HISTORY

         -----

         There is no great and no small

        To the Soul that maketh all:

        And where it cometh, all things are;

        And it cometh everywhere.

 

        I am owner of the sphere,

        Of the seven stars and the solar year,

        Of Caesar"s hand, and Plato"s brain,

        Of Lord Christ"s heart, and Shakspeare"s strain.

 

                          ESSAY I  History

 

        There is one mind common to all individual men.  Every man is

an inlet to the same and to all of the same.  He that is once

admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole

estate.  What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt,

he may feel; what at any time has be-fallen any man, he can

understand.  Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all

that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent.

        Of the works of this mind history is the record.  Its genius is

illustrated by the entire series of days.  Man is explicable by

nothing less than all his history.  Without hurry, without rest, the

human spirit goes forth from the beginning to embody every faculty,

every thought, every emotion, which belongs to it in appropriate

events.  But the thought is always prior to the fact; all the facts

of history preexist in the mind as laws.  Each law in turn is made by

circumstances predominant, and the limits of nature give power to but

one at a time.  A man is the whole encyclopaedia of facts.  The

creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece,

Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man.

Epoch after epoch, camp, kingdom, empire, republic, democracy, are

merely the application of his manifold spirit to the manifold world.

        This human mind wrote history, and this must read it.  The

Sphinx must solve her own riddle.  If the whole of history is in one

man, it is all to be explained from individual experience.  There is

a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time.

As the air I breathe is drawn from the great repositories of nature,

as the light on my book is yielded by a star a hundred millions of

miles distant, as the poise of my body depends on the equilibrium of

centrifugal and centripetal forces, so the hours should be instructed

by the ages, and the ages explained by the hours.  Of the universal

mind each individual man is one more incarnation.  All its properties

consist in him.  Each new fact in his private experience flashes a

light on what great bodies of men have done, and the crises of his

life refer to national crises.  Every revolution was first a thought

in one man"s mind, and when the same thought occurs to another man,

it is the key to that era.  Every reform was once a private opinion,

and when it shall be a private opinion again, it will solve the

problem of the age.  The fact narrated must correspond to something

in me to be credible or intelligible.  We as we read must become

Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner, must

fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we

shall learn nothing rightly.  What befell Asdrubal or Caesar Borgia

is as much an illustration of the mind"s powers and depravations as

what has befallen us.  Each new law and political movement has

meaning for you.  Stand before each of its tablets and say, `Under

this mask did my Proteus nature hide itself." This remedies the

defect of our too great nearness to ourselves.  This throws our

actions into perspective: and as crabs, goats, scorpions, the

balance, and the waterpot lose their meanness when hung as signs in

the zodiac, so I can see my own vices without heat in the distant

persons of Solomon, Alcibiades, and Catiline.

        It is the universal nature which gives worth to particular men

and things.  Human life as containing this is mysterious and

inviolable, and we hedge it round with penalties and laws.  All laws

derive hence their ultimate reason; all express more or less

distinctly some command of this supreme, illimitable essence.

Property also holds of the soul, covers great spiritual facts, and

instinctively we at first hold to it with swords and laws, and wide

and complex combinations.  The obscure consciousness of this fact is

the light of all our day, the claim of claims; the plea for

education, for justice, for charity, the foundation of friendship and

love, and of the heroism and grandeur which belong to acts of

self-reliance.  It is remarkable that involuntarily we always read as

superior beings.  Universal history, the poets, the romancers, do not

in their stateliest pictures -- in the sacerdotal, the imperial

palaces, in the triumphs of will or of genius -- anywhere lose our

ear, anywhere make us feel that we intrude, that this is for better

men; but rather is it true, that in their grandest strokes we feel

most at home.  All that Shakspeare says of the king, yonder slip of a

boy that reads in the corner feels to be true of himself.  We

sympathize in the great moments of history, in the great discoveries,

the great resistances, the great prosperities of men; -- because

there law was enacted, the sea was searched, the land was found, or

the blow was struck _for us_, as we ourselves in that place would

have done or applauded.

       We have the same interest in condition and character.  We honor

the rich, because they have externally the freedom, power, and grace

which we feel to be proper to man, proper to us.  So all that is said

of the wise man by Stoic, or oriental or modern essayist, describes

to each reader his own idea, describes his unattained but attainable

self.  All literature writes the character of the wise man.  Books,

monuments, pictures, conversation, are portraits in which he finds

the lineaments he is forming.  The silent and the eloquent praise him

and accost him, and he is stimulated wherever he moves as by personal

allusions.  A true aspirant, therefore, never needs look for

allusions personal and laudatory in discourse.  He hears the

commendation, not of himself, but more sweet, of that character he

seeks, in every word that is said concerning character, yea, further,

in every fact and circumstance, -- in the running river and the

rustling corn.  Praise is looked, homage tendered, love flows from

mute nature, from the mountains and the lights of the firmament.

        These hints, dropped as it were from sleep and night, let us

use in broad day.  The student is to read history actively and not

passively; to esteem his own life the text, and books the commentary.

Thus compelled, the Muse of history will utter oracles, as never to

those who do not respect themselves.  I have no expectation that any

man will read history aright, who thinks that what was done in a

remote age, by men whose names have resounded far, has any deeper

sense than what he is doing to-day.

        The world exists for the education of each man.  There is no

age or state of society or mode of action in history, to which there

is not somewhat corresponding in his life.  Every thing tends in a

wonderful manner to abbreviate itself and yield its own virtue to

him.  He should see that he can live all history in his own person.

He must sit solidly at home, and not suffer himself to be bullied by

kings or empires, but know that he is greater than all the geography

and all the government of the world; he must transfer the point of

view from which history is commonly read, from Rome and Athens and

London to himself, and not deny his conviction that he is the court,

and if England or Egypt have any thing to say to him, he will try the

case; if not, let them for ever be silent.  He must attain and

maintain that lofty sight where facts yield their secret sense, and

poetry and annals are alike.  The instinct of the mind, the purpose

of nature, betrays itself in the use we make of the signal narrations

of history.  Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of

facts.  No anchor, no cable, no fences, avail to keep a fact a fact.

Babylon, Troy, Tyre, Palestine, and even early Rome, are passing

already into fiction.  The Garden of Eden, the sun standing still in

Gibeon, is poetry thenceforward to all nations.  Who cares what the

fact was, when we have made a constellation of it to hang in heaven

an immortal sign?  London and Paris and New York must go the same

way.  "What is History," said Napoleon, "but a fable agreed upon?"

This life of ours is stuck round with Egypt, Greece, Gaul, England,

War, Colonization, Church, Court, and Commerce, as with so many

flowers and wild ornaments grave and gay.  I will not make more

account of them.  I believe in Eternity.  I can find Greece, Asia,

Italy, Spain, and the Islands, -- the genius and creative principle

of each and of all eras in my own mind.

        We are always coming up with the emphatic facts of history in

our private experience, and verifying them here.  All history becomes

subjective; in other words, there is properly no history; only

biography.  Every mind must know the whole lesson for itself, -- must

go over the whole ground.  What it does not see, what it does not

live, it will not know.  What the former age has epitomized into a

formula or rule for manipular convenience, it will lose all the good

of verifying for itself, by means of the wall of that rule.

Somewhere, sometime, it will demand and find compensation for that

loss by doing the work itself.  Ferguson discovered many things in

astronomy which had long been known.  The better for him.

        History must be this or it is nothing.  Every law which the

state enacts indicates a fact in human nature; that is all.  We must

in ourselves see the necessary reason of every fact, -- see how it

could and must be.  So stand before every public and private work;

before an oration of Burke, before a victory of Napoleon, before a

martyrdom of Sir Thomas More, of Sidney, of Marmaduke Robinson,

before a French Reign of Terror, and a Salem hanging of witches,

before a fanatic Revival, and the Animal Magnetism in Paris, or in

Providence.  We assume that we under like influence should be alike

affected, and should achieve the like; and we aim to master

intellectually the steps, and reach the same height or the same

degradation, that our fellow, our proxy, has done.

        All inquiry into antiquity, -- all curiosity respecting the

Pyramids, the excavated cities, Stonehenge, the Ohio Circles, Mexico,

Memphis, -- is the desire to do away this wild, savage, and

preposterous There or Then, and introduce in its place the Here and

the Now.  Belzoni digs and measures in the mummy-pits and pyramids of

Thebes, until he can see the end of the difference between the

monstrous work and himself.  When he has satisfied himself, in

general and in detail, that it was made by such a person as he, so

armed and so motived, and to ends to which he himself should also

have worked, the problem is solved; his thought lives along the whole

line of temples and sphinxes and catacombs, passes through them all

with satisfaction, and they live again to the mind, or are _now_.

       A Gothic cathedral affirms that it was done by us, and not done

by us.  Surely it was by man, but we find it not in our man.  But we

apply ourselves to the history of its production.  We put ourselves

into the place and state of the builder.  We remember the

forest-dwellers, the first temples, the adherence to the first type,

and the decoration of it as the wealth of the nation increased; the

value which is given to wood by carving led to the carving over the

whole mountain of stone of a cathedral.  When we have gone through

this process, and added thereto the Catholic Church, its cross, its

music, its processions, its Saints" days and image-worship, we have,

as it were, been the man that made the minster; we have seen how it

could and must be.  We have the sufficient reason.

        The difference between men is in their principle of

association.  Some men classify objects by color and size and other

accidents of appearance; others by intrinsic likeness, or by the

relation of cause and effect.  The progress of the intellect is to

the clearer vision of causes, which neglects surface differences.  To

the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly

and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine.

For the eye is fastened on the life, and slights the circumstance.

Every chemical substance, every plant, every animal in its growth,

teaches the unity of cause, the variety of appearance.

      Upborne and surrounded as we are by this all-creating nature,

soft and fluid as a cloud or the air, why should we be such hard

pedants, and magnify a few forms?  Why should we make account of

time, or of magnitude, or of figure?  The soul knows them not, and

genius, obeying its law, knows how to play with them as a young child

plays with graybeards and in churches.  Genius studies the causal

thought, and, far back in the womb of things, sees the rays parting

from one orb, that diverge ere they fall by infinite diameters.

Genius watches the monad through all his masks as he performs the

metempsychosis of nature.  Genius detects through the fly, through

the caterpillar, through the grub, through the egg, the constant

individual; through countless individuals, the fixed species; through

many species, the genus; through all genera, the steadfast type;

through all the kingdoms of organized life, the eternal unity.

Nature is a mutable cloud, which is always and never the same.  She

casts the same thought into troops of forms, as a poet makes twenty

fables with one moral.  Through the bruteness and toughness of

matter, a subtle spirit bends all things to its own will.  The

adamant streams into soft but precise form before it, and, whilst I

look at it, its outline and texture are changed again.  Nothing is so

fleeting as form; yet never does it quite deny itself.  In man we

still trace the remains or hints of all that we esteem badges of

servitude in the lower races; yet in him they enhance his nobleness

and grace; as Io, in Aeschylus, transformed to a cow, offends the

imagination; but how changed, when as Isis in Egypt she meets

Osiris-Jove, a beautiful woman, with nothing of the metamorphosis

left but the lunar horns as the splendid ornament of her brows!

        The identity of history is equally intrinsic, the diversity

equally obvious.  There is at the surface infinite variety of things;

at the centre there is simplicity of cause.  How many are the acts of

one man in which we recognize the same character!  Observe the

sources of our information in respect to the Greek genius.  We have

the _civil history_ of that people, as Herodotus, Thucydides,

Xenophon, and Plutarch have given it; a very sufficient account of

what manner of persons they were, and what they did.  We have the

same national mind expressed for us again in their _literature_, in

epic and lyric poems, drama, and philosophy; a very complete form.

Then we have it once more in their _architecture_, a beauty as of

temperance itself, limited to the straight line and the square, -- a

builded geometry.  Then we have it once again in _sculpture_, the

"tongue on the balance of expression," a multitude of forms in the

utmost freedom of action, and never transgressing the ideal serenity;

like votaries performing some religious dance before the gods, and,

though in convulsive pain or mortal combat, never daring to break the

figure and decorum of their dance.  Thus, of the genius of one

remarkable people, we have a fourfold representation: and to the

senses what more unlike than an ode of Pindar, a marble centaur, the

peristyle of the Parthenon, and the last actions of Phocion?

       Every one must have observed faces and forms which, without any

resembling feature, make a like impression on the beholder.  A

particular picture or copy of verses, if it do not awaken the same

train of images, will yet superinduce the same sentiment as some wild

mountain walk, although the resemblance is nowise obvious to the

senses, but is occult and out of the reach of the understanding.

Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws.

She hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations.

 

        Nature is full of a sublime family likeness throughout her

works; and delights in startling us with resemblances in the most

unexpected quarters.  I have seen the head of an old sachem of the

forest, which at once reminded the eye of a bald mountain summit, and

the furrows of the brow suggested the strata of the rock.  There are

men whose manners have the same essential splendor as the simple and

awful sculpture on the friezes of the Parthenon, and the remains of

the earliest Greek art.  And there are compositions of the same

strain to be found in the books of all ages.  What is Guido"s

Rospigliosi Aurora but a morning thought, as the horses in it are

only a morning cloud.  If any one will but take pains to observe the

variety of actions to which he is equally inclined in certain moods

of mind, and those to which he is averse, he will see how deep is the

chain of affinity.

     A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree without in some

sort becoming a tree; or draw a child by studying the outlines of its

form merely, -- but, by watching for a time his motions and plays,

the painter enters into his nature, and can then draw him at will in

every attitude.  So Roos "entered into the inmost nature of a sheep."

I knew a draughtsman employed in a public survey, who found that he

could not sketch the rocks until their geological structure was first

explained to him.  In a certain state of thought is the common origin

of very diverse works.  It is the spirit and not the fact that is

identical.  By a deeper apprehension, and not primarily by a painful

acquisition of many manual skills, the artist attains the power of

awakening other souls to a given activity.

        It has been said, that "common souls pay with what they do;

nobler souls with that which they are." And why?  Because a profound

nature awakens in us by its actions and words, by its very looks and

manners, the same power and beauty that a gallery of sculpture, or of

pictures, addresses.

        Civil and natural history, the history of art and of

literature, must be explained from individual history, or must remain

words.  There is nothing but is related to us, nothing that does not

interest us, -- kingdom, college, tree, horse, or iron shoe, the

roots of all things are in man.  Santa Croce and the Dome of St.

Peter"s are lame copies after a divine model.  Strasburg Cathedral is

a material counterpart of the soul of Erwin of Steinbach.  The true

poem is the poet"s mind; the true ship is the ship-builder.  In the

man, could we lay him open, we should see the reason for the last

flourish and tendril of his work; as every spine and tint in the

sea-shell preexist in the secreting organs of the fish.  The whole of

heraldry and of chivalry is in courtesy.  A man of fine manners shall

pronounce your name with all the ornament that titles of nobility

could ever add.

    The trivial experience of every day is always verifying some

old prediction to us, and converting into things the words and signs

which we had heard and seen without heed.  A lady, with whom I was

riding in the forest, said to me, that the woods always seemed to her

_to wait_, as if the genii who inhabit them suspended their deeds

until the wayfarer has passed onward: a thought which poetry has

celebrated in the dance of the fairies, which breaks off on the

approach of human feet.  The man who has seen the rising moon break

out of the clouds at midnight has been present like an archangel at

the creation of light and of the world.  I remember one summer day,

in the fields, my companion pointed out to me a broad cloud, which

might extend a quarter of a mile parallel to the horizon, quite

accurately in the form of a cherub as painted over churches, -- a

round block in the centre, which it was easy to animate with eyes and

mouth, supported on either side by wide-stretched symmetrical wings.

What appears once in the atmosphere may appear often, and it was

undoubtedly the archetype of that familiar ornament.  I have seen in

the sky a chain of summer lightning which at once showed to me that

the Greeks drew from nature when they painted the thunderbolt in the

hand of Jove.  I have seen a snow-drift along the sides of the stone

wall which obviously gave the idea of the common architectural scroll

to abut a tower.

        By surrounding ourselves with the original circumstances, we

invent anew the orders and the ornaments of architecture, as we see

how each people merely decorated its primitive abodes.  The Doric

temple preserves the semblance of the wooden cabin in which the

Dorian dwelt.  The Chinese pagoda is plainly a Tartar tent.  The

Indian and Egyptian temples still betray the mounds and subterranean

houses of their forefathers.  "The custom of making houses and tombs

in the living rock," says Heeren, in his Researches on the

Ethiopians, "determined very naturally the principal character of the

Nubian Egyptian architecture to the colossal form which it assumed.

In these caverns, already prepared by nature, the eye was accustomed

to dwell on huge shapes and masses, so that, when art came to the

assistance of nature, it could not move on a small scale without

degrading itself.  What would statues of the usual size, or neat

porches and wings, have been, associated with those gigantic halls

before which only Colossi could sit as watchmen, or lean on the

pillars of the interior?"

        The Gothic church plainly originated in a rude adaptation of

the forest trees with all their boughs to a festal or solemn arcade,

as the bands about the cleft pillars still indicate the green withes

that tied them.  No one can walk in a road cut through pine woods,

without being struck with the architectural appearance of the grove,

especially in winter, when the bareness of all other trees shows the

low arch of the Saxons.  In the woods in a winter afternoon one will

see as readily the origin of the stained glass window, with which the

Gothic cathedrals are adorned, in the colors of the western sky seen

through the bare and crossing branches of the forest.  Nor can any

lover of nature enter the old piles of Oxford and the English

cathedrals, without feeling that the forest overpowered the mind of

the builder, and that his chisel, his saw, and plane still reproduced

its ferns, its spikes of flowers, its locust, elm, oak, pine, fir,

and spruce.

        The Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in stone subdued by the

insatiable demand of harmony in man.  The mountain of granite blooms

into an eternal flower, with the lightness and delicate finish, as

well as the aerial proportions and perspective, of vegetable beauty.

        In like manner, all public facts are to be individualized, all

private facts are to be generalized.  Then at once History becomes

fluid and true, and Biography deep and sublime.  As the Persian

imitated in the slender shafts and capitals of his architecture the

stem and flower of the lotus and palm, so the Persian court in its

magnificent era never gave over the nomadism of its barbarous tribes,

but travelled from Ecbatana, where the spring was spent, to Susa in

summer, and to Babylon for the winter.

        In the early history of Asia and Africa, Nomadism and

Agriculture are the two antagonist facts.  The geography of Asia and

of Africa necessitated a nomadic life.  But the nomads were the

terror of all those whom the soil, or the advantages of a market, had

induced to build towns.  Agriculture, therefore, was a religious

injunction, because of the perils of the state from nomadism.  And in

these late and civil countries of England and America, these

propensities still fight out the old battle in the nation and in the

individual.  The nomads of Africa were constrained to wander by the

attacks of the gad-fly, which drives the cattle mad, and so compels

the tribe to emigrate in the rainy season, and to drive off the

cattle to the higher sandy regions.  The nomads of Asia follow the

pasturage from month to month.  In America and Europe, the nomadism

is of trade and curiosity; a progress, certainly, from the gad-fly of

Astaboras to the Anglo and Italo-mania of Boston Bay.  Sacred cities,

to which a periodical religious pilgrimage was enjoined, or stringent

laws and customs, tending to invigorate the national bond, were the

check on the old rovers; and the cumulative values of long residence

are the restraints on the itineracy of the present day.  The

antagonism of the two tendencies is not less active in individuals,

as the love of adventure or the love of repose happens to

predominate.  A man of rude health and flowing spirits has the

faculty of rapid domestication, lives in his wagon, and roams through

all latitudes as easily as a Calmuc.  At sea, or in the forest, or in

the snow, he sleeps as warm, dines with as good appetite, and

associates as happily, as beside his own chimneys.  Or perhaps his

facility is deeper seated, in the increased range of his faculties of

observation, which yield him points of interest wherever fresh

objects meet his eyes.  The pastoral nations were needy and hungry to

desperation; and this intellectual nomadism, in its excess, bankrupts

the mind, through the dissipation of power on a miscellany of

objects.  The home-keeping wit, on the other hand, is that continence

or content which finds all the elements of life in its own soil; and

which has its own perils of monotony and deterioration, if not

stimulated by foreign infusions.

        Every thing the individual sees without him corresponds to his

states of mind, and every thing is in turn intelligible to him, as

his onward thinking leads him into the truth to which that fact or

series belongs.

        The primeval world, -- the Fore-World, as the Germans say, -- I

can dive to it in myself as well as grope for it with researching

fingers in catacombs, libraries, and the broken reliefs and torsos of

ruined villas.

        What is the foundation of that interest all men feel in Greek

history, letters, art, and poetry, in all its periods, from the

Heroic or Homeric age down to the domestic life of the Athenians and

Spartans, four or five centuries later?  What but this, that every

man passes personally through a Grecian period.  The Grecian state is

the era of the bodily nature, the perfection of the senses, -- of the

spiritual nature unfolded in strict unity with the body.  In it

existed those human forms which supplied the sculptor with his models

of Hercules, Ph;oebus, and Jove; not like the forms abounding in the

streets of modern cities, wherein the face is a confused blur of

features, but composed of incorrupt, sharply defined, and symmetrical

features, whose eye-sockets are so formed that it would be impossible

for such eyes to squint, and take furtive glances on this side and on

that, but they must turn the whole head.  The manners of that period

are plain and fierce.  The reverence exhibited is for personal

qualities, courage, address, self-command, justice, strength,

swiftness, a loud voice, a broad chest.  Luxury and elegance are not

known.  A sparse population and want make every man his own valet,

cook, butcher, and soldier, and the habit of supplying his own needs

educates the body to wonderful performances.  Such are the Agamemnon

and Diomed of Homer, and not far different is the picture Xenophon

gives of himself and his compatriots in the Retreat of the Ten

Thousand.  "After the army had crossed the river Teleboas in Armenia,

there fell much snow, and the troops lay miserably on the ground

covered with it.  But Xenophon arose naked, and, taking an axe, began

to split wood; whereupon others rose and did the like."  Throughout

his army exists a boundless liberty of speech.  They quarrel for

plunder, they wrangle with the generals on each new order, and

Xenophon is as sharp-tongued as any, and sharper-tongued than most,

and so gives as good as he gets.  Who does not see that this is a

gang of great boys, with such a code of honor and such lax discipline

as great boys have?

        The costly charm of the ancient tragedy, and indeed of all the

old literature, is, that the persons speak simply, -- speak as

persons who have great good sense without knowing it, before yet the

reflective habit has become the predominant habit of the mind.  Our

admiration of the antique is not admiration of the old, but of the

natural.  The Greeks are not reflective, but perfect in their senses

and in their health, with the finest physical organization in the

world.  Adults acted with the simplicity and grace of children.  They

made vases, tragedies, and statues, such as healthy senses

should,---- that is, in good taste.  Such things have continued to be

made in all ages, and are now, wherever a healthy physique exists;

but, as a class, from their superior organization, they have

surpassed all.  They combine the energy of manhood with the engaging

unconsciousness of childhood.  The attraction of these manners is

that they belong to man, and are known to every man in virtue of his

being once a child; besides that there are always individuals who

retain these characteristics.  A person of childlike genius and

inborn energy is still a Greek, and revives our love of the Muse of

Hellas.  I admire the love of nature in the Philoctetes.  In reading

those fine apostrophes to sleep, to the stars, rocks, mountains, and

waves, I feel time passing away as an ebbing sea.  I feel the

eternity of man, the identity of his thought.  The Greek had, it

seems, the same fellow-beings as I.  The sun and moon, water and

fire, met his heart precisely as they meet mine.  Then the vaunted

distinction between Greek and English, between Classic and Romantic

schools, seems superficial and pedantic.  When a thought of Plato

becomes a thought to me, -- when a truth that fired the soul of

Pindar fires mine, time is no more.  When I feel that we two meet in

a perception, that our two souls are tinged with the same hue, and

do, as it were, run into one, why should I measure degrees of

latitude, why should I count Egyptian years?

        The student interprets the age of chivalry by his own age of

chivalry, and the days of maritime adventure and circumnavigation by

quite parallel miniature experiences of his own.  To the sacred

history of the world, he has the same key.  When the voice of a

prophet out of the deeps of antiquity merely echoes to him a

sentiment of his infancy, a prayer of his youth, he then pierces to

the truth through all the confusion of tradition and the caricature

of institutions.

        Rare, extravagant spirits come by us at intervals, who disclose

to us new facts in nature.  I see that men of God have, from time to

time, walked among men and made their commission felt in the heart

and soul of the commonest hearer.  Hence, evidently, the tripod, the

priest, the priestess inspired by the divine afflatus.

        Jesus astonishes and overpowers sensual people.  They cannot

unite him to history, or reconcile him with themselves.  As they come

to revere their intuitions and aspire to live holily, their own piety

explains every fact, every word.

        How easily these old worships of Moses, of Zoroaster, of Menu,

of Socrates, domesticate themselves in the mind.  I cannot find any

antiquity in them.  They are mine as much as theirs.

        I have seen the first monks and anchorets without crossing seas

or centuries.  More than once some individual has appeared to me with

such negligence of labor and such commanding contemplation, a haughty

beneficiary, begging in the name of God, as made good to the

nineteenth century Simeon the Stylite, the Thebais, and the first

Capuchins.

        The priestcraft of the East and West, of the Magian, Brahmin,

Druid, and Inca, is expounded in the individual"s private life.  The

cramping influence of a hard formalist on a young child in repressing

his spirits and courage, paralyzing the understanding, and that

without producing indignation, but only fear and obedience, and even

much sympathy with the tyranny, -- is a familiar fact explained to

the child when he becomes a man, only by seeing that the oppressor of

his youth is himself a child tyrannized over by those names and words

and forms, of whose influence he was merely the organ to the youth.

The fact teaches him how Belus was worshipped, and how the Pyramids

were built, better than the discovery by Champollion of the names of

all the workmen and the cost of every tile.  He finds Assyria and the

Mounds of Cholula at his door, and himself has laid the courses.

        Again, in that protest which each considerate person makes

against the superstition of his times, he repeats step for step the

part of old reformers, and in the search after truth finds like them

new perils to virtue.  He learns again what moral vigor is needed to

supply the girdle of a superstition.  A great licentiousness treads

on the heels of a reformation.  How many times in the history of the

world has the Luther of the day had to lament the decay of piety in

 

his own household!  "Doctor," said his wife to Martin Luther, one

day, "how is it that, whilst subject to papacy, we prayed so often

and with such fervor, whilst now we pray with the utmost coldness and

very seldom?"

        The advancing man discovers how deep a property he has in

literature, -- in all fable as well as in all history.  He finds that

the poet was no odd fellow who described strange and impossible

situations, but that universal man wrote by his pen a confession true

for one and true for all.  His own secret biography he finds in lines

wonderfully intelligible to him, dotted down before he was born.  One

after another he comes up in his private adventures with every fable

of Aesop, of Homer, of Hafiz, of Ariosto, of Chaucer, of Scott, and

verifies them with his own head and hands.

        The beautiful fables of the Greeks, being proper creations of

the imagination and not of the fancy, are universal verities.  What a

range of meanings and what perpetual pertinence has the story of

Prometheus!  Beside its primary value as the first chapter of the

history of Europe, (the mythology thinly veiling authentic facts, the

invention of the mechanic arts, and the migration of colonies,) it

gives the history of religion with some closeness to the faith of

later ages.  Prometheus is the Jesus of the old mythology.  He is the

friend of man; stands between the unjust "justice" of the Eternal

Father and the race of mortals, and readily suffers all things on

their account.  But where it departs from the Calvinistic

Christianity, and exhibits him as the defier of Jove, it represents a

state of mind which readily appears wherever the doctrine of Theism

is taught in a crude, objective form, and which seems the

self-defence of man against this untruth, namely, a discontent with

the believed fact that a God exists, and a feeling that the

obligation of reverence is onerous.  It would steal, if it could, the

fire of the Creator, and live apart from him, and independent of him.

The Prometheus Vinctus is the romance of skepticism.  Not less true

to all time are the details of that stately apologue.  Apollo kept

the flocks of Admetus, said the poets.  When the gods come among men,

they are not known.  Jesus was not; Socrates and Shakspeare were not.

Antaeus was suffocated by the gripe of Hercules, but every time he

touched his mother earth, his strength was renewed.  Man is the

broken giant, and, in all his weakness, both his body and his mind

are invigorated by habits of conversation with nature.  The power of

music, the power of poetry to unfix, and, as it were, clap wings to

solid nature, interprets the riddle of Orpheus.  The philosophical

perception of identity through endless mutations of form makes him

know the Proteus.  What else am I who laughed or wept yesterday, who

slept last night like a corpse, and this morning stood and ran?  And

what see I on any side but the transmigrations of Proteus?  I can

symbolize my thought by using the name of any creature, of any fact,

because every creature is man agent or patient.  Tantalus is but a

name for you and me.  Tantalus means the impossibility of drinking

the waters of thought which are always gleaming and waving within

sight of the soul.  The transmigration of souls is no fable.  I would

it were; but men and women are only half human.  Every animal of the

barn-yard, the field, and the forest, of the earth and of the waters

that are under the earth, has contrived to get a footing and to leave

the print of its features and form in some one or other of these

upright, heaven-facing speakers.  Ah! brother, stop the ebb of thy

soul, -- ebbing downward into the forms into whose habits thou hast

now for many years slid.  As near and proper to us is also that old

fable of the Sphinx, who was said to sit in the road-side and put

riddles to every passenger.  If the man could not answer, she

swallowed him alive.  If he could solve the riddle, the Sphinx was

slain.  What is our life but an endless flight of winged facts or

events!  In splendid variety these changes come, all putting

questions to the human spirit.  Those men who cannot answer by a

superior wisdom these facts or questions of time, serve them.  Facts

encumber them, tyrannize over them, and make the men of routine the

men of _sense_, in whom a literal obedience to facts has extinguished

every spark of that light by which man is truly man.  But if the man

is true to his better instincts or sentiments, and refuses the

dominion of facts, as one that comes of a higher race, remains fast

by the soul and sees the principle, then the facts fall aptly and

supple into their places; they know their master, and the meanest of

them glorifies him.

        See in Goethe"s Helena the same desire that every word should

be a thing.  These figures, he would say, these Chirons, Griffins,

Phorkyas, Helen, and Leda, are somewhat, and do exert a specific

influence on the mind.  So far then are they eternal entities, as

real to-day as in the first Olympiad.  Much revolving them, he writes

out freely his humor, and gives them body tohis own imagination.  And

although that poem be as vague and fantastic as a dream, yet is it

much more attractive than the more regular dramatic pieces of the

same author, for the reason that it operates a wonderful relief to

the mind from the routine of customary images, -- awakens the

reader"s invention and fancy by the wild freedom of the design, and

by the unceasing succession of brisk shocks of surprise.

        The universal nature, too strong for the petty nature of the

bard, sits on his neck and writes through his hand; so that when he

seems to vent a mere caprice and wild romance, the issue is an exact

allegory.  Hence Plato said that "poets utter great and wise things

which they do not themselves understand." All the fictions of the

Middle Age explain themselves as a masked or frolic expression of

that which in grave earnest the mind of that period toiled to

achieve.  Magic, and all that is ascribed to it, is a deep

presentiment of the powers of science.  The shoes of swiftness, the

sword of sharpness, the power of subduing the elements, of using the

secret virtues of minerals, of understanding the voices of birds, are

the obscure efforts of the mind in a right direction.  The

preternatural prowess of the hero, the gift of perpetual youth, and

the like, are alike the endeavour of the human spirit "to bend the

shows of things to the desires of the mind."

        In Perceforest and Amadis de Gaul, a garland and a rose bloom

on the head of her who is faithful, and fade on the brow of the

inconstant.  In the story of the Boy and the Mantle, even a mature

reader may be surprised with a glow of virtuous pleasure at the

triumph of the gentle Genelas; and, indeed, all the postulates of

elfin annals, -- that the fairies do not like to be named; that their

gifts are capricious and not to be trusted; that who seeks a treasure

must not speak; and the like, -- I find true in Concord, however they

might be in Cornwall or Bretagne.

        Is it otherwise in the newest romance?  I read the Bride of

Lammermoor.  Sir William Ashton is a mask for a vulgar temptation,

Ravenswood Castle a fine name for proud poverty, and the foreign

mission of state only a Bunyan disguise for honest industry.  We may

all shoot a wild bull that would toss the good and beautiful, by

fighting down the unjust and sensual.  Lucy Ashton is another name

for fidelity, which is always beautiful and always liable to calamity

in this world.

        -----------

        But along with the civil and metaphysical history of man,

another history goes daily forward, -- that of the external world, --

in which he is not less strictly implicated.  He is the compend of

time; he is also the correlative of nature.  His power consists in

the multitude of his affinities, in the fact that his life is

intertwined with the whole chain of organic and inorganic being.  In

old Rome the public roads beginning at the Forum proceeded north,

south, east, west, to the centre of every province of the empire,

making each market-town of Persia, Spain, and Britain pervious to the

soldiers of the capital: so out of the human heart go, as it were,

highways to the heart of every object in nature, to reduce it under

the dominion of man.  A man is a bundle of relations, a knot of

roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world.  His faculties refer

to natures out of him, and predict the world he is to inhabit, as the

fins of the fish foreshow that water exists, or the wings of an eagle

in the egg presuppose air.  He cannot live without a world.  Put

Napoleon in an island prison, let his faculties find no men to act

on, no Alps to climb, no stake to play for, and he would beat the air

and appear stupid.  Transport him to large countries, dense

population, complex interests, and antagonist power, and you shall

see that the man Napoleon, bounded, that is, by such a profile and

outline, is not the virtual Napoleon.  This is but Talbot"s shadow;

                "His substance is not here:

        For what you see is but the smallest part

        And least proportion of humanity;

        But were the whole frame here,

       It is of such a spacious, lofty pitch,

        Your roof were not sufficient to contain it."

        _Henry VI._

        Columbus needs a planet to shape his course upon.  Newton and

Laplace need myriads of ages and thick-strewn celestial areas.  One

may say a gravitating solar system is already prophesied in the

nature of Newton"s mind.  Not less does the brain of Davy or of

Gay-Lussac, from childhood exploring the affinities and repulsions of

particles, anticipate the laws of organization.  Does not the eye of

the human embryo predict the light? the ear of Handel predict the

witchcraft of harmonic sound?  Do not the constructive fingers of

Watt, Fulton, Whittemore, Arkwright, predict the fusible, hard, and

temperable texture of metals, the properties of stone, water, and

wood?  Do not the lovely attributes of the maiden child predict the

refinements and decorations of civil society?  Here also we are

reminded of the action of man on man.  A mind might ponder its

thought for ages, and not gain so much self-knowledge as the passion

of love shall teach it in a day.  Who knows himself before he has

been thrilled with indignation at an outrage, or has heard an

eloquent tongue, or has shared the throb of thousands in a national

exultation or alarm?  No man can antedate his experience, or guess

what faculty or feeling a new object shall unlock, any more than he

can draw to-day the face of a person whom he shall see to-morrow for

the first time.

        I will not now go behind the general statement to explore the

reason of this correspondency.  Let it suffice that in the light of

these two facts, namely, that the mind is One, and that nature is its

correlative, history is to be read and written.

        Thus in all ways does the soul concentrate and reproduce its

treasures for each pupil.  He, too, shall pass through the whole

cycle of experience.  He shall collect into a focus the rays of

nature.  History no longer shall be a dull book.  It shall walk

incarnate in every just and wise man.  You shall not tell me by

languages and titles a catalogue of the volumes you have read.  You

shall make me feel what periods you have lived.  A man shall be the

Temple of Fame.  He shall walk, as the poets have described that

goddess, in a robe painted all over with wonderful events and

experiences; -- his own form and features by their exalted

intelligence shall be that variegated vest.  I shall find in him the

Foreworld; in his childhood the Age of Gold; the Apples of Knowledge;

the Argonautic Expedition; the calling of Abraham; the building of

the Temple; the Advent of Christ; Dark Ages; the Revival of Letters;

the Reformation; the discovery of new lands; the opening of new

sciences, and new regions in man.  He shall be the priest of Pan, and

bring with him into humble cottages the blessing of the morning stars

and all the recorded benefits of heaven and earth.

        Is there somewhat overweening in this claim?  Then I reject all

I have written, for what is the use of pretending to know what we

know not?  But it is the fault of our rhetoric that we cannot

strongly state one fact without seeming to belie some other.  I hold

our actual knowledge very cheap.  Hear the rats in the wall, see the

lizard on the fence, the fungus under foot, the lichen on the log.

What do I know sympathetically, morally, of either of these worlds of

life?  As old as the Caucasian man, -- perhaps older, -- these

creatures have kept their counsel beside him, and there is no record

of any word or sign that has passed from one to the other.  What

connection do the books show between the fifty or sixty chemical

elements, and the historical eras?  Nay, what does history yet record

of the metaphysical annals of man?  What light does it shed on those

mysteries which we hide under the names Death and Immortality?  Yet

every history should be written in a wisdom which divined the range

of our affinities and looked at facts as symbols.  I am ashamed to

see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is.  How many

times we must say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople!  What does

Rome know of rat and lizard?  What are Olympiads and Consulates to

these neighbouring systems of being?  Nay, what food or experience or

succour have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, for the Kanaka in

his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?

        Broader and deeper we must write our annals, -- from an ethical

reformation, from an influx of the ever new, ever sanative

conscience, -- if we would trulier express our central and

wide-related nature, instead of this old chronology of selfishness

and pride to which we have too long lent our eyes.  Already that day

exists for us, shines in on us at unawares, but the path of science

and of letters is not the way into nature.  The idiot, the Indian,

the child, and unschooled farmer"s boy, stand nearer to the light by

which nature is to be read, than the dissector or the antiquary.