancient Egyptian and Greek the statue spoke in no uncertain tones. Venerated from the Danube to the sources of the Nile, it gave to its votaries, at the hour of dawn, ad monishment, praise or counsel, bidding all who listened know that shadows are transient and light immortal. [ 107 ] THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY XIX LIGHT AND SHADOW Throughout life, tis death that makes life live, Gives it whatever the significance. R. BEOWNING GOD hath made the mountain for thy altar, proclaims Zoroaster, shaping his teachings to the needs of wanderers. To the ancient Egyptians, with their populous cities strung on the silt-laden Nile, such limi tation to homage of the gods was unthinkable. Nevertheless, the amplitude of Egyptian thought could and did conceive, after its own kind, the Zoroastrian ideal and offer to light, as a fitting altar, the dark heart of a mountain. If the Sun would thus accept worship, it should be his ; but the mountain must first be rendered worthy. Its core should be hewn from it; its native roof should be upheld by giants of stone ; the walls of its cavernous depths should tell in ideograms the aspirations of the land; its shadows should teach the true meaning of light ; [ 108 ] LIGHT AND SHADOW and in the night of its chambers the groping souls of men should find far vision. Out of such thoughts was born the wondrous shrine of Abu Simbel in Nubia. Caves in many lands have been enlarged by men for religious purposes, or carved in the mountain sides of India and elsewhere, but none quite in the spirit or with the grandeur of this temple, marooned in the desert between the first and second cataracts of the Nile. What inspiration was it that bade the architect of Sesostris forget the columned courtyards of by-gone Pharaohs, sentinelled by lofty pylons lifting to the eternal blue, and conjure a lonely and inanimate moun tain of Nubia into a living anthem to the Sun who is born each morn of the dark and passes daily from Death to Life. As I wandered years ago in the halls of this Nubian temple, I in voked the spirit of its creator, biding him teach my heart the secret of his purpose, en treating him to aid me catch some phrase of his enduring prayer echoing down the corridors of time. And measureless was his response. There are epochs in the lives of nations when the atmosphere is full of whispered innovations. We call them renaissances but they are born with a fulness of knowledge and with the in- [ 109 ] THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY spirations of maturity. So was it in Egypt thirty-two centuries ago, when the Ramesesan dynasty had made her mistress of the known world, and men sustained far hopes with strong endeavors. Let us sense how the heart of Egypt then could beat ; let us go together to this quiet altar set in the mountain depths, and watch the Silences minister to the eternal veri ties of life. We will leave behind us the beaten tracks of Egypt ; for tours distort and guide books dis color the stream of thought. Our dahabeah has ascended the now forgotten first cataracts of the Nile; has passed the island of Philae, more beautiful in olden days than the Parthe non, where a utilitarian age has buried beneath the sighing waves the sanctuaries and colon nades of Isis. In our voyage southward we shall not share the fair fertility of the northern land for stern in its aspects is this Nubian river. The fields which stretch away till lost at the feet of the desert hills are gone, and no where can be seen those bounteous crops which gave to Egypt the name of the land of plenty. In their stead rise craggy bluffs of granite or limestone through which rushes the deep river, [ no ] LIGHT AND SHADOW or, widening out, its waters travel between rival wastes of sand. Poverty is written on the face of this sun-scorched country, and its sparse population tills with care the narrow strip of ground which, as Herodotus says, is the gift of the Nile. Thereon the natives grow slender harvests of bean and millet and tend the pre cious date palm which grows in the outskirts of every village. Between Korosko and Derr, there are miles of these palms, like an undula ting fringe of green attached to the brown and golden robes of the desert. With tortuous course, its bed full of shifting shoals, its banks hemmed in or wide by turns, the river winds ; fit symbol of the path of life, to the riddle of which we seek answer from the oracle at Abu Simbel. Each day we sail and warp against the current, which reflects in its myriad glimpses the fiery eyes of the Sun until he sinks, weary as a god may be with purposes fulfilled, behind the western hills in whose shad ows lieth Amenti. At night we moor the un wieldy boat at some village ; and as the mooring pegs are driven into the bank the villagers troop down to watch us, bringing uncouth dag gers, barbed spears and leather goods to barter for our simple gifts, amongst the most coveted THE SCHOOL OP SYMPATHY of which will be an empty bottle to hold the oil which your Ethiopian needs to give him a cheerful countenance. Shyly come the chil dren, big-stomached and nude, with eyes of ga zelles, gazing, thumb in mouth, at the big boat and our strange ways. They are joined by the mothers, living statues of unconscious grace, with babe on shoulder and black hair decked with a Danae shower of shells and coins. Then follow the workers of the shadoofs and sakirs, and the elders, grave and reverend seigneurs of the wilds, eager to discuss the outside world. Darkness falls ; the village sleeps and all is quiet, save for the occasional protest of the dogs disturbed in dreams by owl or prowling jackals. *;** In the final miles of our journey the scenery grows sterile and desolate. On both sides are low hills over the broken edges of which the Sa hara and Arabian deserts pour their golden cascades. Suddenly, as we turn a promontory, we obtain a distant view of Abu Simbel rising from the water s edge like some mystic dome poised between heaven and earth and dimly we discern the four colossal figures of Rameses which are seated before its portal. As their LIGHT AND SHADOW dimensions develop, their majestic calm and utter solitude impress the attention vividly. Not even Karnak, with the heaped-up chaos of its bygone palaces, infuses such a feeling of awe as the Nile traveller experiences when first he comes before these enormous figures, throned before the rock-temple of Ra. Cut in the rock of the mountain, its fa9ade is over one hundred feet high, and on each side of the doorway sit two effigies of Rameses II who caused this unique shrine to be hewn in testi mony of his conquests and in honor of his gods. These statues are sixty-six feet in height, each of their forefingers being a yard long. The figure on the southern side of the entrance has been broken off at the waist by an earthquake and lies, in itself an imposing ruin, at the foot of its tenantless throne. In a deep niche over the door stands Ra, the Sun-god, crowned with the disc emblematical of his cult, and fronting that east wherefrom each morn he bathes this astounding temple with his light. On entering we are appalled by the profound gloom. The darkness is peopled with the wraiths of other days ; our voices are hushed, our feet as noiseless upon the invading carpet of sand. Above our heads the mountain THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY is upheld by huge columns of native rock, against each of which stands a figure of Osiris almost as high as the roof, with hands folded across the breast, holding the signs of life and power. Impassively their eyes regard us as we pass down the aisles of their stately home ; eyes that are cold and quiet but watchful of men as are the centuries. Two hundred yards from the temple door, where the light of day was left, is an adytum or sanctuary, and in the centre of this inner chamber stands an altar the altar of the Sun, whereon thirty-two centuries ago Sesos- tris, the conqueror of the world of his time, sacrificed to the gods amid pageants which filled these halls where now reigns solitude. In such a place the stillness speaks. Surrounded by the emblems of a faith which gave to Greece her mysteries and bequeathed many a tenet to our modern creeds, one senses deeply those con victions which found such noble expression. On my first visits to the temple I wandered in its recesses, studied its mural writings, made myself familiar with its material aspects. Yet each time that I stepped forth from its gloom LIGHT AND SHADOW into the brightness of day I knew that I had missed its message, that I had not heard the voices of its ministering presences. Therefore I resolved that I would sleep at night within the temple, and I bade my Nile sailors not to dis turb me, despite their assurances that evil hap penings would befall. And Isis smiled upon my resolution, silvering shore and seated Pha raohs with her rays, but, wistful of my quest, she hung the velvet of her night across the portal. Within the temple the giants of the great hall greeted me with stony stare, and the pictured votaries seemed whispering to graven gods as I passed through succeeding chambers to the sanctuary. Here I called upon the soul of him who devised this temple, to teach me its purpose and his thought, and I lay down upon the altar of Ra and slept. Before the night of the outside world had turned to day I awoke. A beam of light had touched my face and as I sprang up it fell upon the center of the altar of the sun. All else around was darker than the darkness of a thousand nights. But I was aware that in the far distance beyond the Nile, at the meeting of two hills, the young sun peeped at his sleep ing world. Across the intervening desert and THE SCHOOL, OF SYMPATHY river, through the long corridors of the shrine, this first beam passed to lay, as its first touch of day, a ray of the eternal light upon this altar set in the eternal shadow. Wise architect, we sense the heart of thy philosophy. If the Sun is born each morn, at taining to fullness of vigor at noon and declin ing slowly to the west at eve; if then it seems that it is lost to the world of the living so that we know it only in memory, doth it not live in the realms of Amenti and come again to rebirth? If this be so of Ha, the Lord of Light, shall it not be true of Pharaoh, and if thus with Pharaoh shall the meanest of subjects share less in the great lesson? Wise architect, we thank thee. BY HIM WHO SLEEPS AT PHIL/E XX BY HIM WHO SLEEPS AT PHIL^J IT is remarkable how unfailingly men, in all climes and conditions of evolution, have felt the magnetic influences of certain lo calities, often with no apparent reason behind the traditions which gather round them. The veneration bestowed is not the source of our wonder; rather is it the surety and eagerness with which men discover and admit the forces emanating from such centres; using them to their uplifting. Scores of such potent places, scattered over the world, have, from different causes, swayed the peoples of empires dead and living. Most of them possess histories which clearly suggest the source of their power for good ; or legendary lore through the mists whereof we faintly discern the far-off cause of the transmitted effect. But in the majority of cases only their latent influence remains screened, ofttimes by a veil of superstition, like a fair face hidden behind the mask of car- T HE SCHOOL OP SYMPATHY nival. The purpose and the power have been fulfilled, the story of their origin is lost. Such an example is the island of Philas which once gemmed the placid stream above the first cataracts of the Nile; the joj in the centuries that are dead of all lovers of the beautiful; the resting-place of Isis and Osiris; the "sa cred-isle" of ancient creeds. In the days when Ptolemaic Pharoahs reigned in Sais, there were few expressions more revered in Greece or Egypt than the adjuration "by Him who sleeps at Philse." Contracts and vows of moment were made binding by the utterance of this phrase. In the mind of the speaker it invoked Osiris to bear witness to the oath thus attested in his name ; to guide its due fulfilling ; to pro tect him whose promise was thus made in the name of the mighty Lord of life, whose realm was the universe, and whose resting-place was Philae in the far waters of the Nubian Nile. How came this small and distant isle to win a renown so widely spread and an influence so unquestioned? What benediction, forgotten amongst the myriad secrets of the Sphinx, first gave its protective radiations, and filled the early Greeks and Egyptians with the sense of this focussed power? In later ages, with the [ H8] BY HIM WHO SLEEPS AT PHIL2E accretion of traditions and the consequent repe tition of ceremonials, and converging thoughts one may understand the accumulated power of the island. But the early pages of the record are strangely mute. In the days when I assisted at its excavation the lowest strata of the ground yielded only the crumbled adobes of humble villages, the inhabitants of which may, perchance, have watched the granite blocks of Syene sent down the river to the builders of the Pyramids. And the subsequent ages piled up layer upon layer of uninstructive ruin, like the seared pages of a book which has passed through some fire. Then came the hour of acknowledgment, the time when men first whispered of this island, "take off thy shoes for the ground whereon thou standest is holy." And shrines arose; humble at first, yet sending forth their influence for good as tiny pebbles cast into the stream form concentric and ever-widening rings beyond all measure of their size. And the fame of Philag grew apace; and the great ones of the earth vied with each other in doing honor to its gods, so that rival kings stipulated in their treaties for permission for their subjects to visit its sanctuaries unharmed, and even bor- THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY rowed the images of its gods in time of stress or gladness ; while Pharoahs of Egypt and tyrants of Greece and emperors of Rome show ered favors upon its priesthood until "Ailak," the angel-island, jewelled with its clustering temples, deep bowered amid its palms and gar dens, and shining even as the face of Isis re flected in her silver pool of Chelal, won the title "the sacred isle where rest the gods." In the ancient writings there is no distinct mention of Philse until the reign of Nektanebos, about 350 B.C., to whose time the oldest build ings on the island belong. There can be little doubt, however, that long before that decadent period in Egyptian history the island had been held in veneration, and there are indications that some shrine existed as far back as 1580 B.C., when Amosis was waging his long fight against the intruding Hyksos, and restoring the earlier order of things in Egypt. Prob ably some of these minor temples were removed to make room for later and more worthy erec tions, while others being built too near the con stantly encroaching water, the unmindful river destroyed the sanctuaries of its own deities. But from the time of Nektanebos to a date comparatively modern the island must have been [ 120 ] BY HIM WHO SLEEPS AT PHIL^E a hive of busy workers, resounding with the fashioning of granite columns, the chiseling of hieroglyphs, the sighing of ropes straining at mighty monoliths, the panting of countless laborers spent with their tasks, and the cries of master builders. It is probable that the peculiar sanctity of the place was first ascribed to the gods of the neighboring cataracts, but their worship was afterwards combined with that of other deities, and in the course of time the chief temples were dedicated to Isis and Osiris. Most of the im posing buildings, which, until recently, lent the island its characteristic appearance, were erected by the Ptolemaic Pharaohs during the three centuries before the Christian era, and by the Roman emperors during the three subse quent centuries. Long after Egypt had been Christianized, the ancient-worship still held sway in Nubia. Despite the edicts of Theodosius, the temples were not closed until the reign of Justinian in 565, when Isis saw the face of Mary painted upon her walls and witnessed her chambers, decorated with the symbol of the Moon, used for the creed of the Cross. Then followed the conquest of Egypt by the Arabs and Philse [ 121 ] THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY embraced Islam, whilst in the northern corner of the island flourished a Coptic town of sun- dried bricks, built like a swallow s nest under the eaves of the mighty fanes whose sculptured figures were daubed with plaster, and covered with presentations of the saints and the in signia of Christianity. Let us visit Philse as it appeared in the glory of its old age some thirty-five years ago before the needs of a utilitarian age had dammed the waters of the Nile at Assouan. In that aspect of its ruins, and in the full sunlight of a Nubian noon, we may better sense the memories linger ing amongst the white colonnades and note the shadowed wrinkles upon the time-worn walls. Then will we visit it lying prone and dying, choosing the hour when from her throne in heaven Isis weeps in tears of silvered light upon the shrines which sink forever beneath the ris ing river. Our way from the Nubian town of Assouan will lead us across that portion of the desert which borders the cataracts on their eastern side; the rim of one of the waste spaces of the earth where granite boulders of all sizes and fantastic shapes litter the drifting sand. No vegetation may live here. We are treading the [ 122 ] BY HIM WHO SLEEPS AT PHIL.fi threshold of the profound desolations of Arabia from which, verily, no barriers separate us. It is nothingness materialized no life or move ment save of the kites, wheeling under a dome of metallic blue, and an atmosphere that quivers beneath the pitiless sun. The banks of the upper river form a lake above the cataracts, where our boat, manned by its Arab sailors, awaits us, and embarking we put forth to the green paradise of Philae beckoning us to its palms and shadows. A short row against the current which swirls around many self-sub merged rocks and we land on the sandy carpet of the sacred isle scattered with its fragmentary litter of history. Each separate ruin, studied for itself, was a gem, lighting one s mind with suggestions which still might sway the votary. These piled evi dences of a great philosophy and of profound occult studies were numerous some years ago, but for most of them the river was already forming a sarcophagus which men might no more violate. A few still lingered above the tide. In all representations of Philas the ex quisite kiosk built by the Emperor Trajan, and known as Pharoah s bed, uplifted its grace ful canopy of stone, nor had the invading [ 123 ] THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY waters taken from us the peerless colonnades which, with their forests of carved capitals, lined a causeway worthy the Queen of Egypt s heaven. Where much else was ruin, time had respected her sanctuary and the coloring on many of the sculpturings which covered the high walls and columns were still marvellously bright. In one room, called the "Chamber of the Ten Columns," lingered an exquisite ex ample of decorative art. Here the ceilings of blue, picked out with golden stars, and the green and orange of the carvings, preserved the unchanged look of its former state, and furnished a feast of harmonious coloring. If Philae in its decay and dust, commanded such wonder for the vanished faith to which it bears deathless testimony, we may faintly pic ture the scenes of pomp that once enlivened its halls and terraces, when the sacred isle was filled with royal and priestly ceremonies. The gorgeous barges, draped in costly fabrics, then came gliding to the sentinelled stairs, where their owners joined the glittering processions of priests and princes. The dimly-seen interior of the temple was brilliant with lamps and torches, while the proud knee that only bent to Heaven, knelt to Osiris and Isis, and paid [ 124 ] BY HIM WHO SLEEPS AT PHILjE homage, in the mystic forms of that religion which has stamped its liturgy on many creeds. The pageants have disappeared with the in cense of their lamps but their wraiths of grandeur still proclaim the past. That view of Philse was ours thirty-five years ago. Now let us see a great queen die ; a centre of magnetism surrender its powers when those powers have fulfilled their purpose? Modern science has done its work only too well, and today the grim barrage across the river buries the Nile gods beneath their waters. Once more let us make our way towards the sad rock of Philse, in the sympathetic company of Pierre Loti. The wind has fallen with the night, and the lake is calm. To the yellow sky of eve has succeeded one that is blue-black, "infinitely dis tant, where the stars of Egypt scintillate in myriads. A glimmering light shows in the east and the full moon rises, not leaden-coloured as in our climates, but straightway very luminous, and surrounded by an aureole of mist, caused by the eternal dust of the sands." As we row towards the now baseless kiosk, lulled by the song of the boatman, the great disc mounts into the sky and illuminates everything with a gentle splendour. All is very still; the boat- C 125 J THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY men cease their Nubian song and the occasional call of some night bird suggests only the drown ing cry of a spirit of the past. We glide be neath the capitals of submerged columns and stay the gentle movements of the oars lest they should break too noisefully upon our thoughts. It is difficult to realize that this is the Philse of a few years ago. The very air seems cold as if the life blood of the place no longer coursed within its walls, and the graven stones are clammy to the touch. We hear only the sighing of the wind and the lapping of the water against the columns and the bas-reliefs. Then suddenly there comes the noise of a heavy body falling, followed by endless eddies. A great carved stone has plunged at its due hour, to rejoin in the black chaos below its fel lows that have already disappeared. Through the vista of these ghostly realms we pass in our boat. It is Pierre Loti who voices the dying magnetism of the place. "We are not alone ; a world of phantoms has been evoked around us by the Moon, some little, some very large. They had been hiding there in the shadow and now suddenly recommence their mute conversations, without breaking the pro found silence, using only their expressive hands [ 126 ] BY HIM WHO SLEEPS AT PHIL.*: and raised fingers. Now also the colossal Isis begins to appear ; the one carved on the left of the portico of her shrine ; first, her refined head with its bird s helmet, surmounted by a lunar disc; then, as the light continues to descend, her neck and shoulders, and her arm, raised to make who knows what mysterious, indicating sign; and finally the slim nudity of her torso, and her lips close bound. Behold her now, the goddess, come forth from the shadow. But she hesitates; she seems surprised and disturbed at seeing her feet, instead of the stones she had known for two thousand years, her own likeness, a reflection of herself, that stretches away, reversed in the mirror of water." "And suddenly again in the midst of the deep nocturnal calm of this temple, isolated here in the lake, comes the sound of a kind of mournful booming, of things that topple, stones that become detached and fall. Then, on the surface of the lake, a thousand concentric circles form, chase one another and disappear, ruffling indefinitely this mirror embanked be tween the terrible granites, in which Isis regards herself sorrowfully." [ 127 ] THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY XXI PLAY OUT THE GAME Practise what you know and you shall attain to higher knowledge. MATTHEW THE heart of man is a lake which reflects the mountains whereon God is throned. But the surface must be quiet, and the more profound its depths the surer shall be this condition of reflective peace. Gusts of worry and waves of mood break the image into trembling fragments. The water is troubled beyond its efficacy to heal, and ills which are hard to bear begin to prompt a longing for the imagined, because desired, oblivion of death. For those who would discard the labors of life for the seeming peace of death seldom are willing to "enquire curiously" if the relief sought may be gained in this way. They con ceive the universe as an idle fantasy wherein a life, with its accumulated loves and hates and variant experiences, may be snuffed out like a candle, and darkness and negation follow. [ 128 ] PLAY OUT THE GAME Tears or fears have bred in them a despair which seeks redress not in effort but in evasion or suicide, wholly disregarding the probability that effort is an essential of evolution, a privi lege continuing as time, a right which may not be waived, and being used grows with enlarging powers. It is as if our lesson books were to prove unexpectedly difficult and in a rage we should throw them upon the schoolroom floor, refusing consideration to the obvious fact that sooner or later we must learn those lessons if we are to pass beyond them to a greater knowl edge. The trials which they present are, as Zoroaster said, "merely the shavings in God s carpentry shop"; it is the carpentry which in vokes our energies. These faint-hearted climbers to the heights of destiny forget the potentialities of life. Its unliquidated assets are ignored by them, its opportunities denied, its shadows so exagger ated that their inherent beauty as the children of light becomes a source of dread. For surely shadows, if our vision is clear, are lovely and instructive? When Mohammed was asked what was the most gracious thing on earth he re plied with superb simplicity, "the shadow of a palm tree." [ 129 ] THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY All philosophies have taught this truth in various guises, setting forth in due equation the concordance of life and death. A remark able example was discovered some years ago in Egypt. Its message is broken and any trans lation must necessarily lack the colors of its original environment. Yet even in fragmentary form and with the colder rendering of our age its matter, pertinent and brief, should be worthy repetition without apology. The papyrus was found amongst the debris of a Nile tomb and purports to give us the dialogue between an Egyptian and his Soul. It is a document of unique interest ; and the profundity of thought which inspired its writer deepens our regret that the papyrus is so mutilated. The beginning of the manuscript in which this imaginary conversation is preserved is un fortunately lost, but the subject is obviously connected with an evaluation of our mundane lives and with the nature of the life to which we are born at the event called Death. The Soul of the man has concluded an eloquent tirade on the opportunities presented by terres trial life and its corroboration, death, but he complains that his Soul has not always be friended him with counsel and encouragement; [ 130 ] PLAY OUT THE GAME has not sufficiently prompted him during the recent troubles which have come to him during his sojourn on the banks of the Nile. "Thou hast fled away during these days of misfortune, and thou shouldst have kept by my side as one who weeps for me, as one who walks near me. O my Soul, cease to reproach me that I mourn for the sorrows of my life, cease to thrust me towards death; how should I go towards it with entire pleasure?" And he proceeds to explain the various types of labour in which he is engaged, and the work he would leave unfinished and the affairs of the world wherein he is interested. Here the Soul interrupts : "Thou cursest the other world as if thou wert a rich man." What a shrewd thrust is here to test his courage. But the man is in no wise disconcerted by this at tack and replies, "It s no good, your getting angry, I shall not go." Then the Soul pictures to the man the troubles of the life he is leading and shows him, amongst other incidents, that the child cut off in the spring-time of its life by being acciden tally drowned in the Nile, or drawn under its surface by a crocodile, has lost the opportuni ties of the physical existence, whereas the ma- [ 131 ] THE SCHOOL OF SYMPATHY ture man has already been through varied ex periences, and should be willing to face the new adventures of another life. After some further arguments urged by his Soul the man is convinced that he has nothing to fear in death, and he acknowledges that while he has not much more happiness to expect from living, he would gladly rest a little. What follows is evidently the principal part of the work, that over which the poet took most care. The man declares the misery and contempt into which he fell after experiencing those events which were doubtless related in the missing portion of this extraordinary doc ument. "See, my name is more abused than the brave child about whom lies are told to his parents! See, my name is more abused than a town which is continually plotting re bellion, but which is never found out! "To whom shall I speak to-day? No one remembers yesterday, and no one dares act at the moment. To whom shall I speak to-day? The earth is a heap of evil doers! Death seems to me to-day like the remedy for a disease, like going out into the open air after a fever ! Death seems to me to-day like the odour of the lotus, like repose on the shores of a land of [ 132 ] PLAY OUT THE GAME plenty ! Death seems to me to-day like the de sire of a man to see his home after many years spent in captivity!" The Soul, delighted with his success, adds a few well-chosen words of congratulation to this profession of faith, and promises not even to seem to desert the man in any hour of trouble : "When you pass over and your body still be longs to the earth, I will keep close to you, and yonder we shall dwell together." Such is this strange manuscript, one of the most extraordinary among the many left to us from those ancient days. The undulation of the poetry, the harmonies of colour, the spirit which inspired the work, may not be re produced from this torn fragment of a dead philosophy, but it sends down the ringing grooves of time the echo of a brave and sympathetic appreciation of life and a readi ness to meet the wider opportunities of death. THE END [ 133 ] UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY Los Angeles This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. Form L9-42m-8, 49(B5573)444 UBfcARY OF CALIFOWtt school of A 000917671 PS 5501 A756s * v