I %0JHV3JO^ %0JITV3JO^ ^UIBRARYQ? ^HlBRAWtf*. ^W0MVER% .^lOSANCEl ^OF-CAIIFOR^ ^UN!VER% ^lOSANCEl, y 0Aavaan#" If .^EUNIVERto* <3\ ^ ^lOSANCEIfj^ -^HIBRARY^ § i if i 1 https://archive.org/details/naturalhistoryofOOemer_C 4/f v/sa3AiNn]i\v xOFCAUFOfi^ c§ ft t ^AavaaiB^ pi ^OFCAUFOR^ ^3Awn-ivt^ ^HIBBARY^ ^ttlBRARYGr NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT AND OTHER PAPERS BEING VOLUME XII. EMERSON'S COMPLETE WORKS NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT AND OTHER PAPERS BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON WITH A GENERAL INDEX TO EMERSON'S COLLECTED WORKS BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 1893 Copyright, 1893, By EDWARD W. EMERSON. All rights reserved. The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U.S. A. Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton and Company. PS 41 PREFATORY NOTE. The first two pieces in this volume are lectures from the " University Courses " on philosophy, given at Harvard College in 1870 and 1871, by persons not members of the Faculty. " The Natural History of the Intellect " was the subject which Emerson chose. He had, from his early youth, cherished the project of a new method in metaphysics, proceeding by observation of the mental facts, without attempting an analysis and coordination of them which must, from the nature of the case, be premature. With this view, he had, at intervals from 1848 to 1866, announced courses on the "Natural History of Intellect," "The Natural Method of Mental Philosophy," and " Philosophy for the People." He would, he said, give anecdotes of the spirit, a calendar of mental moods, without any pretence of system. None of these attempts, however, disclosed any novelty of method, or indeed, after the opening iv PREFATORY NOTE. statement of his intention, any marked difference from his ordinary lectures. He had always been writing anecdotes of the spirit, and those which he wrote under this heading were used by him in subsequently published essays so largely that I find very little left for present publication. The lecture which gives its name to the volume was the first of the earliest course, and it seems to me to include all that distinctly belongs to the par- ticular subject. The lecture on " Memory " is from the same course ; that on " Boston " from the course on " Life and Literature," in 1861. The other pieces are reprints from the " North American Review " and the " Dial." To this final volume of Mr. Emerson's writings, an index to all the volumes has been appended. It was prepared by Professor John H. Woods, of Jacksonville, Illinois, but has undergone some alterations for which he is not responsible. J. E. Cabot. September 9, 1893. CONTENTS PAGE Natural History of Intellect 1 Memory 61 Boston 83 Michael Angelo 113 Milton 143 Papers from the Dial 175 I. Thoughts on Modern Literature .... 177 II. Walter Savage Landor 201 III. Prayers 212 IV. Agriculture of Massachusetts . . . .219 V. Europe and European Books .... 225 VI. Past and Present 237 VII. A Letter 249 VIII. The Tragic 260 General Index 273 NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT. / NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT, t have used such opportunity as I have had, and lately 1 in London and Paris, to attend scien- tific lectures ; and in listening to Richard Owen's masterly enumeration of the parts and laws of the human body, or Michael Faraday's explanation of magnetic powers, or the botanist's descriptions, one could not help admiring the irresponsible security and happiness of the attitude of the naturalist ; sure of admiration for his facts, sure of their suf- ficiency. They ought to interest you ; if they do not, the fault lies with you. Then I thought — could not a similar enumera- tion be made of the laws and powers of the Intel- lect, and possess the same claims on the student ? Could we have, that is, the exhaustive accuracy of distribution which chemists use in their nomencla- ture and anatomists in their descriptions, applied to a higher class of facts ; to those laws, namely, which are common to chemistry, anatomy, astron- i 1850. 4 NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT. omy, geometry, intellect, morals, and social life ; — laws of the world ? Why not? These powers and laws are also facts in a Natural History. They also are objects of science, and may be numbered and recorded, like stamens and vertebrse. At the same time they have a deeper interest, as in the order of nature they lie higher and are nearer to the mys- terious seat of pow T er and creation. For at last, it is only that exceeding and univer- sal part which interests us, when we shall read in a true history what befalls in that kingdom where a thousand years is as one day, and see that what is set down is true through all the sciences ; in the laws of thought as well as of chemistry. In all sciences the student is discovering that nature, as he calls it, is always working, in wholes and in every detail, after the laws of the human mind. Every creation, in parts or in particles, is on the method and by the means which our mind approves as soon as it is thoroughly acquainted with the facts ; hence the delight. No matter how far or how high science explores, it adopts the method of the universe as fast as it appears ; and this discloses that the mind as it opens, the mind as it shall be, comprehends and works thus ; that is to say, the Intellect builds the universe and is the key to all it contains. It is not then cities or NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT. 5 mountains, or animals, or globes that any longer command us, but only man; not the fact but so much of man as is in the fact. In astronomy, vast distance, but we never go into a foreign system. In geology, vast duration, but we are never strangers. Our metaphysic should be able to follow the flying force through all trans- formations, and name the pair identical through all variety. I believe in the existence of the material world as the expression of the spiritual or the real, and in the impenetrable mystery which hides (and hides through absolute transparency) the mental nature, I await the insight which our advancing knowledge of material laws shall furnish. Every object in nature is a word to signify some fact in the mind. But when that fact is not yet put into English words, when I look at the tree or the river and have not yet definitely made out what they would say to me, they are by no means unimpressive. I wait for them, I enjoy them be- fore they yet speak. I feel as if I stood by an ambassador charged with the message of his king, which he does not deliver because the hour when he should say it is not yet arrived. Whilst we converse with truths as thoughts, they exist also as plastic forces ; as the soul of a man, the soul of a plant, the genius or constitution 6 NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT. of any part of nature, which makes it what it is. The thought which was in the world, part and parcel of the world, has disengaged itself and taken an independent existence. My belief in the use of a course on philosophy is that the student shall learn to appreciate the miracle of the mind ; shall learn its subtle but immense power, or shall begin to learn it ; shall come to know that in seeing and in no tradition he must find what truth is ; that he shall see in it the source of all traditions, and shall see each one of them as better or worse statement of its revela- tions ; shall come to trust it entirely, as the only true ; to cleave to God against the name of God. When he has once known the oracle he will need no priest. And if he finds at first with some alarm how impossible it is to accept many things which the hot or the mild sectarian may insist on his believing, he will be armed by his insight and brave to meet all inconvenience and all resistance it may cost him. He from whose hand it came will guide and direct it. Yet these questions which really interest men, how few can answer. Here are learned faculties of law and divinity, but would questions like these come into mind when I see them? Here are learned academies and universities, yet they have not propounded these for any prize. NATUEAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT. 7 Seek the literary circles, the stars of fame, the men of splendor, of bon-mots, will they afford me satisfaction ? I think you could not find a club of men acute and liberal enough in the world. Bring the best wits together, and they are so impatient of each other, so vulgar, there is so much more than their wit, — such follies, gluttonies, partiali- ties, age, care, and sleep, that you shall have no academy. There is really a grievous amount of unavail- ableness about men of wit. A plain man finds them so heavy, dull and oppressive, with bad jokes and conceit and stupefying individualism, that he comes to write in his tablets, Avoid the great man as one who is privileged to be an unprofitable com- panion. For the course of things makes the schol- ars either egotists or worldly and jocose. In so many hundreds of superior men hardly ten or five or two from whom one can hope for a reasonable word. Go into the scientific club and hearken. Each savant proves in his admirable discourse that he and he only knows now or ever did know anything on the subject : " Does the gentleman speak of anatomy ? Who peeped into a box at the Custom House and then published a drawing of my rat ? " Or is it pretended discoveries of new strata that are before the meeting ? This professor hastens to 8 NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT. inform us that he knew it all twenty years ago, and is ready to prove that he knew so much then that all further investigation was quite superfluous ; — and poor nature and the sublime law, which is all that our student cares to hear of, are quite omitted in this triumphant vindication. Was it better when we came to the philosophers, who found everybody wrong ; acute and ingenious to lampoon and degrade mankind ? And then was there ever prophet burdened with a message to his people who did not cloud our gratitude by a strange confounding in his own mind of private folly with his public wisdom ? But if you like to run away from this besetting sin of sedentary men, you can escape all this insane egotism by running into society, where the man- ners and estimate of the world have corrected this folly, and effectually suppressed this overweening self-conceit. Here each is to make room for others, and the solidest merits must exist only for the entertainment of all. We are not in the smallest degree helped. Great is the dazzle, but the gain is small. Here they play the game of conversation, as they play billiards, for pastime and credit. Yes,'tis a great vice in all countries, the sacrifice of scholars to be courtiers and diners-out, to talk for the amusement of those who wish to be amused, though the stars of heaven must be plucked down NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT. 9 and packed into rockets to this end. What with egotism on one side and levity on the other we shall have no Olympus. But there is still another hindrance, namely, practicality. We must have a special talent, and bring something to pass. Ever since the Norse heaven made the stern terms of admission that a man must do something excellent with his hands or feet, or with his voice, eyes, ears, or with his whole body, the same demand has been made in Norse earth. Yet what we really want is not a haste to act, but a certain piety toward the source of action and knowledge. In fact we have to say that there is a certain beatitude, — I can call it nothing less, — to which all men are entitled, tasted by them in dif- ferent degrees, which is a perfection of their na- ture, and to which their entrance must be in every way forwarded. Practical men, though they could lift the globe, cannot arrive at this. Something very different has to be done, — the availing our- selves of every impulse of genius, an emanation of the heaven it tells of, and the resisting this con- spiracy of men and material things against the sanitary and legitimate inspirations of the intel- lectual nature. What is life but the angle of vision ? A man is measured by the angle at which he looks at objects. 10 NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT. What is life but what a man is thinking of all day? This is his fate and his employer. Know- ing is the measure of the man. By how much we know, so much we are. The laws and powers of the Intellect have, how- ever, a stupendous peculiarity, of being at once ob- servers and observed. So that it is difficult to hold them fast, as objects of examination, or hinder them from turning the professor out of his chair. The wonder of the science of Intellect is that the sub- stance with which we deal is of that subtle and ac- tive quality that it intoxicates all who approach it. Gloves on the hands, glass guards over the eyes, wire-gauze masks over the face, volatile salts in the nostrils, are no defence against this virus, which comes in as secretly as gravitation into and through all barriers. Let me have your attention to this dangerous subject, which we will cautiously approach on dif- ferent sides of this dim and perilous lake, so attrac- tive, so delusive. We have had so many guides and so many failures. And now the world is still uncertain whether the pool has been sounded or not. My contribution will be simply historical. I write anecdotes of the intellect ; a sort of Farmer's Almanac of mental moods. I confine my ambition NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT. 11 to true reporting of its play in natural action, though I should get only one new fact in a year. I cannot myself use that systematic form which is reckoned essential in treating the science of the mind. But if one can say so without arrogance, I might suggest that he who contents himself with dotting a fragmentary curve, recording only what facts he has observed, without attempting to arrange them within one outline, follows a system also, — a system as grand as any other, though he does not interfere with its vast curves by prema- turely forcing them into a circle or ellipse, but only draws that arc which he clearly sees, or perhaps at a later observation a remote curve of the same orbit, and waits for a new opportunity, well-assured that these observed arcs will consist with each other. I confess to a little distrust of that completeness / of system which metaphysicians are apt to affect. 'T is the gnat grasping the world. All these ex- haustive theories appear indeed a false and vain at- tempt to introvert and analyze the Primal Thought. That is up-stream, and what a stream ! Can you swim up Niagara Falls ? We have invincible repugnance to introversion, to study of the eyes instead of that which the eyes see ; and the belief of men is that the attempt is un- natural and is punished by loss of faculty. I share 12 NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT. the belief that the natural direction of the intellect- ual powers is from within outward, and that just in proportion to the activity of thoughts on the study of outward objects, as architecture, or farm- ing, or natural history, ships, animals, chemistry, — in that proportion the faculties of the mind had a healthy growth ; but a study in the opposite direc- tion had a damaging effect on the mind. ^Metaphysic is dangerous as a single pursuit. We should feel more confidence in the same results from the mouth of a man of the world. The in- ward analysis must be corrected by rough experi- ence. Metaphysics must be perpetually reinforced by life flmust be the observations of a working-man on working-men ; must be biography, — the record of some law whose working was surprised by the observer in natural action. I think metaphysics a grammar to which, once read, we seldom return. 'T is a Manila full of pep- per, and I want only a teaspoonful in a year. I admire the Dutch, who burned half the harvest to enhance the price of the remainder. I want not the logic but the power, if any, which it brings into science and literature ; the man who can humanize this logic, these syllogisms, and give me the results. The adepts value only the pure geometry, the aerial bridge ascending from earth to heaven with arches and abutments of pure reason. NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT. 13 I am fully contented if you tell me where are the two termini. to know the laws of this wonderful power, that I may domesticate it. I observe with curiosity its risings and settings, illumination and eclipse ; its obstructions and its provocations, that I may learn to live with it wisely, court its aid, catch sight of its splendor, feel its approach, hear and save its oracles and obey them. But this watching of the mind, in season and out of season, to see the me- chanics of the thing, is a little of the detective. The analytic process is cold and bereaving and, shall I say it ? somewhat mean, as spying. There is something surgical in metaphysics as we treat it. Were not an ode a better form ? The poet sees wholes and avoids analysis; the metaphysician, dealing as it were with the mathematics of the mind, puts himself out of the way of the inspira- tion ; loses that which is the miracle and creates the worship. I think that philosophy is still rude and element- ary. It will one day be taught by poets. The poet is in the natural attitude ; he is believing ; the philosopher, after some struggle, having only reasons for believing. sics are to the end of use. I wish What I am now to attempt is simply some 14 NATURAL HIS TOBY OF INTELLECT. sketches or studies for such a picture ; Memoires pour servir toward a Natural History of Intellect. First I wish to speak of the excellence of that element, and the great auguries that come from it, notwithstanding the impediments which our sensual civilization puts in the way. Next I treat of the identity of the thought with Nature ; and I add a rude list of some by-laws of the mind. Thirdly I proceed to the fountains of thought in Instinct and Inspiration, and I also attempt to show the relation of men of thought to the existing religion and civility of the present time. I. We figure to ourselves Intellect as an ethe- real sea, which ebbs and flows, which surges and washes hither and thither, carrying its whole vir- tue into every creek and inlet which it bathes. To this sea every human house has a water front. But this force, creating nature, visiting whom it will and withdrawing from whom it will, making day where it comes and leaving night when it de- parts, is no fee or property of man or angel. It is as the light, public and entire to each, and on the same terms. What but thought deepens life, and makes us better than cow or cat ? The grandeur of the im- pression the stars and heavenly bodies make on us NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT. 15 is surely more valuable than our exact perception of a tub or a table on the ground. To Be is the unsolved, unsolvable wonder. To Be, in its two connections of inward and outward, the mind and nature. The wonder subsists, and age, though of eternity, could not approach a so- lution. But the suggestion is always returning, that hidden source publishing at once our being and that it is the source of outward nature. Who are we and what is Nature have one answer in the life that rushes into us. In my thought I seem to stand on the bank of a river and watch the endless flow of the stream, floating objects of all shapes, colors and natures ; nor can I much detain them as they pass, except by running beside them a little way along the bank. But whence they come or whither they go is not told me. Only I have a suspicion that, as geolo- gists say every river makes its own valley, so does this mystic stream. It makes its valley, makes its banks and makes perhaps the observer too. Who has found the boundaries of human intelligence ? Who has made a chart of its channel or approached the fountain of this wonderful Nile ? I am of the oldest religion. Leaving aside the question which was prior, egg or bird, I believe the mind is the creator of the world, and is ever creat- ing ; — that at last Matter is dead Mind ; that 16 NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT. mind makes the senses it sees with ; that the genius of man is a continuation of the power that made him and that has not done making him. I dare not deal with this element in its pure essence. It is too rare for the wings of words. Yet I see that Intellect is a science of degrees, and that as man is conscious of the law of vege- table and animal nature, so he is aware of an Intel- lect which overhangs his consciousness like a sky, of degree above degree, of heaven within heaven. Every just thinker has attempted to indicate these degrees, these steps on the heavenly stair, until he comes to light where language fails him. Above the thought is the higher truth, — truth as yet undomesticated and therefore unformulated. It is a steep stair down from the essence of In- tellect pure to thoughts and intellections. As the sun is conceived to have made our system by hurl- ing out from itself the outer rings of diffuse ether which slowly condensed into earths and moons, by a higher force of the same law the mind detaches minds, and a mind detaches thoughts or intellec- tions. These again all mimic in their sphericity the first mind, and share its power. Life is incessant parturition. There are vivi- parous and oviparous minds ; minds that produce their thoughts complete men, like armed soldiers, NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT. 17 ready and swift to go out to resist and conquer all the armies of error, and others that deposit their dangerous unripe thoughts here and there to lie still for a time and be brooded in other minds, and the shell not be broken until the next age, for them to begin, as new individuals, their career. The perceptions of a soul, its wondrous progeny, are born by the conversation, the marriage of souls; so nourished, so enlarged. They are de- tached from their parent, they pass into other minds ; ripened and unfolded by many they hasten to incarnate themselves in action, to take body, only to carry forward the will which sent them out. They take to themselves wood and stone and iron ; ships and cities and nations and armies of men and ages of duration ; the pomps of religion, the armaments of war, the codes and heraldry of states ; agriculture, trade, commerce ; — these are the ponderous instrumentalities into which the nimble thoughts pass, and which they animate and alter, and presently, antagonized by other thoughts which they first aroused, or by thoughts which are sons and daughters of these, the thought buries it- self in the new thought of larger scope, whilst the old instrumentalities and incarnations are decom- posed and recomposed into new. Our eating, trading, marrying, and learning are mistaken by us for ends and realities, whilst they 18 NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT. are properly symbols only ; when we have come, by a divine leading, into the inner firmament, we are apprised of the unreality or representative character of what we esteemed final. So works the poor little blockhead manikin. He must arrange and dignify his shop or farm the best he can. At last he must be able to tell you it, or write it, translate it all clumsily enough into the new sky-language he calls thought. He cannot help it, the irresistible meliorations bear him for- ward. II. Whilst we consider this appetite of the mind to arrange its phenomena, there is another fact which makes this useful. There is in nature a parallel unity which corresponds to the unity in the mind and makes it available. This methodiz- ing mind meets no resistance in its attempts. The scattered blocks, with which it strives to form a symmetrical structure, fit. This design following after finds with joy that like design went before. Not only man puts things in a row, but things be- long in a row. It is certain that however we may conceive of the wonderful little bricks of which the world is builded, we must suppose a similarity and fitting and identity in their frame. It is necessary to NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT. 19 suppose that every hose in nature fits every hy- drant ; so only is combination, chemistry, vegeta- tion, animation, intellection possible. Without identity at base, chaos must be forever. And as mind, our mind or mind like ours reap- pears to us in our study of nature, nature being everywhere formed after a method which we can well understand, and all the parts, to the most remote, allied or explicable, — therefore our own organization is a perpetual key, and a well-ordered mind brings to the study of every new fact or class of facts a certain divination of that which it shall find. This reduction to a few laws, to one law, is not a choice of the individual, it is the tyrannical in- stinct of the mind. There is no solitary flower and no solitary thought. It comes single like a foreign traveller, — but find out its name and it is related to a powerful and numerous family. Wonderful is their working and relation each to each. We hold them as lanterns to light each other and our present design. Every new thought modifies, in- terprets old problems. The retrospective value of each new thought is immense, like a torch applied to a long train of gunpowder. To be isolated is to be sick, and in so far, dead. The life of the All must stream through us to make the man and the moment great. 20 NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT. Well, having accepted this law of identity per- vading the universe, we next perceive that whilst every creature represents and obeys it, there is diversity, there is more or less of power ; that the lowest only means incipient form, and over it is a higher class in which its rudiments are opened, raised to higher powers ; that there is development from less to more, from lower to superior function, steadily ascending to man. If man has organs for breathing, for sight, for locomotion, for taking food, for digesting, for pro- tection by house-building, by attack and defence, for reproduction and love and care of his young, you shall find all the same in the muskrat. There is a perfect correspondence ; or 't is only man modi- fied to live in a mud-bank. A fish in like manner is man furnished to live in the sea i a thrush, to fly in the air ; and a mollusk is a cheap edition with a suppression of the costlier illustrations, designed for dingy circulation, for shelving in an oyster- bank or among the sea-weed. If we go through the British Museum or the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, or any cabinet where is some representation of all the kingdoms of nature, we are surprised with occult sympathies ; we feel as if looking at our own bone and flesh through coloring and distorting glasses. Is it not a little startling to see with what genius some peo- NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT. 21 pie take to hunting, with what genius some people fish, — what knowledge they still have of the creature they hunt? The robber, as the police- reports say, must have been intimately acquainted with the premises. How lately the hunter was the poor creature's organic enemy ; a presumption inflamed, as the lawyers say, by observing how many faces in the street still remind us of visages in the forest, — the escape from the quadruped type not yet perfectly accomplished. From whatever side we look at Nature we seem to be exploring the figure of a disguised man. How obvious is the momentum in our mental his- tory ! The momentum, which increases by exact laws in falling bodies, increases by the same rate in the intellectual action. Every scholar knows that he applies himself coldly and slowly at first to his task, but, with the progress of the work, the mind itself becomes heated, and sees far and wide as it approaches the end, so that it is the common remark of the student, Could I only have begun with the same fire which I had on the last day, I should have done something. The affinity of particles accurately translates the affinity of thoughts, and what a modern experi- menter calls " the contagious influence of chemical action " is so true of mind that I have only to read 22 NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT. the law that its application may be evident : " A body in the act of combination or decomposition enables another body, with which it may be in contact, to enter into the same state." And if one remembers how contagious are the moral states of men, how much we are braced by the presence and actions of any Spartan soul ; it does not need vigor of our own kind, but the spectacle of vigor of any kind, any prodigious power of performance wonderfully arms and recruits us. There are those who disputing will make you dispute, and the nervous and hysterical and animalized will pro- duce a like series of symptoms in you, though no other persons ever evoke the like phenomena, and though you are conscious that they do not properly belong to you, but are a sort of extension of the diseases of this particular person into you. The idea of vegetation is irresistible in consider- ing mental activity. Man seems a higher plant. What happens here in mankind is matched by what happens out there in the history of grass and wheat. This curious resemblance repeats, in the mental function, the germination, growth, state of melioration, crossings, blight, parasites, and in short all the accidents of the plant. Under every leaf is the bud of a new leaf, and not less under every thought is a newer thought. The plant ab- sorbs much nourishment from the ground in order NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT. 23 to repair its own waste by exhalation, and keep itself good. Increase its food and it becomes fer- tile. The mind is first only receptive. Surcharge it with thoughts in which it delights and it becomes active. The moment a man begins not to be con- vinced, that moment he begins to convince. In the orchard many trees send out a moderate shoot in the first summer heat, and stop. They look all summer as if they would presently burst into bud again, but they do not. , The fine tree continues to grow. The same thing happens in the man. Every man has material enough in his ex- perience to exhaust the sagacity of Newton in working it out. We have more than we use. I never hear a good speech at caucus or at cattle- show but it helps me, not so much by adding to my knowledge as by apprising me of admirable uses to which what I know can be turned. The commonest remark, if the man could only extend it a little, would make him a genius ; but the thought is prematurely checked, and grows no more. All great masters are chiefly distinguished by the power of adding a second, a third, and per- haps a fourth step in a continuous line. Many a man had taken their first step. With every addi- tional step you enhance immensely the value of your first. The botanist discovered long ago that Nature 24 NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT. loves mixtures, and that nothing grows well on the crab-stock, but the blood of two trees being mixed a new and excellent fruit is produced. And not less in human history aboriginal races are in- capable of improvement; the dull, melancholy Pelasgi arrive at no civility until the Phoenicians and lonians come in. The Briton, the Pict, is nothing until the Roman, the Saxon, the Norman, arrives. It is observed that our mental processes go for- ward even when they seem suspended. Scholars say that if they return to the study of a new lan- guage after some intermission, the intelligence of it is more and not less. A subject of thought to which we return from month to month, from year to year, has always some ripeness of which we can give no account. We say the book grew in the author's mind. In unfit company the finest powers are paralyzed. No ambition, no opposition, no friendly attention and fostering kindness, no wine, music or exhila- rating aids, neither warm fireside nor fresh air, walking or riding, avail at all to resist the palsy of mis-association. Genius is mute, is dull ; there is no genius. Ask of your flowers to open when you have let in on them a freezing wind. The mechanical laws might as easily be shown pervading the kingdom of mind as the vegetative. NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT. 25 A man has been in Spain. The facts and thoughts which the traveller has found in that country gradually settle themselves into a determinate heap of one size and form and not another. That is what he knows and has to say of Spain ; he cannot say it truly until a sufficient time for the arrange- ment of the particles has elapsed. These views of the source of thought and the mode of its communication lead us to a whole sys- tem of ethics, strict as any department of human duty, and open to us the tendencies and duties of men of thought in the present time. Wisdom is like electricity. There is no per- manent wise man, but men capable of wisdom, who being put into certain company or other favorable conditions become wise, as glasses rubbed acquire power for a time. An individual body is the momentary arrest or fixation of certain atoms, which, after performing compulsory duty to this enchanted statue, are re- leased again to flow in the currents of the world. An individual mind in like manner is a fixation or * momentary eddy in which certain services and powers are taken up and minister in petty niches and localities, and then, being released, return to the unbounded soul of the world. In this eternal resurrection and rehabilitation of 26 NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT transitory persons, who and what are they ? 'T is only the source that we can see ; — the eternal mind, careless of its channels, omnipotent in it- self, and continually ejaculating its torrent into every artery and vein and veinlet of humanity. Wherever there is health, that is, consent to the cause and constitution of the universe, there is perception and power. Each man is a new power in Nature. He holds the keys of the world in his hands. No quality in Nature's vast magazines he cannot touch, no truth he cannot see. Silent, passive, even sulkily Nature offers every morning her wealth to man. She is immensely rich ; he is welcome to her entire goods, but she speaks no word, will not so much as beckon or cough ; only this, she is careful to leave all her doors ajar, — towers, hall, storeroom and cellar. If he takes her hint and uses her goods she speaks no word; if he blunders and starves she says no- thing. To the idle blockhead Nature is poor, ster- ile, inhospitable. To the gardener her loam is all strawberries, pears, pineapples. To the miller her rivers whirl the wheel and weave carpets and broad- cloth. To the sculptor her stone is soft ; to the painter her plumbago and marl are pencils and chromes. To the poet all sounds and words are melodies and rhythms. In her hundred-gated Thebes every chamber is a new door. NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT 27 But he enters the world by one key. Herein is the wealth of each. His equipment, though new, is complete ; his prudence is his own ; his courage, his charity, are his own. He has his own defences and his own fangs ; his perception and his own mode of reply to sophistries. Whilst he draws on his own he cannot be overshadowed or supplanted. There are two mischievous superstitions, I know not which does the most harm, one, that " I am wiser than you," and the other that " You are wiser than I." The truth is that every man is furnished, if he will heed it, with wisdom necessary to steer his own boat, — if he will not look away from his own to see how his neighbor steers his. Every man is a new method and distributes things anew. If he could attain full size he would take up, first or last, atom by atom, all the world into a new form. And our deep conviction of the riches proper to every mind does not allow us to admit of much looking over into one another's vir- tues. Let me whisper a secret ; nobody ever for- gives any admiration in you of them, any overesti- mate of what they do or have. I acquiesce to be that I am, but I wish no one to be civil to me. Strong men understand this very well. Power fraternizes with power, and wishes you not to be like him but like yourself. Echo the leaders and they will fast enough see that you have nothing for 28 NATUBAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT. them. They came to you for something they had not. There is always a loss of truth and power when a man leaves working for himself to work for another. Absolutely speaking I can only work for myself. All my good is magnetic, and I educate not by les- sons but by going about my business. When, moved by love, a man teaches his child or joins with his neighbor in any act of common benefit, or spends himself for his friend, or rushes at immense personal sacrifice on some public, self-immolating act, it is not done for others, but to fulfil a high necessity of his proper character. The benefit to others is contingent and not contemplated by the doer. The one thing not to be forgiven to intellectual persons is that they believe in the ideas of others. From this deference comes the imbecility and fa- tigue of their society, for of course they cannot af- firm these from the deep life ; they say what they would have you believe, but what they do not quite know. Profound sincerity is the only basis of tal- ent as of character. The temptation is to patronize Providence, to fall into the accepted ways of talk- ing and acting of the good sort of people. * Each has a certain aptitude for knowing or doing somewhat which, when it appears, is so adapted and aimed on that, that it seems a sort of obtuse- NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT. 29 ness to everything else. Well, this aptitude, if he would obey it, would prove a telescope to bring un- der his clear vision what was blur to everybody else. ? T is a wonderful instrument, an organic sympathy with the whole frame of things. There is no property or relation in that immense arsenal of forces which the earth is, but some man is at last found who affects this, delights to unfold and work it, as if he were the born publisher and de- monstrator of it. As a dog has a sense that you have not, to find the track of his master or of a fox, and as each tree can secrete from the soil the elements that form a peach, a lemon, or a cocoa-nut, according to its kind, so individual men have secret senses, each some incommunicable sagacity. And men are pri- mary or secondary as their opinions and actions are organic or not. I know well what a sieve every ear is. Teach me never so much and I hear or retain only that which I wish to hear, what comports with my ex-/ perience and my desire. Many eyes go through the meadow, but few see the flowers. A hunter finds plenty of game on the ground you have saun- tered over with idle gun. White huckleberries are so rare that in miles of pasture you shall not find a dozen. But a girl who understands it will find you a pint in a quarter of an hour. 30 NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT. Though the world is full of food we can take only the crumbs fit for us. The air rings with sounds, but only a few vibrations can reach our tympanum. Perhaps creatures live with us which we never see, because their motion is too swift for our vision. The sun may shine, or a galaxy of suns ; you will get no more light than your eye will hold. What can Plato or Newton teach, if you are deaf or incapable ? A mind does not receive truth as a chest receives jewels that are put into it, but as the stomach takes up food into the system. J.t is no longer food, but flesh, and is assimilated. The appetite and the power of digestion measure our right to knowledge. He has it who can use it. As soon as our accumulation overruns our inven- tion or power to use, the evils of intellectual glut- tony begin, — congestion of the brain, apoplexy and strangulation. III. In reckoning the sources of our mental power it were fatal to omit that one which pours all the others into its mould ; — that unknown country in which all the rivers of our knowledge have their fountains, and which, by its qualities and structure, determines both the nature of the waters and the direction in which they flow. The healthy mind lies parallel to the currents of nature and sees things in place, or makes discover- NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT. 31 ies. Newton did not exercise more ingenuity but less than another to see the world. Right thought comes spontaneously, comes like the morning wind ; comes daily, like our daily bread, to humble ser- vice ; comes duly to those who look for it. It does not need to pump your brains and force thought to think rightly. O no, the ingenious person is warped by his ingenuity and mis-sees. Instinct is our name for the potential wit. Each man has a feeling that what is done anywhere is done by the same wit as his. All men are his rep- resentatives, and he is glad to see that his wit can work at this or that problem as it ought to be done, and better than he could do it. We feel as if one man wrote all the books, painted, built, in dark ages ; and we are sure that it can do more than ever was done. It was the same mind that built the world. That is Instinct. Ask what the Instinct declares, and we have lit- tle to say. He is no newsmonger, no disputant, no talker. 'T is a taper, a spark in the great night. Yet a spark at which all the illuminations of hu- man arts and sciences were kindled. This is that glimpse of inextinguishable light by which men are guided ; though it does not show objects, yet it shows the way. This is that sense by which men feel when they are wronged, though they do not see how. This is that source of thought and feel- 32 NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT. ing which acts on masses of men, on all men at certain times, with resistless power. Ever at inter- vals leaps a word or fact to light which is no man's invention, but the common instinct, making the revolutions that never go back. This is Instinct, and Inspiration is only this power excited, breaking its silence ; the spark bursting into flame. Instinct is a shapeless giant in the cave, massive, without hands or fingers or articu- lating lips or teeth or tongue ; Behemoth, disdain- ing speech, disdaining particulars, lurking, surly, invincible, disdaining thoughts, always whole, never distributed, aboriginal, old as nature, and saying, like poor Topsy, " never was born, growed." In- different to the dignity of its function, it plays the god in animal nature as in human or as in the an- gelic, and spends its omniscience on the lowest wants. The old Hindoo Gautama says, "Like the approach of the iron to the loadstone is the approach of the new-born child to the breast. 9 ' There is somewhat awful in that first approach. The Instinct begins at this low point, at the sur- face of the earth, and works for the necessities of the human being ; then ascends step by step to suggestions which are when expressed the intellec- tual and moral laws. The mythology cleaves close to nature ; and what else was it they represented in Pan, god of NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT, 33 shepherds, who was not yet completely finished in god-like form, blocked rather, and wanting the ex- tremities ; had emblematic horns and feet ? Pan, that is, All. His habit was to dwell in mountains, lying on the ground, tooting like a cricket in the sun, refusing to speak, clinging to his b ehemoth w r ays. He could intoxicate by the strain of his shepherd's pipe, — silent yet to most, for his pipes make the music of the spheres, which because it sounds eternally is not heard at all by the dull, but only by the mind. He wears a coat of leopard spots or stars. He could terrify by earth-born fears called panics. Yet was he in the secret of nature and could look both before and after. He was only seen under disguises, and was not repre- sented by any outward image ; a terror sometimes, at others a placid omnipotence. Such homage did the Greek, delighting in accu- rate form, not fond of the extravagant and un- bounded, pay to the inscrutable force we call In- stinct, or nature when it first becomes intelligent. The action of the Instinct is for the most part negative, regulative, rather than initiative or im- pulsive. But it has a range as wide as human na- ture, running over all the ground of morals, of in- tellect, and of sense. In its lower function, when it deals with the apparent world, it is common- sense. It requires the performance of all that is 34 NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT. needful to the animal life and health. Then it re- quires a proportion between a man's acts and his condition, requires all that is called humanity ; that symmetry and connection which is imperative in all healthily constituted men, and the want of which the rare and brilliant sallies of irregular genius cannot excuse. If we could retain our early innocence we might trust our feet uncommanded to take the right path to our friend in the woods. But we have inter- fered too often ; the feet have lost, by our distrust, their proper virtue, and we take the wrong path and miss him. 'T is the barbarian instinct within us which culture deadens. We find ourselves expressed in nature, but we cannot translate it into words. But Perception is the armed eye. A civilization has tamed and ripened this savage wit, and he is a Greek. His Aye and No have become nouns and verbs and adverbs. Perception differs from Instinct by add- ing the Will. Simple percipiency is the virtue of space, not of man. The senses minister to a mind they do not know. At a moment in our history the mind's eye opens and we become aware of spiritual facts, of rights, of duties, of thoughts, — a thousand faces of one essence. We call the essence Truth ; the particu- NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT. 35 lar aspects of it we call thoughts. These facts, this essence, are not new ; they are old and eternal, but our seeing of them is new. Having seen them we are no longer brute lumps whirled by Fate, but we pass into the council-chamber and government of nature. In so far as we see them we share their life and sovereignty. The point of interest is here, that these gates, once opened, never swing back. The observers may come at their leisure, and do at last satisfy themselves of the fact. The thought, the doctrine, the right hitherto not affirmed is published in set propositions, in conversation of scholars and phi- losophers, of men of the world, and at last in the very choruses of songs. The young hear it, and as they have never fought it, never known it other- wise, they accept it, vote for it at the polls, embody it in the laws. And the perception thus satisfied reacts on the senses, to clarify them, so that it becomes more indisputable. This is the first property of the Intellect I am to point out ; the mind detaches. A'man is intel- lectual in proportion as he can make an object of every sensation, perception and intuition ; so long as he has no engagement in any thought or feel- ing which can hinder him from looking at it as somewhat foreign. 36 NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT. A man of talent has only to name any form or fact with which we are most familiar, and the strong light which he throws on it enhances it to all eyes. People wonder they never saw it before. The detachment consists in seeing it under a new order, not under a personal but under a universal light. To us it had economic, but to the universe it has poetic relations, and it is as good as sun and star now. Indeed this is the measure of all intel- lectual power among men, the power to complete this detachment, the power of genius to hurl a new individual into the world. An intellectual man has the power to go out of himself and see himself as an object ; therefore his defects and delusions interest him as much as his successes. He not only wishes to succeed in life, but he wishes in thought to know the history and destiny of a man ; whilst the cloud of egotists drifting about are only interested in a success to their egotism. The senses report the new fact or change ; the mind discovers some essential copula binding this fact or change to a class of facts or changes, and enjoys the discovery as if coming to its own again. A perception is always a generalization. It lifts the object, whether in material or moral nature, into a type. The animal, the low degrees of intellect, know only individuals. The philoso- NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT. 37 pher knows only laws. That is, he considers a purely mental fact, part of the soul itself. We say with Kenelm Digby, " All things that she knoweth are herself, and she is all that she know- eth." Insight assimilates the thing seen. Is it only another way of affirming and illustrating this to say that it sees nothing alone, but sees each particular object in just connections, — sees all in God ? In all healthy souls is an inborn necessity of presupposing for each particular fact a prior Being which compels it to a harmony with all other natures. The game of Intellect is the per- ception that whatever befalls or can be stated is a universal proposition ; and contrariwise, that every general statement is poetical again by being par- ticularized or impersonated. A single thought has no limit to its value ; a thought, properly speaking, — that is a truth held not from any man's saying so, or any accidental benefit or recommendation it has in our trade or circumstance, but because we have perceived it is a fact in the nature of things, and in all times and places will and must be the same thing, — is of inestimable value. Every new impression on the mind is not to be derided, but is to be accounted for, and, until accounted for, registered as an in- disputable addition to our catalogue of natural facts. 38 NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT. The first fact is the fate in every mental percep- tion, — that my seeing this or that, and that I see it so or so, is as much a fact in the natural history of the world as is the freezing of water at thirty- two degrees of Fahrenheit. My percipiency affirms the presence and perfection of law, as much as all the martyrs. A perception, it is of a necessity older than the sun and moon, and the Father of the Gods. It is there with all its destinies. It is its nature to rush to expression, to rush to embody itself. It is impatient to put on its sandals and be gone on its errand, which is to lead to a larger perception, and so to new action. For thought exists to be expressed. That which cannot exter- nize itself is not thought. Do not trifle with your perceptions, or hold them cheap. They are your door to the seven heavens, and if you pass it by you will miss your way. Say, what impresses me ought to impress me. I am bewildered by the immense variety of attrac- tions and cannot take a step ; but this one thread, fine as gossamer, is yet real ; and I hear a whis- per, which I dare trust, that it is the thread on which the earth and the heaven of heavens are strung. The universe is traversed by paths or bridges or stepping-stones across the gulfs of space in every direction. To every soul that is created is its NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT. 39 path, invisible to all but itself. Each soul, there- fore, walking in its own path walks firmly ; and to the astonishment of all other souls, who see not its path, it goes as softly and playfully on its way as if, instead of being a line, narrow as the edge of a sword, over terrific pits right and left, it were a wide prairie. Genius is a delicate sensibility to the laws of the / world, adding the power to express them again in some new form. The highest measure of poetic power is such insight and faculty to fuse the cir- cumstances of to-day as shall make transparent the whole web of circumstance and opinion in which the man finds himself, so that he releases himself from the traditions in which he grew, — no longer looks back to Hebrew or Greek or English use or tradition in religion, laws, or life, but sees so truly the omnipresence of eternal cause that he can con- vert the daily and hourly event of New York, of Boston, into universal symbols. I owe to genius always the same debt, of lifting the curtain from the common and showing me that gods are sitting disguised in every company. The conduct of Intellect must respect nothing so much as preserving the sensibility. My mea- sure for all subjects of science as of events is their impression on the soul. That mind is best which is most impressionable. There are times when the 40 NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT. cawing of a crow, a weed, a snow-flake, a boy's willow whistle, or a farmer planting in his field is more suggestive to the mind than the Yosemite gorge or the Vatican would be in another hour. In like mood an old verse, or certain words, gleam with rare significance. But sensibility does not exhaust our idea of it. That is only half. Genius is not a lazy angel con- templating itself and things. It is insatiable for expression. Thought must take the stupendous step of passing into realization. A master can formulate his thought. Our thoughts at first pos- sess us. Later, if we have good heads, we come to possess them. We believe that certain persons add to the common vision a certain degree of con- trol over these states of mind; that the true scholar is one who has the power to stand beside his thoughts or to hold off his thoughts at arm's length and give them perspective. It is not to be concealed that the gods have guarded this privilege with costly penalty. This slight discontinuity which perception effects be- tween the mind and the object paralyzes the will. If you cut or break in two a block or stone and press the two parts closely together, you can indeed bring the particles very near, but never again so near that they shall attract each other so that you NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT. 41 can take up the block as one. That indescribably small interval is as good as a thousand miles, and has forever severed the practical unity. Such is the immense deduction from power by disconti- nuity. The intellect that sees the interval partakes of it, and the fact of intellectual perception severs once for all the man from the things with which he converses. Affection blends, intellect disjoins subject and object. For weal or woe we clear our- selves from the thing we contemplate. We grieve but are not the grief ; we love but are not love. If we converse with low things, with crimes, with mischances, we are not compromised. And if with high things, with heroic actions, with virtues, the interval becomes a gulf and we cannot enter into the highest good. Artist natures do not weep. Goethe, the surpassing intellect of modern times, apprehends the spiritual but is not spiritual. There is indeed this vice about men of thought, that you cannot quite trust them ; not as much as other men of the same natural probity, without in- tellect ; because they have a hankering to play Providence and make a distinction in favor of themselves from the rules they apply to the hu- man race. The primary rule for the conduct of Intellect is 42 NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT. to have control of the thoughts without losing their natural attitudes and action. They are the ora- cle ; we are not to poke and drill and force, but to follow them. Yet the spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets. You must formulate your thought or 'tis all sky and no stars. There are men of great apprehension, discursive minds, who easily entertain ideas, but are not exact, severe with themselves, cannot connect or arrange their thoughts so as effectively to report them. A blend- y ing of these two — the intellectual perception of truth and the moral sentiment of right — is wis- dom. All thought is practical. Wishing is one thing ; will another. Wishing is castle-building ; the dreaming about things agreeable to the senses, but to which we have no right. Will is the ad- vance to that which rightly belongs to us, to which the inward magnet ever points, and which we dare to make ours. The revelation of thought takes us out of servitude into freedom. So does the sense of right. Will is the measure of power. To a great genius there must be a great will. If the thought v is not a lamp to the will, does not proceed to an act, the wise are imbecile. He alone is strong and happy who has a will. The rest are herds. He uses; they are used. He is of the Maker; they are of the Made. NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT. 43 Will is always miraculous, being the presence of God to men. When it appears in a man he is a hero, and all metaphysics are at fault. Heaven is the exercise of the faculties, the added sense of power. All men know the truth, but what of that ? It is rare to find one who knows how to speak it. A man tries to speak it and his voice is like the hiss of a snake, or rude and chiding. The truth is not spoken but injured. The same thing happens in power to do the right. His rectitude is ridiculous. His organs do not play him true. There is a meter which determines the construc- tive power of man, — this, namely, the question whether the mind possesses the control of its thoughts, or they of it. The new sect stands for certain thoughts. We go to individual members for an exposition of them. Vain expectation. They are possessed by the ideas but do not pos- sess them. One meets contemplative men who dwell in a certain feeling and delight which are intellectual but wholly above their expression. They cannot formulate. They impress those who know them by their loyalty to the truth they wor- ship but cannot impart. Sometimes the patience and love are rewarded by the chamber of power being at last opened ; but spmetimes they pass away dumb, to find it where all obstruction is re- moved. 44 NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT. By and by comes a facility ; some one that can move the mountain and build of it a causeway through the Dismal Swamp, as easily as he carries the hair on his head. Talent is habitual facility of execution. We like people who can do things. The various talents are organic, or each related to that part of nature it is to explore and utilize. Somewhat is to come to the light, and one was created to fetch it, — a vessel of honor or of dis- honor. ? T is of instant use in the economy of the Cosmos, and the more armed and biassed for the work the better. Each of these talents is born to be unfolded and set at work for the use and delight of men, and, in the last result, the man with the talent is the need of mankind ; the whole ponderous machinery of the state has really for its aim just to place this skill of each. But idea and execution are not often entrusted to the same head. There is some incompatibility of good speculation and practice, for example, the failure of monasteries and Brook Farms. To ham- mer out phalanxes must be done by smiths ; as soon as the scholar attempts it he is half a charlatan. The grasp is the main thing. Most men's minds do not grasp anything. All slips through their fingers, like the paltry brass grooves that in most country houses are used to raise or drop the NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT 45 curtain, but are made to sell, and will not hold any curtain but cobwebs. I have heard that idiot children are known from their birth by the cir- cumstance that their hands do not close round anything. Webster naturally and always grasps, and therefore retains something from every com- pany and circumstance. As a talent Dante's imagination is the nearest to hands and feet that we have seen. He clasps the thought as if it were a tree or a stone, and de- scribes as mathematically. I once found Page the painter modelling his figures in clay, Euth and Naomi, before he painted them on canvas. Dante, one would say, did the same thing before he wrote the verses. I have spoken of Intellect constructive. But it is in degrees. How it moves when its pace is accelerated ! The pace of Nature is so slow. Why not from strength to strength, from miracle to miracle, and not as now with this retardation — as if Nature had sprained her foot — and plenteous stopping at little stations ? The difference is obvious enough in Talent be- tween the speed of one man's action above anoth- er's. In debate, in legislature, not less in action ; in war or in affairs, alike daring and effective. But I speak of it in quite another sense, namely, in the habitual speed of combination of thought. 46 NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT. The same functions which are perfect in our quadrupeds are seen slower performed in palaeon- tology. Many races it cost them to achieve the completion that is now in the life of one. Life had not yet so fierce a glow. Shakespeare astonishes by his equality in every play, act, scene or line. One would say he must have been a thousand years old when he wrote his first line, so thoroughly is his thought familiar to him, and has such scope and so solidly worded, as if it were already a proverb and not hereafter to become one. Well, that millenium in effect is really only a little acceleration in his process of thought. But each power is commonly at the expense of some other. When pace is increased it will happen that the control is in a degree lost. Reason does not keep her firm seat. The Delphian prophetess, when the spirit possesses her, is herself a victim. The excess of individualism, when it is not cor- rected or subordinated to the Supreme Reason, makes that vice which we stigmatize as monotones, men of one idea, or, as the French say, enfant perdu d'une conviction isolee, which give such a comic tinge to all society. Every man has his theory, true, but ridiculously overstated. We are forced to treat a great part of mankind as if they were a little deranged. We detect their mania NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT. 47 and humor it, so that conversation soon becomes a tiresome effort. You laugh at the monotones, at the men of one idea, but if we look nearly at heroes we may find the same poverty ; and perhaps it is not poverty, but power. The secret of power, intellectual or physical, is concentration, and all concentration involves of necessity a certain narrowness. It is a law of nature that he who looks at one thing must turn his eyes from every other thing in the uni- verse. The horse goes better with blinders, and the man for dedication to his task. If you ask what compensation is made for the inevitable nar- rowness, why, this, that in learning one thing well you learn all things. Immense is the patience of Nature. You say thought is a penurious rill. Well, we can wait. Nature is immortal, and can wait. Nature having for capital this rill, drop by drop, as it trickles from the rock of ages, — this rill and her patience, — she husbands and hives, she forms reservoirs, were it only a phial or a hair-tube that will hold as it were a drop of attar. Not having enough to sup- port all the powers of a race, she thins her stock and raises a few individuals, or only a pair. Not sufficing to feed all the faculties synchronously, she feeds one faculty and starves all the rest. I am familiar with cases, we meet them daily, 48 NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT. wherein the vital force being insufficient for the constitution, everything is neglected that can be spared ; some one power fed, all the rest pine. 'T is like a withered hand or leg on a Hercules. It makes inconvenience in society, for we presume symmetry, and because they know one thing we defer to them in another, and find them really contemptible. We can't make half a bow and say, I honor and despise you. But Nature can ; she whistles with all her winds, and does as she pleases. It is much to write sentences ; it is more to add method and write out the spirit of your life sym- metrically. But to arrange general reflections in their natural order, so that I shall have one homo- geneous piece, — a Lycidas, an Allegro, a Hamlet, a Midsummer Night's Dream, — this continuity is for the great. The wonderful men are wonderful hereby. Such concentration of experiences is in every great work, which, though successive in the mind of the master, were primarily combined in his piece. But what we want is consecutiveness. 'T is with us a flash of light, then a long darkness, then a flash again. Ah ! could we turn these fugitive sparkles into an astronomy of Copernican worlds. I must think this keen sympathy, this thrill NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT. 49 of awe with which we watch the performance of genius, a sign of our own readiness to exert the like power. I must think we are entitled to pow- ers far transcending any that we possess ; that we have in the race the sketch of a man which no individual comes up to. Every sincere man is right, or, to make him right, only needs a little larger dose of his own per- sonality. Excellent in his own way by means of not apprehending the gift of another. When he speaks out of another's mind, we detect it. He can't make any paint stick but his own. No man passes for that with another which he passes for with himself. The respect and the censure of his brother are alike injurious and irrelevant. We see ourselves; we lack organs to see others, and only squint at them. Don't fear to push these individualities to their farthest divergence. Characters and talents are complemental and suppletory. The world stands by balanced antagonisms. The more the peculiar- ities are pressed the better the result. The air would rot without lightning ; and without the vio- lence of direction that men have, without bigots, without men of fixed idea, no excitement, no effi- ciency. The novelist should not make any character act absurdly, but only absurdly as seen by others. 50 NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT. For it is so in life. Nonsense will not keep its unreason if you come into the humorist's point of view, but unhappily we find it is fast becoming sense, and we must flee again into the distance if we would laugh. What strength belongs to every plant and ani- mal in nature. The tree or the brook has no duplicity, no pretentiousness, no show. It is, with all its might and main, what it is, and makes one and the same impression and effect at all times. All the thoughts of a turtle are turtles, and of a rabbit, rabbits. But a man is broken and dissi- pated by the giddiness of his will; he does not throw himself into his judgments ; his genius leads him one way but 't is likely his trade or politics in quite another. He rows with one hand and with the other backs water, and does not give to any manner of life the strength of his constitution. Hence the perpetual loss of power and waste of human life. The natural remedy against this miscellany of knowledge and aim, this desultory universality of ours, this immense ground- juniper falling abroad and not gathered up into any columnar tree, is to substitute realism for sentimentalism ; a certain recognition of the simple and terrible laws which, seen or unseen, pervade and govern. You will say this is quite axiomatic and a little NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT. 51 too true. I do not find it an agreed point. Lit- erary men for the most part have a settled despair as to the realization of ideas in their own time. There is in all students a distrust of truth, a timid- ity about affirming it ; a wish to patronize Provi- dence. We disown our debt to moral evil. To science there is no poison ; to botany no weed ; to chemis- try no dirt. The curses of malignity and despair are important criticism, which must be heeded until he can explain and rightly silence them. " Croyez moi, I ^erreur aussi a son merite" said Voltaire. We see those who surmount by dint of egotism or infatuation obstacles from which the prudent recoil. The right partisan is a heady man, who, because he does not see many things, sees some one thing with heat and exaggeration ; and if he falls among other narrow men, or objects which have a brief importance, prefers it to the uni- verse, and seems inspired and a godsend to those who wish to magnify the matter and carry a point. 'Tis the difference between progress by railroad and by walking across the broken country. Im- mense speed, but only in one direction. There are two theories of life ; one for the de- monstration of our talent, the other for the educa- tion of the man. One is activity, the busy-body, the 52 NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT, following of that practical talent which, we have, in the belief that what is so natural, easy and pleasant to us and desirable to others will surely lead us out safely ; in this direction lie usefulness, comfort, so- ciety, low power of all sorts. The other is trust, religion, consent to be nothing for eternity, en- tranced waiting, the worship of ideas. This is soli- tary, grand, secular. They are in perpetual bal- ance and strife. One is talent, the other genius. One is skill, the other character. We are continually tempted to sacrifice genius to talent, the hope and promise of insight to the lust of a freer demonstration of those gifts we have ; and we buy this freedom to glitter by the loss of general health. It is the levity of this country to forgive every- thing to talent. If a man show cleverness, rhetori- cal skill, bold front in the forum or the senate, people clap their hands without asking more. We have a juvenile love of smartness, of showy speech. We like faculty that can rapidly be coined into money, and society seems to be in conspiracy to utilize every gift prematurely, and pull down gen- ius to lucrative talent. Every kind of meanness and mischief is forgiven to intellect. All is con- doned if I can write a good song or novel. Wide is the gulf between genius and talent. The men we know, poets, wits, writers, deal with NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT. 53 their thoughts as jewellers with jewels, which they sell but must not wear. Like the carpenter, who gives up the key of the fine house he has built, and never enters it again. There is a conflict between a man's private dex- terity or talent and his access to the free air and light which wisdom is ; between wisdom and the habit and necessity of repeating itself which be- longs to every mind. Peter is the mould into which everything is poured like warm wax, and be it as- tronomy or railroads or French revolution or the- ology or botany, it comes out Peter. But there are quick limits to our interest in the personality of people. They are as much alike as their barns and pantries, and are as soon musty and dreary. They entertain us for a time, but at the second or third encounter we have nothing more to learn. The daily history of the Intellect is this alter- nating of expansions and concentrations. The ex- pansions are the invitations from heaven to try a larger sweep, a higher pitch than we have yet climbed, and to leave all our past for this enlarged scope. Present power, on the other hand, requires concentration on the moment and the thing to be done. The condition of sanity is to respect the order of the intellectual world ; to keep down talent in 54 NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT. its place, to enthrone the instinct. There must be perpetual rallying and self -recovery. Each talent is ambitious and self-asserting ; it works for show and for the shop, and the greater it grows the more is the mischief and the misleading, so that pres- ently all is wrong. No wonder the children love masks and cos- tumes, and play horse, play soldier, play school, play bear, and delight in theatricals. The children have only the instinct of the universe, in which becoming somewhat else is the perpetual game of nature, and death the penalty of standing still. 'T is not less in thought. I cannot conceive any good in a thought which confines and stagnates. The universe exists only in transit, or we behold it shooting the gulf from the past to the future. We are passing into new heavens in fact by the move- ment of our solar system, and in thought by our better knowledge. Transition is the attitude of power. A fact is only a fulcrum of the spirit. It is the terminus of a past thought, but only a means now to new sallies of the imagination and new progress of wisdom. The habit of saliency, of not pausing but proceeding, is a sort of importation and domestication of the divine effort into a man. Routine, the rut, is the path of indolence, of cows, of sluggish animal life ; as near gravitation as it NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT. 55 can go. But wit sees the short way, puts together what belongs together, custom or no custom; in that is organization. Inspiration is the continuation of the divine ef- fort that built the man. The same course contin- ues itself in the mind which we have witnessed in nature, namely the carrying-on and completion of the metamorphosis from grub to worm, from worm to fly. In human thought this process is often ar- rested for years and ages. The history of man- kind is the history of arrested growth. This pre- mature stop, I know not how, befalls most of us in early youth ; as if the growth of high powers, the access to rare truths, closed at two or three years in the child, while all the pagan faculties went ripening on to sixty. So long as you are capable of advance, so long you have not abdicated the hope and future of a divine soul. That wonderful oracle will reply when it is consulted, and there is no history or tradition, no rule of life or art or science, on which it is not a competent and the only compe- tent judge. Man was made for conflict, not for rest. In action is his power; not in his goals but in his transitions man is great. Instantly he is dwarfed by self-indulgence. The truest state of mind rested in becomes false. 56 NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT. The spiritual power of man is twofold, mind and heart, Intellect and morals ; one respecting truth, the other the will. One is the man, the other the woman in spiritual nature. One is power, the other is love. These elements always coexist in every normal individual, but one predominates. And as each is easily exalted in our thoughts till it serves to fill the universe and become the syno- nym of God, the soul in which one predominates is ever watchful and jealous when such immense claims are made for one as seem injurious to the other. Ideal and practical, like ecliptic and equa- tor, are never parallel. Each has its vices, its proper dangers, obvious enough when the opposite element is deficient. Intellect is skeptical, runs down into talent, self- ish working for private ends, conceited, ostenta- tious and malignant. On the other side the clear- headed thinker complains of souls led hither and thither by affections which, alone, are blind guides and thriftless workmen, and in the confusion asks the polarity of intellect. But all great minds and all great hearts have mutually allowed the absolute necessity of the twain. If the first rule is to obey your genius, in the second place the good mind is known by the choice of what is positive, of what is advancing. We must embrace the affirmative. But the affirmative of NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT. 57 affirmatives is love. Quantus amor tantus ani- mus. Strength enters as the moral element enters. Lovers of men are as safe as the sun. Goodwill makes insight. Sensibility is the secret readiness to believe in all kinds of power, and the contempt of any experience we have not is the opposite pole. The measure of mental health is the disposition to find good everywhere, good and order, analogy, health and benefit, — the love of truth, tendency to be in the right, no fighter for victory, no cockerel. We have all of us by nature a certain divination and parturient vaticination in our minds of some higher good and perfection than either power or knowledge. Knowledge is plainly to be preferred before power, as being that which guides and di- rects its blind force and impetus; but Aristotle declares that the origin of reason is not reason but something better. m The height of culture, the highest behavior, con- sists in the identification of the Ego with the uni- verse ; so that when a man says I hope, I find, I think, he might properly say, The human race thinks or finds or hopes. And meantime he shall be able continually to keep sight of his biograph- ical Ego, — I have a desk, I have an office, I am hungry, I had an ague, — as rhetoric or offset to his grand spiritual Ego, without impertinence, or ever confounding them. 58 NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT. I may well say this is divine, the continuation of the divine effort. Alas ! it seems not to be ours, to be quite independent of us. Often there is so little affinity between the man and his works that we think the wind must have writ them. Also its communication from one to another follows its own law and refuses our intrusion. It is in one, it be- longs to all ; yet how to impart it ? We need all our resources to live in the world which is to be used and decorated by us. Socrates kept all his virtues as well as his faculties well in hand. He was sincerely humble, but he utilized his humanity chiefly as a better eyeglass to pene- trate the vapors that baffled the vision of other men. The superiority of the man is in the simplicity of his thought, that he has no obstruction, but looks straight at the pure fact, with no color of option. Profound sincerity is the only basis of talent as of character. The virtue of the Intellect is its own, its courage is of its own kind, and at last it will be justified, though for the moment it seem hostile to what it most reveres. We wish to sum up the conflicting impressions I by saying that all point at last to a unity which in- spires all. Our poetry, our religion are its skirts NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT. 59 and penumbrse. Yet the charm of life is the hints we derive from this. They overcome us like per- fumes from a far-off shore of sweetness, and their meaning is that no tongue shall syllable it without leave ; that only itself can name it ; that by cast- ing ourselves on it and being its voice it rushes each moment to positive commands, creating men and methods, and ties the will of a child to the love of the First Cause. MEMORY. MEMORY. Memory is a primary and fundamental faculty, without which none other can work ; the cement, the bitumen, the matrix in which the other facul- ties are imbedded ; or it is the thread on which the beads of man are strung, making the personal identity which is necessary to moral action. With- out it all life and thought were an unrelated suc- cession. As gravity holds matter from flying off into space, so memory gives stability to knowledge ; it is the cohesion which keeps things from falling into a lump, or flowing in waves. We like longevity, we like signs of riches and extent of nature in an individual. And most of all we like a great memory. The lowest life remem- bers. The sparrow, the ant, the worm, have the same memory as we. If you bar their path, or offer them somewhat disagreeable to their senses, they make one or two trials, and then once for all avoid it. Every machine must be perfect of its sort. It is essential to a locomotive that it can reverse its 64 MEMORY. movement, and run backward and forward with equal celerity. The builder of the mind found it not less needful that it should have retroaction, and command its past act and deed. Perception, though it were immense and could pierce through the universe, was not sufficient. Memory performs the impossible for man by the strength of his divine arms ; holds together past and present, beholding both, v existing in both, abides in the flowing, and gives continuity and dignity to human life. It holds us to our family, to our friends. Hereby a home is possible ; hereby only a new fact has value. Opportunities of investment are useful only to those who have capital. Any piece of knowledge I acquire to-day, a fact that falls under my eyes, a book I read, a piece of news I hear, has a value at this moment exactly proportioned to my skill to deal with it. To-morrow, when I know more, I recall that piece of knowledge and use it better. The Past has a new value every moment to the active mind, through the incessant purification and better method of its memory. Once it joined its facts by color and form and sensuous relations. Some fact that had a childish significance to your childhood and was a type in the nursery, when riper intelligence recalls it means more and serves you better as an illustration ; and perhaps in your MEMORY. 65 age has new meaning. What was an isolated, un- related belief or conjecture, our later experience instructs us how to place in just connection with other views which confirm and expand it. The old whim or perception was an augury of a broader in- sight, at which we arrive later with securer convic- tion. This is the companion, this the tutor, the poet, the library, with which you travel. It does not lie, cannot be corrupted, reports to you not what you wish but what really befel. You say, " I can never think of some act of neglect, of selfishness, or of passion without pain." Well, that is as it should be. That is the police of the Universe : the angels are set to punish you, so long as you are capable of such crime. But in the history of character the day comes when you are incapable of such crime. Then you suffer no more, you look on it as heaven looks on it, with wonder at the deed, and with applause at the pain it has cost you. Memory is not a pocket, but a living instructor, with a prophetic sense of the values which he guards ; a guardian angel set there within you to record your life, and by recording to animate you to uplift it. It is a scripture written day by day from the birth of the man ; all its records full of meanings which open as he lives on, explaining each other, explaining the world to him and ex- panding their sense as he advances, until it shall become the whole law of nature and life. 66 MEMORY. As every creature is furnished with teeth to seize and eat, and with stomach to digest its food, so the memory is furnished with a perfect apparatus. There is no book like the memory, none with such a good index, and that of every kind, alpha- betic, systematic, arranged by names of persons, by colors, tastes, smells, shapes, likeness, unlike- ness, by all sorts of mysterious hooks and eyes to catch and hold, and contrivances for giving a hint. The memory collects and re-collects. We figure it as if the mind were a kind of looking-glass, which being carried through the street of time re- ceives on its clear plate every image that passes ; only with this difference that our plate is iodized so that every image sinks into it, and is held there. But in addition to this property it has one more, this, namely, that of all the million images that are imprinted, the very one we want reappears in the centre of the plate in the moment when we want it. We can tell much about it, but you must not ask us what it is. On seeing a face I am aware that I have seen it before, or that I have not seen \t before. On hearing a fact told I am aware that I knew it already. You say the first words of the old song, and I finish the line and the stanza. But where I have them, or what .becomes of them when I am not thinking of them for months and years, that they should lie so still, as if they did not MEMORY. 67 exist, and yet so nigh that they come on the in- stant when they are called for, never any man was so sharp-sighted, or could turn himself inside out quick enough to find. 'T is because of the believed incompatibility of the affirmative and advancing attitude of the mind with tenacious acts of recollection that people are often reproached with living in their memory. Late in life we live by memory, and in our solstices or periods of stagnation ; as the starved camel in the desert lives on his humps. Memory was called by the schoolmen vespertina cognitio, evening knowledge, in distinction from the command of the future which we have by the knowledge of causes, and which they called matutina cognitio, or morning knowledge. Am I asked whether the thoughts clothe them- selves in words ? I answer, Yes, always ; but they are apt to be instantly forgotten. Never was truer fable than that of the Sibyl's writing on leaves which the wind scatters. The difference between men is that in one the memory with inconceivable swift- ness flies after and re-collects the flying leaves, — flies on wing as fast as that mysterious whirlwind, arid the envious Fate is baffled. This command of old facts, the clear beholding at will of what is best in our experience, is our splendid privilege. " He who calls what is van- 68 MEMORY. ished back again into being enjoys a bliss like that of creating," says Niebuhr. The memory plays a great part in settling the intellectual rank of men* We estimate a man by how much he remembers. A seneschal of Parnassus is Mnemosyne. This power will alone make a man remarkable ; and it is found in all good wits. Therefore the poets represented the Muses as the daughters of Memory, for the power exists in some marked and eminent degree in men of an ideal determination. Quin- tilian reckoned it the measure of genius. " Tantum ingenii quantum memoriae." We are told that Boileau having recited to Daguesseau one day an epistle or satire he had just been composing, Daguesseau tranquilly told him he knew it already, and in proof set himself to recite it from end to end. Boileau, astonished, was much distressed until he perceived that it was only a feat of memory. The mind disposes all its experience after its affection and to its ruling end ; one man by puns and one by cause and effect, one to heroic benefit and one to wrath and animal desire. This is the high difference, the quality of the association by which a man remembers. In the minds of most men memory is nothing but a farm-book or a pocket-diary. On such a day I paid my note ; on the next day the cow calved ; on the next I cut my ME MOBY. 69 finger ; on the next the banks suspended payment. But another man's memory is the history of science and art and civility and thought ; and still another deals with laws and perceptions that are the theory of the world. This thread or order of remembering, this classi- fication, distributes men, one remembering by shop- rule or interest ; one by passion ; one by trifling external marks, as dress or money. And one rarely takes an interest in how the facts really stand, in the order of cause and effect, without self-refer- ence. This is an intellectual man. Nature inter- ests him ; a plant, a fish, time, space, mind, being, in their own method and law. Napoleon was such, and that saves him. But this mysterious power that binds our life together has its own vagaries and interruptions. It sometimes occurs that memory has a personality of its own, and volunteers or refuses its informa- tions at its will, not at mine. One sometimes asks himself, Is it possible that it is only a visitor, not a resident ? Is it some old aunt who goes in and out of the house, and occasionally recites anecdotes of old times and persons which I recognize as hav- ing heard before, and she being gone again I search in vain for any trace of the anecdotes ? We can help ourselves to the modus of mental processes only by coarse material experiences. A 70 MEMORY. knife with a good spring, a forceps whose lips accurately meet and match, a steel-trap, a loom, a watch, the teeth or jaws of which fit and play per- fectly, as compared with the same tools when badly put together, describe to us the difference between a person of quick and strong perception, like Frank- lin or Swift or Webster or Richard Owen, and a heavy man who witnesses the same facts or shares experiences like theirs. 'Tis like the impression made by the same stamp in sand or in wax. The way in which Burke or Sheridan or Webster or any orator surprises us is by his always having a sharp tool that fits the present use. He has an old story, an odd circumstance, that illustrates the point he is now proving, and is better than an argu- ment. The more he is heated, the wider he sees ; he seems to remember all he ever knew ; thus cer- tifying us that he is in the habit of seeing better than other people ; that what his mind grasps it does not let go. 'T is the bull-dog bite ; you must cut off the head to loosen the teeth. We hate this fatal shortness of Memory, these docked men whom we behold. We gathered up what a rolling snow-ball as we came along, — much of it professedly for the future, as capital stock of knowledge. Where is it now ? Look behind you. I cannot see that your train is any longer than it was in childhood. The facts of the last two or MEMOBY. 71 three days or weeks are all you have with you, — the reading of the last month's books. Your con- versation, action, your face and manners report of no more, of no greater wealth of mind. Alas! you have lost something for everything you have gained, and cannot grow. Only so much iron will the load-stone draw ; it gains new particles all the way as you move it, but one falls off for every one that adheres. As there is strength in the wild horse which is never regained when he is once broken by training, and as there is a sound sleep of children and of savages, profound as the hibernation of bears, which never visits the eyes of civil gentlemen and ladies, so there is a wild memory in children and youth which makes what is early learned impossi- ble to forget ; and perhaps in the beginning of the world it had most vigor. Plato deplores writing as a barbarous invention which would weaken the memory by disuse. The Rhapsodists in Athens it seems could recite at once any passage of Homer that was desired. If writing weakens the memory, we may say as much and more of printing. What is the news- paper but a sponge or invention for oblivion ? the rule being that for every fact added to the mem- ory, one is crowded out, and that only what the affection animates can be remembered. 72 MEMORY. The mind has a better secret in generalization than merely adding units to its list of facts. The reason of the short memory is shallow thought. As deep as the thought, so great is the attraction. An act of the understanding will marshal and concate- nate a few facts ; a principle of the reason will thrill and magnetize and redistribute the whole world. But defect of memory is not always want of genius. By no means. It is sometimes owing to excellence of genius. Thus men of great presence of mind who are always equal to the occasion do not need to rely on what they have stored for use, but can think in this moment as well and deeply as in any past moment, and if they cannot remem- ber the rule they can make one. Indeed it is remarked that inventive men have bad memories. Sir Isaac Newton was embarrassed when the con- versation turned on his discoveries and results ; he could not recall them ; but if he was asked why things were so or so he could find the reason on the spot. A man would think twice about learning a new science or reading a new paragraph, if he believed the magnetism was only a constant amount, and that he lost a word or a thought for every word he gained. But the experience is not quite so bad. In reading a foreign language, every new word MEMORY. 73 mastered is a lamp lighting up related words and so assisting the memory. Apprehension of the whole sentence aids to fix the precise meaning of a particular word, and what familiarity has been ac- quired with the genius of the language and the writer helps in fixing the exact meaning of the sentence. So is it with every fact in a new science : they are mutually explaining, and each one adds transparency to the whole mass. The damages of forgetting are more than com- pensated by the large values which new thoughts and knowledge give to what we already know. If new impressions sometimes efface old ones, yet we steadily gain insight ; and because all nature has one law and meaning, — part corresponding to part, — all we have known aids us continually to the knowledge of the rest of nature. Thus, all the facts in this chest of memory are property at interest. And who shall set a boundary to this mounting value? Shall we not on higher stages of being remember and understand our early his- tory better ? They say in Architecture, " An arch never sleeps ; " I say, the Past will not sleep, it works still. With every new fact a ray of light shoots up from the long buried years. Who can judge the new book? He who has read many books. Who, the new assertion ? He who has heard many 74 MEMORY. the like. Who, the new man ? He that has seen men. The experienced and cultivated man is lodged in a hall hung with pictures which every new day retouches, and to which every step in the march of the soul adds a more sublime perspec- tive. We learn early that there is great disparity of value between our experiences; some thoughts perish in the using. Some days are bright with thought and sentiment, and we live a year in a day. Yet these best days are not always those which memory can retain. This water once spilled cannot be gathered. There are more inventions in the thoughts of one happy day than ages could execute, and I suppose I speak the sense of most thoughtful men when I say, I would rather have a perfect recollection of all I have thought and felt in a day or a week of high activity than read all the books that have been published in a cen- tury. The memory is one of the compensations which Nature grants to those who have used their days well ; when age and calamity have bereaved them of their limbs or organs, then they retreat on men- tal faculty and concentrate on that. The poet, the philosopher, lamed, old, blind, sick, yet disputing the ground inch by inch against fortune, finds a strength against the wrecks and decays sometimes ME MOBY. 75 more invulnerable than the heyday of youth and talent. I value the praise of Memory. And how does Memory praise? By holding fast the best. A thought takes its true rank in the memory by sur- viving other thoughts that were once preferred. Plato remembered Anaxagoras by one of his say- ings. If we recall our own favorites we shall usu- ally find that it is for one crowning act or thought that we hold them dear. Have you not found memory an apotheosis or deification ? The poor, short lone fact dies at the birth. Memory catches it up into her heaven, and bathes it in immortal waters. Then a thou- sand times over it lives and acts again, each time transfigured, ennobled. In solitude, in darkness, we tread over again the sunny walks of youth; confined now in populous streets you behold again the green fields, the shadows of the gray birches ; by the solitary river hear again the joyful voices of early companions, and vibrate anew to the ten- derness and dainty music of the poetry your boy- hood fed upon. At this hour the stream is still flowing, though you hear it not; the plants are still drinking their accustomed life and repaying it with their beautiful forms. But you need not wander thither. It flows for you, and they grow for you, in the returning images of former sum- 76 MEMORY. mers. In low or bad company you fold yourself in your cloak, withdraw yourself entirely from all the doleful circumstance, recall and surround yourself with the best associates and the fairest hours of your life : — " Passing sweet are the domains of tender memory." You may perish out of your senses, but not out of your memory or imagination. The memory has a fine art of sifting out the pain and keeping all the joy. The spring days when the bluebird arrives have usually only few hours of fine temperature, are sour and unlovely ; but when late in autumn we hear rarely a blue- bird's notes they are sweet by reminding us of the spring. Well, it is so with other tricks of memory. Of the most romantic fact the memory is more ro- mantic ; and this power of sinking the pain of any experience and of recalling the saddest with tran- quillity, and even with a wise pleasure, is familiar. The memory is as the affection. Sampson Reed says, " The true way to store the memory is to develop the affections." A souvenir is a token of love. Remember me means, Do not cease to love me. We remember those things which we love and those things which we hate. The memory of all men is robust on the subject of a debt due to them, or of an insult inflicted on them. 44 They ME MOBY. 77 can remember," as Johnson said, "who kicked them last." Every artist is alive on the subject of his art. The Persians say, " A real singer will never forget the song he has once learned." Michael Angelo, after having once seen a work of any other artist, would remember it so perfectly that if it pleased him to make use of any portion thereof, he could do so, but in such a manner that none could per- ceive it. We remember what we understand, and we understand best what we like ; for this doubles our power of attention, and makes it our own. Captain John Brown, of Ossawatomie, said he had in Ohio three thousand sheep on his farm, and could tell a strange sheep in his flock as soon as he saw its face. One of my neighbors, a grazier, told me that he should know again every cow, ox, or steer that he ever saw. Abel Lawton knew every horse that went up and down through Concord to the towns in the county. And in higher examples each man's memory is in the line of his action. Nature trains us on to see illusions and prodi- gies with no more wonder than our toast and ome- let at breakfast. Talk of memory and cite me these fine examples of Grotius and Daguesseau, and I think how awful is that power and what privilege and tyranny it must confer. Then I 78 ME MOBY. come to a bright school-girl who remembers all she hears, carries thousands of nursery rhymes and all the poetry in all the readers, hymn-books, and pic- torial ballads in her mind ; and 't is a mere drug. She carries it so carelessly, it seems like the pro- fusion of hair on the shock heads of all the village boys and village dogs ; it grows like grass. 'T is a bushel-basket memory of all unchosen knowledge, heaped together in a huge hamper, without method, yet securely held, and ready to come at call; so that an old scholar, who knows what to do with a memory, is full of wonder and pity that this magi- cal force should be squandered on such frippery. He is a skilful doctor who can give me a recipe for the cure of a bad memory. And yet we have some hints from experience on this subject. And first, health. It is found that we remember best when the head is clear, when we are thoroughly awake. When the body is in a quiescent state in the absence of the passions, in the moderation of food, it yields itself a willing medium to the intel- lect. For the true river Lethe is the body of man, with its belly and uproar of appetite and moun- tains of indigestion and bad humors and quality of darkness. And for this reason, and observing some mysterious continuity of mental operation during sleep or when our will is suspended, 't is an old rule of scholars, that which Fuller records, " 'T is MEMORY. 79 best knocking in the nail overnight and clinching it next morning." Only I should give extension to this rule and say Yes, drive the nail this week and clinch it the next, and drive it this year and clinch it the next. But Fate also is an artist. We forget also according to beautiful laws. Thoreau said, 44 Of what significance are the things you can forget. A little thought is sexton to all the world." We must be severe with ourselves, and what we wish to keep we must once thoroughly possess. Then the thing seen will no longer be what it was, a mere sensuous object before the eye or ear, but a reminder of its law, a possession for the intellect. Then we relieve ourselves of all task in the matter, we put the onus of being remembered on the ob- ject, instead of on our will. We shall do as we do with all our studies, prize the fact or the name of the person by that predominance it takes in our mind after near acquaintance. I have several times forgotten the name of Flamsteed, never that of Newton ; and can drop easily many poets out of the Elizabethan chronology, but not Shakespeare. We forget rapidly what should be forgotten. The universal sense of fables and anecdotes is marked by our tendency to forget name and date and geography. 44 How in the right are children," said Margaret Fuller, 44 to forget name and date and place." 80 MEMORY. You cannot overstate our debt to the past, but has the present no claim ? This past memory is the baggage, but where is the troop ? The divine gift is not the old but the new. The divine is the instant life that receives and uses, the life that can well bury the old in the omnipotency with which it makes all things new. The acceleration of mental process is equivalent to the lengthening of life. If a great many thoughts pass through your mind you will believe a long time has elapsed, many hours or days. In dreams a rush of many thoughts, of seeming expe- riences, of spending hours and going through a great variety of actions and companies, and when we start up and look at the watch, instead of a long night we are surprised to find it was a short nap. The opium-eater says, " I sometimes seemed to have lived seventy or a hundred years in one night." You know what is told of the experience of some persons who have been recovered from drowning. They relate that their whole life's history seemed to pass before them in review. They remembered in a moment all that they ever did. If we occupy ourselves long on this wonderful faculty, and see the natural helps of it in the mind, and the way in which new knowledge calls upon old knowledge — new giving undreamed-of value to old ; everywhere relation and suggestion, so that what MEMORY. 81 one had painfully held by strained attention and recapitulation now falls into place and is clamped and locked by inevitable connection as a planet in its orbit (every other orb, or the law or system of which it is a part, being a perpetual reminder), — we cannot fail to draw thence a sublime hint that thus there must be an endless increase in the power of memory only through its use ; that there must be a proportion between the power of memory and the amount of knowables ; and since the Universe opens to us, the reach of the memory must be as large. With every broader generalization which the mind makes, with every deeper insight, its retro- spect is also wider. With every new insight into the duty or fact of to-day we come into new posses- sion of the past. When we live by principles instead of traditions, by obedience to the law of the mind instead of by passion, the Great Mind will enter into us, not as now in fragments and detached thoughts, but the light of to-day will shine backward and forward. Memory is a presumption of a possession of the future. Now we are halves, we see the past but not the future, but in that day will the hemisphere complete itself and foresight be as perfect as after- sight. BOSTON. " We are citizens of two fair cities/' said the Genoese gentleman to a Florentine artist, " and if I were not a Genoese, I should wish to be Florentine." "And I," replied the artist, " if I were not Florentine " — " You would wish to be Genoese," said the other. " No," re~ plied the artist, " I should wish to be Florentine." The rocky nook with hill-tops three Looked eastward from the farms, And twice each day the flowing sea Took Boston in its arms. The sea returning day by day Restores the world-wide mart ; So let each dweller on the Bay Fold Boston in his heart. Let the blood of her hundred thousands Throb in each manly vein, And the wits of all her wisest Make sunshine in her brain. And each shall care for other, And each to each shall bend, To the poor a noble brother, To the good an equal friend. A blessing through the ages thus Shield all thy roofs and towers ! God with the fathers, so with us, Thou darling town of ours ! BOSTON. The old physiologists said, " There is in the air a hidden food of life ; " and they watched the effect of different climates. They believed the air of mountains and the seashore a potent predisposer to rebellion. The air was a good republican, and it was remarked that insulary people are versatile and addicted to change, both in religious and secu- lar affairs. The air that we breathe is an exhalation of all the solid material globe. An aerial fluid streams all day, all night, from every flower and leaf, from every water and soil, from every rock-ledge ; and from every stratum a different aroma and air ac- cording to its quality.. According to quality and according to temperature, it must have effect on manners. There is the climate of the Sahara : a climate where the sunbeams are vertical ; where is day af- ter day, sunstroke after sunstroke, with a frosty shadow between. "There are countries," said 86 BOSTON. Howell, " where the heaven is a fiery furnace, or a blowing bellows, or a dropping sponge, most parts of the year." Such is the assimilating force of the Indian climate, that, Sir Erskine Perry says, " the usage and opinion of the Hindoos so in- vades men of all castes and colors who deal with them that all take a Hindoo tint. Parsee, Mongol, Afghan, Israelite, Christian, have all passed under this influence and exchanged a good part of their patrimony of ideas for the notions, manner of see- ing, and habitual tone of Indian society." He compares it to the geologic phenomenon which the black soil of the Dhakkan offers, — the property, namely, of assimilating to itself every foreign sub- stance introduced into its bosom. How can we not believe in influences of climate and air, when, as true philosophers, we must be- lieve that chemical atoms also have their spiritual cause why they are thus and not other ; that car- bon, oxygen, alum and iron, each has its origin in spiritual nature ? Even at this day men are to be found supersti- tious enough to believe that to certain spots on the surface of the planet special powers attach, and an exalted influence on the genius of man. And it appears as if some localities of the earth, through wholesome springs, or as the habitat of rare plants and minerals, or through ravishing beauties of Na- BOSTON. 87 ture, were preferred before others. There is great testimony of discriminating persons to the effect that Rome is endowed with the enchanting prop- erty of inspiring a longing in men there to live and there to die. Who lives one year in Boston ranges through all the climates of the globe. And if the character of the people has a larger range and greater versa- tility, causing them to exhibit equal dexterity in what are elsewhere reckoned incompatible works, perhaps they may thank their climate of extremes, which at one season gives them the splendor of the equator and a touch of Syria, and then runs down to a cold which approaches the temperature of the celestial spaces. It is not a country of luxury or of pictures ; of snows rather, of east-winds and changing skies ; visited by icebergs, which, floating by, nip with their cool breath our blossoms. Not a luxurious climate, but wisdom is not found with those who dwell at their ease. Give me a climate where peo- ple think well and construct well, — I will spend six months there, and you may have all the rest of my years. What Vasari says, three hundred years ago, of the republican city of Florence might be said of Boston ; " that the desire for glory and honor is 88 BOSTON. powerfully generated by the air of that place, in the men of every profession ; whereby all who pos- sess talent are impelled to struggle that they may not remain in the same grade with those whom they perceive to be only men like themselves, even though they may acknowledge such indeed to be masters ; but all labor by every means to be fore- most." We find no less stimulus in our native air ; not less ambition in our blood, which Puritanism has not sufficiently chastised ; and at least an equal freedom in our laws and customs, with as many and as tempting rewards to toil ; with so many phi- lanthropies, humanities, charities, soliciting us to be great and good. New England is a sort of Scotland. 'T is hard to say why. Climate is much ; then, old accumu- lation of the means, — books, schools, colleges, lit- erary society ; — as New Bedford is not nearer to the whales than New London or Portland, yet they have all the equipments for a whaler ready, and they hug an oil-cask like a brother. I do not know that Charles River or Merrimac water is more clarifying to the brain than the Sa- vannah or Alabama rivers, yet the men that drink it get up earlier, and some of the morning light lasts through the day, I notice that they who drink for some little time of the Potomac water BOSTON. 89 lose their relish for the water of the Charles River, of the Merrimac and the Connecticut, — even of the Hudson. I think the Potomac water is a little acrid, and should be corrected by copious infusions of these provincial streams. Of great cities you cannot compute the influ- ences. In New York, in Montreal, New Orleans and the farthest colonies, — in Guiana, in Guada- loupe, — a middle-aged gentleman is just embarking with all his property to fulfil the dream of his life and spend his old age in Paris ; so that a fortune falls into the massive wealth of that city every day in the year. Astronomers come because there they can find apparatus and companions. Chemist, ge- ologist, artist, musician, dancer, because there only are grandees and their patronage, appreciators and patrons. Demand and supply run into every invis- ible and unnamed province of whim and passion. Each great city gathers these values and de- lights for mankind, and comes to be the brag of its age and population. The Greeks thought him un- happy who died without seeing the statue of Jove at Olympia. With still more reason, they praised Athens, the " Violet City." It was said of Rome in its proudest days, looking at the vast radiation of the privilege of Roman citizenship through the then-known world, — " the extent of the city and of the world is the same " (spatium et urbis et 90 BOSTON. orbis idem*). London now for a thousand years has been in an affirmative or energizing mood ; has not stopped growing. Linnaeus, like a naturalist, esteeming the globe a big egg, called London the punctum saliens in the yolk of the world. This town of Boston has a history. It is not an accident, not a windmill, or a railroad station, or cross-roads tavern, or an army-barracks grown up by time and luck to a place of wealth ; but a seat of humanity, of men of principle, obeying a senti- ment and marching loyally whither that should lead them ; so that its annals are great historical lines, inextricably national ; part of the history of political liberty. I do not speak with any fond- ness, but the language of coldest history, when I say that Boston commands attention as the town which was appointed in the destiny of nations to lead the civilization of North America. A capital fact distinguishing this colony from all other colonies was that the persons composing it consented to come on the one condition that the charter should be transferred from the company in England to themselves; and so they brought the government with them. On the 3d of November, 1620, King James in- corporated forty of his subjects, Sir F. Gorges and others, the council established at Plymouth in the BOSTON. 91 county of Devon for the planting, ruling, ordering and governing of New England in America. The territory — conferred on the patentees in absolute property, with unlimited jurisdiction, the sole power of legislation, the appointment of all officers and all forms of government — extended from the 40th to the 48th degree of north latitude, and in length from the Atlantic to the Pacific. John Smith writes (1624) : " Of all the four parts of the world that I have yet seen not inhab- ited, could I but have means to transplant a colony, I would rather live here than anywhere ; and if it did not maintain itself, were we but once indiffer- ently well fitted, let us starve. Here are many isles planted with corn, groves, mulberries, salvage gardens and good harbours. The sea-coast as you pass shows you all along large cornfields and great troops of well-proportioned people." Massachusetts in particular, he calls " the paradise of these parts," notices its high mountain, and its river, " which doth pierce many days' journey into the entrails of that country." Morton arrived in 1622, in June, beheld the country, and " the more he looked, the more he liked it." In sixty-eight years after the foundation of Bos- ton, Dr. Mather writes of it, " The town hath in- deed three elder Sisters in this colony, but it hath wonderfully outgrown them all, and her mother, 92 BOSTON. Old Boston in England, also ; yea, within a few years after the first settlement it grew to be the metropolis of the whole English America." How easy it is, after the city is built, to see where it ought to stand. In our beautiful bay, with its broad and deep waters covered with sails from every port ; with its islands hospitably shining in the sun ; with its waters bounded and marked by light-houses, buoys and sea-marks ; every foot sounded and charted ; with its shores trending steadily from the two arms which the capes of Massachusetts stretch out to sea, down to the bot- tom of the bay where the city domes and spires sparkle through the haze, — a good boatman can easily find his way for the first time to the State House, and wonder that Governor Carver had not better eyes than to stop on the Plymouth Sands. But it took ten years to find this out. The col- ony of 1620 had landed at Plymouth. It was De- cember, and the ground was covered with snow. Snow and moonlight make all places alike ; and the weariness of the sea, the shrinking from cold weather and the pangs of hunger must justify them. But the next colony planted itself at Salem, and the next at Weymouth ; another at Medford ; be- fore these men, instead of jumping on to the first land that offered, wisely judged that the best point BOSTON, 93 for a city was at the bottom of a deep and islanded bay, where a copious river entered it, and where a bold shore was bounded by a country of rich undulating woodland. The planters of Massachusetts do not appear to have been hardy men, rather, comfortable citizens, not at all accustomed to the rough task of discov- erers ; and they exaggerated their troubles. Bears and wolves were many; but early, they believed there were lions ; Monadnoc was burned over to kill them. John Smith was stung near to death by the most poisonous tail of a fish, called a sting-ray. In the journey of Rev. Peter Bulkeley and his company through the forest from Boston to Con- cord they fainted from the powerful odor of the sweetf ern in the sun ; — like what befell, still ear- lier, Biorn and Thorfinn, Northmen, in their expe- dition to the same coast ; who ate so many grapes from the wild vines that they were reeling drunk. The lions have never appeared since, — nor before. Their crops suffered from pigeons and mice. Na- ture has never again indulged in these exaspera- tions. It seems to have been the last outrage ever committed by the sting-rays or by the sweetfern, or by the fox-grapes ; they have been of peaceable behavior ever since. Any geologist or engineer is accustomed to face 94 BOSTON. more serious dangers than any enumerated, except- ing the hostile Indians. But the awe was real and overpowering in the -superstition with which every new object was magnified. The superstition which hung over the new ocean had not yet been scat- tered ; the powers of the savage were not known ; the dangers of the wilderness were unexplored; and, in that time, terrors of witchcraft, terrors of evil spirits, and a certain degree of terror still clouded the idea of God in the mind of the purest. The divine will descends into the barbarous mind in some strange disguise ; its pure truth not to be guessed from the rude vizard under which it goes masquerading. The common eye cannot tell what the bird will be, from the egg, nor the pure truth from the grotesque tenet which sheathes it. But by some secret tie it holds the poor savage to it, and he goes muttering his rude ritual or mythol- ogy, which yet conceals some grand commandment ; as courage, veracity, honesty, or chastity and gen- erosity. So these English men, with the Middle Ages still obscuring their reason, were filled with Chris- tian thought. They had a culture of their own. They read Milton, Thomas a Kempis, Bunyan and Elavel with religious awe and delight, not for en- tertainment. They were precisely the idealists of England ; the most religious in a religious era. An BOSTON. 95 old lady who remembered these pious people said of them that "they had to hold on hard to the huckleberry bushes to hinder themselves from be- ing translated." In our own age we are learning to look as on chivalry at the sweetness of that ancient piety which makes the genius of St. Bernard, Latimer, Scougal, Jeremy Taylor, Herbert, and Leighton. Who can read the fiery ejaculations of St. Augus- tine, a man of as clear a sight as almost any other ; of Thomas a Kempis, of Milton, of Bunyan even, without feeling how rich and expansive a culture — not so much a culture as a higher^life — they owed to the promptings of this sentiment ; without con- trasting their immortal heat with the cold complex- ion of our recent wits ? Who can read the pious diaries of the Englishmen in the time of the Com- monwealth and later, without a sigh that we write no diaries to-day? Who shall restore to us the odoriferous Sabbaths which made the earth and the humble roof a sanctity ? This spirit, of course, involved that of Stoicism, as, in its turn, Stoicism did this. Yet how much more attractive and true that this piety should be the central trait and the stern virtues follow, than that Stoicism should face the gods and put J ove on his defence. That piety is a refutation of every skeptical doubt. These men are a bridge to us be- 96 BOSTON. tween the unparalleled piety of the Hebrew epoch and our own. These ancient men, like great gar- dens with great banks of flowers, send out their perfumed breath across the great tracts of time. How needful is David, Paul, Leighton, Fenelon, to our devotion. Of these writers, of this spirit which deified them, I will say with Confucius, " If in the morning I hear of the right way, and in the even- ing die, I can be happy." I trace to this deep religious sentiment and to its culture great and salutary results to the people of New England ; first, namely, the culture of the in- tellect, which has always been found in the Calvin- istic church. The colony was planted in 1620 ; in 1638 Harvard College was founded. The General Court of Massachusetts, in 1647, " To the end that learning may not be buried in the graves of the forefathers, ordered, that every township, after the Lord has increased them to the number of fifty householders, shall appoint one to teach all chil- dren to write and read ; and where any town shall increase to the number of a hundred families, they shall set up a Grammar School, the Masters thereof being able to instruct youth so far as they may be fitted for the University." Many and rich are the fruits of that simple stat- ute. The universality of an elementary education in New England is her praise and her power in the BOSTON.' 97 whole world. To the schools succeeds the village Lyceum, — now very general throughout all the country towns of New England, — where every week through the winter, lectures are read and de- bates sustained which prove a college for the young rustic. Hence it happens that the young farmers and mechanics, who work all summer in the field or shop, in the winter often go into a neighboring town to teach the district school arithmetic and grammar. As you know too, New England sup- plies annually a large detachment of preachers and schoolmasters and private tutors to the interior of the South and West. New England lies in the cold and hostile latitude which by shutting men up in houses and tight and heated rooms a large part of the year, and then again shutting up the body in flannel and leather, defrauds the human being in some degree of his relations to external nature ; takes from the mus- cles their suppleness, from the skin its exposure to the air ; and the New Englander, like every other northerner, lacks that beauty and grace which the habit of living much in the air, and the activity of the limbs not in labor but in graceful exercise, tend to produce in climates nearer to the sun. Then the necessity, which always presses the northerner, of providing fuel and many clothes and tight houses 98 BOSTON. and much food against the long winter, makes him anxiously frugal, and generates in him that spirit of detail which is not grand and enlarging, but goes rather to pinch the features and degrade the character. As an antidote to the spirit of commerce and of economy, the religious spirit — always enlarging, firing man, prompting the pursuit of the vast, the beautiful, the unattainable — was especially neces- sary to the culture of New England. In the midst of her laborious and economical and rude and awk- ward population, where is little elegance and no facility ; with great accuracy in details, little spirit of society or knowledge of the world, you shall not unfrequently meet that refinement which no educa- tion and no habit of society can bestow; which makes the elegance of wealth look stupid, and unites itself by natural affinity to the highest minds of the world ; nourishes itself on Plato and Dante, Michael Angelo and Milton ; on whatever is pure and sublime in art, — and, I may say, gave a hos- pitality in this country to the spirit of Coleridge and Wordsworth, and to the music of Beethoven, before yet their genius had found a hearty welcome in Great Britain. I do not look to find in England better manners than the best manners here. We can show native examples, and I may almost say (travellers as we BOSTON. 99 are) natives who never crossed the sea, who possess all the elements of noble behavior. It is the property of the religious sentiment to be the most refining of all influences. No external advantages, no good birth or breeding, no culture of the taste, no habit of command, no association with the elegant, — even no depth of affection that does not rise to a religious sentiment, can bestow that delicacy and grandeur of bearing which belong only to a mind accustomed to celestial conversa- tion. Ail else is coarse and external; all else is tailoring and cosmetics beside this ; 1 for thoughts are expressed in every look or gesture, and these thoughts are as if angels had talked with the child. By this instinct we are lifted to higher ground. The religious sentiment gave the iron purpose and arm. That colonizing was a great and generous scheme, manly meant and manly done. When one thinks of the enterprises that are attempted in the heats of youth, the Zoars, New-Harmonies and Brook -Farms, Oakdales and Phalansteries, which have been so profoundly ventilated, but end in a protracted picnic which after a few weeks or months dismisses the partakers to their old homes, 1 " Come dal fuoco il caldo, esser diviso, Non puo'l bel dall' eterno." Michel Anoelo. [As from fire heat cannot be separated, — neither can beauty from the eternal.] 100 BOSTON. we see with new increased respect the solid, well- calculated scheme of these emigrants, sitting down hard and fast where they came, and building their empire by due degrees. John Smith says, " Thirty, forty, or fifty sail went yearly in America only to trade and fish, but nothing would be done for a plantation, till about some hundred of your Brownists of England, Am- sterdam and Leyden went to New Plymouth ; whose humorous ignorances caused them for more than a year to endure a wonderful deal of misery, with an infinite patience." What should hinder that this America, so long kept in reserve from the intellectual races until they should grow to it, glimpses being afforded which spoke to the imagination, yet the firm shore hid until science and art should be ripe to propose it as a fixed aim, and a man should be found who should sail steadily west sixty-eight days from the port of Palos to find it, — what should hinder that this New Atlantis should have its happy ports, its mountains of security, its gardens fit for human abode where all elements were right for the health, power and virtue of man ? America is growing like a cloud, towns on towns, States on States ; and wealth (always interesting, since from wealth power cannot be divorced) is piled in every form invented for comfort or pride. BOSTON. 101 If John Bull interest you at home, come and see him under new conditions, come and see the Jonathanization of John. There are always men ready for adventures, — more in an over-governed, over-peopled country, where all the professions are crowded and all character suppressed, than elsewhere. This thirst for adventure is the vent which Destiny offers ; a war, a crusade, a gold mine, a new country, speak to the imagination and offer swing and play to the confined powers. The American idea, Emancipation, appears in our freedom of intellection, in our reforms, and in our bad politics ; it has, of course, its sinister side, which is most felt by the drilled and scholas- tic, but if followed it leads to heavenly places. European and American are each ridiculous out of his sphere. There is a Columbia of thought and art and character, which is the last and endless sequel of Columbus's adventure. European critics regret the detachment of the Puritans to this country without aristocracy; which a little reminds one of the pity of the Swiss mountaineers when shown a handsome English- man : " What a pity he has no goitre ! " The fu- ture historian will regard the detachment of the Puritans without aristocracy the supreme fortune 102 BOSTON. of the colony ; as great a gain to mankind as the opening of this continent. There is a little formula, couched in pure Saxon, which you may hear in the corners of streets and in the yard of the dame's school, from very little republicans : " I 'm as good as you be," which con- tains the essence of the Massachusetts Bill of Rights and of the American Declaration of Inde- pendence. And this was at the bottom of Plym- outh Rock and of Boston Stone ; and this could be heard (by an acute ear) in the Petitions to the King, and the platforms of churches, and was said and sung in every tone of the psalmody of the Puritans ; in every note of Old Hundred and Hallelujah and Short Particular Metre. What is very conspicuous is the saucy indepen- dence which shines in all their eyes. They could say to themselves, Well, at least this yoke of man, of bishops, of courtiers, of dukes, is off my neck. We are a little too close to wolf and famine than that anybody should give himself airs here in the swamp. London is a long way off, with beadles and pur- suivants and horse-guards. Here in the clam- banks and the beech and chestnut forest, I shall take leave to breathe and think freely. If you do not like it, if you molest me, I can cross the brook and plant a new state out of reach of anything but squirrels and wild pigeons. BOSTON. 103 Bonaparte sighed for his republicans of 1789. The soul of a political party is by no means usu- ally the officers and pets of the party, who wear the honors and fill the high seats and spend the salaries. No, but the theorists and extremists, the men who are never contented and never to be con- tented with the work actually accomplished, but who from conscience are engaged to what that party professes, — these men will work and watch and rally and never tire in carrying their point. The theology and the instinct of freedom that grew here in the dark in serious men furnished a certain rancor which consumed all opposition, fed the party and carried it, over every rampart and obsta- cle, to victory. Boston never wanted a good principle of rebel- lion in it, from the planting until now ; there is always a minority unconvinced, always a heresi- arch, whom the governor and deputies labor with but cannot silence. Some new light, some new doctrinaire who makes an unnecessary ado to es- tablish his dogma ; some Wheelwright or defender of Wheelwright ; some protester against the cruelty of the magistrates to the Quakers ; some tender minister hospitable to Whitefield against the counsel of all the ministers; some John Adams and Josiah Quincy and Governor Andrew to undertake and carry the defence of patriots in 104 BOSTON. the courts against the uproar of all the province ; some defender of the slave against the politician and the merchant; some champion of first prin- ciples of humanity against the rich and luxuri- ous; some adversary of the death penalty; some pleader for peace ; some noble protestant, who will not stoop to infamy when all are gone mad, but will stand for liberty and justice, if alone, until all come back to him. I confess I do not find in our people, with all their education, a fair share of originality of thought; — not any remarkable book of wisdom ; not any broad generalization, any equal power of imagina- tion. No Novum Organon ; no Mecanique Ce- leste ; no Principia ; no Paradise Lost ; no Ham- let ; no Wealth of Nations ; no National Anthem ; have we yet contributed. Nature is a frugal mother and never gives with- out measure. When she has work to do she quali- fies men for that and sends them equipped for that. In Massachusetts she did not want epic poems and dramas yet, but first, planters of towns, fellers of the forest, builders of mills and forges, build- ers of roads, and farmers to till and harvest corn for the world. Corn, yes, but honest corn ; corn with thanks to the Giver of corn ; and the best thanks, namely, obedience to his law ; this was the BOSTON. 105 office imposed on our Founders and people ; liberty, clean and wise. It was to be built on Religion, the Emancipator ; Religion which teaches equality of all men in view of the spirit which created man. The seed of prosperity was planted. The peo- ple did not gather where they had not sown. They did not try to unlock the treasure of the world except by honest keys of labor and skill. They knew, as God knew, that command of nature comes by obedience to nature; that reward comes by faithful service ; that the most noble motto was that of the Prince of Wales, — " I serve," — and that he is greatest who serves best. There was no secret of labor which they disdained. They accepted the divine ordination that man is for use ; that intelligent being exists to the utmost use ; and that his ruin is to live for pleasure and for show. And when within our memory some flippant senator wished to taunt the people of this country by calling them, " the mudsills of society," he paid them ignorantly a true praise ; for good men are as the green plain of the earth is, as the rocks, and the beds of rivers are, the foundation and flooring and sills of the State. The power of labor which belongs to the English race fell here into a climate which befriended it, and into a maritime country made for trade, where was no rival and no envious lawgiver. The sailor 106 BOSTON. and the merchant made the law to suit themselves, so that there was never, I suppose, a more rapid expansion in population, wealth and all the ele- ments of power, and in the citizens' consciousness of power and sustained assertion of it, than was exhibited here. Moral values become also money values. When men saw that these people, besides their industry and thrift, had a heart and soul and would stand by each other at all hazards, they desired to come and live here. A house in Boston was worth as much again as a house just as good in a town of timorous people, because here the neighbors would defend each other against bad governors and against troops ; quite naturally house-rents rose in Boston. Besides, youth and health like a stirring town, above a torpid place where nothing is doing. In Boston they were sure to see something going for- ward before the year was out. For here was the moving principle itself, the primum mobile, a liv- ing mind agitating the mass and always afflicting the conservative class with some odious novelty or other ; a new religious sect, a political point, a point of honor, a reform in education, a philan- thropy. From Roger Williams and Eliot and Robinson and the Quaker women who for a testimony walked naked into the streets, and as the record tells us BOSTON. 107 " were arrested and publicly whipped, — the bag- gages that they were ; " from Wheelwright the Antinomian and Ann Hutchinson and Whitefield and Mother Ann the first Shaker, down to Abner Kneeland and Father Lamson and William Gar- rison, there never was wanting some thorn of dis- sent and innovation and heresy to prick the sides of conservatism. With all their love of his person, they took im- mense pleasure in turning out the governor and deputy and assistants, and contravening the coun- sel of the clergy ; as they had come so far for the sweet satisfaction of resisting the Bishops and the King. The Massachusetts colony grew and filled its own borders with a denser population than any other American State (Kossuth called it the City State), all the while sending out colonies to every part of New England ; then South and West, until it has infused all the Union with its blood. We are willing to see our sons emigrate, as to see our hives swarm. That is what they were made to do, and what the land wants and invites. The towns or countries in which the man lives and dies where he was born, and his son and son's son live and die where he did, are of no great account. 108 BOSTON. I know that this history contains many black lines of cruel injustice ; murder, persecution, and execution of women for witchcraft. I am afraid there are anecdotes of poverty and disease in Broad Street that match the dismal statistics of New York and London. No doubt all manner of vices can be found in this, as in every city; infinite meanness, scarlet crime. Granted. But there is yet in every city a certain permanent tone ; a tendency to be in the right or in the wrong ; audacity or slowness ; labor or luxury ; giving or parsimony ; which side is it on ? And I hold that a community, as a man, is entitled to be judged by his best. We are often praised for what is least ours. Boston too is sometimes pushed into a theatrical attitude of virtue, to which she is not entitled and which she cannot keep. But the genius of Boston is seen in her real independence, productive power and northern acuteness of mind, — which is in nature hostile to oppression. It is a good city as cities go ; Nature is good. The climate is electric, good for wit and good for character. What pub- lic souls have lived here, what social benefactors, what eloquent preachers, skilful workmen, stout captains, wise merchants ; what fine artists, what gifted conversers, what mathematicians, what law- BOSTON. 109 yers, what wits ; and where is the middle class so able, virtuous and instructed ? And thus our little city thrives and enlarges, striking deep roots, and sending out boughs and buds, and propagating itself like a banyan over the continent. Greater cities there are that sprung from it, full of its blood and names and traditions. It is very willing to be outnumbered and out- grown, so long as they carry forward its life of civil and religious freedom, of education, of so- cial order, and of loyalty to law. It is very willing to be outrun in numbers, and in wealth ; but it is very jealous of any superiority in these, its natural instinct and privilege. You cannot conquer it by numbers, or by square miles, or by counted millions of wealth. For it owes its existence and its power to principles not of yesterday, and the deeper principle will always prevail over whatever material accumulations. As long as she cleaves to her liberty, her educa- tion and to her spiritual faith as the foundation of these, she will teach the teachers and rule the ru- lers of America. Her mechanics, her farmers will toil better ; she will repair mischief ; she will fur- nish what is wanted in the hour of need ; her sail- ors will man the Constitution ; her mechanics re- pair the broken rail ; her troops will be the first in the field to vindicate the majesty of a free 110 BOSTON. nation, and remain last on the field to secure it. Her genius will write the laws and her historians record the fate of nations. In an age of trade and material prosperity, we have stood a little stupefied by the elevation of our ancestors. We praised the Puritans because we did not find in ourselves the spirit to do the like. We praised with a certain adulation the invariable valor of the old war-gods and war-councillors of the Revolution. Washington has seemed an excep- tional virtue. This praise was a concession of un- worthiness in those who had so much to say of it. The heroes only shared this power of a sentiment, which, if it now breathes into us, will make it easy to us to understand them, and we shall not longer flatter them. Let us shame the fathers, by supe- rior virtue in the sons. It is almost a proverb that a great man has not a great son. Bacon, Newton and Washington were childless. But, in Boston, Nature is more indulgent, and has given good sons to good sires, or at least continued merit in the same blood. The elder President Adams has to divide voices of fame with the younger President Adams. The elder Otis could hardly excel the popular eloquence of the younger Otis ; and the Quincy of the Revolu- tion seems compensated for the shortness of his \ BOSTON. Ill bright career in the son who so long lingers among the last of those bright clouds, " That on the steady breeze of honor sail In long succession calm and beautiful." Here stands to-day as of yore our little city of the rocks ; here let it stand forever, on the man- bearing granite of the North ! Let her stand fast by herself ! She has grown great. She is filled with strangers, but she can only prosper by adher- ing to her faith. Let every child that is born of her and every child of her adoption see to it to keep the name of Boston as clean as the sun ; and in distant ages her motto shall be the prayer of millions on all the hills that gird the town, " As with our Fathers, so God be with us ! " SiCUT PATRIBUS, SIT DEUS NOBIS ! MICHAEL ANGELO. — ♦ — Never did sculptor's dream unfold A form which marble doth not hold In its white block ; yet it therein shall find Only the hand secure and bold Which still obeys the mind. Michael Angelo's Sonnets. Non ha 1' ottimo artista alcun concetto, Ch'un marmo solo in se non circoscriva Col suo soverchio, e solo a quello arriva La man che obbedisce all' intelletto. M. Angelo, Sonnetto prvmo. MICHAEL ANGELO. 1 Few lives of eminent men are harmonious ; few that furnish, in all the facts, an image correspond- ing with their fame. But all things recorded of Michael Angelo Buonarotti agree together. He lived one life ; he pursued one career. He accom- plished extraordinary works ; he uttered extraordi- nary words ; and in this greatness was so little ec- centricity, so true was he to the laws of the human mind, that his character and his works, like Sir Isaac Newton's, seem rather a part of nature than arbitrary productions of the human will. Especi- ally we venerate his moral fame. Whilst his name belongs to the highest class of genius, his life con- tains in it no injurious influence. Every line in his biography might be read to the human race with wholesome effect. The means, the materials of his activity, were coarse enough to be appreciated, being addressed for the most part to the eye ; the results, sublime and all innocent. A purity severe and even terrible goes out from the lofty productions 1 Reprinted from the North American Review 9 June, 1837. 116 MICHAEL ANGELO. of his pencil and his chisel, and again from the more perfect sculpture of his own life, which heals and exalts. " He nothing common did, or mean," and dying at the end of near ninety years, had not yet become old, but was engaged in executing his grand conceptions in the ineffaceable architecture of St. Peter's. Above all men whose history we know, Michael Angelo presents us with the perfect image of the artist. He is an eminent master in the four fine arts, Painting, Sculpture, Architecture and Poetry. In three of them by visible means, and in poetry by words, he strove to express the Idea of Beauty. This idea possessed him and determined all his ac- tivity. Beauty in the largest sense, beauty inward and outward, comprehending grandeur as a part, and reaching to goodness as its soul, — this to re- ceive and this to impart, was his genius. It is a happiness to find, amid the falsehood and griefs of the human race, a soul at intervals born to behold and create only beauty. So shall not the indescribable charm of the natural world, the great spectacle of morn and evening which shut and open the most disastrous day, want observers. The an- cient Greeks called the world x^M 05 ? Beauty; a name which, in our artificial state of society, sounds fanciful and impertinent. Yet, in proportion as man rises above the servitude to wealth and a pursuit of MICHAEL ANGELO. 117 mean pleasures, he perceives that what is most real is most beautiful, and that, by the contemplation of such objects, he is taught and exalted. This truth, that perfect beauty and perfect goodness are one, was made known to Michael Angelo ; and we shall endeavor by sketches from his life to show the di- rection and limitations of his search after this ele- ment. In considering a life dedicated to the study of Beauty, it is natural to inquire, what is Beauty ? Can this charming element be so abstracted by the human mind, as to become a distinct and permanent object? Beauty cannot be defined. Like Truth, it is an ultimate aim of the human being. It does not lie within the limits of the understanding. " The nature of the beautiful," — we gladly borrow the language of Moritz, a German critic, — " con- sists herein, that because the understanding in the presence of the beautiful cannot ask, ' Why is it beautiful?' for that reason is it so. There is no standard whereby the understanding can determine whether objects are beautiful or otherwise. What other standard of the beautiful exists, than the en- tire circuit of all harmonious proportions of the great system of nature? All particular beauties scattered up and down in nature are only so far beautiful, as they suggest more or less in themselves this entire circuit of harmonious proportions." 118 MICHAEL ANGELO. This great Whole, the understanding cannot em- brace. Beauty may be felt. It may be produced. But it cannot be defined. The Italian artists sanction this view of beauty by describing it as il piu nelV uno, "the many in one," or multitude in unity, intimating that what is truly beautiful seems related to all nature. A beau- tiful person has a kind of universality, and appears to have truer conformity to all pleasing objects in external nature than another. Every great work of art seems to take up into itself the excellencies of all works, and to present, as it were, a miniature of nature. In relation to this element of Beauty, the minds of men divide themselves into two classes. In the first place, all men have an organization correspond- ing more or less to the entire system of nature, and therefore a power of deriving pleasure from Beauty. This is Taste. In the second place, certain minds, more closely harmonized with nature, possess the power of abstracting Beauty from things, and re- producing it in new forms, on any object to which accident may determine their activity; as stone, canvas, song, history. This is Art. Since Beauty is thus an abstraction of the har- mony and proportion that reigns in all nature, it is therefore studied in nature, and not in what does not exist. Hence the celebrated French maxim of MICHAEL ANGELO. 119 / Rhetoric, Rien de beau que le mai ; "Nothing is beautiful but what is true." It has a much wider application than to Rhetoric ; as wide, namely, as the terms of the proposition admit. In art, Michael Angelo is himself but a document or verification of this maxim. He labored to express the beauti- ful, in the entire conviction that it was only to be attained unto by knowledge of the true. The com- mon eye is satisfied with the surface on which it rests. The wise eye knows that it is surface, and, if beautiful, only the result of interior harmonies, which, to him who knows them, compose the image of higher beauty. Moreover, he knew well that only by an understanding of the internal mechanism can the outside be faithfully delineated. The walls of houses are transparent to the architect. The symp- toms disclose the constitution to the physician ; and to the artist it belongs by a better knowledge of anatomy, and, within anatomy, of life and thought, to acquire the power of true drawing. " The hu- man form," says Goethe, " cannot be comprehended through seeing its surface. It must be stripped of the muscles, its parts separated, its joints observed, its divisions marked, its action and counter action learned ; the hidden, the reposing, the foundation of the apparent, must be searched, if one would really see and imitate what moves as a beautiful insepara- ble whole in living waves before the eye." Michael 120 MICHAEL ANGELO. Angelo dedicated himself, from his childhood to his death, to a toilsome observation of nature. The first anecdote recorded of him shows him to be al- ready on the right road. Granacci, a painter's ap- prentice, having lent him, when a boy, a print of St. Antony beaten by devils, together with some colors and pencils, he went to the fish-market to observe the form and color of fins and of the eyes of fish. Car- dinal Farnese one day found him, when an old man, walking alone in the Coliseum, and expressed his surprise at finding him solitary amidst the ruins ; to which he replied, " I go yet to school that I may continue to learn." And one of the last drawings in his portfolio is a sublime hint of his own feel- ing ; for it is a sketch of an old man with a long beard, in a go-cart, with an hour-glass before him ; and the motto, Ancora imparo, " I still learn." In this spirit he devoted himself to the study of anatomy for twelve years ; we ought to say rather, as long as he lived. The depth of his knowledge in anatomy has no parallel among the artists of mod- ern times. Most of his designs, his contemporaries inform us, were made with a pen, and in the style of an engraving on copper or wood ; a manner more expressive but not admitting of correction. When Michael Angelo would begin a statue, he made first on paper the skeleton; afterwards, upon another paper, the same figure clothed with muscles. The MICHAEL ANGELO. 121 studies of the statue of Christ in the Church of Minerva at Rome, made in this manner, were long preserved. Those who have never given attention to the arts of design, are surprised that the artist should find so much to study in a fabric of such limited parts and dimensions as the human body. But reflection discloses evermore a closer analogy between the finite form and the infinite inhabitant. Man is the highest, and indeed the only proper object of plastic art. There needs no better proof of our instinctive feeling of the immense expression of which the hu- man figure is capable, than the uniform tendency which the religion of every country has betrayed towards Anthropomorphism, or attributing to the Deity the human form. And behold the effect of this familiar object every day ! No acquaintance with the secrets of its mechanism, no degrading views of human nature, not the most swinish com- post of mud and blood that was ever misnamed phi- losophy, can avail to hinder us from doing involun- tary reverence to any exhibition of majesty or sur- passing beauty in human clay. Our knowledge of its highest expression we owe to the Fine Arts. Not easily in this age will any man acquire by himself such perceptions of the dignity or grace of the human frame, as the student of art owes to the remains of Phidias, to the Apollo, 122 MICHAEL ANGELO. the Jove, the paintings and statues of Michael An- gelo, and the works of Canova. There are now in Italy, both on canvas and in marble, forms and faces which the imagination is enriched by contem- plating. Goethe says that he is but half himself who has never seen the Juno in the Rondanini pal- ace at Rome. Seeing these works true to human nature and yet superhuman, 46 we feel that we are greater than we know." Seeing these works, we appreciate the taste which led Michael Angelo, against the taste and against the admonition of his patrons, to cover the walls of churches with un- clothed figures, " improper " says his biographer, " for the place, but proper for the exhibition of all the pomp of his profound knowledge." The love of beauty which never passes beyond outline and color, was too slight an object to occupy the powers of his genius. There is a closer relation than is commonly thought between the fine arts and the useful arts ; and it is an essential fact in the his- tory of Michael Angelo, that his love of beauty is made solid and perfect by his deep understanding of the mechanic arts. Architecture is the bond that unites the elegant and the economical arts, and his skill in this is a pledge of his capacity in both kinds. His Titanic handwriting in marble and travertine is to be found in every part of Rome and Florence ; and even at Venice, on defective MICHAEL ANGELO. 123 evidence, he is said to have given the plan of the bridge of the Rialto. Nor was his a skill in orna- ment, or confined to the outline and designs of tow- ers and facades, but a thorough acquaintance with all the secrets of the art, with all the details of economy and strength. When the Florentines united themselves with Venice, England and France, to oppose the power of the Emperor Charles V., Michael Angelo was appointed Military Architect and Engineer, to su- perintend the erection of the necessary works. He visited Bologna to inspect its celebrated fortifica- tions, and, on his return, constructed a fortification on the heights of San Miniato, which commands the city and environs of Florence. On the 24th of October, 1529, the Prince of Orange, general of Charles V., encamped on the hills surrounding the city, and his first operation was to throw up a ram- part to storm the bastion of San Miniato. His design was frustrated by the providence of Michael Angelo. Michael made such good resistance, that the Prince directed the artillery to demolish the tower. The artist hung mattresses of wool on the side exposed to the attack, and by means of a bold projecting cornice, from which they were suspended, a considerable space was left between them and the wall. This simple expedient was sufficient, and the Prince was obliged to turn his siege into a blockade. 124 MICHAEL ANGELO. After an active and successful service to the city for six months, Michael Angelo was informed of a treachery that was ripening within the walls. He communicated it to the government with his ad- vice upon it ; but was mortified by receiving from the government reproaches at his credulity and fear. He replied, " that it was useless for him to take care of the walls, if they were determined not to take care of themselves, " and he withdrew pri- vately from the city to Ferrara, and thence to Ven- ice. The news of his departure occasioned a gen- eral concern in Florence, and he was instantly fol- lowed with apologies and importunities to return. He did so, and resumed his office. On the 21st of March, 1530, the Prince of Orange assaulted the city by storm. Michael Angelo is represented as having ordered his defence so vigorously, that the Prince was compelled to retire. By the treachery however of the general of the Republic, Malatesta Baglioni, all his skill was rendered unavailing, and the city capitulated on the 9th of August. The excellence of the works constructed by our artist has been approved by Vauban, who visited them and took a plan of them. In Eome, Michael Angelo was consulted by Pope Paul III. in building the fortifications of San Borgo. He built the stairs of Ara Celi leading to the Church once the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus ; MICHAEL ANGELO. 125 he arranged the piazza of the Capitol, and built its porticoes. He was charged with rebuilding the Pons Palatinus over the Tiber. He prepared, ac- cordingly, a large quantity of blocks of travertine, and was proceeding with the work, when, through the intervention of his rivals, this work was taken from him and intrusted to Nanni di Bacio Bigio, who plays but a pitiful part in Michael's history. Nanni sold the travertine, and filled up the piers with gravel at a small expense. Michael Angelo made known his opinion, that the bridge could not resist the force of the current ; and, one day riding over it on horseback, with his friend Vasari, he cried, " George, this bridge trembles under us ; let us ride faster lest it fall whilst we are upon it." It fell, five years after it was built, in 1557, and is still called the " Broken Bridge." Versatility of talent in men of undoubted ability always awakens the liveliest interest ; and we ob- serve with delight, that, besides the sublimity and even extravagance of Michael Angelo, he possessed an unexpected dexterity in minute mechanical con- trivances. When the Sistine Chapel was prepared for him that he might paint the ceiling, he found the platform on which he was to work, suspended by ropes which passed through the ceiling. Mich- ael demanded of San Gallo, the Pope's architect, how these holes were to be repaired in the picture ? 126 MICHAEL ANGELO. San Gallo replied ; " That was for him to con- sider, for the platform could be constructed in no other way." Michael removed the whole, and con- structed a movable platform to rest and roll upon the floor, which is believed to be the same simple contrivance which is used in Rome, at this day, to repair the walls of churches. He gave this model to a carpenter, who made it so profitable as to fur- nish a dowry for his two daughters. He was so nice in tools, that he made with his own hand the wimbles, the files, the rasps, the chisels and all other irons and instruments which he needed in sculpture ; and, in painting, he not only mixed but ground his colors himself, trusting no one. And not only was this discoverer of Beauty, and its teacher among men, rooted and grounded in those severe laws of practical skill, which genius can never teach, and which must be learned by practice alone, but he was one of the most indus- trious men that ever lived. His diligence was so great that it is wonderful how he endured its fa- tigues. The midnight battles, the forced marches, the winter campaigns of Julius Caesar or Charles XII. do not indicate greater strength of body or of mind. He finished the gigantic painting of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in twenty months, a fact which enlarges, it has been said, the known powers of man. Indeed he toiled so assiduously MICHAEL ANGELO. 127 at this painful work, that, for a long time after, he was unable to see any picture but by holding it over his head. A little bread and wine was all his nourishment ; and he told Vasari that he often slept in his clothes, both because he was too weary to undress, and because he would rise in the night and go immediately to work. " I have found," says his friend, " some of his designs in Florence, where, whilst may be seen the greatness of his gen- ius, it may also be known that when he wished to take Minerva from the head of Jove, there needed the hammer of Vulcan." He used to make to a single figure nine, ten, or twelve heads before he could satisfy himself, seeking that there should be in the composition a certain universal grace such as nature makes, saying, that " he needed to have his compasses in his eye, and not in his hand, because the hands work whilst the eye judges." He was accustomed to say, " Those figures alone are good, from which the labor is scraped off, when the scaf- folding is taken away." At near eighty years, he began in marble a group of four figures for a dead Christ ; because, he said, to exercise himself with the mallet was good for his health. And what did he accomplish ? It does not fall within our design to give an account of his works, yet for the sake of the completeness of our sketch 128 MICHAEL ANGELO. we will name the principal ones. Sculpture, he called Ms art, and to it he regretted afterwards he had not singly given himself. The style of his paint- ings is monumental ; and even his poetry partakes of that character. In sculpture, his greatest work is the statue of Moses in the Church of Pietro in Vincolo, in Rome. It is a sitting statue of colossal size, and is designed to embody the Hebrew Law. The lawgiver is supposed to gaze upon the wor- shippers of the golden calf. The majestic wrath of the figure daunts the beholder. In the Piazza del Gran Duca at Florence, stands, in the open air, his David, about to hurl the stone at Goliah. In the Church called the Minerva, at Rome, is his Christ ; an object of so much devotion to the peo- ple, that the right foot has been shod with a brazen sandal to prevent it from being kissed away. In St. Peter's, is his Pieta, or dead Christ in the arms of his mother. In the Mausoleum of the Medici at Florence, are the tombs of Lorenzo and Cosmo, with the grand statues of Night and Day, and Au- rora and Twilight. Several statues of less fame, and bas-reliefs, are in Rome and Florence and Paris. His Paintings are in the Sistine Chapel, of which he first covered the ceiling with the story of the creation, in successive compartments, with the great series of the Prophets and Sibyls in alternate MICHAEL ANGELO. 129 tablets, and a series of greater and smaller fancy- pieces in the lunettes. This is his capital work painted in fresco. Every one of these pieces, every figure, every hand and foot and finger, is a study of anatomy and design. Slighting the secondary arts of coloring, and all the aids of graceful finish, he aimed exclusively, as a stern designer, to ex- press the vigor and magnificence of his conceptions. Upon the wall, over the altar, is painted the Last J udgment. Of his designs, the most celebrated is the car- toon representing soldiers coming out in the bath and arming themselves ; an incident of the war of Pisa. The wonderful merit of this drawing, which contrasts the extremes of relaxation and vigor, is conspicuous even in the coarsest prints. Of his genius for Architecture, it is sufficient to say that he built St. Peter's, an ornament of the earth. He said he would hang the Pantheon in the air ; and he redeemed his pledge by suspend- ing that vast cupola, without offence to grace or to stability, over the astonished beholder. He did not live to complete the work; but is there not something affecting in the spectacle of an old man, on the verge of ninety years, carrying steadily on- ward with the heat and determination of manhood, his poetic conceptions into progressive execution, surmounting by the dignity of his purposes all ob- 130 MICHAEL ANGELO. stacles and all enmities, and only hindered by the limits of life from fulfilling his designs? Very slowly came he, after months and years, to the dome. At last he began to model it very small in wax. When it was finished, he had it copied larger in wood, and by this model it was built. Long after it was completed, and often since, to this day, rumors are occasionally spread that it is giving way, and it is said to have been injured by unskilful attempts to repair it. Benedict XIV., during one of these panics, sent for the architect Marchese Polini, to come to Rome and examine it. Polini put an end to all the various projects of repairs, by the satisfying sentence ; " The cupola does not start, and if it should start, nothing can be done but to pull it down." The impulse of his grand style was instantaneous upon his contemporaries. Every stroke of his pen- cil moved the pencil in Raphael's hand. Eaphael said, " I bless God I live in the times of Michael Angelo." Sir Joshua Reynolds, two centuries later, declared to the British Institution, " I feel a self- congratulation in knowing myself capable of such sensations as he intended to excite." A man of such habits and such deeds, made good his pretensions to a perception and to delineation of external beauty. But inimitable as his works are, his whole life confessed that his hand was all MICHAEL ANGEiLO. 131 inadequate to express his thought. " He alone " he said, "is an artist whose hands can perfectly execute what his mind has conceived ; " and such was his own mastery, that men said, " the marble was flexible in his hands." Yet, contemplating ever with love the idea of absolute beauty, he was still dissatisfied with his own work. The things proposed to him in his imagination were such, that, for not being able with his hands to express so grand and terrible conceptions, he often abandoned his work. For this reason he often only blocked his statue, A little before he died, he burned a great number of designs, sketches, and cartoons made by him, being impatient of their defects. Grace in living forms, except in very rare instances, did not satisfy him. He never made but one portrait (a cartoon of Messer Tommaso di Cavalieri), because he abhorred to draw a likeness unless it were of infinite beauty. Such was his devotion to art. But let no man suppose that the images which his spirit worshipped were mere transcripts of external grace, or that this profound soul was taken or holden in the chains of superficial beauty. To him, of all men, it was transparent. Through it he beheld the eter- nal spiritual beauty which ever clothes itself with grand and graceful outlines, as its appropriate form. He called eternal grace "the frail and 132 MICHAEL ANGELO. weary weed, in which God dresses the soul which he has called into Time." " As from the fire, heat cannot be divided, no more can beauty from the eternal." He was conscious in his efforts of higher aims than to address the eye. He sought, through the eye, to reach the soul. Therefore, as, in the first place, he sought to approach the Beautiful by the study of the True, so he failed not to make the next step of progress, and to seek Beauty in its highest form, that of Goodness. The sublimity of his art is in his life. He did not only build a di- vine temple, and paint and carve saints and proph- ets. He lived out the same inspiration. There is no spot upon his fame. The fire and sanctity of his pencil breathe in his words. When he was in- formed that Paul IV. desired he should paint again the side of the chapel where the Last Judgment was painted, because of the indecorous nudity of the fig- ures, he replied, " Tell the Pope that this is easily done. Let him reform the world and he will find the pictures will reform themselves." He saw clearly that if the corrupt and vulgar eyes, that could see nothing but indecorum in his terrific prophets and angels, could be purified as his own were pure, they would only find occasion for devo- tion in the same figures. As he refused to undo his work, Daniel di Volterra was employed to clothe the figures ; aence ludicrously called II Braghet- MICHAEL ANGELO. 133 tone. When the Pope suggested to him that the chapel would be enriched if the figures were orna- mented with gold, Michael Angelo replied, " In those days, gold was not worn ; and the characters I have painted were neither rich nor desirous of wealth, but holy men, with whom gold was an ob- ject of contempt." Not until he was in the seventy-third year of his age, he undertook the building of St. Peter's. On the death of San Gallo, the architect of the church, Paul III. first entreated, then commanded the aged artist, to assume the charge of this great work, which though commenced forty years before, was only commenced by Bramante, and ill continued by San Gallo. Michael Angelo, who believed in his own ability as a sculptor, but distrusted his capacity as an architect, at first refused and then reluctantly complied. His heroic stipulation with the Pope was worthy of the man and the work. He required that he should be permitted to accept this work without any fee or reward, because he undertook it as a religious act ; and, furthermore, that he should be absolute master of the whole de- sign, free to depart from the plans of San Gallo and to alter what had been already done. This disinterestedness and spirit, — no fee and no interference, — reminds one of the reward named by the ancient Persian. When importuned to claim 134 MICHAEL ANGELO. some compensation of the empire for the important services he had rendered it, he demanded, "that he and his should neither command nor obey, but should be free." However, as it was undertaken, so was it performed. When the Pope, delighted with one of his chapels, sent him one hundred crowns of gold, as one month's wages, Michael sent them back. The Pope was angry, but the artist was immovable. Amidst endless annoyances from the envy and interest of the office-holders and agents in the work whom he had displaced, he steadily ripened and executed his vast ideas. The combined desire to fulfil, in everlasting stone, the conceptions of his mind, and to complete his worthy offering to Almighty God, sustained him through numberless vexations with unbroken spirit. In answer to the importunate solicitations of the Duke of Tuscany that he would come to Florence, he replies that " to leave St. Peter's in the state in which it now was, would be to ruin the structure, and thereby be guilty of a great sin ; " that he hoped he should shortly see the execution of his plans brought to such a point that they could no longer be interfered with, and this was the capital object of his wishes, " if," he adds, " I do not com- mit a great crime, by disappointing the cormorants who are daily hoping to get rid of me." A natural fruit of the nobility of his spirit is his MICHAEL ANGELO. 135 admiration of Dante, to whom two of his sonnets are addressed. He shared Dante's " deep contempt of the vulgar, not of the simple inhabitants of lowly- streets or humble cottages, but of that sordid and abject crowd of all classes and all places who ob- scure, as much as in them lies, every beam of beauty in the universe." In like manner, he pos- sessed an intense love of solitude. He lived alone, and never or very rarely took his meals with any person. As will be supposed, he had a passion for the country, and in old age speaks with extreme pleasure of his residence with the hermits in the mountains of Spoleto ; so much so that he says he is " only half in Rome, since, truly, peace is only to be found in the woods." Traits of an almost sav- age independence mark all his history. Although he was rich, he lived like a poor man, and never would receive a present from any person ; because it seemed to him that if a man gave him anything, he was always obligated to that individual. His friend Vasari mentions one occasion on which his scruples were overcome. It seems that Michael was accustomed to work at night with a pasteboard cap or helmet on his head, into which he stuck a candle, that his work might be lighted and his hands at liberty. Vasari observed that he did not use wax candles, but a better sort made of the tal- low of goats. He therefore sent him four bundles 136 MICHAEL ANGELO. of them, containing forty pounds. His servant brought them after night-fall, and presented them to him. Michael Angelo refused to receive them. " Look you, Messer Michael Angelo," replied the man, "these candles have well nigh broken my arm, and I will not carry them back; but just here, before your door, is a spot of soft mud, and they will stand upright in it very well, and there I will light them all." — " Put them down, then," returned Michael, "since you shall not make a bonfire at my gate." Meantime he was liberal to profusion to his old domestic Urbino, to whom he gave at one time two thousand crowns, and made him rich in his service. Michael Angelo was of that class of men who are too superior to the multitude around them to command a full and perfect sympathy. They stand in the attitude rather of appeal from their contem- poraries to their race. It has been the defect of some great men, that they did not duly appreciate or did not confess the talents and virtues of others, and so lacked one of the richest sources of happi- ness and one of the best elements of humanity. This apathy perhaps happens as often from pre- occupied attention as from jealousy. It has been supposed that artists more than others are liable to this defect. But Michael Angelo's praise on many works is to this day the stamp of fame. Michael MICHAEL ANGELO. 137 Angelo said of Masaccio's pictures that wnen they were first painted they must have been alive. He said of his predecessor, the architect Bramante, that he laid the first stone of St. Peter's, clear, insulated, luminous, with fit design for a vast structure. He often expressed his admiration of Cellini's bust of Altoviti. He loved to express admiration of Titian, of Donatello, of Ghiberti, of Brunelleschi. And it is said that when he left Florence to go to Kome, to build St. Peter's, he turned his horse's head on the last hill from which the noble dome of the Cathedral (built by Brunel- leschi) is visible, and said, " Like you, I will not build ; better than you I cannot." Indeed, as we have said, the reputation of many works of art now in Italy derives a sanction from the tradition of his praise. It is more commendation to say, " This was Michael Angelo's favorite," than to say, "This was carried to Paris by Napoleon." Mi- chael, however, had the philosophy to say, " Only an inventor can use the inventions of others." There is yet one more trait in Michael Angelo's history, which humanizes his character without les- sening its loftiness ; this is his platonic love. He was deeply enamored of the most accomplished lady of the time, Vittoria Colonna, the widow of the Marquis di Pescara, who, after the death of her husband, devoted herself to letters, and to the writ- 138 MICHAEL ANGELO. ing of religious poetry. She was also an admirer of his genius, and came to Rome repeatedly to see him. To her his sonnets are addressed ; and they all breathe a chaste and divine regard, unparalleled in any amatory poetry except that of Dante and Petrarch. They are founded on the thought that beauty is the virtue of the body, as virtue is the beauty of the soul ; that a beautiful person is sent into the world as an image of the divine beauty, not to provoke but to purify the sensual into an intellectual and divine love. He enthrones his mistress as a benignant angel, who is to refine and perfect his own character. Condivi, his friend, has left this testimony ; " I have often heard Mi- chael Angelo reason and discourse upon love, but never heard him speak otherwise than upon pla- tonic love. As for me, I am ignorant what Plato has said upon this subject ; but this I know very well, that, in a long intimacy, I never heard from his mouth a single word that was not perfectly de- corous and having for its object to extinguish in youth every improper desire, and that his own nature is a stranger to depravity." The poems themselves cannot be read without awakening sen- timents of virtue. An eloquent vindication of their philosophy may be found in a paper by Signor Radici in the London " Retrospective Review," and, by the Italian scholar, in the Discourse of MICHAEL ANGELO. 139 Benedetto Varolii upon one sonnet of Michael Angelo, contained in the volume of his poems pub- lished by Biagioli, from which, in substance, the views of Radici are taken. Towards his end, there seems to have grown in him an invincible appetite of dying, for he knew that his spirit could only enjoy contentment after death. So vehement was this desire that, he says, " my soul can no longer be appeased by the wonted seductions of painting and sculpture." A fine mel- ancholy, not unrelieved by his habitual heroism, pervades his thoughts on this subject. At the age of eighty years, he wrote to Vasari, sending him various spiritual sonnets he had written, and tells him he " is at the end of his life, that he is careful where he bends his thoughts, that he sees it is al- ready twenty-four o'clock, and no fancy arose in his mind but death was sculptured on it." In conver- sing upon this subject with one of his friends, that person remarked, that Michael might well grieve that one who was incessant in his creative labors should have no restoration. " No," replied Michael, " it is nothing ; for, if life pleases us, death, being a work of the same master, ought not to displease us." But a nobler sentiment, uttered by him, is contained in his reply to a letter of Vasari, who had informed him of the rejoicings made at the house of his nephew Lionardo, at Florence, over the birth 140 MICHAEL ANGELO. of another Buonarotti. Michael admonishes him that "a man ought not to smile, when all those around him weep ; and that we ought not to show that joy when a child is born, which should be re- served for the death of one who has lived well." Amidst all these witnesses to his independence, his generosity, his purity and his devotion, are we not authorized to say that this man was penetrated with the love of the highest beauty, that is, good- ness ; that his was a soul so enamored of grace, that it could not stoop to meanness or depravity ; that art was to him no means of livelihood or road to fame, but the end of living, as it was the organ through which he sought to suggest lessons of an unutterable wisdom ; that here was a man who lived to demonstrate that to the human faculties, on every hand, worlds of grandeur and grace are opened, which no profane eye and no indolent eye can behold, but which to see and to enjoy, demands the severest discipline of all the physical, intellect- ual and moral faculties of the individual ? The city of Florence, on the river Arno, still treasures the fame of this man. There, his picture hangs in every window ; there, the tradition of his opinions meets the traveller in every spot. "Do you see that statue of St. George ? Michael An- gelo asked it why it did not speak." — "Do you see this fine church of Santa Maria Novella ? It MICHAEL ANGELO. 141 is that which Michael Angelo called ' his bride.' " — " Look at these bronze gates of the Baptistery, with their high reliefs, cast by Ghiberti five hun- dred years ago. Michael Angelo said, ' they were fit to be the gates of Paradise.' " — Here is the church, the palace, the Laurentian library, he built. Here is his own house. In the church of Santa Croce are his mortal remains. Whilst he was yet alive, he asked that he might be buried in that church, in such a spot that the dome of the cathe- dral might be visible from his tomb when the doors of the church stood open. And there and so is he laid. The innumerable pilgrims whom the gen- ius of Italy draws to the city, duly visit this church, which is to Florence what Westminster Abbey is to England. There, near the tomb of Nicholas Machiavelli, the historian and philosopher ; of Gali- leo, the great-hearted astronomer; of Boccaccio, and of Alfieri, stands the monument of Michael Angelo Buonarotti. Three significant garlands are sculptured on the tomb ; they should be four, but that his countrymen feared their own partiality. The forehead of the bust, esteemed a faithful like- ness, is furrowed with eight deep wrinkles one above another. The traveller from a distant conti- nent, who gazes on that marble brow, feels that he is not a stranger in the foreign church ; for the great name of Michael Angelo sounds hospitably 142 MICHAEL ANGELO. in his ear. He was not a citizen of any country ; he belonged to the human race ; he was a brother and a friend to all who acknowledge the beauty that beams in universal nature, and who seek by labor and self-denial to approach its source in per- fect goodness. MILTON. I framed his tongue to music, I armed his hand with skill, I moulded his face to beauty, And his heart the throne of wilL MILTON. 1 The discovery of the lost work of Milton, the treatise "Of the Christian Doctrine," in 1823, drew a sudden attention to his name. For a short time the literary journals were filled with disquisi- tions on his genius ; new editions of his works, and new compilations of his life, were published. But the new-found book having in itself less attraction than any other work of Milton, the curiosity of the public as quickly subsided, and left the poet to the enjoyment of his permanent fame, or to such in- crease or abatement of it only as is incidental to a sublime genius, quite independent of the momen- tary challenge of universal attention to his claims. But if the new and temporary renown of the poet is silent again, it is nevertheless true that he has gained, in this age, some increase of permanent praise. The fame of a great man is not rigid and stony like his bust. It changes with time. It needs time to give it due perspective. It was very easy to remark an altered tone in the criticism 1 Reprinted from the North American Review, July, 1838. 146 MILTON. when Milton re-appeared as an author, fifteen years ago, from any that had been bestowed on the same subject before. It implied merit indisputable and illustrious ; yet so near to the modern mind as to be still alive and life-giving. The aspect of Milton, to this generation, will be part of the history of the nineteenth century. There is no name in English literature between his age and ours that rises into any approach to his own. And as a man's fame, of course, characterizes those who give it, as much as him who receives it, the new criticism indicated a change in the public taste, and a change which the poet himself might claim to have wrought. The reputation of Milton had already undergone one or two revolutions long anterior to its recent aspects. In his lifetime, he was little or not at all known as a poet, but obtained great respect from his contemporaries as an accomplished scholar and a formidable pamphleteer. His poem fell unre- garded among his countrymen. His prose writings, especially the " Defence of the English People," seem to have been read with avidity. These tracts are remarkable compositions. They are earnest, spiritual, rich with allusion, sparkling with innu- merable ornaments ; but, as writings designed to gain a practical point, they fail. They are not effective, like similar productions of Swift and Burke ; or, like what became also controversial MILTON. 147 tracts, several masterly speeches in the history of the American Congress. Milton seldom deigns a glance at the obstacles that are to be overcome before that which he proposes can be done. There is no attempt to conciliate, — no mediate, no pre- paratory course suggested, — but, peremptory and impassioned, he demands, on the instant, an ideal justice. Therein they are discriminated from mod- ern writings, in which a regard to the actual is all but universal. Their rhetorical excellence must also suffer some deduction. They have no perf ectness. These writ- ings are wonderful for the truth, the learning, the subtilty and pomp of the language ; but the whole is sacrificed to the particular. Eager to do fit jus- tice to each thought, he does not subordinate it so as to project the main argument. He writes whilst he is heated ; the piece shows all the rambles and resources of indignation, but he has never inte- grated the parts of the argument in his mind. The reader is fatigued with admiration, but is not yet master of the subject. Two of his pieces may be excepted from this de- scription, one for its faults, the other for its excel- lence. The " Defence of the People of England," on which his contemporary fame was founded, is, when divested of its pure Latinity, the worst of his works. Only its general aim, and a few elevated 148 MILTON. passages, can save it. We could be well content, if the flames to which it was condemned at Paris, at Toulouse, and at London, had utterly consumed it. The lover of his genius will always regret that he should not have taken counsel of his own lofty heart at this, as at other times, and have written from the deep convictions of love and right, which are the foundations of civil liberty. There is little poetry or prophecy in this mean and ribald scold- ing. To insult Salmasius, not to acquit England, is the main design. What under heaven had Madame de Saumaise, or the manner of living of Saumaise, or Salmasius, or his blunders of grammar, or his niceties of diction, to do with the solemn question whether Charles Stuart had been rightly slain? Though it evinces learning and critical skill, yet, as an historical argument, it cannot be valued with similar disquisitions of Robertson and Hallam, and even less celebrated scholars. But, when he comes to speak of the reason of the thing, then he always recovers himself. The voice of the mob is silent, and Milton speaks. And the perora- tion, in which he implores his countrymen to refute this adversary by their great deeds, is in a just spirit. The other piece is his " Areopagitica," the discourse, addressed to the Parliament, in favor of removing the censorship of the press ; the most splendid of his prose works. It is, as Luther said MILTON. 149 of one of Melancthon's writings, " alive, hath hands and feet, — and not like Erasmus's sentences, which were made, not grown." The weight of the thought is equalled by the vivacity of the expression, and it cheers as well as teaches. This tract is far the best known and the most read of all, and is still a magazine of reasons for the freedom of the press. It is valuable in history as an argument addressed to a government to produce a practical end, and plainly presupposes a very peculiar state of so- ciety. But deeply as that peculiar state of society, in which and for which Milton wrote, has engraved itself in the remembrance of the world, it shares the destiny which overtakes everything local and personal in nature ; and the accidental facts on which a battle of principles was fought have already passed, or are fast passing, into oblivion. We have lost all interest in Milton as the redoubted dispu- tant of a sect ; but by his own innate worth this man has steadily risen in the world's reverence, and occupies a more imposing place in the mind of men at this hour than ever before. It is the aspect which he presents to this gener- ation, that alone concerns us. Milton the polemic has lost his popularity long ago ; and if we skip the pages of " Paradise Lost " where " God the Father argues like a school divine," so did the next age to 150 MILTON. his own. But, we are persuaded, he kindles a love and emulation in us which he did not in foregoing generations. We think we have seen and heard criticism upon the poems, which the bard himself would have more valued than the recorded praise of Dryden, Addison and Johnson, because it came nearer to the mark ; was finer and closer apprecia- tion ; the praise of intimate knowledge and delight ; and, of course, more welcome to the poet than the general and vague acknowledgment of his genius by those able but unsympathizing critics. We think we have heard the recitation of his verses by genius which found in them that which itself would say ; recitation which told, in the diamond sharp- ness of every articulation, that now first was such perception and enjoyment possible ; the perception and enjoyment of all his varied rhythm, and his perfect fusion of the classic and the English styles. This is a poet's right ; for every masterpiece of art goes on for some ages reconciling the world unto itself, and despotically fashioning the public ear. The opposition to it, always greatest at first, con- tinually decreases and at last ends ; and a new race grows up in the taste and spirit of the work, with the utmost advantage for seeing intimately its power and beauty. But it would be great injustice to Milton to con- sider him as enjoying merely a critical reputation. MILTON. 151 It is the prerogative of this great man to stand at this hour foremost of all men in literary history, and so (shall we not say ?) of all men, in the power to inspire. Virtue goes out of him into others. Leaving out of view the pretensions of our con- temporaries (always an incalculable influence), we think no man can be named whose mind still acts on the cultivated intellect of England and America with an energy comparable to that of Milton. As a poet, Shakspeare undoubtedly transcends, and far surpasses him in his popularity with foreign nations ; but Shakspeare is a voice merely ; who and what he was that sang, that sings, we know not. Milton stands erect, commanding, still visi- ble as a man among men, and reads the laws of the moral sentiment to the new-born race. There is something pleasing in the affection with which we can regard a man who died a hundred and sixty years ago in the other hemisphere, who, in respect to personal relations, is to us as the wind, yet by an influence purely spiritual makes us jealous for his fame as for that of a near friend. He is iden- tified in the mind with all select and holy images, with the supreme interests of the human race. If hereby we attain any more precision, we proceed to say that we think no man in these later ages, and few men ever, possessed so great a conception of the manly character. Better than any other he has 152 MILTON. discharged the office of every great man, namely, to raise the idea of Man in the minds of his con- temporaries and of posterity, — to draw after na- ture a life of man, exhibiting such a composition of grace, of strength and of virtue, as poet had not described nor hero lived. Human nature in these ages is indebted to him for its best portrait. Many philosophers in England, France and Germany, have formerly dedicated their study to this prob- lem ; and we think it impossible to recall one in those countries who communicates the same vibra- tion of hope, of self -reverence, of piety, of delight in beauty, which the name of Milton awakens. Lord Bacon, who has written much and with pro- digious ability on this science, shrinks and falters before the absolute and uncourtly Puritan. Ba- con's Essays are the portrait of an ambitious and profound calculator, — a great man of the vulgar sort. Of the upper world of man's being they speak few and faint words. The man of Locke is virtuous without enthusiasm and intelligent with- out poetry. Addison, Pope, Hume and Johnson, students, with very unlike temper and success, of the same subject, cannot, taken together, make any pretension to the amount or the quality of Milton's inspirations. The man of Lord Chesterfield is un- worthy to touch his garment's hem. Franklin's man is a frugal, inoffensive, thrifty citizen, but sa- MILTON. 153 vors of nothing heroic. The genius of France has not, even in her best days, yet culminated in any one head, — not in Rousseau, not in Pascal, not in F^nelon, — into such perception of all the attributes of humanity as to entitle it to any rivalry in these lists. In Germany, the greatest writers are still too recent to institute a comparison ; and yet we are tempted to say that art and not life seems to be the end of their effort. But the idea of a purer existence than any he saw around him, to be real- ized in the life and conversation of men, inspired every act and every writing of John Milton. He defined the object of education to be, " to fit a man to perform justly, skilfully and magnanimously all the offices, both private and public, of peace and war." He declared that " he who would aspire to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought him- self to be a true poem ; that is, a composition and pattern of the best and honorablest things, not pre- suming to sing high praises of heroic men or famous cities, unless he have in himself the experience and the practice of all that which is praiseworthy." Nor is there in literature a more noble outline of a wise external education, than that which he drew up, at the age of thirty-six, in his Letter to Samuel Hartlib. The muscles, the nerves and the flesh with which this skeleton is to be filled up and cov- ered, exist in his works and must be sought there. 154 MILTON. For the delineation of this heroic image of man, Milton enjoyed singular advantages. Perfections of body and of mind are attributed to him by his biographers, that, if the anecdotes had come down from a greater distance of time, or had not been in part furnished or corroborated by political enemies, would lead us to suspect the portraits were ideal, like the Cyrus of Xenophon, the Telemachus of Fenelon, or the popular traditions of Alfred the Great. Handsome to a proverb, he was called the lady of his college. Aubrey says, " This harmonical and ingenuous soul dwelt in a beautiful and well-pro- portioned body." His manners and his carriage did him no injustice. Wood, his political opponent, relates that " his deportment was affable, his gait erect and manly, bespeaking courage and un- dauntedness." Aubrey adds a sharp trait, that "he pronounced the letter E very hard, a certain sign of satirical genius." He had the senses of a Greek. His eye was quick, and he was accounted an excel- lent master of his rapier. His ear for music was so acute, that he was not only enthusiastic in his love, but a skilful performer himself ; and his voice, we are told, was delicately sweet and harmonious. He insists that music shall make a part of a generous education. With these keen perceptions, he naturally re- MILTON. 155 ceived a love of nature and a rare susceptibility to impressions from external beauty. In the midst of London, he seems, like the creatures of the field and the forest, to have been tuned in concord with the order of the world ; for, he believed, his poetic vein only flowed from the autumnal to the vernal equinox ; and, in his essay on Education, he doubts whether, in the fine days of spring, any study can be accomplished by young men. " In those vernal seasons of the year when the air is calm and pleas- ant, it were an injury and sullenness against nature not to go out and see her riches and partake in her rejoicing with heaven and earth." His sensibility to impressions from beauty needs no proof from his history ; it shines through every page. The form and the voice of Leonora Baroni seemed to have captivated him in Rome, and to her he addressed his Italian sonnets and Latin epigrams. To these endowments it must be added that his address and his conversation were worthy of his fame. His house was resorted to by men of wit, and foreigners came to- England, we are told, " to see the Lord Protector and Mr. Milton." In a let- ter to one of his foreign correspondents, Emeric Bi- got, and in reply apparently to some compliment on his powers of conversation, he writes : " Many have been celebrated for their compositions, whose com- mon conversation and intercourse have betrayed no 156 MILTON. marks of sublimity or genius. But, as far as possi- ble, I aim to show myself equal in thought and speech to what I have written, if I have written anything well." These endowments received the benefit of a care- ful and happy discipline. His father's care, sec- onded by his own endeavor, introduced him to a profound skill in all the treasures of Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Italian tongues ; and, to enlarge and enliven his elegant learning, he was sent into Italy, where he beheld the remains of ancient art, and the rival works of Raphael, Michael Angelo and Correggio ; where, also, he received social and ac- ademical honors from the learned and the great. In Paris, he became acquainted with Grotius ; in Florence or Rome, with Galileo ; and probably no traveller ever entered that country of history with better right to its hospitality, none upon whom its influences could have fallen more congenially. Among the advantages of his foreign travel, Mil- ton certainly did not count it the least that it con- tributed to forge and polish that great weapon of which he acquired such extraordinary mastery, — his power of language. His lore of foreign tongues added daily to his consummate skill in the use of his own. He was a benefactor of the English tongue by showing its capabilities. Very early in life he became conscious that he had more to say to MILTON. 157 his fellow-men than they had fit words to embody. At nineteen years, in a college exercise, he ad- dresses his native language, saying to it that it would be his choice to leave trifles for a grave argu- ment, " Such as may make thee search thy coffers round, Before thou clothe my fancy in fit sound ; Such where the deep transported mind may soar Above the wheeling poles, and at Heaven's door Look in, and see each blissful deity, How he before the thunderous throne doth lie." Michael Angelo calls " him alone an artist, whose hands can execute what his mind has conceived." The world, no doubt, contains many of that class of men whom Wordsworth denominates " silent poets" whose minds teem with images which they want words to clothe. But Milton's mind seems to have no thought or emotion which refused to be recorded. His mastery of his native tongue was more than to use it as well as any other ; he cast it into new forms. He uttered in it things unheard before. Not imitating but rivalling Shakspeare, he scattered, in tones of prolonged and delicate mel- ody, his pastoral and romantic fancies ; then, soar- ing into unattempted strains, he made it capable of an unknown majesty, and bent it to express every trait of beauty, every shade of thought ; and searched the kennel and jakes as well as the palaces 158 MILTON. of sound for the harsh discords of his polemic wrath. We may even apply to his performance on the in- strument of language, his own description of music ; " — Notes, with many a winding bout Of linked sweetness long drawn out, With wanton heed and giddy cunning, The melting voice through mazes running, Untwisting all the chains that tie The hidden soul of harmony." But, whilst Milton was conscious of possessing this intellectual voice, penetrating through ages and propelling its melodious undulations forward through the coming world, he knew that this mas- tery of language was a secondary power, and he re- spected the mysterious source whence it had its spring; namely, clear conceptions and a devoted / heart. " For me," he said, in his " Apology for \ Smectymnuus," " although I cannot say that I am utterly untrained in those rules which best rhetori- cians have given, or unacquainted with those exam- ples which the prime authors of eloquence have written in any learned tongue, yet true eloquence I find to be none but the serious and hearty love of truth ; and that whose mind soever is fully pos- sessed with a fervent desire to know good things, and with the dearest charity to infuse the knowl- edge of them into others, when such a man would speak, his words, by what I can express, like so MILTON. 159 many nimble and airy servitors, trip about him at command, and in well-ordered files, as he would wish, fall aptly into their own places." J But, as basis or fountain of his rare physical and intellectual accomplishments, the man Milton was just and devout. He is rightly dear to man- kind, because in him, among so many perverse and partial men of genius, — in him humanity rights itself ; the old eternal goodness finds a home in his breast, and for once shows itself beautiful. His gifts are subordinated to his moral sentiments. And his virtues are so graceful that they seem rather talents than labors. Among so many con- trivances as the world has seen to make holiness ugly, in Milton at least it was so pure a flame, that the foremost impression his character makes is that of elegance. The victories of the conscience in him are gained by the commanding charm which all the severe and restrictive virtues have for him. His virtues remind us of what Plutarch said of Timoleon's victories, that they resembled Homer's verses, they ran so easy and natural. His habits of living were austere. He was abstemious in diet, chaste, an early riser, and industrious. He tells us, in a Latin poem, that the lyrist may indulge in wine and in a freer life; but that he who would write an epic to the nations, must eat beans and drink water. Yet in his severity is no grimace or 160 MILTON. effort. He serves from love, not from fear. He is innocent and exact, because his taste was so pure and delicate. He acknowledges to his friend Dio- dati, at the age of twenty-one, that he is enamored, if ever any was, of moral perfection : " For, what- ever the Deity may have bestowed upon me in other respects, he has certainly inspired me, if any ever were inspired, with a passion for the good and fair. Nor did Ceres, according to the fable, ever seek her daughter Proserpine with such unceasing solicitude, as I have sought this tov k