BRIEF ESSAYS 
 
 AND 
 
 BREVITIES
 
 BRIEF ESSAYS 
 
 BREVITIES 
 
 BY 
 
 GEORGE H. CALVERT 
 
 BOSTON : 
 LEE AND SHEPARD, PUBLISHERS. 
 
 NEW YORK : 
 
 LEE, SHEPARD AND DILLINGHAM. 
 1874.
 
 Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1874, by 
 
 GEORGE H. CALVERT, 
 In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 
 
 RIVERSIDE, CAMBRIDGE: 
 
 STEREOTYPED AND PRINTED BY 
 
 H. O- HOUGHTON AND COMPANY.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 ESSAYS. 
 
 I. EARTHLINGS 9 
 
 II. LADYHOOD 12 
 
 IIL GENIUS AND TALENT 17 
 
 IV. ARISTOCRACY 22 
 
 V. ORGANIZATION 29 
 
 VI. WORK 35 
 
 VII. SOCIAL PALACE AT GUISE .... 42 
 
 VIII. WORLDLINESS 49 
 
 IX. ART 55 
 
 X. TRAVEL 61 
 
 XI. OBEDIENCE 70 
 
 XII. FREEDOM 73 
 
 XIII. THE BRAIN 78 
 
 XIV. MATERIALISM 90 
 
 XV. THE LIFE TO COME 96 
 
 XVI. BOOKS FOR BOYS 106 
 
 XVII. F. W. ROBINSON . 115 
 
 XVIII. GOETHE'S FAUST 123 
 
 XIX. SHELLEY 129 
 
 XX. SHAKESPEARE 140 
 
 XXI. THE MERCHANT OK VENICE .... 149
 
 6 CONTENTS. 
 
 XXII. TAMING OF THE SHREW . . . . 154 
 
 XXIII. THE TEMPEST 157 
 
 XXIV. MACBETH 167 
 
 XXV. HAMLET 177 
 
 BREVITIES. 
 
 I. SPIRITUAL, MORAL 193 
 
 II. LITERARY, ^ESTHETICAL 208 
 
 III. CONDUCT, MANNERS ; . 239 
 
 IV. MISCELLANEOUS . .... 255
 
 BRIEF ESSAYS.
 
 BRIEF ESSAYS. 
 
 EARTHLINGS. 
 
 WHEN one has just spent an hour in a police 
 court or the " Tombs," or reads of the diver- 
 sified daily crimes by countless criminals, or 
 dipping personally into Wall Street, feels him- 
 self a party to the selfish scramble which makes 
 up so much of life, or tries to count the lies 
 that are sneaking or buzzing about, or thinks 
 of the manifold rascalities, rampant or covert, 
 and the multiform sensualities that darken and 
 deform humanity, one might, in certain moods, 
 be misled to Believe that man is, after all, but a 
 low, creeping slave, the dupe of vulgar desires 
 and ignoble impulses, a restless, insatiable 
 earthling. Earthling though he be, his eye 
 carries his thought up to stars whose light has 
 been thousands of years in reaching him ; and 
 there, his inward vision dazzled with the tran- 
 scendent grandeur of creation, he is at once
 
 10 BRIEF ESSAYS. 
 
 humbled and exalted ; and humility and exalta- 
 tion both attest a higher than a mere earthly 
 being. 
 
 Within his magnetic brain are other cham- 
 bers, built to be opened to deeper medita- 
 tion, to be illuminated by still finer light. 
 " Only by celestial observations can terrestrial 
 charts be constructed," says Jean Paul. In 
 man there is an upper heavenly sphere ; only 
 by help of this can be instituted and conducted 
 an orderly human life. Unguided, untempered 
 by these nobler capacities, even the lower could 
 not accomplish their specific functions. Here 
 is the celestial canopy which gives amplitude 
 and security to man's being. The vaulting 
 sweep of disinterested feeling, open to men, 
 constitutes their humanity, their divine hu- 
 manity. Without the breadth and freedom of 
 this upper range, men were not men, but a 
 herd of low-cropping bipeds. Take from a 
 man his capacity to be just, to be charitable, 
 to bound up from the very depths of despair 
 upon ever-surging waves of hope, to feel at 
 times a thrill shoot through him from Infini- 
 tude, cut him off from all this, and you dis- 
 crown him, you disorb him. By no intellectual 
 projection, by no scientific dexterity, can he be
 
 EARTHLINGS. 1 1 
 
 launched and upheld on his proper path. Only 
 the power of trustful intuition, of a sure moral 
 sensibility, can lift and hold him to his human 
 track. Destroy this power, and he flounders in 
 the mire of animalism. A more appalling sight 
 could not be than a scientific animal, a being 
 endowed only with impulse and full intellect. 
 And think (if the imagination can stretch 
 itself to such an abstraction) of a tribe of 
 such : I do not say community, for community 
 there could not be, that implying an organized 
 combination for the general good ; and where 
 men were purely selfish, there could be no per- 
 manent combination, no tenacious apportion- 
 ment. Think of a crowd of Calibans and sons 
 of Mephistopheles : nay, a crowd even of such 
 miscreations could not be. Either, they would 
 fly asunder by mutual repulsion, or assail each 
 other's being ruthlessly and destructively. But 
 the beauty and grandeur of the divine scheme 
 exclude such monsters. In the worst speci- 
 mens of our kind, in a Nero or a Borgia, 
 there stirs the germ of the generic and noble. 
 Through the darkest and coldest nature pene- 
 trates somewhat of the light from a holy inter- 
 nal fire. Did there not, the individual would 
 shiver and burst in his own icy darkness. Pure 
 blrick cannot be.
 
 II. 
 
 LADYHOOD. 
 
 EXAMPLES of ladyhood should not be sought 
 in the Sultan's seraglio ; for ladyhood implies 
 independence of spirit and womanly self-re- 
 spect, with ableness for self-direction ; nor 
 would one look for the higher illustrations in 
 a community coarse and unfashioned ; for la- 
 dyhood is an emanation from the heart, sub- 
 tilized by culture. Nor would you be likely to 
 come upon the finer type among the rings of 
 the garish, bedizened, recurrent whirl of fash- 
 ion ; for a continued blaze of publicity is no 
 more favorable to the growth of ladyhood than 
 is gas-light to the ripening of rose-buds. La- 
 dies of the purest water hesitate not to enter 
 Broadway, but they neither seek nor enjoy an 
 ostentatious thoroughfare. The glare of its 
 gaze, if too often submitted to, dries the au- 
 roral moisture which glistens on the counte- 
 nance of ladyhood, aye, glistens when years 
 have pinched the smoothness of outward beauty. 
 
 Only through example and authority can the
 
 LADYHOOD. 13 
 
 lady be unfolded. The earthly angel 01 girl- 
 hood is matronly womanhood, ever hovering 
 near its trust. Youth, permitted to be un- 
 bound and irreverent, runs into excesses, which 
 sap its chasteness and its strength. Of ado- 
 lescence maturity is the guardian appointed by 
 nature ; and nature ever punishes with impris- 
 onment a breach of her mandates. The guard- 
 ianship of matrons over girls is the guardian- 
 ship of their freedom ; and freedom not thus 
 guarded, carries a latent chain in its temporary 
 license. 
 
 Any, even the slightest, decrement of mod- 
 esty lays a weight upon the spring of ladyhood, 
 whose essence is a refined womanly self-con- 
 sciousness. Nature's choicest product is wo- 
 man ; and modesty being the interior fount 
 that suffuses her with spiritual bloom, lady- 
 hood, as the consummate flower, the florescent 
 acme, of womanhood, a distillation from its su- 
 perlatives, draws from this fount a perennial 
 freshness. Thence, the wealthiest dower where- 
 with a maiden can enter womanhood is modest 
 reserve. From this deep, clear, sparkling 
 source are recruited all the feminine virtues 
 of her life. We say modest reserve ; for there 
 is a cold and a proud reserve, and these are
 
 1 4 BRIEF ESS A YS. 
 
 barren. Modesty implies warmth, and a living 
 store of power ; denotes impulses, emotions, 
 desires, to be directed, protected, controlled ; 
 and reserve betokens capacity to protect and 
 control this palpitating material of conduct. 
 
 " All integrants of being, the low and higher, 
 The lords of work, the visionary powers, 
 Leap with the lightnings of a holier fire," 
 
 in a woman whose speech and bearing are ever 
 thus guarded. A lady of the highest type is 
 the unmatched 
 
 " Delight of whate'er lives and wills and loves, 
 The central majesty to all that moves ; " 
 
 and to be this, her life must be steadied, re- 
 freshed, empowered by modest reserve. 
 
 Does it seem that in estimating ladyhood I 
 set too much store by purity and continence, 
 the wardens of a treasure whose unspeakable 
 value is only revealed by what is missed when 
 it is lost. Whoever called a lorette a lady ? 
 Among the richest in physical beauty and in 
 wit she may be, with generosity even of heart ; 
 but so poor is she spiritually, there is none will 
 do her reverence. Fallen from her height of 
 womanhood, none now looks up to her. She 
 has forfeited her eminence, and lives without
 
 LADYHOOD. 15 
 
 honor, without command, without obedience. 
 She is scarcely a person, is become almost a 
 thing. Her being is blind with the gloom of 
 self-destruction. The threads wherewith is 
 woven the exquisite veil of ladyhood a veil 
 protective, which is a transparent beautifier 
 must themselves be wrought of cleanest mate- 
 rial, their delicate fineness proceeding from 
 their strength, and their strength from their 
 purity. Not an outward gauze, not a super- 
 added screen is this veil ; it is self-spun, inly 
 woven, a spiritual lacework, only traceable in 
 the flush of its twinkle, the subtlest of mag- 
 netic auras, permeating and illuminating with 
 delicate light the finer fibres of conduct. 
 
 If the nest wherein ladyhood is hatched be 
 modesty, out of beauty, spiritual beauty, are 
 wrought the wings wherewith it soars to its 
 serene dominance. Of the higher type of la- 
 dyhood may always be said what Steele said 
 of Lady Elizabeth Hastings, that " unaffected 
 freedom and conscious innocence gave her the 
 attendance of the graces in all her actions." 
 At its highest, ladyhood implies a spirituality 
 made manifest in poetic grace. From the lady 
 there exhales a subtler magnetism. Uncon- 
 sciously she circles herself with an atmosphere
 
 1 6 BRIEF ESSAYS. 
 
 of unruffled strength, which, to those who 
 come into it, gives confidence and repose. 
 Within her influence the diffident grow self- 
 possessed, the impudent are checked, the in- 
 considerate admonished ; even the rude are 
 constrained to be mannerly, and the refined 
 are perfected ; all spelled unawares by the 
 charm of the flexible dignity, the commanding 
 gentleness, the thorough womanliness of her 
 look, speech, and demeanor. A sway is this 
 purely spiritual. Every sway, every legitimate, 
 every enduring, sway is spiritual, a regnancy 
 of light over obscurity, of right over brutality. 
 The only real gains we ever make are spiritual 
 gains, a further subjection of the gross to the 
 incorporal, of body to soul, of the animal to 
 the human. The finest, the most characteris- 
 tic acts of a lady involve a spiritual ascension, 
 a going out of herself. In her being and bear- 
 ing, patience, benignity, generosity, are the 
 graces that give shape to the virtues of truth- 
 fulness. In the radiant reality of ladyhood the 
 artificial and the conventional are naught. Dif- 
 ferent from, opposite to, the superpositions of 
 art, or the dictates of mode, is the culture of 
 the innate, the unfolding of the living ; as dif- 
 ferent as the glow of health is from the cos- 
 metic stain that would counterfeit its tint.
 
 III. 
 
 GENIUS AND TALENT. 
 
 CRUDEN'S and Mrs. Cowden Clarke's " Con- 
 cordances " show that in the Bible the word 
 genius is never found, the word talent only as 
 a measure of money ; and that in Shakespeare 
 genius (occurring but seven times) stands for 
 guardian spirit or what is akin, and of the 
 fourteen times that talent is read, ten are in 
 " Timon," being there always used in the an- 
 cient Athenian sense, as a standard of money- 
 value. In the prolific Elizabethan period, and 
 for some time later, these two words had not 
 set themselves into the important positions 
 they have since held in the language. Im- 
 portant we call them, for the two express so 
 much of the inward mysterious power, and the 
 varied aptitudes of the human mind, that their 
 suppression now were a laming of habitual ut- 
 terance. Hence their so frequent use in criti- 
 cism and conversation, and hence the endeavor 
 of critics and aestheticians to define the mean-
 
 1 8 BRIEF ESS A YS. 
 
 ing of each, and to distinguish the one from 
 the other. 
 
 Genius is of the soul, talent of the under- 
 standing. Genius is warm, talent is passion- 
 less. Without genius there is no intuition, 
 no inspiration ; without talent, no execution. 
 Genius is interior, talent exterior ; hence ge- 
 nius is productive, talent accumulative. Genius 
 invents, talent accomplishes. Genius gives the 
 substance ; talent works it up under the eye, 
 or, rather, under the feeling of genius. Genius 
 is emotional, talent intellectual ; hence genius 
 is creative, and talent instrumental. Genius 
 has insight, talent only outsight. Genius is 
 always calm, reserved, self-centred ; talent is 
 often bustling, officious, confident. Genius 
 gives the impulse and aim as well as the illu- 
 mination, talent the means and implements. 
 Genius, in short, is the central, finer essence 
 of the mind, the self-lighted fire, the intuitional 
 gift. Talent gathers and shapes and applies 
 what genius forges. Talent is ever approach- 
 ing, and yet never reaches, that point whence 
 genius starts. Genius is often entirely right, 
 and is never 'wholly wrong; talent is never 
 wholly right. Genius avails itself of all the 
 capabilities of talent, appropriates to itself what
 
 GENIUS AND TALENT. 19 
 
 suits and helps it. Talent can appropriate to 
 itself nothing ; for it has not the inward heat 
 that can fuse all material, and assimilate all 
 food, to convert it into blood ; this only genius 
 can do. Goethe was a man of genius and, at 
 the same time, of immense and varied talents ; 
 and no contemporary profited so much as ne 
 did by all the knowledges and discoveries and 
 accumulations made by others. For full suc- 
 cess the two, genius and talent, should co-exist 
 in one mind in balanced proportions, as they 
 did in Goethe's, so that they can play smoothly 
 together in effective combination. In Walking 
 Stewart, says De Quincey, genius was out of 
 all proportion to talent, and thus wanted an 
 organ for manifesting itself. 
 
 The work of the world, even the higher 
 ranges, being done by talent, talent, backed 
 by industry, is sure to achieve outward suc- 
 cess. Commonplace is the smooth road on 
 which are borne the freights that supply the 
 daily needs of life. Genius, to be sure, as 
 the originator of all appliances and aids and 
 motions and improvements, is the parent of 
 what is to-day common, of all that talent has 
 turned to practical account ; but genius, when 
 it first exhibits itself, is as alarming and hate-
 
 2O BRIEF ESS A YS. 
 
 ful to talent and routine as the first locomo- 
 tives were to the drivers and horses of the 
 mail-coach. Even on the highest plane of 
 literature, the poetical, talent wins laurels more 
 readily, and at first more abundantly, than 
 genius. Scott and Moore were, by their con- 
 temporaries, much more valued as poets than 
 Wordsworth and Coleridge. Scott and Moore 
 were men of genius, but of far less genial in- 
 sight than Wordsworth and Coleridge, and 
 with more literary talent. Hence they were 
 accessible to the many, and were by the semi- 
 critics, men of mere talent, like Jeffrey and 
 Gifford, absolutely as well as relatively over- 
 rated. Their genius gives liveliness to the 
 commonplaces of feeling and adventure, a 
 sheen to surfaces that were otherwise dull ; 
 but their pages lack the sparkle that issues 
 out of recesses suddenly illuminated by im- 
 aginative collisions, a subtle, joyful blaze flash- 
 ing up from new marriages between thought 
 and sentiment, marriages that can only be 
 consecrated by the high priests of thought, 
 and which stand forever inviolate, and for- 
 ever productive, in the best verse of Keats and 
 Shelley. 
 
 Genius involves a more than usual suscepti-
 
 GENIUS AND TALENT. 21 
 
 bility to divine promptings, a delicacy in spirit- 
 ual auscultation, a quick obedience to the 
 invisible helmsman ; and these high superiori- 
 ties imply fineness and fullness of organization. 
 The man of genius is subject, says Joubert, 
 to " transport, or rather rapture, of mind." 
 In this exalted state he has glimpses of truths, 
 beauties, principles, laws, that are new revela- 
 tions, and bring additions to human power. 
 Goethe might have been thinking of Kepler, 
 when he said, " Genius is that power of man 
 which by thought and action gives laws and 
 rules ; " and Coleridge of Milton when he 
 wrote, " The ultimate end of genius is ideal ; " 
 and Hegel may have had Michael Angelo in 
 his mind when, in one of his chapters on the 
 plastic arts, he affirms that " talent cannot do 
 its part fully without the animation (Besee- 
 lung), the besouling, of genius." Schiller con- 
 cludes an apostrophe to Columbus with these 
 lines : 
 
 " Trust to the guiding GOD, follow the silent sea : 
 
 Were not yet there the shore, 'twould now rise from the 
 
 wave ; 
 
 For nature is to genius linked eternally, 
 And ever will perform the promise genius gave."
 
 IV. 
 
 ARISTOCRACY. 
 
 ASPIRATION is a universal instinct. Vines 
 ever strive to lay hold of what will help them 
 to climb. Forest oaks vie with each other 
 which shall ascend highest into the light and 
 air. The mineral aspires toward the vegetable, 
 the vegetable toward the animal kingdom. From 
 zoophyte to man each type is, at its best, a 
 " mute prophecy " of the one above it. Up- 
 ward, upward, is an innate impulse of whatever 
 lives. All being struggles to ascend, thereby 
 to better itself, for every mounted degree is a 
 gain of freedom, and freedom, the highest aim 
 of life, is the gauge of advancement. The tree 
 is freer than the rock, and the bird that builds 
 in its boughs is freer than the tree, and man is 
 freer than any other animal, and his freedom 
 is in precise proportion to the degree that the 
 animal in him is subordinated to the human ; 
 and among individual men, as among nations, 
 elevation, relative and absolute, is in the ratio
 
 ARISTOCRACY. 23 
 
 of freedom, the freest man approximating, 
 while yet on the earth to the emancipated con- 
 dition of the angels. 
 
 In the political and the social spheres the 
 mounting instinct is ever active, and more dif- 
 fused and lively now than in any past genera- 
 tion is this activity, because, since our inde- 
 pendence and the French Revolution, there is 
 in Christendom more freedom of movement than 
 at any previous stage of history. La carrtire 
 ouverte aux talents is not a windy boast ; it is a 
 transforming, vivifying reality, whereby France, 
 as a state, has been for thirty years much more 
 of an aristocracy than ever before ; that is, in 
 her political administration she has had more 
 of her stronger men than she had under the 
 kings and nobles who for centuries were her 
 sole governors. Hereditary governors, one or 
 many, are pseudo-aristocrats. Nature says to 
 man : Choose ye for rulers the best I furnish, 
 but do not dare encroach on my large function 
 by aiming to confine the virtues and faculties 
 of rulership to a few families. This is, with 
 man's shallow devices, to try to overrule the 
 deep laws of nature. Disastrous are all these 
 attempts ; for not only does Nature in her 
 breadth and justice, discountenance such mo-
 
 24 BRIEF ESSAYS. 
 
 nopoly, but in maturing her best specimens 
 she exhausts the particular stock, so that the 
 descendants of a great man are mostly like the 
 parings and fragments of a feast, the potency of 
 nature culminating in the one glorious product, 
 the juices of the stock whence she drew it 
 being by so deep a draught exhausted. Hence 
 it is that the English " nobility " has been more 
 of an aristocracy than the " noblesse " of France 
 or that of other continental nations. It has not 
 been so counter to nature ; it has not been a 
 caste ; it has sucked at the breast of the mighty 
 multitude. Less pure in blood heraldically, its 
 blood is richer, more prolific, essentially more 
 * aristocratic. Take from England her Wolseys, 
 and Burleighs, and Bacons, and Cromwells, and 
 Somersets, and Clives, and Nelsons, and Pitts, 
 and Foxes, and Cannings, and Peels, all ple- 
 beians, and you unman her history. Had not 
 the blood of her hereditary rulers been thus 
 refreshed and invigorated, her De Veres, and 
 Tudors, and Percys, and Nevilles, and Howards 
 would not have been so powerful and so 
 famous. It is the virtue of the English polity, 
 or of the English character, that under mon- 
 archic and oligarchic forms, high and highest 
 places are kept open to the men fittest for
 
 ARISTOCRACY. 2$ 
 
 regency, nature's aristocrats, drawn often from 
 the lower strata of the social pile. 
 
 For its prosperous administration and endur- 
 ance a republic has especial need of nature's 
 aristocrats, of the best men engendered in its 
 bosom. For a republic stands and thrives on 
 self-government, and self-government can only 
 draw its breath of life from character. Among 
 the citizens of a large modern republic, if it is 
 to last, there must be prevalent that union of 
 good intentions with intelligence which results 
 in common sense ; and common sense demands 
 of the members of a republic or democracy 
 that in choosing administrators, they know 
 who are the best citizens, and have the will to 
 take them. Thus a republic, for its welfare, 
 should be able not only to breed capable, 
 honest men, nature's aristocrats, but, having 
 bred them, be so alive to noble interests as to 
 put them into its high places. In a word, a 
 republic, to thrive, should be a democratic 
 aristocracy, which is the same as to say it 
 should be ruled by its best heads. Elections 
 should be wise selections. A man without 
 faith in humanity, or one with vision bounded 
 to self-seeking goals, or one constitutionally 
 despondent, might readily despair of our re-
 
 26 BRIEF ESSA YS. 
 
 public on reviewing the men who, in the past 
 decade or two, have made and administered 
 laws at Washington. For a score of years we 
 have been going from bad to worse ; and unless 
 we have reached the worst, unless by an inward 
 motion (part instinctive, part conscious) we 
 soon swing ourselves up out of the rapacious 
 rankness, the mercenary filth, which from stain- 
 ing our garments is beginning to infect our 
 pores with its poison ; unless we delegate our 
 vast sovereign power to better men, to larger 
 men, to freer men, that is, to men less the 
 slaves of self-seeking, unless, in short, we 
 soon reverse our movement and ascend vigor- 
 ously into a lighter, purer air, the tremors of 
 the despondent and the faithless will shape 
 themselves into the fears of the thoughtful and 
 the hopeful, and these will have to look deeper 
 than political forms and principles for the means 
 of keeping the higher interests of a great people 
 from being sacrificed to the lower, and of 
 counteracting the demoralizing influence of 
 narrow egotisms and a general relaxing mate- 
 rialism. 
 
 History teaches that artificial, nominal aris- 
 tocracies run to despotism or uphold it ; and 
 that whenever a state has thriven, under what-
 
 ARISTOCRACY. 2? 
 
 ever form, monarchical, oligarchical, or repub- 
 lican, it has thriven through the agency of 
 genuine aristocracy, that is,, through having its 
 best men at the political helm. 
 
 In the social sphere aspiration is still more 
 lively and pertinacious. Here refinement fur- 
 nishes the wings for ascent. In the long run 
 those individuals and breeds most open to 
 impressions of the beautiful, and* thence most 
 capable of culture, form the nucleus and are 
 the stamina of social superiorities. From this 
 class (when social conditions have some free- 
 dom of play) accretions are ever a-making to 
 supply the losses incurred by forfeiture of in- 
 herited social position, forfeiture through lack 
 of sensibilities to value and retain a polish, 
 through lack of manly bottom to maintain a 
 gentlemanly conduct and carriage, of delicacy 
 to appreciate beauties of bearing, subtleties of 
 demeanor. As in the political, so in the social 
 sphere, there ,are assumptions, pretensions, 
 audacious usurpations, and especially there are 
 the oligarchic impudences of fashion to mar and 
 weaken ; but what is real and pure, what is 
 truly aristocratic, what is the best socially, is 
 a projection beyond the limited self into a sphere 
 of aesthetic association. " Good society," if it
 
 28 BRIEF ESSAYS. 
 
 be not an arrogated name, not vulgarized by 
 ostentatious ambitions, but if it be essentially 
 good, is, like art, an issue out of the finer 
 sensibilities. It is the flowering of the social 
 tree, not a mere fragile ornament on the top, 
 and gracefully embodies the essence of that 
 which it surmounts, carrying in its folds the 
 seed for reproduction. 
 
 In an advanced civilization the desire for 
 social preferment vibrates through the whole 
 frame of a people. The late Dr. Bowditch, the 
 eminent mathematician, used to tell a story of 
 a serving-maid who related how her engage- 
 ment had been broken off through objections 
 made by the friends of her lover to the position 
 of herself and her family. " Why, Lucy," said 
 the doctor, " I did not know that you had an 
 aristocracy in your class." " Aristocracy ! " 
 rejoined Lucy,' " we have more down there 
 than you have up here." The masses, it has 
 been said, have the sense of the ideal. Had 
 they it not, there would be no great poets, for 
 these are a subtle distillation out of the juices 
 that give life and character to the mind of a 
 people. The aristocracy " up here " owes much 
 of its quality to the quality of the aristocracy 
 " down there."
 
 V. 
 
 ORGANIZATION. 
 
 THE ecclesiastical and military institutions 
 of the Middle Ages grew out of the latent 
 capacities of European manhood. They were 
 protective shells wrought out of man's instincts 
 for the safety of his body and of his soul. 
 Clumsily were they wrought : so was astrol- 
 ogy ; but had there been no star-ward need 
 that first vented itself in creating astrology, 
 the grandeurs and uses of astronomy would 
 to us have never been revealed. The military 
 apparatus enabled civil and industrial organ- 
 ization to form and strengthen. The Church 
 did similarly for the mind, giving to thought a 
 channel, and thus saving it, in dark ignorant 
 times, from running loose on wide surfaces, 
 where it could have neither depth nor current, 
 and would have tended to wayward expansion, 
 and thence to wasting evaporation. These 
 institutions denoted in the European popula- 
 tion power of development and self-protection. 
 Among the inhabitants of tropical Asia and
 
 30 BRIEF ESSAYS. 
 
 Africa are no such beginnings : these feel lit- 
 tle inward motion towards, and have not ca- 
 pacities for, graduated outward arrangement. 
 They never shape themselves into organic 
 wholes ; they are little more than aggrega- 
 tions of shiftless individualities ; and hence 
 they do not emerge into civilization. The 
 need of, and capacity for, organization are the 
 mark of mental breadth and resources. 
 
 To secure enjoyment and growth, the mind, 
 with help of its executive constituent, intel- 
 lect, builds for its behoof artificial structures, 
 to shelter and further its activities. Being 
 artificial, man-made, these structures are tem- 
 porary. Even the natural body, which is God- 
 made for the individualization of soul, is tem- 
 porary, quickly mortal. Organizations, devised 
 by human intellect, are become obstructions, 
 usurpations, when they cease to be auxiliary 
 to the strength and play of the higher mental 
 powers, for whose service they first arose. In 
 man-made organizations there is an inherent 
 tendency to materiality, to grossness ; and a 
 sign it is that they have become material and 
 gross, when they are no longer subordinated 
 to the spiritual, but would govern and bound 
 it, when they have become end instead of
 
 ORGANIZA TION. 3 1 
 
 means, masters instead of servants. Such the 
 ecclesiastical institutions of Europe had be- 
 come in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fif- 
 teenth centuries. Men were imprisoned in 
 the Church. The mind, the light of manhood, 
 the creative core, the source of life and worth, 
 the mind was weakened, maimed, blindfolded, 
 was thwarted and smitten by the very insti- 
 tution designed to enlarge and second it ; as 
 though a citadel should come to be controlled 
 by its own outworks, as though a parent were 
 bound and scourged by his own children. But 
 the same inward force that first promoted the 
 organization stirred to rend it, now that it 
 had grown worldly and tyrannical. Many were 
 the voices raised in protest, and many were 
 the martyrs of freedom ; some of them like 
 Wickliffe and Huss and Savonarola, so full of 
 light that they still throw light on our path. 
 At last from the heart of Germany came a 
 voice stronger and clearer than any yet heard, 
 the voice of Luther. This giant rent in twain 
 the huge fabric of Roman ecclesiastical dom- 
 ination. How broad was the rent, how ir- 
 reconcilably hostile were the two camps into 
 which his manly might had split Christen- 
 dom, Luther himself was hardly aware. More
 
 32 BRIEF ESSAYS. 
 
 grandly and far more deeply than he knew, 
 Luther was the assertor and spokesman of 
 mental independence. Thenceforward one-half, 
 and the stronger half of the Christian world, 
 was open to free organization. 
 
 The largest, the most prolific right that man 
 has ever achieved is the right of private judg- 
 ment. In the beginning it was a protest of 
 the free against the despotic, of the spiritual 
 against the mechanical and material ; and it 
 insures the final triumph of the free and spir- 
 itual in all provinces of human being and 
 endeavor. For in the right of private judg- 
 ment is involved the power to exercise it, and 
 the successful exercise implies capacity for, 
 nay, possession of, social and political organi- 
 zation ; and the higher this is the more com- 
 plicated will it be. Note the simplicity and 
 one-sidedness of life under despotic govern- 
 ments in all ages and continents, and then 
 the diversity and the many-sidedness of Amer- 
 ican republican life. A distinctive feature of 
 our country is the number of associations, 
 combinations, institutions, which, originating 
 in the wants, desires, aspirations of free self- 
 governing citizens, grow up spontaneously, and 
 maintain themselves within, but independent
 
 ORGANIZATION; 
 
 33 
 
 of, the State, so many imperia in Imperio. 
 Hardly any day's newspaper but has a report 
 of the proceedings of some Temperance, Odd 
 Fellows, Woman's Rights, Free Trade, Meth- 
 odist, Baptist, or other Sectarian meeting, 
 Benevolent, Artistic, or Scientific society, 
 all private organizations, started for the pur- 
 pose of cultivating and propagating, each one 
 certain special principles and practices, each 
 one nourishing some tissue of our manifold 
 life, and all therefore contributing more or less 
 to the general weal. These many and diverse 
 voluntary organizations contain the essence 
 of political self-direction : they are the healthy 
 offspring of free spirit and free life : they tem- 
 per the hardening forms of legislative rule : 
 they lie beneath constitutions, and upheave 
 them with their spiritual force. Besides these 
 there are countless industrial combinations for 
 furthering especial objects of capital or labor. 
 All, whatever their aim or amplitude, are so 
 many nests of self-government, forestalling 
 much of the work of public political authority, 
 and are at once the evidence of, and a school 
 for, self-direction and practical self-culture, a 
 result and a support of manly life and polit- 
 ical freedom. 
 
 3
 
 34 
 
 BRIEF ESSAYS. 
 
 The further you go east the fewer there are 
 of these voluntary public-spirited associations. 
 England, next to ourselves, has the most of 
 them. In France, under the shallow despot, 
 Louis Napoleon, they were not allowed to be, 
 while they are springing up in Italy and Spain 
 and Germany, since these nations have begun 
 their regeneration.
 
 VI. 
 
 WORK. 
 
 WE live by work ; we prosper by work ; we 
 rise by work. Men take rank according to the 
 work they do. Luther and Shakespeare are 
 ruling sovereigns among men by virtue of the 
 vastness and excellence of their work. All 
 history, all civilization, is the product of work. 
 We advance by its inventions, we thrive on its 
 accumulations. Intellect is the parent of work ; 
 the more method there is in work, the more ef- 
 fective it is. The simplest garden is laid out 
 in beds ; if you ^sow squash, and peas, and 
 beets, and celery, and Brussels sprouts, all to- 
 gether, you will have a horticultural chaos and 
 no vegetables. Foresight, intelligence in work, 
 are the guage of progress. Mankind rests on 
 work, moves on work ; stop work, and New 
 York, London, Berlin, collapse. London, New 
 York, Berlin, are great workshops. 
 
 Walk through the thoroughfares of these 
 workshops, to learn what wealth they turn out 
 daily, then pass into other quarters, into dark,
 
 36 BRIEF ESSA VS. 
 
 damp, crowded cellars, and hungry attics, and 
 reeking tenement-houses, to learn how squalor 
 and poverty cling to the sides of wealth and 
 luxury, like a " mildewed ear blasting its whole- 
 some brother." A busy city may be likened to 
 a huge monster, its upper members glittering 
 in gold and diamonds, while its lower are bound 
 with rags oozing with festered sores. And is 
 not he a social monster, the single individual 
 who, with a million in his pocket, walks through 
 a crowd of the half-clad and the half-fed ? or 
 are not they the monsters, beings unnatural, by 
 the side of comfortable opulence, prodigies in 
 the face of healthy Nature ? 
 
 Can this yawning chasm be filled ? The 
 pale, stooping woman in that bare, chill gar- 
 ret, stitching from daybreak till midnight to 
 earn poor clothes and poorer meals, can she be 
 brought near to that other woman in jewels and 
 laces, who in cushioned coach is rolling to the 
 fashionable ball, striving to turn night into day 
 in search of amusement ? They are both of 
 American birth, possibly cousins, and both are 
 immortal souls. Both, in different forms, are 
 victims of conditions whose cold, pitiless arbi- 
 trariness may, within a decade, banish the 
 daughter of the bejewelled one to the garret
 
 WORK. 37 
 
 of the overworked and underfed. What polit- 
 ical economist, with his formulas and super- 
 ficial expedients, dares confront the vast lower- 
 ing problem of capital and labor ? Political 
 economy deals with producers and consumers, 
 not with throbbing men. Until you deal with 
 men primarily as men, you will solve no such 
 problems. 
 
 Individual men, and aggregates of men in 
 communities and nations, are set in motion by, 
 are agitated by, nay, have their very being in, 
 feeling. Feeling propels the intellect, which is 
 but its tool ; feeling is the father of all wants, 
 originates all work. The needs of conjoined 
 beings, co-working for mutual help, these create 
 society, gradually promoting it, according to the 
 power and purity of feeling, from savagery 
 through barbarism up to the highest levels yet 
 attained in the more advanced communities 
 of the most civilized nations. In the best 
 of these, even in foremost personages, there 
 is nevertheless but partial play given to the 
 feelings. Hence discontents, restlessness, vice, 
 unhappiness, despondency ; and in those out- 
 wardly and personally less favored, misery, de- 
 spair, crime. Free play, not to say full play, to 
 the deep, infinitely varied, ceaseless motions of
 
 38 BRIEF ESSAYS. 
 
 the feelings, those regents of life, those con- 
 stituents of the substance of human being, free 
 play to these demands a far closer mental asso- 
 ciation among men than has yet taken place. 
 As human relations now are, each one does, 
 comparatively with what he might do, little for 
 himself, because he does and can do so little for 
 others ; it is an everlasting principle that the 
 more we do for others the more we do for our- 
 selves. 
 
 Men in all positions stand in too hostile at- 
 titudes one towards another. Every man is 
 trying to get the better of somebody. There is 
 far too much counter-working and not enough 
 co-working. The stronger and shrewder make 
 the many work for the few the few growing 
 rich, the many keeping poor. The problem of 
 wages, the relations between buyer and seller, 
 between producer and consumer, the reciprocal 
 rights of capitalist and laborer, beneath all 
 these problems, within them, above them, lie the 
 rights of man, not rights political, but those 
 rights which grow out of, inhere in, his organic 
 nature. Now the faculties, powers, impulses, 
 aspirations which, because they involve these 
 rights, constitute the human being, these carry 
 within them laws implanted there to solve all
 
 WORK. 39 
 
 such problems, laws, obscure it may be, dif- 
 ficult to discover, as laws of large comprehen- 
 siveness are apt to be. Electricity played round 
 and through the air and earth in the days of 
 Socrates and Cicero ; and how many centuries 
 had mankind to wait for the Franklin and the 
 Morse to seize its law, and turn it to great 
 uses ? A deep law, covering a wide field of 
 being or action, is ever freighted with impor- 
 tant and with beneficent solutions. 
 
 Of deep, fruitful, social laws, Fourier pro- 
 fesses to be the discoverer. I am not aware 
 that any other social reformer and thinker puts 
 forward a like pretension. At the same time 
 without some such discovery discovery of 
 synthetic, far-stretching law no solution of 
 social and industrial problems can be reached. 
 Is Fourier a discoverer? In recent discus- 
 sions the name of Fourier occasionally comes 
 up ; in most cases to be briefly dismissed as 
 that of a communist, free lovist, at best an im- 
 practical dreamer. Fourier is nothing of all 
 this, be he a genuine discoverer or not. Of 
 a thoughtful and conscientious nature, by the 
 frauds he witnessed, and was obliged to be a 
 party to, in trade, he was, as a young man, 
 driven to meditate on the means of introducing 
 lustice into the dealings among men ; and the
 
 4O BRIEF ESSAYS. 
 
 result, after years of observation and study, 
 was, that by higher methods work may be made 
 more thorough, more productive, and, instead 
 of being in most cases irksome, and in many 
 repulsive, be attractive and enjoyable. 
 
 See that shoemaker, bent over his last all 
 day, and that tailor, plying the needle eight or 
 ten hours daily, each bound to his one task 
 from week to week, from year to year, through 
 a long work-weary life ? Such in its monotony 
 and irksomeness, is the life of the tens of mil- 
 lions of workers. Those two stout intelligent 
 young men are capable of several kinds of work, 
 and how willingly would each shift his hands, 
 some hours every day, from the one endless 
 routine to other production. There is not a 
 sound man but is capable of more than one 
 kind of work, many men are capable of several 
 kinds, and some of many kinds. Figure to 
 yourself a thousand people living in conven- 
 ient proximity not the close and foul prox- 
 imity of the tenement-house so ordering a 
 dozen different forms of work that they could 
 in parties of ten or twenty alternate every two 
 or three hours, each choosing departments 
 for which he has aptitude or liking. Here, 
 besides the enlivening changes, they have 
 the exhilaration of congenial companionship.
 
 WORK. 41 
 
 Add to this that in most kinds of work, men, 
 women, and children are united in cheerful 
 rivalry, and does not the attractiveness and 
 joyousness of such work shine upon you ? It 
 is only higher organization, profounder method 
 applied to work, whereby to satisfy, as they 
 never have been satisfied, the wants of the 
 human being. In this there is nothing de- 
 structive, nothing subversive. It is a change 
 similar to that which a man makes when he 
 sells his house, puts the proceeds into a joint- 
 stock company, and betakes him to a board- 
 ing-house, similar, but far more serviceable. 
 It will be an expansion, a liberation of the 
 worker, a change which will be justified, nay, 
 it is demanded, by the whole diversified capa- 
 bility of man ; is invigorating to his intellect 
 as it will be purifying to his heart. 
 
 Let the thoughtful, sympathetic men, whose 
 minds are now busy with the momentous ques- 
 tions of poverty and crime, of wages and com- 
 petition, of cooperation and labor, let them 
 give an intelligent and a dispassionate exam- 
 ination to the pretensions of Fourier as a dis- 
 coverer of social and industrial laws. Latent 
 in humanity there are such laws ; bring them 
 to light, and the way is opened to great solu- 
 tions.
 
 VII. 
 
 THE SOCIAL PALACE AT GUISE. 
 
 AT Guise, a small town in the northeastern 
 part of France, on the Oise, half-way between 
 Paris and Brussels, has arisen an industrial 
 and social phenomenon, in the shape of a 
 human hive of busy, well-housed, well-fed men, 
 women, and children, literally a Social Palace. 
 Above the destitutions and squalors and star- 
 vations of the laboring masses of Christendom, 
 this pile rears itself like an illuminated dome 
 lighting up the dim domains of an unhealthy 
 dream-land. But the buildings and business 
 of this pile are the opposite of dream-like ; 
 they are the logical outcome of generations of 
 healthy aspiring effort, the legitimate offspring 
 of centuries of deep gestation. They stand 
 there now a great new fact, smiling with a 
 noble pride, glistening with hope to the civil- 
 ized world. But what is the Social Palace at 
 Guise ? 
 
 In the first quarter of the present century, 
 into the mind of a French boy, while seated
 
 THE SOCIAL PALACE AT GUISE. 43 
 
 on the benches of a crowded, misused school, 
 came the wish to better its conditions. Soon 
 this thoughtful sympathy was transferred from 
 his school-fellows to mechanical laborers ; and 
 between the ages of eleven and twelve he set 
 himself earnestly to work in his father's iron 
 work-shop, that he might get command of a 
 wide field for usefulness. As he grew towards 
 manhood the injustices, oppressions, hardships, 
 which press upon the toiling masses wrought 
 on him more deeply, and set him to devising 
 plans for their remedy. Intelligent, zealous, 
 punctual, young Godin was early able to start 
 for himself, and to prosper. The capital ac- 
 quired by his foresight and industry he used 
 to fulfill the broad, generous desires of his 
 opening years ; from his own high, pecuniary 
 vantage-ground he sought to bring more jus- 
 tice into the relations between labor and capi- 
 tal, and bringing more justice, to bring greater 
 profit to both. His is one of those clear, sym- 
 pathetic natures that will not let the man 
 forget the great dreams of the youth. 
 
 Studying in search of the best method to 
 compass his noble wish ; examining the vari- 
 ous plans projected for associating on deeper 
 principles the workman and his employer,
 
 44 BRIEF ESSAYS. 
 
 M. Godin accepted the deductions of Fou- 
 rier's great synthetic mind. His own mind is 
 of the same " large composition " as Fourier's 
 one of those rare organizations which com- 
 bine high, strong, forecasting intellect with 
 the bountiful sensibilities which, besides mak- 
 ing the intellect penetrative, send the man out 
 of himself to accomplish his dearest wishes. 
 
 The sound principle, that workmen should 
 receive a justly proportioned share in the net 
 produce of their work, this did not satisfy M. 
 Godin. His plan embraced, in addition, the 
 intellectual and social improvement of them 
 and theirs through a unitary building. So 
 soon as he had gathered capital enough he col- 
 lected all his workmen and their families under 
 one roof, or rather, under three roofs, a cen- 
 tral building and two large wings, all connected 
 together, each one of the three four stories 
 high, with a court in the centre of each, and 
 galleries running round the interior of the 
 court. Near to these are separate buildings 
 for nurseries, school-rooms, restaurant, mar- 
 kets, bakery, etc. ; and further off are the 
 various structures for the manufacture of 
 stoves, this being the business of M. Godin. 
 
 Economy, convenience, cleanliness, health-
 
 THE SOCIAL PALACE AT GUISE. 45 
 
 fulness, cheerfulness, these are the primary 
 gains of the unitary building. In the bulky 
 volume of M. Godin, published in 1871, en- 
 titled "Solutions Sociales," wherein he ex- 
 pounds his whole theory and aims and practice, 
 the final chapter is devoted to the Social Pal- 
 ace he has established at Guise. This chapter 
 has forty-four sections. Space fails us here 
 to illustrate the many and various advantages 
 of such a palatial home ; but from the titles 
 of some of these sections the reader can judge 
 of their contents and import : " Character of 
 the Social Abode ; Peculiarities of Architectu- 
 ral Unity ; Facility of Relations ; Domestic 
 Economy ; Ventilation and General Salubrity ; 
 Temperature and Heating ; Absence of In- 
 sects ; Water and Baths ; Light, the Symbol 
 of Progress ; Light in the Day ; Light at 
 Night ; Order and Tranquillity ; Personal Se- 
 curity ; Medical Attendance ; Integral Educa- 
 tion ; Nurseries ; Schools ; Principles of Or- 
 ganization ; Order and Liberty." 
 
 In the three connected buildings, called by 
 their wise founder the Familistire, are lodged 
 nine hundred people. Out of their share of 
 the profits from the manufactory, food, lodg- 
 ing, and clothing are paid for, all to be had
 
 46 BRIEF ESS A YS. 
 
 at wholesale prices, and of good quality. Their 
 general interests are under the charge of a 
 council of twenty-four, twelve of either sex, 
 chosen by the whole body of adult inmates. 
 Out of the common fund their children, from 
 infancy to youth, are educated as they can be 
 nowhere else, all the nurses as well as the 
 teachers in the ascending classes, holding 
 their places through their attraction to those 
 places. 
 
 This is a great step from wages and the 
 isolated household ; and it is the initiatory 
 movement to a higher step, which will be 
 taken when work shall be organized under a 
 yet deeper and broader principle, divulged by 
 Fourier through his discovery of the law of 
 groups and series. Work will then be brought 
 within the scope of the prolific, beneficent 
 sway of attraction, and of afifectional sympa- 
 thies. Work is the regent of all human rela- 
 tions ; work has raised us from barbarism to 
 civilization ; every achievement is begotten, 
 every joy enlivened, every liberty won, every 
 virtue perfected by work. When in its many, its 
 infinite modifications, work through thorough 
 intellectual and affective cooperation, shall have 
 become grateful, aye, and delightful, then will
 
 THE SOCIAL PALACE AT GUISE. 47 
 
 the sunshine of life tingle in all the countless 
 hearts that now throb in the shadow of poverty, 
 or beat heavily under the gloom of vice. In 
 work made attractive, there is salvation, moral 
 as well as industrial salvation. Have, therefore, 
 no fear for morals. With increased well-being 
 and cleanliness, with the independence and free- 
 dom gained through steady, willing occupation, 
 is engendered a more solid self-respect, a deeper 
 sense of personal responsibility, and thence a 
 healthier moral tone. A sparkle there will be 
 of mental as well as of bodily health unknown 
 elsewhere. To life will be imparted a fresh mo- 
 mentum and cheerfulness, and unprecedented 
 liveliness and honesty. A thousand people of 
 all ages and both sexes, held together by joyful 
 co-work and nothing else could hold them 
 cannot but be sound, and the more and more 
 sound according as greater play be given to all 
 their faculties of intellect and feeling through 
 varied occupation. Put the same thousand into 
 the same building to live in idleness, unknit 
 together by active co-working, and they would 
 fly asunder in less than a year, scattered and 
 shattered by discords and sensuality. When 
 we see the effects of passions seduced and per- 
 verted, as they are now so often seen, we ex-
 
 48 BRIEF ESS A YS. 
 
 claim with awe, " How fearfully we are made ! " 
 When we shall see them all healthily active, we 
 shall exclaim with ecstacy, " How beautifully, 
 how divinely we are made ! " 
 
 Already in M. Godin's establishment the 
 moral tone is much raised above what prevails 
 among the same class of workmen out of the 
 Familisttre. If it is still far from the highest, 
 this is because, through the limitation of the 
 faculties to one or two employments, freedom is 
 limited. Moral perception grows clearer and 
 clearer through more and more freedom. Free- 
 dom grows through the unfolding and culture 
 of all the faculties, those of feeling as well as 
 those of intellect ; and this full unfolding and 
 culture can only take place through intimate, 
 variegated co-working of age, manhood, woman- 
 hood, youth, and childhood.
 
 VIII. 
 
 WORLDLINESS. 
 
 THAT the world should be full of worldliness 
 seems as right as that a stream should be full 
 of water, or a living body of blood. So should 
 a healthy mind be full of religion ; yet, for a 
 thousand years a religious man meant the in- 
 mate of a monastery, and means so now where 
 monkery still glooms. The first equivalent 
 your French dictionary will give you for the 
 noun religieux is friar. 
 
 A worldling is not a man filled with the 
 deeper, cleaner realities, delighting in what is 
 highest and best in God's world ; he is not a 
 freeman of Nature's guild, but of man's ; and 
 thence so laden is he with the begilt and the 
 temporary, that he has little strength for the 
 solid and the eternal. 
 
 Within the majestic evolution of power and 
 beauty, the incessant corruscation of God's 
 world, before the eyes of man, in the midst 
 of this boundless, infinite, untangled interlace- 
 ment of wheeling, illumined circles, there 
 4
 
 5O BRIEF ESSAYS. 
 
 moves another world, dependent on, subordi- 
 nate to, this primal mighty one, and sometimes 
 obstructive of it ; this is man's world, which, 
 from a twig, has grown to be a far-spreading 
 forest, so umbrageous at times that it is often 
 a darkening screen between man's vision and 
 the superior creation whence its life is drawn. 
 From crude impulses, from few simple desires, 
 has come, through the unfolding of intelligence, 
 and the culture of feeling, a complex over- 
 growth of wants and fruitions, of arts and re- 
 finements, of inventions and auxiliaries, of 
 discoveries and institutions, which so busy and 
 concern, so flatter and engross civilized man, 
 that he, their creator, has grown to be their de- 
 pendent ; and, limiting his life to the round of 
 their dwarfish gyrations, converting conven- 
 iences into essentials, luxuries into blessings, 
 things secondary into things cardinal, he in 
 many cases is become such a slave to circum- 
 stance, so much a creature towards his own 
 creation, that he has almost ceased to feel him- 
 self an issue of God. Many a man, many an 
 educated man, is but dimly conscious that he is 
 the inhabitant of an upper world. He knows 
 of no uses but the prosaic ; the sun is his lamp, 
 the summer his gardener. Like the cloth he
 
 WORLDLINESS. 51 
 
 wears or the carriage that carries him, he is 
 grown to be an artificial instead of a natural 
 product. Allegiance to the divine has been 
 forfeited ; he is the obsequious burgher of a 
 sensuous, earthly subcreation ; he is a world- 
 ling. 
 
 In one of his weird, significant tales, Haw- 
 thorne writes : " Wealth is the golden essence 
 of the outward world, embodying almost every- 
 thing that exists beyond the limits of the soul." 
 When, therefore, we say that the worldling is 
 always a mammonist, that gold is his chief 
 god, we draw the widest circumference that en- 
 closes his active being. His centre has not the 
 heat to project the radii of life beyond material 
 circumscriptions. The worldling does not live 
 in his soul ; he tries to ignore his inmost self ; 
 his habitation is on the outskirts of beautiful 
 being. Thence he has but slight relations with 
 the souls of other men. Living in and on ex- 
 ternalities, the superficial is the element he 
 thrives in ; but, as the less food has of nutri- 
 tious substance the larger must be the quan- 
 tity taken, he, for his contentment, needs to be 
 ^ver busy with the external. The internal re- 
 pels him, profundities confound him ; tell him 
 he is a spirit, and you sadden him. He de-
 
 52 BRIEF ESSAYS. 
 
 lights in select crowds, in showy equipages, in 
 fashionable dinner-parties, in the glare of chan- 
 deliers. When not in " company " he is pre- 
 paring for it and thinking of it. When alone, 
 he has on his cordial expression only when he 
 is about to go out ; the putting on of his dress- 
 coat lights up his countenance. But this is 
 only the modish worldling, your drawing-room 
 loafer or leader, your company -man whose 
 diplomas are his invitations, whose rent-roll is 
 his visiting-list. Worldliness were not worth 
 a paragraph in a printed page, did it not busy 
 and impel brains to which those of a dressy 
 metropolitan gossip were but as the fizz of 
 a holiday rocket to the flash of a minie rifle. 
 Erasmus was a worldling, and a higher than 
 he, Bacon, much of the wisdom of whose great 
 essays is worldly wisdom. Napoleon was the 
 chief of worldlings, the Lucifer of this multi- 
 tudinous heaven-banished crew. Herein Louis 
 Napoleon is very like his uncle. The high places 
 in the State, and alas ! in the Church, are apt to 
 be held by worldlings, these having a simian tal- 
 ent for climbing, a prehensile gift, and sinuous- 
 ness in seizing and winding themselves among 
 the branches of the glistening smooth-barked 
 tree that has its root deep in the soil of matter,
 
 WORLDLINESS. 53 
 
 and bears a bifold fruit of gold and power. But 
 man can never get entirely rid of his con- 
 science, nor smother utterly the inner self; 
 and so, worldliness has an instinct of hypocrisy, 
 and is ever seeking to wrap itself in veils and 
 teguments that hide its ugliness without ham- 
 pering its action ; and for this it finds often 
 effectual the badges and tools of the highest 
 functions, secretly hugging itself behind the 
 gown judicial, the cloth clerical, and the ros- 
 trum philanthropical. 
 
 This falseness of aim, this exaggeration of 
 the transient and the artificial, this deference to 
 wealth and contempt of material poverty, this 
 all for having and naught for being, this rest- 
 less shallow activity, to which truly belong the 
 words Burke untruly applied to all human ef- 
 fort, " What shadows we are, what shadows we 
 pursue ! " this unhealthiness of desire, this futile 
 turning of the means into the end, all this, 
 which is but a many-sided sign of the one hollow- 
 ness, this protean worldliness, confining itself 
 to no class or condition, taints members of all, 
 from the king to the beggar, but dyes with its 
 most gaudy stains that class in which gold most 
 ministers to superfluity, the class which it at- 
 tires as its choice victim, the class thus char-
 
 54 BRIEF ESS A YS. 
 
 acterized by the spiritual, intellectual F. W. 
 Robertson : " If you wish to know what hol- 
 lowness and heartlessness are, you must seek 
 for them in the world of light, elegant, super- 
 ficial fashion, where frivolity has turned the 
 heart into a rock-bed of selfishness. Say what 
 men will of the heartlessness of trade, it is 
 nothing compared with the heartlessness of 
 fashion. Say what they will of the atheism of 
 science, it is nothing to the atheism of that 
 round of pleasure in which the heart lives ; 
 dead while it lives."
 
 IX. 
 
 ART. 
 
 FROM the heroic combat at Thermopylae to 
 the simplest individualities of doing or suffer- 
 ing that give to the present hour its animation, 
 every fact, event, conjunction, has its life and 
 especial significance. To seize this life, in any- 
 thing like its essential being and import, the 
 rays shed on it from the witnessing mind must 
 be well fed with vigor and sympathy. To him 
 who can read them, the world is full of mean- 
 ings, of hints, full of appeals. Nature is lav- 
 ish of jets that issue from her glowing core, 
 and await a spark from some human thought 
 to flash into delightful illumination. The mind 
 that is to ignite these jets must itself be warm 
 with the fire of ideas. We see with ideas : he 
 who has the brightest and clearest, sees best 
 and farthest. 
 
 Thus vivid, the mind builds within itself 
 fabrics of thought. Out of intuitions and of 
 knowledge acquired it forms images, and holds 
 and carries them in its invisible grasp. This
 
 56 BRIEF ESSAYS. 
 
 mental power of interior construction is called 
 imagination, and is the most intense exertion 
 of intellect at its highest degree of action, ex- 
 ercised most effectually in such direction as the 
 predominant faculties of the individual prompt. 
 To the mercantile combiner, to the military 
 strategist, to the measurer of stars, imagina- 
 tion, or the power of mental construction, is as 
 needful as to the poet. The astronomer too, 
 and the strategist must, in order to do their 
 work, be able to carry in the mind combina- 
 tions and completed plans. The far-seeing 
 masterly man of business, who brings order 
 out of a chaos of affairs, partakes with the poet 
 of the creative power. The difference between 
 them is, that the Poet or Artist always makes 
 appeal to the feelings. So do the melodramat- 
 ist and the prosaic novelist. But these work 
 superficially, for rapid transitory effects. Not 
 from a deep store of rich sensibilities are their 
 materials drawn ; for, if so, in their work would 
 be the foundations and promise of poetry ; nor, 
 when their sensibilities are used by the imagi- 
 nation in fiction, are they sublimated by the 
 supreme, by what may be called the creative 
 sensibility, that to the beautiful ; for that were 
 the fulfillment of a poetic promise.
 
 ART. 57 
 
 Poetry, Art (for Art is not Art unless it be 
 poetical) is creative. The Artist is a creator, 
 or he is naught ; that is, the light thrown from 
 his mind upon an object or scene, whether real 
 or mentally constructed, must win from that 
 object or scene a new aspect, endue it with 
 new life, enliven it with new meaning. Poetic 
 genius vitalizes with its own spirit what it takes 
 in hand, and it takes a subject in hand because 
 it can so re-animate and elevate it. It is the 
 power and privilege of genius to be fresh on 
 trite themes, original on old ground. Genuine 
 Art always spiritualizes, in its means as well as 
 its end subordinating the physical to the men- 
 tal, the animal to the psychical. It appeals to 
 the feelings in such a way as not superficially 
 to please them or to flatter them, but in such 
 a way as shall rejoice, and through that rejoic- 
 ing, purify them. The crowning faculty, 
 crowning a pyramid of abilities, which em- 
 powers the Artist to do this, is his sensibility 
 to the beautiful, what may be called his glori- 
 fying faculty. Hence the Artist is not a copy- 
 ist, a sensuous imitator of Nature, a mere re- 
 flector ; his brain is not a daguerreotype plate 
 to be painted on by the sun's rays. He is his 
 own sun, and prints on an object fresh lines
 
 58 BRIEF ESSAYS. 
 
 that make it a new picture. By experience, by 
 contemplation of Nature, his susceptive mind 
 is, to be sure, ever enriched. As Wordsworth 
 says : 
 
 " From Nature and her overflowing^soul 
 I had received so much that all my thoughts 
 Were steeped in feeling." 
 
 That he be so enriched the wealth of his aesthetic 
 endowment must be refined by his delight in 
 the beautiful. Within him there throbs more 
 feeling than he needs for his every day individ- 
 ual use, and the superflux he throws out in 
 products having in them so much that they 
 live for generations, imparting life to others, 
 like the sun who from his abounding bosom 
 projects warm globes to animate space. 
 
 Under poetic impulse the Artist throws him 
 out of and above his common self up to a purer, 
 freer plane, where his vision is so penetrative, 
 so elective, as to bring before him what is most 
 choice. Life is full of wonders, is all wonder ; 
 and it is the Artist's privilege to be in closer 
 rapport with the divine essence out of which 
 springs this manifold wonder ; and thence, be- 
 come originative, he breathes into his work 
 some of the breath from the creative spirit. 
 To the grand and mysterious and beautiful in
 
 ART. 59 
 
 Nature his soul gives a livelier echo, and thus 
 is he able to make his work, as Goethe says, 
 " seem at once natural and supernatural." The 
 only faithful reporter and interpreter of Nature 
 is the poetic reporter. No object, whether in 
 Nature, or feigned in harmony therewith by 
 the imagination, can be fully, distinctly seen, 
 except by the light that flares higher and 
 brighter in him than in others, the light of the 
 beautiful. Not the most gifted can reproduce 
 the whole, can reveal the full secret ; the genial 
 hand can tell enough to give stimulating inti- 
 mations, visionary glimpses of much that is 
 untold. Yet in itself a work of Art should 
 not be vague or indecisive ; a finite whole in 
 one sense, it so speaks to the soul as to let 
 us feel that it comes out of the Infinite, and 
 it points us thither 
 
 Art, then, is a projection out of the inmost 
 of gifted, poetic-minded men. Its source is 
 given, quite unsconsciously, in a few lines of 
 Raphael's letter to his friend, Count Baldas- 
 sare Castiglione : " As to the Galatea," he 
 writes, " I should hold myself to be a great 
 Master were only half of the great things in 
 *t that your excellency writes to me. In your 
 words, however, I find proof of the love you
 
 6O BRIEF ESS A YS. 
 
 bear me. Let me here say to you that, in 
 order to paint a beautiful female figure, I 
 should have to see many, and, moreover, under 
 the condition that your excellency stood near 
 me, to choose the most beautiful. But as a right 
 judgment is as rare as is a beautiful woman, 
 / make tise of a certain idea which springs up in 
 my mind. Whether or not this possesses ar- 
 tistic excellence I know not, but I strive to com- 
 pass it" The brains of Raphaels and Leo- 
 nardos and Phidiases, these are the nests, high 
 and lonely like the eagle's, overlooking the 
 plains below, whence issues winged Art. A 
 visionary realm is that of Art, too ethereal to 
 be but partially incarnated ; and this is its 
 source, a longing for, an inward mounting 
 towards, perfection, a striving after beautiful 
 possibilities. Art is an iris-hued transfigura- 
 tion of plodding prosaic life, a rainbow everlast- 
 ingly spanning the storm-drenched world.
 
 X. 
 
 TRAVEL. 
 
 WOULD you make the most of a capable 
 youth ? Drive him away from home, even 
 should his home be a vast metropolis, a London, 
 a Paris, a New York. If he never quits it he 
 gets withered and localized into a cockney or a 
 badaud. A youth of mental force, especially 
 one with the boldness of genius, will not wait 
 to be driven. Travel is a lively educator ; it 
 opens, it expands, it liberates the mind. Ob- 
 serve those citizens of the better class so- 
 called who never go beyond their county or 
 state ; they get to be so self-complacent about 
 petty home-possessions, so intellectually (and 
 unconsciously) emaciated, from ever breathing 
 the same close mental air, so redolent of pro- 
 vincial egotism, that the sole self-defense their 
 friends have is to laugh outright at such child- 
 ish limitation. 
 
 When a competent man travels, he goes out 
 of himself, he projects him beyond the narrow 
 circle of home-activities and customary influ-
 
 62 BRIEF ESS A YS. 
 
 ences ; his faculties by being freed, are strength- 
 ened. To go out of one's self, to forget one's 
 self, is morally the most gainful movement that 
 can be made. Akin to this is the intellectual 
 liberation by travel, which, like the moral, is 
 often rich in wide-spread benefit. Had Shake- 
 speare not travelled up to London, what would 
 have become of us ? We should have had no 
 Lear, no Tempest, no Hamlet, no Imogen. 
 Stratford-on-Avon, with neighboring Warwick, 
 could not have fed the brain out of which were 
 to spring these wonders and giants. Much 
 of circumstance genius can overcome ; such 
 conquest is one of its functions ; but it must 
 have room for the free play of its sprightly 
 brood. Who will pretend that if Raphael had 
 been born and bred in picture-banning Con- 
 stantinople, the world would have been replen- 
 ished with his Madonnas ? Goethe was im- 
 pelled to travel away from prosaic Frankfort, 
 and his long life in genial Weimar he freshened 
 and indoctrinated by travel into France, into 
 Switzerland, into Italy. The best thing that 
 Franklin ever did for himself was to run away 
 from Boston when a boy. A new city with 
 new influences wrought freshly on his self- 
 reliance and resources, and unfolded his mental
 
 TRA VEL. 63 
 
 means more decisively. His remarkable indi- 
 viduality he brought with him from his birth- 
 place, but its full development was due to his 
 abode in Philadelphia. Travel to England com- 
 pleted Franklin's early self-education. 
 
 One of Milton's biographers, Sir Egerton 
 Brydges, a genial tory, thinks that Milton's 
 journey to Italy in his twenty-ninth year was 
 "the preservative of Milton's poetical genius 
 against his political adoptions." Certain it is, 
 that what he saw and heard and learnt and felt 
 in Italy, was a phasis in his culture which 
 nothing else could have supplied. This journey 
 Milton shortened, being ashamed, as he says, 
 to remain abroad enjoying himself, while his 
 countrymen were fighting for freedom at home. 
 For twenty years politics withdrew him from 
 poetry. When he returned from Italy Milton 
 was thirty-one. Dante was thirty-six when 
 banished from Florence. Had he been re- 
 called after a year or two, he would, with his 
 fiery temperament, have thrown himself again 
 upon the sea of Italian politics at that stormy 
 period, and the calm, abstracted moods, needed 
 for high poetry, would not have been found. 
 To Dante's enforced travel for the last twenty 
 years of his life the world probably owes one 
 of the great epics of literature.
 
 64 BRIEF ESSAYS. 
 
 Of single journeys the most momentous 
 was that of Luther to Rome. In after life he 
 declared, " I would not for a hundred thousand 
 florins not have seen Rome, not have seen 
 Rome, not have seen Rome. I should have 
 been troubled for fear that I did the Pope in- 
 justice." The opening of such eyes on what 
 they saw in Rome, and on the way thither, was 
 an effect of travel which in turn became a cause 
 as potent and prolific as any that human in- 
 sight can trace. 
 
 A restless yearning often drives men of 
 creative power abroad to enlarge themselves, to 
 feast their hungry faculties on variety. Homer 
 and Plato and Pythagoras were great travel- 
 lers. yEschylus did part of his travel as a sol- 
 dier, and won the crown of preeminent bravery 
 at Marathon and again at Salamis. Socrates 
 went on three military expeditions, two of 
 them into remote Thrace. Demosthenes liked 
 travel ; so did Cicero and Virgil and Horace. 
 Nor should we forget the saints, Augustin and 
 Jerome and Chrysostom and Thomas Aquinas. 
 To Montaigne and Cervantes travel was a 
 harvest ; and so it was to Montesquieu, Voltaire, 
 Rousseau, to Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, 
 Shelley.
 
 TRA VEL. 65 
 
 The most majestic and far-seeing of travellers 
 was Columbus. He travelled in search of a 
 World and found it. Three centuries later, 
 while yet the natives roamed on the hither side 
 of the Alleghanies, there grew up in this new 
 world a boy, who, taking on himself at the 
 age of sixteen the engagements of manhood, 
 started on his travels, an authorized surveyor, 
 towards the wilds of the Shenandoah and the 
 mountains beyond, training his courageous eye 
 among untamed Indians, inuring his heroic 
 limbs to toil and storm, thus unconsciously 
 educating himself for the great journey he was, 
 in mature manhood, to make from Cambridge 
 in Massachusetts to Yorktown in Virginia ; a 
 journey which lasted about six years, and the 
 fruits whereof may be judged by this, that 
 in one hundred years from the day he started 
 on that journey in 1776, the three millions 
 of colonists whose national independence was 
 secured by the capture of Cornwallis at York- 
 town, will have grown to be a Republic of 
 more than forty millions of souls, the most 
 prosperous and most progressive nation, the 
 most enlightened and most influential on the 
 globe. A few years after the capture of Corn- 
 wallis, the first President of the new republic 
 5
 
 66 BRIEF ESSAYS. 
 
 granted at Philadelphia an audience to a young 
 French traveller, then unknown, Chateaubriand, 
 who, in his memoirs written half a century 
 later, thus records the interview : " Happy am 
 I that the looks of Washington fell on me. 
 I felt myself warmed by them for the rest of 
 my life." 
 
 Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon were terrible 
 travellers. With such retinue did they move, 
 that not only were they secure against being 
 robbed, but were strong enough to rob and 
 sack at any of the stations of their numerous 
 journeys. But to humanity even more event- 
 ful than these, are another class, who may 
 be called travellers paramount, namely Tribes, 
 Hordes, Peoples. Under a sway resistless, and 
 deeper than any conscious impulse, do they 
 stretch forward on their long endless journey- 
 ings. Think of the first wave which, far back 
 in the dim dawn of time, started westward, 
 rolling on, we know not how far and how 
 fast, pushed forward by stronger waves, and 
 these again urged onward by still stronger, 
 until, out of the vast, mysterious Asiatic womb, 
 the whole of Europe was peopled even to its 
 westwardmost islands. Think of those huge 
 tidal waves, irresistible, overwhelming, which,
 
 TRAVEL. 67 
 
 under the names of Goths, Suevi, Lombards, 
 Burgundians, Vandals, swept over the Roman 
 Empire in the early centuries of our era, over- 
 laying an exhausted population with fresh de- 
 posits of human breeds, wherefrom were to 
 spring the modern nations of Europe, out of 
 barbarian grossness emerging self-crowned with 
 Literature and Art, and finally with the great- 
 est of civilizers, Science. 
 
 Onward, still onward they again rolled, in 
 the tempestuous track of the bold God-driven 
 Columbus. And now, while this new World 
 is yet but sparsely peopled, already have the 
 stoutest of them pushed across our wide conti- 
 nent, and are heaping themselves up on its 
 western shore, preparing to roll still westward 
 on the long, broad paths of the Pacific. 
 
 Seeing what we have seen, and knowing oi} 
 stronger authority than that of Bishop Berke- 
 ley, that 
 
 " Westward the course of Empire takes its way," 
 were it a mere egotistic imagination, an ethno- 
 graphical impertinence, to foresee that at no 
 very remote time the descendants of those 
 teeming bands of stout adventurous travellers 
 who, a dozen centuries ago, in spite of Roman 
 Emperors and Roman Legions, took possession
 
 68 BRIEF ESSA YS. 
 
 of Europe, coming out of Asia, will take pos- 
 session of Asia, coming out of America ? Sav- 
 ages, they went out of Asia ; they will enter 
 it, men of the same force, armed with all the 
 thousandfold might of science and invention. 
 A race ahead of all other races in knowledge 
 and mental power, and yet itself but partially 
 unfolded, and in the full swing of eager prog- 
 ress, will meet on the populous shores of East- 
 ern Asia, a people aged, stagnant, a completed 
 people, a people that has long since run the 
 range of its innate capacities, a people that has 
 never travelled. The stronger a race is, the 
 wider its travel. 
 
 What if we imagine the later waves of 
 population, which, starting from the western 
 slopes of the Himalayas, flooded, to fertilize, 
 first Western Asia, then Eastern Europe, then 
 Western Europe, then America, on their march 
 displacing, or absorbing into their stronger 
 blood less capacious breeds what if we ima- 
 gine them to have come full circle in their toil- 
 some travel round the temperate zone of the 
 globe, surging in triumphant splendor in the 
 heart of ample Asia, brandishing, not the sword 
 of war, but a far more potent instrument of 
 conquest, the torch of Science, blazing with
 
 TRAVEL. 69 
 
 clear, accumulated, thoughtful might, illumi- 
 nating domains at present undreamed of? 
 What if we imagine this buoyant multitude, 
 loaded with the mental spoils of thousands of 
 years, starting again, to plant through Western 
 Asia and Eastern Europe the benefactions of 
 Science and Art and Culture, and the blessings 
 that stream from the general usufruct of broad 
 principles and intelligent submission to divine 
 law, repeating, under far higher conditions, 
 its westward travel, sowing everywhere, along 
 its broadened furrow, truth .and beauty and 
 power ? 

 
 XI. 
 
 OBEDIENCE. 
 
 MOVING to the rhythm of law, the life that 
 throbs from the mighty central soul gladdens 
 with its pulse all the arteries of the Universe, 
 forgetting never the finest capillaries of being. 
 Of this animation the most sparkling result 
 looks through the eyes of man. Within his 
 wonderful self a man carries a triple life, each 
 a boundless power, an unfathomable source, 
 his sensational or animal, what might be termed 
 his fleshly life, his moral, spiritual, or passional 
 life, which supplies the fuel and motive force to 
 his being, and finally the life intellectual, whose 
 office is that of the ship's rudder, to hold the 
 combined lives to their natural or chosen 
 courses. In this high function intellect is 
 aided by instinct, which is a wise and innate, 
 though unconscious, power of self-direction. 
 But against the centrifugal forces within a man 
 the two together, instinct and intellect, suffice 
 not at times to keep his being in its natural 
 orbit. The hardest to enlighten is selfishness.
 
 OBEDIENCE. "J\ 
 
 Through the earlier phases of general human 
 development, man delights in a youthful willful- 
 ness, a contradictory lawlessness, a partial self- 
 destructive indulgence. 
 
 Among the later discoveries man makes 
 is, that his well-being depends on obedience to 
 law, and that the laws he is to obey are not 
 usurping tyrannies, not even self-imposed re- 
 strictions, but movements of growth, impulses 
 of healthy life, which invite kindly guidance 
 in order to work as cooperative activities, 
 healthy vivacities, that only need sympathetic 
 assistance and furtherance. Nature is as me- 
 thodical and orderly as she is generous, and her 
 generosity is only available to those who per- 
 ceive and accept her method and her order. 
 
 What if you were to set yourself to quench 
 the life of outward Nature, to arrest the rising 
 grass in spring, to stay the cataract's leap, to 
 cool the ripening rays of July : the very thought 
 of such efforts savors of lunacy. Yet this is 
 what every one now does daily, in greater or 
 less degree. When, in eating or drinking, in 
 overwork or underwork, asleep or awake, ac- 
 tively or passively, you break a law of Nature, 
 you quench some of her life, and you quench 
 it there where only it can be quenched, tern-
 
 72 BRIEF ESS A YS. 
 
 porarily, partially, personally. You throw your- 
 self out of the wardship of that beneficent 
 wisdom which malces itself your sleepless, 
 almost omnipotent, guardian and servant. And 
 yet, such is the all-pervasive force of Nature, 
 her inaccessible vitality, her irreducible might, 
 and such our dependence upon her, our in- 
 dissoluble ties to her, that with our worst law- 
 lessness and willfulness we can but partially 
 forfeit her protection. By resisting her de- 
 mands, bodies, forms, are maimed or vitiated 
 or destroyed, but the life that holds them in 
 shape is inexpugnable. At the acme of will- 
 fulness, in the extreme darkness of desperation, 
 a man commits suicide : his purpose is, to put 
 an end to himself. He cannot do it : Nature's 
 resource is too deep for his shallow strokes : 
 she baffles him. The life that asserted itself 
 by temporarily animating his organized body is 
 inextinguishable, and keeps its hold for another 
 phase of being. To his surprise, and at first to 
 his dismay, he finds himself still alive : he 
 has killed his body, his soul he cannot kill. 
 Through his imperishable consciousness, he 
 finds himself not only alive but retarded, ob- 
 structed by another, a crowning, breach of law.
 
 XII. 
 
 FREEDOM. 
 
 THERE are who affirm, and try to believe, 
 that indulgence of every impulse were enjoy- 
 ment of freedom. When from present example 
 and from history it is proved to them that such 
 indulgence is ever followed by pain, penance, 
 enslavement, death, then they exclaim that man 
 has no freedom of will. 
 
 One-sided indulgence is license, not liberty. 
 Is a man free to strike his neighbor because he 
 is angry with him ? Desire is not free will, it 
 is not even will. To go whither impulse drives 
 is to be the toy of desire or its victim. This is 
 to be willful as children are. Every child, every 
 man, has a will, many wills ; but no children 
 and few men, very few, have much freedom of 
 will, which high condition is only then attained 
 when there is coincidence between human and 
 divine will, a condition only attainable through 
 the full, harmonious activity of all of man's 
 powers, and partially attainable through the 
 habitual easy empire of the high moral powers
 
 74 BRIEF ESS A VS. 
 
 over his wants and conduct. Only with com- 
 pleted human development can there be perfect 
 freedom of will. A man's liberty is exactly in 
 proportion to the degree of his unfolding. The 
 chief men of Timbuctoo are immeasurably less 
 free than the chief men of London. With hu- 
 man power in this broad sense human liberty 
 ever grows. 
 
 The ancient destiny was the Greek concep- 
 tion of overruling law, checking, baffling, con- 
 trolling human effort. But the Greek spiritual 
 nature was not enough developed to conceive 
 of this Divine law in its full beneficence and 
 absolute justice. Hence the Greeks, and like 
 them many moderns, nominal Christians, repre- 
 sent, and complain of, destiny as hard and 
 cruel ; which complaint is always an animal 
 howl, or an egotistic agony. 
 
 Men in whom robust intellect, and strong 
 animal or self-seeking passions are combined 
 with what is called an iron will, have even less 
 freedom of will than many who are intellect- 
 ually and actively their inferiors. With the 
 world such men often succeed in their aims ; 
 but if so, what they do is afterwards undone ; 
 for unfailingly as the physical law of light, the 
 moral law asserts, sooner or later, its absolute,
 
 FREEDOM. 75 
 
 inevitable dominion. Force of will, thus com- 
 bined, succeeds, at times largely, against men, 
 never against God. Napoleon was the most 
 godless man of his age. But mostly these bold, 
 bad men, who never even near the condition of 
 freemen, fail in their life-time, and die miserable 
 and powerless, or gnaw their lives out on some 
 St. Helena, or stalk about among their fellows 
 under a ban, the harmless ghosts of their for- 
 mer selves, pointed at, but hot heeded or 
 heard. 
 
 To be unbound is no more to be free than 
 to be strong in will and intellect is to be free. 
 To be let loose is not only not to be enfran- 
 chised, it may be a step towards a wider dis- 
 franchisement. Within close tubes which carry 
 their precious charge safe and unwasted to the 
 minutest arterial ramifications, is confined the 
 living blood. Make a breach in one of the tubes, 
 and life flows away in the liberated current. A 
 type is this of all being. Being, to be adequate, 
 must be contained. The universe of being is a 
 vast organic whole, one mighty combined unit 
 made up of countless single units ; and that 
 the one whole abide in harmonious combina- 
 tion, and that each constituent enjoy its indi- 
 vidual essential being, each must be withheld
 
 76 BRIEF ESS A YS. 
 
 from infringing on its neighbors, must keep to 
 its special path. Each is endowed with apti- 
 tudes, capacities, aspirations, the working of 
 which constitutes its life. By misapplying 
 these aptitudes, by balking these aspirations, 
 it so far frustrates its life, and to that degree 
 maims its freedom. When each is a law unto 
 itself, it fulfills its end and feels itself free ; 
 that is, when by inward power and by integrity 
 of aim, it completely obeys the law of its being, 
 and thus fully unfolds its innate virtue. To 
 violate this law is so much anarchy, a step back 
 towards chaos. 
 
 To all life and movement law is a sheath of 
 safety. And thence, man's best business is to 
 study, discover, understand, and administer law. 
 The laws which govern conscious human acts 
 are moral laws, and as consciousness is the 
 highest attribute of life, the laws which rule 
 conduct are to man the most momentous. 
 Equally with all other Divine laws they are 
 inviolable. Every breach of them brings loss 
 and an abridgment of freedom. Continuous 
 breach of them leads to deeper and deeper 
 servitude, ending in forfeiture of the privileges 
 of consciousness, which forfeiture is moral 
 death. What to the life of the body are the
 
 FREEDOM. 77 
 
 arterial tubes, which from the heart unrest- 
 ingly carry blood to feed every corporeal func- 
 tion, such are the moral laws (issuing from his 
 soul) which carry strength to the hourly con- 
 duct of the man. They confine and guide all 
 its motions, that these, performing healthily 
 their appointed offices, may enjoy their full life 
 and freedom. 
 
 The organism of man is a hierarchy, wonder- 
 fully aggregated, beautifully proportioned, ex- 
 quisitely adjusted out of seemingly oppugnant 
 constituents. When all of these shall perform 
 each its healthy function, will ensue active and 
 most productive harmony. For the perform- 
 ance of its healthy function, not only does no 
 one of these many and diverse constituents re- 
 quire the suppression or weakening of any other 
 one, but not one of them, neither the highest 
 nor the lowest in the scale, can reach its full 
 function without the cooperation of each and 
 all of the others. At the summit of the scale, 
 the regulators of human movement are the 
 generic feelings, the spiritual and moral sensi- 
 bilities, whose approval is the touchstone of 
 conduct, whose joy is the benediction of life, 
 whose full satisfaction were the triumphant 
 shout of freedom.
 
 XIII. 
 
 THE BRAIN. 
 
 MEN have mind in proportion to brain. The 
 brain of idiots weighs from fifteen to thirty 
 ounces ; the full, healthy human brain from 
 forty to sixty. Mr. Davis of England, having 
 a very large cranial collection, about eighteen 
 hundred specimens from all quarters of the 
 globe, ascertained the relative volume of brain 
 of different races by rilling the skulls with dry 
 sand. He found that the European averaged 
 92 cubic inches, the Oceanic 89, the Asiatic 
 88, the African 86, the Australian 81. Meas- 
 urements made by the late Dr. Morton of 
 Philadelphia, who had a collection of over a 
 thousand skulls, accorded in the main with 
 those of Mr. Davis, and confirmed Blumen- 
 bach's scale of races, the Caucasian brain 
 being the largest, the Mongolian the next in 
 size, then the Malay, then the American Indian, 
 the Ethiopian being the smallest. 
 
 The brain is made up of nerves and nervous 
 substance ; and in proportion as to the simplest
 
 THE BRAIN. 79 
 
 form of brain (a mere rudimentary ganglion) 
 parts are added, mental power increases. Not 
 only is there no intellect and no emotion with- 
 out nerves, there is no sensation, no voluntary 
 movement Nervous fibres enfold, embrace, 
 penetrate into the body and its every limb and 
 tissue : only through them can the whole and 
 each part show life. Consider the power of 
 nerves : they give to the swift his fleetness, 
 to the strong his strength ; without them no 
 muscle can contract, no lung expand. These 
 white threads are the conductors of force, the 
 primary engines of motion, the arbiters of pain, 
 the dispensers of joy. Now reflect, that of 
 this most refined, most powerful material, this 
 sublimated extract of matter, there are packed 
 away in the scull from fifty to sixty ounces, 
 from three to four pounds of a substance that 
 has the highest potency among visible agents, 
 To think that for centuries naturalists, physi- 
 ologists, philosophers, moralists, psychologists 
 have had this tremendous battery of the soul 
 darting at them messages which none of them 
 could read. Before their eyes ever sparkled 
 this divine treasury of revelations, and none 
 learnt how to prize its transcendent worth ; 
 until, at the very end of the i8th century, a
 
 80 BRIEF ESS A YS. 
 
 large-brained German, GALL, by one of those 
 spontaneous springs of genius whereby the 
 mind leaps from a fact to its law, got upon the 
 track which after years of vigilant observation, 
 patient, conscientious thought, led him to the 
 discovery of the mighty function of this con- 
 fluent, multitudinous, symmetric mass of nerv- 
 ous fibres, this conglomerate constellation of 
 magnetic cells led him to the discovery that 
 this great organ of the mind (using mind to 
 embrace all impulsive and emotional as well 
 as intellectual movement) is not one single 
 organ, but a congeries of organs, each the in- 
 strument of a separate mental power. 
 
 Pascal's saying that he could not conceive of 
 a man without a head, has a deep significance 
 when we reflect that Nature never makes two 
 heads, any more than two faces or two leaves, 
 alike, and that the differences in the size and 
 shape of heads are caused and controlled by 
 the mysterious irresistible motion of electrified 
 nervous cords. To swap heads were to swap 
 beings. The man is his head, or rather, that 
 which shapes his head, the vivid inspired brain 
 within it. Contrast the head of Napoleon with 
 that of Murat, the head of Shakespeare with 
 that of George III. the head 'of Pope Borgia
 
 THE BRAIN. 8 1 
 
 with that of Melancthon. These contrasts hint 
 at the creative potency of brain nerves. Run 
 a line from just above the eyebrows backwards, 
 an inch above the ear, and cut off the chin 
 (which no mere animal has) and you have a 
 type of the head and brain of animals next 
 below man. The head, thus mutilated, is un- 
 human. To humanize it, instead of running 
 the line horizontally from the root of the nose, 
 run it vertically about three inches, and you 
 have the outline of the forehead, the beaming 
 forehead of man, " the front of Jove himself." 
 But still, if from the top of this line you run 
 another nearly at right angles to it with hardly 
 any curve, you have not a man, you have a 
 fearful creature with only animal propensities 
 and intellect, an intellectual monster. But, 
 from the top of the forehead spring an arch, 
 and you have in proportion to the height 
 and width of the arch a vaulting space 
 for the play of those great cerebral organs, 
 through whose instrumentality man has his 
 high humanity, the organs of his broad generic 
 feelings, his spiritual and moral powers. 
 
 Through the discoveries of Gall we are now 
 enabled to make these impressive and most 
 significant general partitions of the brain ; but 
 6
 
 82 BRIEF ESSAYS. 
 
 of such partitions Gall himself had at first no 
 inkling. He started with no theory. The dawn 
 of his discovery was in his schooldays, when, 
 beaten in learning by rote by inferior class- 
 mates, he was led to observe, urged doubt- 
 less by his vexation, that those who excelled 
 in verbal memory had mostly prominent eyes. 
 To couple two such facts, at so early an age, 
 denoted a scientific, philosophic capacity. Ob- 
 serving this coincidence at another school, and 
 afterwards at the university, he conceived that 
 the outward prominence was caused by the 
 action of the brain. From this point the step 
 was short to the conjecture, that if this were 
 so there would be other similar conjunctions. 
 Thus, year after year, he went on making ob- 
 servations and deductions from extremes of 
 cranial conformation, visiting prisons, court- 
 rooms, schools, hospitals, questioning friends 
 and acquaintance, even accosting strangers in 
 whom he perceived any remarkable configura- 
 tion. In 1796, in his thirty-ninth year, he 
 gave in Vienna, where he lived as a practicing 
 physician, his first course of lectures on the 
 physiology of the brain. 
 
 What is the fruit of Gall's work ? This it 
 is : (and when did the thought of man produce
 
 THE BRAIN. 83 
 
 fruit of higher flavor and more nourishing ?) 
 that the discovery of the function of the brain 
 reveals the constitution of the human mind ; 
 that the disclosure of the physiology of this 
 huge, crowded, convoluted pile of precious, 
 most expensive, nervous material opens wide 
 at last the portal to the resplendent, immense, 
 mysterious, unimaginably beautiful, temple of 
 Psychology. Ponder the roll of mental facul- 
 ties as here presented, presented in a distribu- 
 tion, before Gall not suspected or conceived of, 
 which indeed could not have been imagined by 
 any human intellect or combination of intel- 
 lects, so proportioned is it, so logical, so pene- 
 trative, so divine. Not by intuition alone could 
 this order and allotment have been seized or 
 even approached, but only by the insight of 
 genius, working patiently and lovingly upon 
 the broadest, most various, most expressive, 
 most pregnant of Nature's facts and phenom- 
 ena. 
 
 Through the objective method what signif- 
 icant symmetry, what a philosophical evolution 
 is here exhibited, which never could have been 
 reached through the subjective. In intellectual 
 movement what a graduated ascent from the 
 individual to the generic ; from the powers
 
 84 BRIEF ESSAYS. 
 
 that note the crowd of visible, tangible, phys- 
 ical objects, with their properties of form, size, 
 weight, color, (properties common to all and 
 inseparable from each) up through the relations 
 of space and time and the infinitude of per- 
 sonal, historical, and scientific facts, to the 
 great generalizing, combining faculties, the su- 
 preme intelligences, which enable men to pro- 
 vide, to organize, to forecast, to deduce, to 
 classify, and which, engaged, in calm majestic 
 action, to the service of the spiritual and moral 
 sensibilities, with them unite to constitute the 
 high Reason, that lordly, sacred gift, which em- 
 powers man, in the government of himself and 
 his inheritance, the earth, to coact with the 
 divine Regency. 
 
 By this objective process, observing and 
 studying the brain intently, sagaciously, per- 
 sistently, for years, Gall revealed likewise the 
 wonderful organization and character of the 
 other, and by much the larger division of the 
 mind, the affective portion, that embracing the 
 feelings. Here is displayed again a graduated 
 ascension from the personal to the universal, 
 from propensities to emotions, from the self- 
 preservative to the self-expanding, from ap- 
 petites and impulses, which man has in com-
 
 THE BRAIN. 85 
 
 mon with animals, to the wide, deep, disinter- 
 ested sensibilities which make his humanity, 
 from self-seeking dispositions up to innate 
 senses of justice and reverence, to joy in the 
 sublime and the beautiful, to faith, hope, and 
 charity. 
 
 From the discoveries of Gall legitimate de- 
 ductions are, that the brain is the instrument 
 of mind ; that the brain is not a single organ, 
 but a congeries of organs, the function of each 
 being to manifest a primitive mental power of 
 feeling or of intellect ; and that, other things 
 being equal, such as health, temperament, op- 
 portunity, size is the measure of power. 
 
 Look now at the brain, or at the vaulted roof, 
 which it builds for its protection, and shapes to 
 its wants, that glittering crown to the upright 
 majesty of man, that masterpiece of nature, 
 which Gall's happy gift taught him to read with 
 a vision so true as to discover its mighty func- 
 tion, through that discovery laying bare the 
 structure and composition of the human mind, 
 its power, aims, affiliations, which mental phi- 
 osophers, from Plato to Hume, had been vainly 
 trying to fathom with the ever short-coming 
 help of their one dim method of self-conscious- 
 ness. Note first the grouping of the mental
 
 86 BRIEF ESS A VS. 
 
 organs. The perceptive, the elementary, in- 
 tellectual, lie together along the base of the 
 frontal brain. Similarly, the elementary affec- 
 tive, the organs of the domestic affections, the 
 primary bonds among men, form another group 
 at and near the base of the posterior brain. 
 Then, between these two, along the sides and 
 close together, are the energetic, pugnacious, 
 and acquisitive feelings, what might be called 
 the self-seeking propensities. Above this group, 
 and above the domestic group, in the upper 
 part of the rear of the head, come the organs 
 of what may be termed the self-seeking senti- 
 ments. In front of these the feelings which 
 give the glow of grandeur and of beauty to the 
 whole mind, expanding it as by their position 
 they expand the upper head laterally ; and 
 above these, in the coronal region of the brain, 
 are the organs of the moral and spiritual sen- 
 timents, whose high office it is to control and 
 temper all the other feelings, and which, when 
 associated with the broad ratiocinative powers, 
 whose organs have the highest position in 
 the forehead present the noblest type of 
 manhood. 
 
 Here then are presented the most important, 
 the most significant facts that the boundless
 
 THE BRAIN. 87 
 
 wealth of the immeasurable domains of nature 
 can furnish, facts which offer to every man a 
 clear picture, a clean analysis of his mental 
 structure, the like of which for validity, dis- 
 tinctness, reality, was never even approached 
 before, and which thus open the way to the 
 solution of profoundest problems in psychical 
 philosophy, facts genuine, solid, not fancies 
 honored as facts, facts purely objective, not 
 " vain imaginations, " as Bacon calls them, 
 drawn out of a brooding brain, but transparent 
 sunlit phenomena, brought to view by a dis- 
 covery which, from the revelations involved in 
 it, may be called sublime, and to which the 
 dark delvings of the subtlest metaphysician are 
 as the tentative accents of infancy to the re- 
 sounding cadences of intelligent manhood from 
 the mouth of authority. 
 
 The students and expounders of man's men- 
 tal constitution, why have they not only failed 
 to discern this sure source of light, but why, 
 since it has been demonstrably exposed, do 
 they so obstinately, so arrogantly despise it ? 
 Is this from spiritual and intellectual pride, 
 from an egotistic repugnance to be beholden to 
 aught but their own inward expedients, from 
 that false independence which stiffens them
 
 88 BRIEF ESSA YS. 
 
 into defiance of the supreme will, that self- 
 sufficiency of human nature, typified in the 
 revolt of Satan and the fable of the fall ? 
 
 In some metaphysical organizations there is 
 scientific ineptitude, causing tyranny of the 
 subjective over the objective action ; and thus, 
 instead of steering their course by the blaz- 
 ing lights of Heaven, they grope tremulously, 
 sounding forever in the fog of consciousness. 
 Some philosophers never reach so high a plane 
 of philosophy as to be beyond the shadows 
 cast by the vulgar vice of jealousy. Some have 
 not sympathy enough with life, with its infinite, 
 and infinitely beautiful motions : they work in 
 the rigid harness of the understanding, and so 
 talk round and round a subject and never into 
 it : their analysis is too meagre, too unfur- 
 nished, and so it never flowers into the bloom 
 of synthesis. Some so much prefer turning on 
 the axis of their own consciousness to turning 
 their thought outward to the abundant glory 
 and expressive glow of God's worlds, that for 
 the beneficent unchanging laws of His founding 
 they substitute shifting fancies and excogitated 
 doctrines hardened into narrow postulates, into 
 despotic dogmas, thus striving to make these, 
 that is, conventional human ordinations, their
 
 THE BRALV. 89 
 
 rule of life, in place of the eternal injunctions 
 of that transcendent supervisive power, the ex- 
 ploring of whose plans, the discovery of whose 
 designs, is the best exercise of human intellect, 
 the aspiring to know whose will is the most 
 healthy movement of moral activities.
 
 XIV. 
 
 MATERIALISM. 
 
 You have seen, observant reader, an old hen 
 that has hatched a nest of ducklings ; and did 
 you mark her cackling astonishment and alarm, 
 when for the first time she happens to bring 
 her brood near a pond, and the little semi- 
 aquatic fledglings, with a simultaneous joyful 
 rush, all take to the water ? Not from experi- 
 ence do they know that water is one of their 
 elements. The materialists, and those who 
 would make experience our sole teacher, are 
 the puzzled hen, and set up a half angry cackle 
 when you and I, spiritual earthlings, betake 
 us to spirit as an element native to our nature, 
 wherein we move with untaught delight, im- 
 pelled, too, like the ducklings, by an innate 
 impulse, and one infinitely higher and richer 
 than that which drives them to the pond. If 
 traceable antecedents were the sole causes, the 
 cause of the ducklings taking to the water was 
 the hen's happening to come near the pond. 
 But what had her brood been chicks instead 
 of ducklings ?
 
 MA TERIALIS.M. 9 1 
 
 A hundred bricks, set up in file, all go down 
 one after the other. Is the fall of each of the 
 hundred caused by the fall of each immediate 
 antecedent, there being thus a hundred causes ? 
 Secondarily, it is ; primarily, the fall of each 
 and of the whole is caused by a mental move- 
 ment, by a will directing a hand. So, every 
 incident in our life is one of a series, acted 
 on secondarily by an immediate antecedent, 
 the primary source of the existence and con- 
 dition of each incident being an intangible 
 essence, a living power within us, superior to, 
 predominant over, our outward acts. 
 
 To say that we learn everything from ex- 
 perience is to say that we get our all from 
 circumstances, that is, from what is about us, 
 which were to mistake influences for causes. 
 Whence come circumstances ? What are they ? 
 What can they be but pure creatures of mind, 
 the busy product of past marriage between 
 passion and intellect ? All present existent 
 circumstances must be the offspring of mind ; 
 they can have no other parentage, and their 
 weight and multiplicity is in proportion to, 
 is utterly dependent on, the force and quality 
 of mental action. Were experience our only 
 teacher, mankind would have remained un-
 
 92 BRIEF ESSA VS. 
 
 civilized, for civilization can only be reached 
 and advancement achieved through a series of 
 thoughtful efforts, interior originalities, mental 
 projections beyond experience. Of Columbus 
 it may be said, that he first discovered the 
 Western Continent in his brain, and then veri- 
 fied the discovery by experiment. The origi- 
 nator, the maker of facts, can be no other than 
 mind, and mind controls the observation and 
 employment of those already existing. Auto- 
 nomic life the mind must have, or it could not 
 be : some power of self-impulsion is implied 
 in its being. 
 
 The printed words that I am reading, whence 
 are they ? They come through the composi- 
 tor's type-box. Where does he get them ? In 
 the manuscript before him. And the words 
 in the manuscript, whence are they ? From 
 the mind of the writer. Every word is an 
 offshoot from thought. Every deed of man 
 is preceded by a thought. In the most trivial 
 movement, immaterial action is the antecedent 
 and producer of the material. Every result 
 brought about by human contrivance and will 
 is an embodied finishing whose beginning is 
 a spiritual seed sown in the brain. No gross- 
 est act but existed first in thought before it
 
 MATERIALISM. 93 
 
 took body. Without thinking, a man would 
 go without his dinner. Every act proves a 
 precedent thought. This is an absolute law 
 of mind. As all human acts presuppose hu- 
 man thought, so superhuman acts presuppose 
 superhuman thought. A man is a superhu- 
 man act, and the existence of a man demon- 
 strates the preexistence of God. But mate- 
 rialists not being willing to entertain the idea 
 of God, this exposition will not be accepted by 
 minds in which, to use the language of Mr. 
 Hazard in his profound work l on " Causation 
 and Freedom in Willing," " admiration of the 
 minutely perfect is much more active than 
 admiration for the sublimely vast," minds not 
 endowed to enjoy, and therefore to profit by, 
 thoughts on the infinite and immeasurable, 
 minds not open to mysterious suggestions. 
 
 Most men, even among the highly organized, 
 are defective in one direction or other. Some 
 are born without, or with very weak, musical 
 sensibility ; some with small faculty of reason- 
 ing ; others without feeling for the beautiful ; 
 Dr. Johnson had no sense of smell. Material- 
 
 1 Two Letters on Causation and Freedom in Willing, ad- 
 dressed to John Stuart Mill. By Rowland G. Hazard. Bos- 
 ton : Lee & Shepard, 1869.
 
 94 BRIEF ESSAYS. 
 
 ists are born with feeble spiritual intuition. 
 They are truncated, and truncated at the top. 
 They lack the higher imagination ; they know 
 not the sublimity of awe. Their spiritual sen- 
 ses are dull. Hence their minds are compara- 
 tively superficial, and are insufficient. 
 
 Metaphysics, having to do with the laws of 
 mind and of being, must deal with the spiritual. 
 Nay, spiritual intuitions, emotional suscepti- 
 bilities, are the best of its substance. The 
 man who cannot turn a tune, who takes no 
 delight in Beethoven or Bellini, would you go 
 to him for the laws and capacities of music ? 
 Strictly speaking, a materialist cannot be a 
 metaphysician, a mental philosopher. His can- 
 not be what aesthetically is called a creative 
 mind ; and to be a good mental philosopher, 
 there must be a power of intuitive perception 
 that is akin to the creative gift of high poetry. 
 Tell him, with Epictetus, that he is a soul 
 bearing about a corpse, and he will deem your 
 talk foolishness. And yet, to get thoroughly 
 at any movement, or even at any condition of 
 being, there is but one track, and that is along 
 the line of light that flashes from our own soul 
 into the soul of things. By no other can the 
 intellect penetrate beyond surfaces. "The only
 
 MATERIALISM. 95 
 
 cause," I quote again from Mr. Hazard, " of 
 which we have any idea, is the exercise of suf- 
 ficient power in the effort of an intelligent 
 being." 
 
 Was the fall of an apple the cause of the 
 discovery of gravitation, or only the occasion ? 
 Was not the cause in the mental aptitude of 
 Newton for taking a hint from nature, and for 
 tracing ordinary superficial phenomena to their 
 deep source ? On that same day hundreds of 
 eyes saw apples fall, but only the brain of New- 
 ton so seized the spectacle as to see it with 
 interior vision ; he got behind the phenome- 
 non. And still behind this Newtonian cause 
 of the discovery of gravitation, was there not 
 that supreme cause which endowed him to 
 make the discovery ? In living phenomena 
 and motion to see only a quality of matter, 
 is to merge spirit in matter, to dethrone mind, 
 and subordinate it to things. By the habit 
 of doing this we grow short-sighted, defraud- 
 ing ourselves, unmanning ourselves, by a volun- 
 tary circumscription, a psychical semi-suicide.
 
 XV. 
 
 THE LIFE TO COME. 
 
 [The following was written to a friend in the country, a 
 scholar and thinker, a refined thoughtful writer, who alter- 
 nates studious in-door work with agricultural enjoyments, 
 and the improvement of helpful animal breeds. In the let- 
 ter, to which this is an answer, this gentleman had thrown 
 out distrusts and paradoxical hints, to pique and prompt his 
 correspondent.] 
 
 WHEN, to provide winter food for your cat- 
 tle, you plant turnips, you look sharply to the 
 seed ; and when they are sprouted you do your 
 best to have them grow thriftily from week to 
 week, from month to month, so that may be 
 most fully attained their end as healthful bo- 
 vine nutriment. You overlook their whole life, 
 and at the very first stage your thought runs 
 to the last, each successive stage being a step 
 in a progression. The same with your sheep. 
 You strive for the best breeds to begin with, 
 that the final outcome of wool or mutton may 
 be satisfying. Every day of each individual 
 animal is a preparation for the following day, 
 an advancement upon the preceding.
 
 THE LIFE TO COME. 97 
 
 For your little boy this provident looking 
 ahead is still more eager, and far more com- 
 prehensive ; and while you are ever watchful 
 that each day shall be a solid basis for to-mor- 
 row, your imaginations are leaping forward to 
 his school-days, his college-days, his manhood, 
 his wedding-day, his ripeness and success. The 
 present is father to the future, is ever shaping 
 it. By a logical bond, indissoluble, the two 
 are bound together ; and the higher, the more 
 life-saturated, the more significant and pro- 
 phetic the being of the creature is, the more 
 pregnant is the bond, and the more precious 
 each link in its inseparable enchainment. Your 
 life is a palpitating, categorical continuity (that 
 has an Alemannic smack that you will like), 
 each consecutive joint of it a transmitter of 
 the past to the future, its earlier throbs as 
 necessarily linked to the later as are the flashes 
 of the two termini of a telegraphic cable. The 
 end cannot be sundered from the beginning. 
 And when and where is the end ? 
 
 In your interesting, suggestive letter of 
 March 10, you say : " I would willingly leave 
 unsolved all the questions of the life to come, 
 if any teacher would tell me how to settle those 
 of this life." But is not to-morrow, next month. 
 7
 
 98 BRIEF ESSA VS. 
 
 next year, a part of our life to come ? The 
 man who is indifferent to what is to happen to 
 him next week or next year is likely to find 
 himself, by and by, in the poor-house ; for if 
 he neglects to look providently toward his life 
 to come, this will be done for him ; it must be 
 done by somebody. A turnip's life reaches 
 its end in six months, a sheep's in as many 
 years, and a man's its earthly end in as many 
 decades. They who guard his childhood, if 
 they are good guardians, have ever in mind 
 his future stages, his life to come. " In bring- 
 ing up a child, think of its old age," says deep 
 Joubert Is a man's life like a turnip's or a 
 sheep's, to end here " on this shoal of time," 
 in dust ? Is a man but a brain-crowned corpus, 
 temporarily endued with volition and ratiocina- 
 tion and imagination and aspiration ? After 
 getting rid of this body, I should not like to 
 find myself in the poor-house of spirits. 
 
 " What has religion to do with Heaven ? " 
 you ask. Religion is the wakefulness of those 
 sensibilities which bind our present being to 
 its future trans-earthly being, involving thus 
 a consciousness and acknowledgment of, and 
 a submission to, the vast invisible creative 
 might that encompasses us. Sensation, cau-
 
 THE LIFE TO COME. 99 
 
 tion, and intellect combine to watch provi- 
 dently over our bodies ; religion performs a 
 like office for our souls. As sensation warns 
 us against what is hurtful to body, spiritual 
 sensibility warns us what is hurtful to soul, 
 especially in the life which is to come after 
 the fleshly envelope shall have been cast. The 
 being of the body implies shape and size ; the 
 being of the soul implies religious appetence. 
 If we have souls, or, to speak more philosophi- 
 cally, if we are souls, we must be religious ; 
 that is, we must feel ourselves coupled to the 
 Infinite Soul, must be liable to be prompted 
 to aspire toward the Eternal, be ever capable 
 of feeling that we are in a sublime, unimagin- 
 ably resplendent presence, be subject to moods 
 of admiration and awe at thought of the in- 
 visible Mightiness. Men are spirits. Their 
 being spirits gives them this transcendent 
 privilege. Had they it not, they were not 
 spirits, and might adopt as their creed the 
 saying of one of the sprightly interlocutors 
 in Beaumarchais' famous comedy, the "Mar- 
 iage de Figaro : " 
 
 "Boire quand on n'a pas soif, faire I'amour 
 en touts temps il n'y a que c.a qui nous dis- 
 tingue des autres betes."
 
 IOO BRIEF ESSA YS. 
 
 Wordsworth's wish, which he applied to his 
 life on earth, 
 
 " And I could wish my days to be 
 Bound each to each by natural piety," 
 
 should embrace our whole life, so that from the 
 earth-stage we may pass without jar or fall or 
 disappointment to the ultra-earth stage. 
 
 " They end not here, our appetites 
 
 On earth they but begin : 
 For though our bodies rot, their rights 
 Survive as bliss or sin. 
 
 M A marriage deep, without divorce, 
 
 Is that of spirit and flesh, 
 And from the cold relapsing corpse 
 Springs life forever fresh. 
 
 " The body's members are no toys 
 For the soul's sublunar play : 
 But counters that, in griefs or joys, 
 Sum what the soul must pay. 
 
 " How fruitful is the littleness 
 
 Wherewith our souls are vext, 
 When acorns of this world express 
 Oaks rooted in the next." 
 
 You refer to the vexed and vexing problem 
 of the existence of evil. Could we get a view 
 of our world from a high enough point, might 
 we not possibly discover that there is nothing 
 absolutely evil ? By aid of the microscope
 
 THE LIFE TO COME. IQI 
 
 our physical vision finds beauty in mouldiest 
 clods, wonders in dullest matter. Were our 
 moral vision similarly armed, might not that 
 look globular and symmetrical which now seems 
 flat and deformed, that useful which now seems 
 obstructive, that attractive which is now repul- 
 sive, that beneficent which now looks malig- 
 nant ? In the bounded view we commonly get 
 we often find that what we thought a calamity 
 proves a benefaction. What we call evil is 
 always a consequence of a breach of law. To 
 tell your son that his toothache is caused by 
 the breaking of a physiological law by him, 
 or his parents, or his grandparents, will not, 
 to be sure, check the pain ; nor do I think 
 the toothache a spiritual lever. But man can 
 learn and it is the most fruitful of his les- 
 sons that law is absolute, and in its aim be- 
 neficent ; that aim being, along with growth, 
 stability, conservation, improvement. Which- 
 ever way we turn we are met by law, and we 
 soon perceive that law is uniform and irre- 
 sistible, and that we prosper in proportion as 
 we conform ourselves to its behests. Could we 
 always submit us to law, physically, morally, 
 ntellectually, spiritually, we should be com- 
 pletely prosperous. Law is an ever-active ideal,
 
 IO2 BRIEF ESSA YS. 
 
 above us, around us, correcting us, guiding us, 
 cultivating us, inviting us, exalting us. The 
 nations and the individuals that have dis- 
 covered and that obey the most and deepest 
 laws are the most advanced and the wisest and 
 best. 
 
 But why are not all laws laid bare in a way 
 that we could follow and obey them all, and 
 thus escape suffering ? This would be making 
 the earth a Methodist heaven. How would 
 you like to do nought but sing hallelujahs for 
 seventy years ? Let us all be made perfect, 
 and we should have no goal beyond us, no 
 summit above us to climb at, no motive to 
 movement, and thence no joy in mental life, 
 whose great spring and privilege is activity, 
 aim, projection, progress, and whose greatest 
 delight is to grasp something out of the un- 
 known and add it to the known. To be aye 
 reaching up for a higher, to be open forever 
 to new revelations, to grow unceasingly such 
 is the birthright of man. What a destiny ! 
 how vast, how beautiful ! What various and 
 boundless range of life ! Mere animals have 
 only a sensuous, sensual range, and that mo- 
 mentary and short. Your favorite ram can 
 only see from one field to another ; you can
 
 THE LIFE TO COME. 1 03 
 
 behold stars that are so far off their light has 
 been thousands of years in coming to your 
 eye ; and in thought you can travel beyond 
 the visible spheres, and you can think of and 
 believe in a happy endless hereafter. That 
 men can so believe is the subtlest proof of 
 their spirituality and immortality. In a sound 
 mind is there an anticipation that cannot be 
 fulfilled ? 
 
 Don't distress yourself because " the big fish 
 eat the little fish, and the little fish eat mud." 
 Their mode of life and of death is accommo- 
 dated to their sensibilities. Mud is as grate- 
 ful to the palate of the fish that eats it as 
 woodcock is to yours; and woodcock is after 
 all but a cunning elaboration of mud. But 
 why so much death ? Why this terrible catas- 
 trophe ? Wherefore die at all ? Because with- 
 out daily removal by death the surface of the 
 earth would grow encumbered with matter, 
 and thus would get to be a moving dung-heap. 
 Besides, death being " most in apprehension," 
 animals escape the worst of it ; and as it is 
 seen that men who have suffered from this 
 apprehension meet death calmly and without 
 fear, we may infer that it is made easy to ani- 
 mals. And to men it has been made fearful
 
 IO4 BRIEF ESSAYS. 
 
 chiefly by shallow, spurious, extravagant, in- 
 fernal (don't miss the pun) theologies. Death 
 is not a catastrophe ; it is not a coming to an 
 end. It is a crisis of change, a bridge of tran- 
 sition into another state. In the case of ani- 
 mals, it is logical transformation ; in the case 
 of man, it is logical promotion. 
 
 The creative Mightiness and sufficiency 
 manifest themselves in Law. Law is perfec- 
 tion. It is no sign of " deficiency of power " 
 in the creative mind that we and all about 
 us are created imperfect. Imperfection is de- 
 manded for what constitutes the life of life, 
 progression, the joy of change, the delight of 
 improvement, the exhilaration of ascent. Law, 
 being perfect, is ever beckoning us toward 
 perfection. Human life could not be lived 
 without hope ; and hope implies a something 
 brighter and better and happier in the future, 
 and implies therefore a present imperfection 
 and a growth out of it. Imperfection is the 
 ground whence spring up stimulants to motion, 
 to activity, to aspiration. Without imperfec- 
 tion there were no expectation, no curiosity, 
 no color, no ecstasy, on earth neither smiles 
 nor tears, neither comedy nor tragedy. 
 
 " Life, like a dome of many-colored glass, 
 Stains the white radiance of Eternity."
 
 THE LIFE TO COME. 10$ 
 
 Were life pure white, it would be monotonous, 
 tedious, lifeless, beside being invisible. 
 
 Toward the end of your letter you say, " Can- 
 not you write me a few lines, comforting and 
 instructive ? " When, you wrote these words 
 you violated a law that of prudence ; and so 
 you are visited with the evil of these many 
 pages. Look out, when you walk among rat- 
 tlesnakes, not to break this law again, but pro- 
 vide yourself against " the serpent's tooth " 
 with thick leggins ; for the serpent has as 
 much right to his venom as man has to his, 
 and ejects it less malignantly.
 
 XVI. 
 
 BOOKS FOR BOYS. 
 (IN A LETTER TO A LADY.; 
 
 To the bounded extent that it can be granted, 
 willingly I grant the request of your earnest 
 letter. " How shall I educate my son that he 
 may become a wise and happy man ? " this is 
 what you ask. Could any one, could a con- 
 vocation of the wisest, be sure of teaching you 
 this ? A child is too vivid an individuality, 
 that its coming character be so absolutely 
 moulded from without. Nevertheless, for chil- 
 dren much may always be done, in most cases 
 very much, and especially where there is will 
 and intellect moved by a love so deep as yours 
 for your boy. " Tell me what books are best 
 for him : there are so many books." Many, and 
 yet so few that will nourish the mind of a child 
 or a youth. You, perhaps, think that to one 
 versed in books an answer to this question will 
 be easy. Were you to ask me how most natu- 
 rally, and therefore healthfully, to feed your son's 
 body, I should say, give him bread (good
 
 BOOKS FOR BOYS. 1 07 
 
 bread) and fruit and water. Let no flattering 
 food touch his palate, and above all, no stimu- 
 lant in meat or drink. As to what should be 
 set before his mind, follow the same principle. 
 Keep away from him all pages in which there 
 is thought or feeling exaggerated, or forced, or 
 insidiously attractive ; in which there is any- 
 thing one-sided, or superficial, or delusive 
 in a word, all pages in which there is falsehood 
 however dressed or disguised. Let him not 
 be cheated by what he reads. The food of his 
 mind should be clean and sweet with sincerity 
 and truth truth of fact, truth of principle, 
 truth of feeling. 
 
 But this you know : you wish to be told the 
 names of the books whose pages will be whole- 
 some for your boy. Were he six or eight years 
 older, I could more readily tell you. I have 
 known, however, of young readers, not over 
 twelve years, who, of their own motion, took to 
 Shakespeare. If your son has not done so, try 
 him with " The Tempest," or " Twelfth Night," 
 or " As You Like It," or " Much Ado About 
 Nothing." Shakespeare is the best reading I 
 know for minor or adult. There is in Shake- 
 speare more fidelity and fullness, more sense 
 and purity, more liveliness and solidity, more
 
 I O8 BRIEF ESS A YS. 
 
 truth and more poetry, than in any other writer. 
 His large faculty of wonder stretches open the 
 minds of the young, which are then filled with 
 images of beauty. They can take in but a 
 part of him, but their imaginations are warmed 
 and grandly peopled. Intellect and feeling are 
 both educated by his pages as they will be by 
 no others. If a boy can gain admittance to 
 the personages of Shakespeare, they are the 
 best company he can keep. When with them, 
 a child of intelligence and sensibility will be 
 fascinated, he knows not why, Shakespeare is 
 so full of* blood, so full of soul. 
 
 Good biographies, well-told lives of the truly 
 great, are excellent reading for the young. We 
 have two that American boys should delight 
 in Washington and Columbus, by Irving. 
 Here, while storing his brain with the doings 
 and personality of two supreme men, the young 
 reader has the gain of unconsciously learning 
 history. Franklin's autobiography is not a 
 book for the very young. Plutarch is always 
 a resource ; I wish we had a livelier, more 
 idiomatic English version. A dozen years ago 
 an admirable life of the Chevalier Bayard was 
 published in New- York, written by W. Gilmore 
 Simms. There are, I believe, several Lives of
 
 BOOKS FOR BOYS, 1 09 
 
 Sir Philip Sidney. These two rose to so rare 
 a moral height, that their characters and con- 
 duct are inspiring models. John Forster, of 
 the Inner Temple, is the author of valuable 
 " Lives of Eminent British Statesmen," leaders 
 in the Great Rebellion, Pym, Hampden, Crom- 
 well, Vane, Marten. So closely are their ca- 
 reers interwoven with national events, these 
 events themselves being the wrestling of great 
 principles, that the report of the parts played 
 by these eminent actors is more reflective than 
 narrative. But the period and the conflict are 
 so stirring and momentous, that an aspiring 
 tractable boy will not be therefore repelled. 
 Besides, boys, when once mounted on the nar- 
 ration, have a ready way of galloping across 
 the reflective field 
 
 Hartley Coleridge wrote three volumes about 
 "Northern Worthies," Andrew Marvell, Bent- 
 ley, Lord Fairfax, Lady Anne Clifford, Roger 
 Ascham, Captain Cook and others an in- 
 structive series, scholarly, conscientious, sound 
 in feeling and written in good English. Hartley 
 had much of the fine quality of his great father, 
 S. T. Coleridge. Wrangham's " British Plu- 
 4.arch," in six volumes, has some value, con- 
 taining brief biographies of one hundred noted
 
 I IO BRIEF ESS A YS. 
 
 Englishmen, from Wolsey to Nelson. But it 
 wants both research and style. The latter 
 want would make it distasteful to boys, for 
 these have a quick feeling for life and light in 
 the printed page. 
 
 History which is the biography of nations 
 dealing with organic masses, is but partially 
 within reach of immature intelligence, and of 
 histories written for the young one should be 
 mistrustful. That they be well executed, ar- 
 tistic as well as historic gifts are needed. Even 
 then, in trying to adagt the account of com- 
 plicated events and characters to the simpli- 
 city of the youthful mind, there is danger that 
 both be falsified. Thus to qualify history, with- 
 out unmanning it, is next to impossible. Could 
 not a capable boy of 12 or 14, who likes to 
 read, fasten himself upon Motley's " Rise of the 
 Dutch Republic," and its continuation, " The 
 History of the United Netherlands " ? Here, 
 told with the animation of sympathy, is the 
 story of a handful of heroic men who, through 
 two generations, carried on, with unsurpassed 
 courage, persistency and self-sacrifice, against 
 the then most powerful empire on the globe, 
 a struggle for the dearest rights of manhood, 
 ending in a success which was a gain to the
 
 BOOKS FOR BOYS. Ill 
 
 whole of Christendom. In following the for- 
 tunes of the indomitable Hollanders, the reader 
 hugs to his heart their sublime leader, and a 
 boy can have no intimates more profitable, 
 more precious, than William the Silent and 
 Washington ; but he must have it in him to 
 make them his friends by loving and admiring 
 them. 
 
 For a boy's reading tne difficulty is to get 
 books with a soul in them books that one 
 can shake hands with, so real are they and so 
 attaching. The same with his teachers one 
 teacher will make attractive what under another 
 will be repulsive. As to what studies (beyond 
 the universally necessary for every educated 
 man) will be most suitable for your son, that will 
 depend on his individual proclivities ; whether 
 his talents be literary or scientific or artistic ; 
 whether he be inwardly impelled to action or to 
 quiet studiousness. Men of action are mostly 
 not given to books ; and boys, whose bent is 
 . decidedly toward action, will not be furthered 
 by an enforced attention to reading and study. 
 Nor are artists apt to be fond of the printed 
 page ; their business is to express, to give out, 
 not to absorb from others. The three or four 
 most distinguished artists I know read little. 
 In the school-books of boys, who have plastic
 
 112 BRIEF ESS A VS. 
 
 gifts, the pages most used will be the blank fly- 
 leaves, which will be found covered with draw- 
 ings and figures. If your son has a well-defined 
 tendency, a proved inclination for any partic- 
 ular field of work or study, encourage him 
 in that. What a boy goes at with love he will 
 do well. The choice of nature should always 
 be accepted. 
 
 But the moral side thence it is that come 
 your deepest anxieties. The hopes that are 
 the joy of a natural mother are daily darkened 
 by thoughts of the dangerous world your child 
 is soon to enter and work in. To the maternal 
 imagination he is on the border of an ominous 
 wilderness, where crouch wolves and serpents 
 ready to howl and hiss where reigns a lurid 
 twilight terrible with baited traps and ' masked 
 pitfalls. For your son you " dread youth and 
 young manhood." You have suffered yourself, 
 you see others suffer from the malice, or false- 
 hood, or coldness, or rapacity of those around 
 them. But within you was an inner energy be- 
 fore which evil slank away and danger quailed.' 
 A triumphant mother, you have brought your 
 child through twelve years which you almost 
 shudder to look back upon. Has not he a 
 manful share of this inward power for self- 
 protection ? Has he not that in him through
 
 BOOKS FOR BOYS. 113 
 
 which you can make him feel so intense a self- 
 respect, that he shall be able to walk through 
 temptation and corruption unstained and un- 
 bowed ? It is a something higher than pride, 
 stronger than self-reliance, this feeling of thor- 
 ough self-respect. It is a soul-energy, which 
 masters the whole being for its good, which 
 watches with a vigilance to which even that 
 of dutiful mothers is drowsiness. It is the 
 sense of duty and the sense of honor held in 
 hand by the divine individuality within. Make 
 your son keenly aware of this pure lofty self, 
 with its tutelary authority. Make him con- 
 scious that always, everywhere, in all cases, in 
 every emergency, trial, solicitation, he carries 
 within him an inseparable angel, to warn, shield, 
 and rescue him ; make him really know this, and 
 you may loosen "your mother's arms around 
 him." He hears a voice surer, more awaken- 
 ing, more commanding, aye, even more puri- 
 fying than a " mother's whispers." You would 
 like him to have friends ; these are good for 
 him to have. You would like to be ever so 
 near him, as to be yourself his never-failing 
 friend ; this were good. But all this is naught 
 to making himself his friend. All men may 
 be helped by friends ; we all can and should 
 8
 
 1 1 4 BRIEF ESS A YS. 
 
 help one another ; but finally, no one can save 
 a man but himself; and he or she who makes 
 him fully aware of this is his best friend out- 
 side of himself. Out of your own strong warm 
 heart teach your son to value himself; not 
 from pride or ambition or through self-com- 
 parison with others, but through a clear over- 
 powering sense of personal responsibility, re- 
 sponsibility to his higher self; teach him this, 
 and you " put upon him plate-armor which shall 
 shield him," not from all suffering and sorrow 
 on this temporary earth, where our chief busi- 
 ness should be to better ourselves spiritually 
 there are sorrows and sufferings that are 
 purifying and invigorating but from harm 
 from without. Thus will be averted or neu- 
 tralized the hostile influences that still ply 
 around a young man, ever ready to assail him. 
 You do a high duty in getting the best teachers 
 you can for your son, in teaching him your- 
 self; but his best teacher is himself. All his 
 life, should he live to a hundred, should be 
 education, and the best of it self-education. 
 But I must close. What I have here set down, 
 although so fragmentary and insufficient, makes 
 a long letter ; if you get from it a hint or two, 
 or a corroborating breath of sympathy, it will 
 not have been written in vain.
 
 XVII. 
 
 FREDERICK WILLIAM ROBERTSON. 
 
 I WOULD pay my share of tribute to the 
 character, qualities, and doings of a man who 
 in the past few years has become dear to very 
 many far beyond the precincts of his parish 
 in Brighton, England, where, in 1853, he died 
 at the early age of thirty-seven. 
 
 Men there are with such fullness of the 
 higher life in their brains that they overflow 
 procreatively upon their fellows. Of this chosen 
 few was Robertson, one of those deep, pure, 
 abundant human springs that, at far intervals 
 along our track, gush up strong and clear, 
 where all may drink and be slaked, the laborer 
 and the lord, the scholar and the artisan, man 
 and woman. The depth and beauty and lim- 
 pidity and, I will add, the practicality, of 
 Robertson's teaching all come from its spiritu- 
 ality. Few are as intelligent as he ; and so 
 spiritually-minded I know, in our generation, 
 of no man who has been in the public eye. 
 He was a many-sided man, morally and intel-
 
 II 6 BRIEF ESSAYS. 
 
 lectually. Had he not been what he became, 
 a light such as shone from no other pulpit 
 within the British realm, he might have 
 made himself an influential parliamentary ora- 
 tor, or a far-eyed military leader, foremost in 
 the advance, or a brilliant scientific expounder. 
 Into a close tissue were woven threads various, 
 rich, elastic, to give strength and beauty to 
 the vocation which his father, with a wise in- 
 stinct, chose for him. 
 
 The ruling principle of Robertson's life was 
 dutifulness. At the command of this he sacri- 
 ficed his preference for the army to submit 
 him to the preference of his father. Having 
 done so, he threw the whole of his rare energies 
 into the work of qualification. One of the 
 first of his self-imposed tasks was, to imbue 
 himself with the New Testament ; and this 
 task he set about with so earnest a will that 
 in a short time he had the whole by heart, the 
 Greek as well as the English. The qualities 
 requisite to make a clergyman what he should 
 be, he enumerates in the ninth lecture on St.; 
 Paul's Epistle to the Corinthians : " Great 
 powers of sympathy ; a mind masculine in its 
 strength, feminine in its tenderness ; humble- 
 ness ; wisdom to direct ; that knowledge of
 
 FREDERICK WILLIAM ROBERTSON. 1 1/ 
 
 the world which the Bible calls the wisdom of 
 the serpent ; and that knowledge of evil which 
 comes rather from repulsion from it than from 
 perspnal contact with it." A conscientious 
 man, with this ideal of his life-work, would 
 not have easy years. To such a one the car- 
 dinal question, what is truth ? would press ur- 
 gently. Ceaselessly disturbed by discontent 
 with himself, Robertson at times would ex- 
 claim, " I am nothing but a stump-orator." 
 Seeing the crowds that choked his church, 
 Sunday after Sunday, and the breathless at- 
 tention he constrained them to, he would, in 
 moments of over-anxious self-examination, re- 
 proach himself with drawing and holding this 
 throng through the mere gifts of the platform- 
 speaker ; whereas into these discourses he so 
 poured his life, past and present, that, as one 
 of his intimate friends, Lady Byron, said of him, 
 " he was sowing himself beyond his strength." 
 In the pulpit he spoke out, as in his daily 
 doings he strove to act out, what at the close 
 of the great sermon on "Caiaphas' view of 
 Christian Sacrifice" he lays down as the true 
 human life : " Life is elevation of soul noble- 
 ness divine character. The spirit of Caiaphas 
 was death : to receive all and give nothing ;
 
 1 1 8 BRIEF ESS A YS. 
 
 to sacrifice others to himself. The spirit of 
 Christ was life : to give and not receive ; to 
 be sacrificed, and not to sacrifice. Hear Him 
 again He that loseth his life, the same shall 
 find it. That is life : the spirit of losing all 
 for Love's sake. That is the soul's life, which 
 alone is blessedness and heaven." Ever is 
 this one of his inspiring themes. In the beau- 
 tiful discourse in the same volume (the first) 
 on the new commandment of Love to one an- 
 other, he thus comments on the mocking speech, 
 He saved others, himself he cannot save : " Un- 
 consciously these enemies were enunciating 
 the very principle of Christianity, the grand 
 kw of all existence, that only by losing self 
 can you save others ; that only by giving life 
 you can bless." 
 
 One of Robertson's friends said, " His life 
 is in his sermons." That the sermons were 
 the fruit of his life, of his inmost movement, 
 that in them he exhibited what he was and 
 what he strove to be, to this was due their 
 sustained thrilling power over his weekly hear- 
 ers, and to this too, is due that we, his readers, 
 are by them so warmed, so uplifted. Nowhere 
 is there a trace of sentimentality, of feeling as- 
 sumed or super-subtleized or thinly expanded ;
 
 FREDERICK WILLIAM ROBERTSON. 119 
 
 nowhere any ostentation of intellectuality, of 
 dialectic gymnastics. He is always cordial, 
 always in earnest. His sermons are aglow 
 with a large lucent soul : they pulsate with 
 spiritual life : they are mellow with the finest 
 juice of humanity. Thence are they so deeply, 
 so uniquely attractive. The life written in 
 these great discourses is the literary oratorical 
 embodiment of the searchings and the medi- 
 tations, the bafflings and the aspirations, of 
 his daily, hourly, unwritten life, the projec- 
 tion of his luminous personality into public 
 prominence. In Robertson there was no vicious 
 dualism : he never seemed what he was not. 
 His preaching had its roots in his individual 
 strivings after a better practice ; and when his 
 words grow gorgeous and tremulous in delinea- 
 ting possible blessedness, they rise on the 
 wings of a healthful imagination, not on the 
 bubbles of a wordy redundance. 
 
 A mind so progressive, eager, susceptible, 
 would be especially sensitive to the winds of 
 doctrine which, at the period of Robertson's 
 entrance into the Church, were blowing in 
 strong counter-currents over the sea of Eng- 
 lish theology. The Tractarians were in the full 
 aiomentum of their retrogressive movement.
 
 I2O BRIEF ESS A YS. 
 
 For a while he rolled somewhat unsteadily 
 amid the conflicting waves of controversy, and 
 it was only after his settlement in Brighton, 
 that he became so clear and firm in his con- 
 victions as to sail right onward with confidence 
 and steady self-reliance. Of the five volumes 
 of sermons, all preached at Brighton in the 
 last six years of his life, the chief burthen 
 is, CHRISTIANITY is A LIFE, NOT A CREED. His 
 " Master " was his ever present exemplar ; and 
 nowhere is the spirituality of that sublime 
 lonely life set forth more vividly. 
 
 " To saturate life with God, and the world 
 with Heaven, that is the genius of Chris- 
 tianity." " God is the father of the whole hu- 
 man race, and not of a mere section of it : a 
 divine spirit is the source of all goodness in 
 man : the righteousness acceptable in his 
 sight is not ceremonial, but moral, goodness : 
 the only principle which reconciles the soul to 
 God, making it one with God, is self-sacrifice : 
 this is the essence of Christianity." " The first 
 lesson of Christianity is this, Be true ; and 
 the second this, Be true ; and the third this, 
 Be true." " Christ's rule was, if any man 
 will do his will. A blessed rule, a plain and 
 simple. Whatever else may be wrong, it must
 
 FREDERICK WILLIAM ROBERTSON. 121 
 
 be right to be pure, to be just and tender, and 
 merciful and honest. It must be right to love, 
 and to deny one's self. Let him do the will 
 and he shall know. Observe ; men begin the 
 other way. They say, if I could but believe, 
 then I would make my life true. If I could 
 but be sure what is truth, then I would set to 
 work to live in earnest No ; God says, Act 
 make the life true, and then you will be able 
 to believe : Live in earnest, and you will know 
 the answer to what is truth." " The Pharisees 
 could conceive no goodness free, but only that 
 which is produced by rewards and punish- 
 ments, law goodness, law righteousness : to 
 dread God, not to love and trust Him, was their 
 conception of religion. And this, indeed, is 
 the ordinary conception of religion." Expan- 
 sions of these and similar central sentiments 
 are, for the most part, the substance of Robert- 
 son's discourses. Mysteries he makes trans- 
 parent by the solvent of common sense, 
 common sense, as so happily defined by the 
 Duke of Wellington in a conversation with 
 Rogers, "a good understanding modulated 
 by a good heart." The heart of Robertson 
 was a deep spring of sympathies, wrought 
 oy a strong compact intellect into showers,
 
 122 BRIEF ESSAYS. 
 
 through which there sparkled so divine a light 
 that it entranced, while warming and refresh- 
 ing, the hearts of his hearers. And his style 
 partakes of the power and beauty of this union. 
 It has that throbbing vivacity, that elastic un- 
 dulation, which style may have when thought 
 has been steeped in the riches of a soul. 
 
 Never did man more faithfully follow his 
 own great primary precept Be true. He 
 was true to all his duties, true to his fellow 
 men in every relation, true to himself. Man- 
 liness, in the heartiest meaning of the word, 
 he had. To him may be applied what Napo- 
 leon said after his interview with Goethe, 
 "There you have a man" The blessing he 
 was to so many near and around him has not 
 ceased with his life on earth : we feel it through 
 the record left of his speech and his deeds. 
 The glowing words he uses to describe St. 
 Paul might serve for his own epitaph : " A 
 heart, a brain, and a soul of fire : all his life 
 a suppressed volcano : his acts, ' living things 
 with hands and feet : ' his words, ' half bat- 
 tles.'"
 
 XVIII. 
 
 GOETHE'S FAUST. 
 
 THE poet must make himself one with his 
 subject, which then comes from him new-barn, 
 steeped in the juice of his own being. This he 
 can only do through intense sympathy ; and 
 thence, to reproduce a large deep subject (a 
 tragedy of Hamlet or of Lear) the poet must 
 have a large deep nature. His heart must 
 throb with the heart of what he would create, 
 else he can not create it. Into Faust, as his 
 masterpiece and the longest of his poetic works, 
 Goethe put more of himself than into any other. 
 The principles he had thought out ; the knowl- 
 edge he had ripened ; the temptations, joys, tri- 
 als, vexations, he had undergone, his aspirations 
 and his disappointments all is in Faust ; the 
 depths of his mind, the woes of his heart all 
 transfigured by poetry. Never did poet, saving 
 Dante, put so much of himself into a single 
 poem, nor was there ever poet, saving Shake- 
 speare, who had so much to put in. 
 
 When Coleridge said that the Faust of
 
 124 BRIEF ESSAYS. 
 
 Goethe wants causation, he said what is true ; 
 but when he meant this as a reproach, it seems 
 to me he was mistaken. Faust is not, and is 
 not called, a drama. The title-page reads, 
 " Faust, a Tragedy." It is a lyrical tragedy. 
 Goethe's organization was lyrical, not dramatic. 
 His aesthetic forte was the utterance of feeling 
 in song, ballad, elegy, narrative, or dialogue ; 
 and when, in order to have scope for character- 
 ization, in which he was a master, he chose 
 dialogue, the production was dramatic in form, 
 more than in essence. It would have no dra- 
 matic shock of incidents, no rapid material 
 progression, no stirring muscular movement, 
 no shifting interaction of hostile personages, 
 but would give embodiment to an interplay 
 of strong or tender emotion, to inward strug- 
 gles, to overflow of passionate feeling, wrought 
 into scenes vivid and varied and stamped with 
 beauty of form. Such are "Iphigenia" and 
 " Tasso," and even " Egmont " all dramas in 
 outward shape, lyric expansions in dialogue. 
 Goethe was warned against Faust as a sub- 
 ject that has already been often treated, and 
 with small results. Wise monitors ! As if to 
 a poet the subject were anything more than a 
 mould, and a pliable, expansible mould, into
 
 GOETHE'S FAUST. 12$ 
 
 which to pour himself. His predecessors had 
 failed, because they had little or nothing to put 
 into the mould. Faust, as being a popular le- 
 gend, and a popular legend sprung out of the 
 depths of the human soul, lent itself with ease 
 to genuinely poetic treatment, and especially to 
 a poet of such manifold endowment as Goethe, 
 whose lyrical predilections, too, had here, in 
 the legendary character of the theme, a clear 
 field for indulgence. There was no need to 
 bind the scenes in dramatic continuity, in log- 
 ical necessity : they could be kept close enough 
 together by the flowing reins of emotional con- 
 trol, held in hand by the boldest artistic inven- 
 tion. From its compass and free privileges, the 
 subject was particularly attractive to Goethe, 
 who clung to it all his life, taking it up in early 
 manhood and completing it in his eighty-sec- 
 ond year. 
 
 Goethe had such facility of expression that 
 he was only saved from running into verbiage 
 by his strong and exacting intellect, and he 
 had such fullness of sensibility that he was only 
 saved from sentimentalism by his sound ethic 
 as well as aesthetic feeling. But this rare com- 
 bination and balance of high qualities give a 
 precision and compactness to his expression,
 
 1 26 BRIEF ESSA YS. 
 
 and a closeness to the texture of his thought, 
 which make him in his best pages and his 
 best pages count by thousands an author 
 difficult to translate ; and, of all his poems, 
 Faust is the most difficult. And yet Faust 
 must be translated. The light therein must 
 not be hidden away from all the rest of the 
 reading world under the wrappage of a single 
 language. And we can say, without being 
 chargeable with American brag, that the two 
 best translations of Faust into English have 
 been made by two of our countrymen, Mr. C. 
 T. Brooks, and Mr. Bayard Taylor, 
 
 Christianity, civilization, progress, have been, 
 and are now more than ever, nourished by 
 translations. What if Isaiah and Job and Da- 
 vid do lose somewhat of their original poetic 
 sheen in the transit from Hebrew into English. 
 Without translation we should have had no 
 Bible not a chapter. What do we of this re- 
 mote generation not owe to the translators of 
 Plato and Plutarch ? As the nations of Chris- 
 tendom grow more and more united, the more 
 is the need, the greater the service, of transla- 
 tion for the furtherance of science, literature, 
 advancement, freedom. Goethe is one of the 
 master minds of the world. His sixty volumes
 
 GOETHE'S FAUST. 
 
 are in themselves a literature ; his pages are 
 full of wisdom and light ; and, of all his beau- 
 tiful creations, Faust is the most original and 
 the most commanding. 
 
 Goethe declares that " he who cannot get 
 it into his head that spirit and matter, soul 
 and body, thought and extension, or, as a late 
 French writer expresses it, will and movement, 
 were, are, and ever will be the necessary double 
 ingredients of the Universe, which demand for 
 themselves equal rights, and therefore both to- 
 gether may be looked upon as representatives 
 of God that man should give up all attempt to 
 be a thinker, and give all his days to the com- 
 mon noisy business of the world." Goethe's 
 spirituality admitted matter to an equal alli- 
 ance : he would not therefore have given assent 
 to Joubert's position : " To create the world a 
 grain of matter sufficed ; for all that we see, 
 this mass which affrights us, is nothing but a 
 grain which the Eternal has created and set to 
 work." 
 
 In the second part of Faust there might be, 
 along with the purification through outward 
 activity, an inly-originating and inly-working 
 emotion, tending to cleanse and uplift the 
 whole man and his doings, giving to his activi-
 
 128 BRIEF ESS A YS. 
 
 ties larger scope and deeper meaning. This 
 inward self-stirred spiritual source was not so 
 deep in Goethe as to play in his greatest crea- 
 tion a controlling part. Faust sweeps through 
 a wide circle, but here was a segment of it 
 which he passed over, without getting from it 
 all the light it is capable of imparting. 
 
 The product of a nature so rich, thoughtful, 
 and true, Faust involves sound moral lessons. 
 Through the depth and wisdom of his writings 
 Goethe has done much to condemn and correct 
 the very aberrations himself fell into. As poet- 
 thinker, he did more than any man of his age 
 to clear the general atmosphere.
 
 XIX. 
 
 SHELLEY. 
 
 IF to have the power to lift his theme into 
 a light so fresh, so penetrating, that it reveals 
 sides, qualities, relations, never presented be- 
 fore, a light self-kindled in the lifter's soul ; 
 if to be full of thoughts, images, conceptions, 
 as new as beautiful, and so full of them that 
 they are irresistibly urgent for rhythmical ut- 
 terance, and when uttered give a new delight 
 and a new virtue to the capable reader ; if to 
 exalt the earthly that it shall look heavenly, 
 to irradiate the common that it shall glisten 
 with unsuspected life, to make the motions of 
 daily being converge to a focus so lastingly 
 brilliant that men's eyes are drawn to it 
 through the ages, their vision being thereby 
 purged and strengthened ; if to be and do all 
 this is to be a poet, Shelley takes rank among 
 the foremost of those whose function it is to 
 enkindle and refine and elevate and liberate 
 their fellow- men. Rays shot from a central 
 core, ever aflame with love and aspiration, 
 9
 
 I3O BRIEF ESSAYS. 
 
 are the lines of Shelley. Than his poems 
 more genuine emanations from a poet's inmost 
 were never penned. Through them throbs a 
 great heart, the heart of an earnest, unselfish, 
 loving man ; and this manly throb gives sub- 
 stance and an added brilliancy to their poetic 
 sparkle. 
 
 In literature to create is to breathe a soul 
 into your theme. Divest " Hamlet " of Shake- 
 speare, and it is a vulgar tale of lusts clotted 
 with blood. Take the poetry out of " Mid- 
 summer Night's Dream," and Theseus and 
 Hypollita and Hermia and their fellows are 
 graceless egotists, whose talk one would not 
 tolerate for five minutes ; and Oberon and 
 Titania and Puck, those everlasting most vi- 
 vacious of realities, would suddenly sink out 
 of sight into the earth, as being now more 
 valueless than the weeds which deform its sur- 
 face, for these have roots and a life in them. 
 Ask the first man you meet what he has to 
 say of the West Wind. The liveliest answer 
 you would get would be one like that of the 
 lady who, when her companion uttered his de- 
 light at the frisking play of lambs in a field, 
 said, she preferred them with mint sauce. A 
 clever man and a ready might, without shame, 
 have naught to say of the West Wind. Now
 
 SHELLEY. 131 
 
 read Shelley's ode, to learn what a marvel- 
 ously poetical theme it may be made by a 
 great poet who puts himself into it in one of 
 his best moods. 
 
 The " Ode to the West Wind " is especially 
 characteristic of Shelley, because it is so pure- 
 ly poetical ; for when Shelley is most himself, 
 his mind is most creative, he being essen- 
 tially, predominantly, a poet. And the poet is 
 most a poet when he- can spin a lasting web 
 out of his own brain. This Ode is further- 
 more characteristic of Shelley because it is so 
 self-evolved, thought awakening thought in- 
 terminably within him, imagination then waft- 
 ing him from peak to peak of multitudinous 
 sunlit creation. This rapid procreative energy 
 is a mark of the highest mental resource, in- 
 volving intellectual originality with swift and 
 wide imaginative swing. Note, in the follow- 
 ing passage, how image shoots out of image, 
 impromptu fertility lavishing poetic wealth, 
 and with a logical fitness that keeps the shift- 
 ing stream firmly bordered. Every comma is 
 a momentary pause before a new bound. 
 
 " O thou 
 
 Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed 
 
 The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low, 
 
 Each like a corpse within its grave, until
 
 132 BRIEF ESS A YS. 
 
 Thine azure sister of the spring shall blow 
 Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill 
 (Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air) 
 With living hues and odors plain and hill." 
 
 Each of the five stanzas furnishes similar 
 poetically cumulative passages, passages piled 
 up by an insatiate mental liveliness, ever feed- 
 ing itself on fresh beauties of its own beget- 
 ting. Again, this poem is characteristic because 
 through its musical tenderness there sounds 
 an undertone of sadness ; for to Shelley might 
 be applied his own lines to the moon : 
 
 " Art thou pale for weariness 
 Of climbing heaven, and gazing on the earth ; 
 Wandering companionless 
 Among the stars that have a different birth ? " 
 
 The "Ode to the West Wind" is not es- 
 pecially characteristic of Shelley because of 
 the fineness of the mental fibre transparent 
 in it, for that is visible in all that he wrote. 
 One of the most richly endowed of men, Shel- 
 ley was at the same time one of the most ex- 
 quisitely organized. His sensibilities kept his 
 life in a frequent tremor, and at times, when 
 his imagination fastened upon images ol terror, 
 (and he was liable to morbid moods when such 
 images were most congenial) his agony almost 
 convulsed him. When a negotiation was opened
 
 SHELLEY. 133 
 
 with the manager of Covent Garden theatre 
 to get " The Cenci " performed, with Miss 
 O'Neil as Beatrice, Shelley exclaimed, " God 
 forbid that I should see her play it ! it would 
 tear my nerves to pieces." This susceptibility 
 made him recoil from the gross and robust and 
 even from the palpable, while his intellectual 
 subtlety, and his keen sense of the beautiful, 
 ever tempted him into visionary fields, where 
 he fashioned creatures who were largely ab- 
 solved from the cumbersome conditions of 
 earthly being. In a letter to one of his friends, 
 Mr. Gisbourne, he says, speaking of " Epipsy- 
 chidion " : " As to real flesh and blood, you 
 know that I do not deal in those articles ; you 
 might as well go to a gin-shop for a leg of 
 mutton as expect anything human or earthly 
 from me." And that delicate resplendent crea- 
 tion, " The Witch of Atlas," is prefaced with 
 six stanzas addressed to his wife, " on her ob- 
 jecting to the following poem, upon the score 
 of its containing no human interest." 
 
 This objection cannot be made to " Prome- 
 theus Unbound." In conception, Shelley's Pro- 
 metheus is grandly, intensely, human : in the 
 execution its author yields to his overmaster- 
 ing ethereal bent, to his delight in expanding
 
 134 BRIEF ESSAYS. 
 
 towards the unreal. By virtue of imaginative 
 force Shelley holds his visionary figures firmly 
 before his mind : to him they are distinct and 
 lively, because the filaments that hold them 
 issue from his own brain. But these fine fila- 
 ments soon snap in the reader's mental grasp, 
 and the figures float off into the impalpable. 
 The figures are but phantasms ; whereas it is 
 only personages, humanly conditioned, that the 
 reader can clasp long and close enough to feel 
 and love them. In firm, pulse-thridded bodies 
 the Divine Artist incarnates the ideas where- 
 with He wishes to rejoice man's sense of the 
 beautiful. Shelley's incarnations lack the earth- 
 ly element : he had too much nerve and not 
 enough muscle. Hence in his " Prometheus 
 Unbound," stamped as it is with greatness, 
 the conception is not vividly accomplished. 
 The Gods and Spirits and Impersonations 
 that play around Prometheus have not enough 
 red blood in their arteries. It is not a drama 
 (Shelley entitles it a lyrical drama), but a 
 dramatic lyric ; that is, a self-rapt effusion, 
 a soliloquy in dialogue rather than the ob- 
 jective, organic structure, whose essence is 
 characterization, which a drama should prop- 
 erly be. The age was a lyrical age, so volcanic
 
 SHELLEY. 135 
 
 with change, with passion, with aspiration, 
 were the tempers and thoughts of men. 
 
 In "The Cenci," Shelley plants himself firmly 
 upon the earth, and weaves with the tremulous 
 chords of human feeling, pages of passion and 
 power that fill the reader with admiration. But 
 the story is so revolting that the reader's im- 
 agination refuses to harbor it, and the protago- 
 nist of the drama is a monster so hideous as 
 to be far out of the pale of human sympathy. 
 Cenci, the father and husband, is a fiend, not 
 a man : his doings spring not from human 
 motives, they are the contortions of a blase 
 demon. Beside him lago and Edmund are 
 cherubs. To be sure, he was a reality, a re- 
 ality engendered by the union of vice with 
 despotism, of bestiality with superstition, which 
 Rome presented (and only Rome could pre- 
 sent) towards the end of the sixteenth century. 
 But even the genius of Shelley cannot make 
 Francesco Cenci a poetic reality, cannot make 
 his criminal heart radiate a generic light, so 
 far beneath the measure of the human scale 
 is his moral deformity. So overwhelming are 
 ihe deeds and personality of Cenci that the 
 other personages are swamped in the mire of 
 inhumanity through which he strides. All are
 
 136 BRIEF ESSAYS. 
 
 so pale in the lurid glare of his demoniacal 
 will, that there is little room for characteriza- 
 tion, little for dramatic collision, and none for 
 variety. Shelley has made the most of a sub- 
 ject to which he was drawn by that imagina- 
 tive delight in excess which was one of his 
 characteristics, and which, springing in him 
 out of his very susceptibility to the beautiful, 
 was liable to efface the beautiful with its de- 
 vouring flame. In the preface to " The Cenci " 
 he says : " The person who would treat such 
 a subject must increase the ideal, and diminish 
 the actual horror of the events, so that the 
 pleasure which arises from the poetry which 
 exists in these tempestuous sufferings and 
 crimes may mitigate the pain of the contem- 
 plation of the moral deformity from which they 
 spring." But not even his rare poetic gift and 
 thoughtful art can subdue the horror, but it 
 will envelop the reader and the personages in 
 unpoetic gloom. 
 
 The Poems now acknowledged to be 
 among the most original and poetical in our 
 language that were published by Shelley 
 before " The Cenci," met with no acceptance, 
 and hardly with recognition ; but " The Cenci " 
 was at least partly appreciated, and Mrs. Shel-
 
 SHELLEY. 137 
 
 ley thought she saw in it the opening of a new 
 mine, the working of which would further de- 
 velop her husband's powers through the sym- 
 pathy of the public. She endeavored to per- 
 suade him to repeat an experiment which had 
 proved so successful ; but Shelley, instead of 
 yielding, wrote " The Witch of Atlas," the most 
 exquisitely ideal and ethereal of his poems. In 
 her note on " The Witch of Atlas," Mrs. Shel- 
 ley says : " But my persuasions were vain ; 
 the mind could not be bent from its natural 
 inclination, Shelley shrank instinctively from 
 portraying human passion, with its mixture of 
 good and evil, of disappointment and disquiet. 
 Such opened again the wounds of his own 
 heart ; and he loved to shelter himself rather 
 in the airiest flights of fancy, forgetting love 
 and hate, and regret, and lost hope, in such 
 imaginations as borrowed their hues from sun- 
 rise or sunset, from the yellow moonshine or 
 paly twilight, from the aspect of the far ocean 
 or the shadows of the woods, which cele- 
 brated the singing of the winds among the 
 pines, the flow of a murmuring stream, and 
 the thousand harmonious sounds which Nature 
 creates in her solitudes." 
 
 In my judgment not " Prometheus" or "The
 
 138 BRIEF ESSAYS. 
 
 Cenci," but " Adonais " is the masterpiece of 
 Shelley. In it there is more of the poet Shel- 
 ley, and more of the man Shelley, than in any 
 other of his works ; and the result is that 
 Adonais is the finest elegy and one of the best 
 poems in literature. Here we witness what 
 lightnings can flash from the love-enkindled 
 soul of a great poet. While writing the elegy 
 of Keats, Shelley wrote that of himself, and 
 this half-conscious aim deepened the beauty 
 and the pathos of this transcendent poem. 
 The four stanzas which directly relate to him- 
 self give the most brilliant and the most affect- 
 ing portrait that was ever self-drawn : 
 
 " A pard-like spirit, beautiful and swift, 
 Who in another's fate now wept his own." 
 
 Who can read the sudden conclusion of this 
 most touching, most tender, and most vivid 
 portrait, without a thrill of awe ? 
 
 In writing " Adonais," Shelley's best feelings, 
 admiration of the admirable, poetic, and with 
 it, personal sympathy for his great young rival, 
 generous devotion, rightful wrath, were all 
 keenly enlisted, and by the warmth of the oc- 
 casion, and by the extraordinary demands made 
 on him to celebrate a poet so unique, were 
 fused into a glow, which, by the rare cunning
 
 SHELLEY. 139 
 
 of his hand, was fluently moulded into those 
 pliant lustrous forms which only shape them- 
 selves in the sun of the most genial sense of 
 the beautiful. Throughout all the fifty-five 
 Spencerian stanzas there is the most easy and 
 graceful and close and rapid interbraiding of 
 emotion and thought. The poet is in his best 
 mood. The personality of the theme, with his 
 own affections and sorrows, hold his imagi- 
 nation closely to its duty. His cloud-cleaving 
 tendency is controlled to concentrate the whole 
 roused man upon the beloved theme. Through 
 the action of his wrought faculties he exerts, 
 with a copiousness even more lavish than else- 
 where, the poetic power of compelling remote 
 things into neighborhood, unlike, into simili- 
 tude, scattered, into unity ; but his illustrations 
 and metaphors, even those brought from the 
 farthest distances, are so apt and lively, that 
 they cling to the thought before you, making 
 it at once more clear and more compact. This 
 high gift is used to put more life and charac- 
 ter into the verse. In " Adonais " there is a 
 stronger, steadier pulse than in any other of 
 his poems.
 
 XX. 
 
 SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 EVER behind appearances sparkles their 
 mysterious source, appreciable only by spirit- 
 ual insight ; beneath all human doings sways 
 their interior impulse, only fathomable by 
 sympathy ; behind, beneath these mysterious 
 sources, these interior impulses, weighing 
 them, measuring them, is the supernal source 
 and mind which, in its perfect purity, repels 
 the finest mote of soil, and in its plenary mercy, 
 ordains the purification of the foulest. To feel 
 the spring of this supreme dominance in all 
 movements and conjunctions, is a prerogative 
 of man, enjoyed in fullness only through the 
 translucent susceptibility of the highest genial 
 endowment. Through intuitive cognizance of 
 eternal law, through healthfullest fellow-feeling 
 with human desires, through intense joy in all 
 manifestations of life (a token this of aesthetic 
 genius), Shakespeare, with unexampled fidelity 
 to the deep primary demands, presents pictures 
 of being, doing, and suffering, in their infinite
 
 SHAKESPEARE, 14! 
 
 modes and varieties. Like his own Prospero, 
 " his Art is of such power," he controls the 
 stormiest motions of the soul, to play with 
 them for his and our behoof. His gravest trag- 
 edies are an earnest sport with human passion ; 
 his lightest comedies are a playful conflict with 
 human will. 
 
 The incorporation, through superhuman cre- 
 ative might, of thought and will in organic na- 
 ture, is the daily wonder, ever renewed before 
 our eyes : Idea, purpose, successfully, and 
 therefore beautifully, realized in sensuous form 
 and animated motion, the mysterious marriage 
 which results in palpable being, the great un- 
 fathomable act of genesis, brought momently 
 before us, to delight and teach, to unfold and 
 quicken the eager faculties of our finite and in- 
 finite being ! The most valid stroke of creative 
 might if without arrogance the same terms 
 may be used by the human mind in the realm 
 of literature is the reproduction out of itself, 
 the incorporation of men who, thus man-made, 
 shall speak and do as God-made men speak and 
 do, with a like elastic carriage, a like psycholog- 
 ical absolute individuality. To utter warm clear 
 sentiment under the rhythmic press of lyrical 
 inspiration, is a high exercise of mental power,
 
 142 BRIEF ESSAYS. 
 
 but higher than this single act is the compound 
 act which gives to the utterance a broader sig- 
 nificance, a more definite meaning, by grafting 
 it into a brain-projected human being. There- 
 by the poetic strain becomes secondary to a 
 concrete complex whole, and from being the all 
 in all of the lyric, where it is the direct delivery 
 of the poet, is subsidiary to a purpose higher 
 than a personal effusion, and fitting its place as 
 an exponent of character, gains both in brill- 
 iancy and breadth. Characterization, the crea- 
 tion of character, which can only be fully and 
 permanently achieved through the vision and 
 grasp of poetic power, and which implies a 
 group of personages interacting one on the 
 other in an organic series of doings, charac- 
 terization, in this aesthetic sense, is the loftiest 
 literary achievement ; for, in addition to many 
 single literary qualifications, such as flexibility 
 of expression, graphic gift, figurative faculty, 
 imaginative intensity, it demands fullness of 
 mental endowment, and a warmth that shall 
 fuse all these qualities to the furtherance of a 
 complex artistic end ; and finally, as decisive 
 equipment, it involves an intuitive insight into 
 human nature combined with mimetic facility, 
 so that the coordinated union of the above gifts
 
 SHAKESPEARE. 143 
 
 may issue in rounded buoyant figures that shall 
 move and speak like living men, only with a 
 poetic transfiguration of soul through a poetic 
 transparency of diction. The Germans are 
 right to call Sterne and Cervantes poets ; for in 
 none of the epic or dramatic verse of Christen- 
 dom, outside of Shakespeare, is there more 
 plastic poetic fullness, more aesthetic truth, than 
 in their immortal masterpieces. 
 
 To launch upon the sea of time a brain-built 
 being so palpitating with soul, so mobile with 
 individual life, that for centuries it keeps its 
 freshness and wields its power amid the flesh 
 and blood lords of reality, as do Macbeth and 
 Don Quixote and my uncle Toby and FalstafF 
 and Caliban, this proclaims a kinship with the 
 invisible creative mind and mightiness, and ex- 
 alts all humanity on the soaring wings of its 
 sun-eyed poets. For the crowning mastership 
 of characterization, Shakespeare, by his origi- 
 nality, his fidelity to nature, and his universal- 
 ity, takes the first place, being, as Coleridge 
 with sympathetic insight so grandly says, a 
 myriad-minded man. 
 
 In this multiplicity of gifts there is one, at 
 once the subtlest and the broadest of all, with 
 which Shakespeare among poets is uniquely
 
 144 BRIEF ESSAYS. 
 
 portioned, and which, standing him always in 
 good stead, is especially serviceable in his high 
 dramatic function of characterization : I mean 
 his sympathy with the super-earthly. Hereby, 
 through emotional divination, he has range of 
 the peopled world of the invisible. By all the 
 abler among his critics and commentators, this 
 gift has been noted ; but has it been duly no- 
 ted ? Much more is it than one superadded 
 faculty which enables Shakespeare to annex 
 another Province to his immense Empire. A 
 light it is, a vast Sun, in the heaven of his mind, 
 sending illumination and warmth over the whole 
 of that Empire. Through his gift of spiritual 
 insight, through a belief like that of Socrates in 
 his own spirituality, he is enabled to do what 
 without such belief he could not do, namely, to 
 overleap the gross and palpable of sense, and 
 to grasp the key which opens the joyous realm 
 where embodied act is not yet, but is ever 
 hatching, the upper realm, whence the nobler 
 sensibilities receive their polish, the realm mys- 
 terious, unfathomable, actively though impalpa- 
 bly above, around us, wherewith it is our im- 
 measurable privilege to be in close, mystical, 
 more or less conscious relation, and in imagi- 
 nation, nay, more than in imagination, to enter
 
 SHAKESPEARE. 145 
 
 while still on earth. Herein Shakespeare 
 reveled, sharpening by that higher light every 
 weapon of his vast mental armory, growing vis- 
 ionary with a superlative visionariness, which 
 empowered him to divine the thoughts and 
 wills of men with a godlike clearness, and with 
 a godlike sympathy and charitableness. 
 
 The distinctively human faculties in man 
 being the spiritual and moral, only he who is 
 largely endowed with these can figure to him- 
 self human beings in their wholeness. Had 
 Shakespeare not been exceptionally fortified 
 with the supreme sensibilities, not only would 
 he not have been able to hatch in his mind 
 and thence project the nobler among his per- 
 sonages, such as Kent, Vincentio, Duke of 
 Vienna, Orlando, Antonio, Gonzalo, Imogen, 
 Cordelia ; but none of his personages, not the 
 lowest, would have moved before us with the 
 fullness of being, the springiness of port, we 
 now see in them. To measure anything, you 
 must have in your thought a standard. To say 
 that a man is six feet high, implies that you 
 carry within you the conception of a foot. For 
 moral measurement you need a moral standard ; 
 that is, you must have within you, in full propor- 
 tion, the faculties that distinctively constitute a 
 10
 
 T 46 BRIEF ESSAYS. 
 
 human being, the spiritual and moral faculties. 
 As, to judge of physical height, your own geo- 
 metrical competence supplies you with a guage 
 in a foot, so, to judge of moral height, your own 
 spiritual competence must supply you with a 
 moral foot. For lack of this moral foot, in un- 
 confused sensation, it is, that moral judgments 
 are often unsubstantial, and that such morally 
 deformed idols are at times set up, to be tem- 
 porarily worshipped. 
 
 Urged upward by interior want, and carrying 
 with him, like cloud-cleaving Chimborazo, suc- 
 cessive belts of fertility, the dramatist must 
 reach this spiritual height, in order to obtain 
 a clear survey of the wide diversified field 
 where he desires to work. To this height 
 Shakespeare rose with ease ; nay, he habitually 
 dwelt thereon ; and hence there is an airy 
 buoyancy in all his personages, even the most 
 weighty, and in his pages so fine a light. The 
 normal state of the poet, as such, is elation, ele- 
 vation : when under the spell of the " vision and 
 the faculty divine," he is lifted above himself, 
 and this vision and faculty become more divine 
 when sanctified by spiritual transfiguration. 
 The poet's sight grows more transpiercing, his 
 touch more luminous ; he is more of a man 
 and works from a higher plane of reality.
 
 SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 The sturdy realism of Shakespeare is but 
 the solid basis to his lofty structures. Were 
 his realism less earthy, he could not build so 
 high. The grander the cathedral and the taller 
 its spire, the more firmly must it grasp the 
 earth with its foundations. Its foundations 
 take their shape and proportions from the yet 
 unreared grandeurs above them : within its 
 stoutest folds the realism of Shakespeare feels 
 his spiritualism. His consciousness of the 
 cooperative activity and sympathetic helpful- 
 ness of the invisible powers, is a mystic and 
 an animating influence which works into the 
 texture of his personages, imparting to them 
 some of that springiness which marks them as 
 his. Shakespeare's delight in the marvelous 
 is, of itself, an element of depth in him which 
 tempers his whole view of life, and which even 
 adds a vivacity to the least poetic of his dia- 
 logues. Shakespeare is a spiritual earthling, 
 " a budded angel graft on clay," an Antaeus, 
 who draws strength from the earth ; but unlike 
 that giant son of the earth and sea, he loses 
 not strength when lifted from the earth : he 
 gains strength. As on his immense and mi- 
 nutely divided scale of characterization he as- 
 cends from the base to the top, the joyous laugh
 
 148 BRIEF ESSAYS. 
 
 of the earthling becomes the benignant smile 
 of the angel, the muscular grace of the athlete 
 is changed to the winged puissance of a 'de- 
 scending Michael. And, like a lucent atmos- 
 phere at midday, moulding the earth to joy 
 and power, out of the sunny depths of Shake- 
 speare's broad being come the breath and light 
 of his moral nature, giving warmth and sta- 
 bility to details, and to the grander scenes and 
 personages their wise significance and lasting 
 worth.
 
 XXI. 
 
 THE MERCHANT OF VENICE. 
 
 IN the " Merchant of Venice " Shakespeare 
 pits against each other two of the most irrecon- 
 cilable opposites to be found on the fretful mart 
 of human passions. Antonio, by lending money 
 gratis, has hindered Shylock of half a million, 
 which is daily to tap an artery of Shylock's 
 life : that life is all run into love of gain. For 
 this life-tapping, Shylock would, with his own 
 hand, cut out the heart of Antonio. 
 
 In the conflicts of business and ambition two 
 competitors often baffle one the other, without 
 being unlike, at times indeed even from very 
 likeness. But the.intercrossings of such two 
 would furnish a less capable subject for pictur- 
 esque dramatic representation. In the case of 
 Antonio and Shylock a deep moral difference 
 underlies the mutual antagonism. Shakespeare 
 dramatically needed the diversity, the oppug- 
 nancy, and so, as is his profound wont, he sec- 
 onds his infallible artistic instinct with moral 
 conditions, sinking, as nature does, into the in-
 
 150 BRIEF ESS A VS. 
 
 most being the roots of the variegated flowers 
 he has made to bloom on the surface. Had An- 
 tonio come to Venice as a visitor, and fallen but 
 casually in contact with Shylock, and not as 
 a constant counterworker, between the two, 
 even had they both been Christians or both 
 Jews, would have arisen a mutual instinctive 
 repulsion, the one being generous, kindly, liv- 
 ing much out of himself, carrying an open 
 heart that is ever opening his purse : the other 
 hard, morose from penuriousness, a griping 
 usurer, who would use every man as so much 
 capital, funded for his benefit, from which his 
 own shrewdness was to draw dividends. 
 
 With his veracious perception of the actual- 
 ities of life, and his masterly artistic handiness 
 in harmonizing contrasts, Shakespeare at times 
 includes in one frame Comedy and Tragedy. 
 To tragedy death is not necessary ; and there 
 are catastrophes which to the victim would have 
 been lightened by decease. The moral (in the 
 high sense) may not demand the extinction 
 even of a towering transgressor, and the pro- 
 portions of Art may forbid it ; but that to him 
 death would have been, not a penalty, but a 
 release, reveals a deeply tragic element. Such 
 there is in the " Merchant of Venice." Had
 
 THE MERCHANT OF VENICE. \ 5 I 
 
 suicide been a crime to which Jews are ad- 
 dicted, instead of being one from which they re- 
 coil with peculiar aversion, Shylock might have 
 turned his whetted knife upon himself with as 
 much justification as do Brutus and Othello 
 their swords ; and, when overwhelmed by the 
 sentence of the judge, and goaded by the 
 taunts of the bystanders, he might have had 
 the grim satisfaction of spattering with his 
 blood the triumphant circle of Christian mock- 
 ers. 
 
 Daily life offers many a group where, as in the 
 " Merchant of Venice," in the midst of a light 
 laughing company a tragic figure moves and 
 errs and suffers, and where often his suffering 
 casts as little of gloom as Shylock's did upon 
 those about him. Hereby the tragic is deep- 
 ened. Total refusal of sympathy, absolute is- 
 olation, aggravates the tragic condition, even 
 though Shylock himself, from his unsympa- 
 thetic habits, feels the isolation but partially. 
 
 Shylock is a peremptory representative, ac- 
 credited by the sovereign, Shakespeare. The 
 story of the Hebrew people, for two thousand 
 years ever struck down, but never subdued, 
 scorned, persecuted, but never weakened, never 
 disheartened, this is the most loaded tragedy
 
 I 5 2 BRIEF ESS A YS. 
 
 of History, a tragedy whose scenes are cen- 
 turies, whose acts are the epochs of civilization, 
 whose stage is the globe. Happily closed now 
 is its last act, the ban against this remarkable 
 people being lifted by the growth of moral 
 culture in Christendom. The hard stern side 
 in this excommunicated life of a people, Shake- 
 speare has condensed into Shylock. Shylock 
 leaves the court-room baffled, impoverished, 
 cruelly mocked, but unbowed. His was not a 
 spirit to be subjugated by man. 
 
 The heartlessness and levity of Jessica are 
 to some a blemish on the beauty of this play. 
 But Shakespeare, a rigorous realist, saw men 
 and women as they are, idealizing each chosen 
 specimen, not by smoothing its prominences 
 with the false aim of academical impotence, but 
 by unfolding each to its utmost in the light of 
 poetic vision, the only genuine idealization. 
 By the absence of all sentiment in her smile- 
 less home, the natural superficiality of Jessica 
 has been cultivated. Being unlike her father 
 as so many children are the unlikeness, 
 in the absence of all generous concession on 
 his part (and children are particularly attached 
 by generosity), grew to indifference to him, and, 
 in the absence in her of earnestness of char-
 
 THE MERCHANT OF VENICE. 153 
 
 acter, turns to dislike of his absorbing passion, 
 and to frivolous contempt for its object. One 
 of the curses of miserhood is its proneness to 
 envelop its victim in a dark loneliness, even 
 amid the household lights of affection. Around 
 Shylock this gloom is deepened by the unfilial 
 conduct of his only child, of which unfilial con- 
 duct his unparental conduct was partly the 
 cause; while the unlikeness between the two 
 heightens the play of contrasts, which is a 
 characteristic of this brilliant drama.
 
 XXII. 
 
 TAMING OF THE SHREW. 
 
 OUR world teems with materials for poetry. 
 Wherever there is life, poetic aspects are to be 
 won. Under every life-current which has depth 
 to float a literary venture, there lie unrevealed 
 treasures and gems, which only genius has the 
 vision and the vigor to perceive and dive for, 
 and which such genius joyfully seizes, and then 
 holds up in the sun of admiration, dripping 
 with beauty. To do this is the token of genial 
 power, and if to the gift of poetic sensibility be 
 added thoughtfulness and strength, it cannot 
 but be done. 
 
 These fresh revelations of life and beauty 
 may be called the nervous centres of a literary 
 organism, the ganglia which concentrate and 
 distribute motive force ; and according to their 
 number, potency, and fineness, is the organic 
 vitality of the work and its elevation, on the 
 scale of aesthetic originality. At passages thus 
 vitalized, the reader is arrested, to be warmed 
 by the flame they kindle within him. Any one
 
 TAMING OF THE SHREW. 155 
 
 capable of poetic sympathy, can in a moment 
 experience this animating warmth by opening 
 " Hamlet," or " As You Like It." These two 
 first occur to us because their subjects, being 
 especially congenial to Shakespeare, they fill to 
 its fullest his mind, which richly overflows, and 
 deposits its wealth with as much ease and 
 abundance as the Nile does its annual gift of 
 fertility. You can hardly read twenty lines 
 anywhere, without pausing to delight in some 
 sparkling jewel set in the golden page. Now, 
 of these gems of thought, sentiment, and ex- 
 pression, none are to be met with in the " Tam- 
 ing of the Shrew." Thence we conclude that 
 this comedy is the work of the playwright 
 Shakespeare, and not of the poet. Shakespeare, 
 the greatest poet of the world, was also the 
 greatest playwright. As the principal pro- 
 prietor of a theatre, he made it one of his func- 
 tions to keep his stage refreshed with new 
 pieces. It was a dramatic age. Dramatic writ- 
 ers seem to have freely used the works of their 
 predecessors, and even of their contemporaries. 
 Collier thinks it is evident that, in writing the 
 " Taming of the Shrew," Shakespeare made 
 great use of a previous comedy called " Taming 
 of a Shrew." A most skillful playwright, Shake- 
 speare well knew how to tighten loose knots,
 
 156 BRIEF ESSAYS. 
 
 to give a logical sequence to scenes, to put in 
 touches characteristic or sprightly, and to bind 
 the dialogue in that chain of vivacity, wrought 
 in his wondrously vivid mind. To find a good 
 subject ready dramatized, which by his ma- 
 nipulation would be made more buoyant and 
 compact, was doubtless a godsend to the prac- 
 tical Shakespeare. He could thus, in two or 
 three weeks, turn out a play that would draw 
 as much into the treasury of the company, as 
 one of his orginal dramas that cost him three 
 or four months' work. That the " Taming of 
 the Shrew" is only thus secondarily Shake- 
 speare's, we infer from its almost total want in 
 passages of poetic glow, such as in his other 
 comedies shoot up, with more or less frequency, 
 like jets of transparent fire. 
 
 A partial exception must be made for the 
 speech of Catherine at the close of the play, 
 the speech beginning " Fie, fie." Here is no 
 occasion for glow ; but what a sparkle there is 
 of intellectual vivacity. This is all Shake- 
 speare's. What a propontic flow in the cur- 
 rent, showing, from its depth and volume, that 
 there is a deep capacious sea behind it. And 
 how thoroughly is the long speech saved from 
 didactic tedium by the figurative luminousness 
 in which its counsel is enwreathed.
 
 XXIII. 
 
 THE TEMPEST. 
 
 EACH play of Shakespeare has its character, 
 as each of his personages has his or her in- 
 dividuality. When by Shakespeare a subject 
 was taken up, its quality and the chief agents 
 that give it consistence moulded the plan, and 
 determined the nature and tone of the drama 
 to be evolved. This seems to me his process. 
 He did not select a subject directly for the pur- 
 pose of exhibiting characteristics in individuals, 
 or the effects of certain courses ; but he set in 
 motion the men and women who belong to a 
 given circle of events, and, through their rela- 
 tions to one another, and to the end to which 
 pointed their individualities, and the interplay 
 of these, he shaped their combination into an 
 organic whole. So versed was Shakespeare in 
 the possibilities of human conjunctions and 
 catastrophes, so deep in the confidence of the 
 human heart, his imagination was so free and 
 potent, that he had but to bring together the 
 individuals who belonged to the chosen subject,
 
 158 BRIEF ESS A YS. 
 
 and give them impulse from his own mighty 
 being, and they, like their fellows in actual 
 life, would work out a healthy moral, and, 
 under the guidance of his aesthetic genius, 
 present a rounded whole, as symmetrical in 
 shape as it was lively in action and profound 
 in import. 
 
 That this was the procedure of Shakespeare, 
 is transparent on his page ; and it was his 
 because it is that of nature. In man the feel- 
 ings are the primary power : the intellect is 
 their instrument. The weal and life of the 
 body is not more bound to the warmth of the 
 heart that pulsates at its core, than is the per- 
 sonality of the man to his desires and aspira- 
 tions : they build his character. The artist 
 who would rival nature, must make the hearts 
 of his personages beat sadly or joyfully, as the 
 conditions may impose, but distinctly, ener- 
 getically. For this he needs have within him- 
 self a warm, strong throb, that tunes itself with 
 a ready love to the varied moods of humanity ; 
 and therewith a poetic ear that seizes the music 
 in each. To construct characters in order to 
 exhibit certain phases of doing or suffering, 
 and with the understanding to plan all the 
 movements and control them to a given end,
 
 THE TEMPEST. 159 
 
 this being counter to nature's method, will re- 
 sult, not in art but in artificiality, not in poetry, 
 but in mechanism. The initiative is with the 
 feelings, not with the intellect. In the drama, 
 especially, the story growing out of the char- 
 acters (in the epic the story governs the agents), 
 these drive, so to speak, the events before 
 them. For this, of course, they must be vig- 
 orously and warmly conceived, and so con- 
 joined, so harmonized and contrasted, as to 
 build by their action and reaction a whole at 
 once picturesque and real. In the constructive 
 function, in the handling of the materials fur- 
 nished by the heart as well as those furnished 
 by itself, the intellectual constituent of art 
 finds one of its fields ; and here the judgment 
 of Shakespeare approves itself equal to his 
 aesthetic susceptibility. 
 
 A deaf mute might give evidence of great 
 intellect by the way in which he conducts him- 
 self and directs others ; but besides action, 
 which its name implies, the drama asks for 
 talk. It is in the profoundness and keenness, 
 the range and subtlety, the solidity and splendor 
 of his talk, that Shakespeare exhibits again, in 
 unequaled degree and harmony, the union of 
 sensibility with intelligence. His talk is at
 
 160 BRIEF ESSAYS. 
 
 once more natural and more ideal, at once more 
 unprompted and more logically affiliated, than 
 can elsewhere be read. The intellectual ac- 
 tivity among his interlocutors is higher, more 
 brilliant and better sustained than among any 
 other talkers of whom we have record. 
 
 Of all Shakespeare's plays " The Tempest" 
 may perhaps be deemed the most intellectual, in 
 this sense, that having of course, a deep basis 
 of feeling, the personages, their passions and 
 aims, all cooperate to a triumphal pomp of in- 
 tellectual power. In this wonderful poem the 
 poet plays the god. He controls the elements, 
 and creates living, speaking beings, the like of 
 whom had not before been known on the earth. 
 The raising and stilling of the storm, the mas- 
 tery over the minds of the ship's inmates, this 
 is the magnificent apparatus of the poem, sym- 
 bolical of mental might. In Prospero is imag- 
 inatively displayed the power to be attained 
 by intellectual culture and spiritual elevation, 
 with self-devotion to high ends. But Caliban 
 and Ariel are new creatures, not our fellows, 
 like lago and Imogen. They are sub- and 
 super-humanities, sprung from a brain which, 
 in the momentum of its imaginative sweep, and 
 the intensity of its creative vis, swings beyond
 
 THE TEMPEST. l6l 
 
 the known circle of nature, but, still intuitively 
 obedient to her laws, gives birth to beings who 
 are within the pale of nature, while outside 
 that of earthly humanity. 
 
 Caliban, above the brutes, in that he has the 
 use of speech and a broader intelligence, is yet 
 below the upper class of them ; for Prospero 
 says he will " take no print of goodness," and is 
 one " whom stripes may move, not kindness ; " 
 and Caliban himself declares that all the profit 
 he has of language is that he " knows how to 
 curse." Caliban is not z/;zhuman, for he has no 
 quality that human beings have not ; he is 
 dfchuman, that is, a being from whom the dis- 
 tinctively human has been subtracted. He 
 wears in his head the precious jewel of intel- 
 lect, but this is not irradiated by light from the 
 spiritual and moral faculties, nor even by that 
 from the upper reason, and hence it sparkles 
 not, but is dimmed by fumes that are ever 
 rising from the animal abyss. Fancy the 
 horse and the dog endowed with as much un- 
 derstanding as Caliban to guide their selfish- 
 ness, and with a corresponding capacity of 
 speech ; then, instead of affectionate, faithful, 
 subordinate servants, we should have in them 
 self-seeking, treacherous, cruel rivals. All Cali- 
 ii
 
 1 62 BRIEF ESS A YS. 
 
 ban's joys and pains are of the flesh, and his 
 fears do not reach beyond pinches and cramps. 
 For the joy of drink he will make Stephano 
 king, and be his slave. And here Caliban steps 
 back into the pale of humanity. How many 
 a man enacts Caliban, making himself the slave 
 of appetite and passion, shutting out the upper 
 light of which he has more or less within him 
 (and of which poor Caliban had no glimmer), 
 thus exiling himself from the beauties and 
 beatitudes of life, and stifling his whole being 
 into a self-built dungeon. 
 
 One of the preeminences of Shakespeare is 
 this, that a trait or act, struck out of the in- 
 dividuality of the scene and personages, is dis- 
 covered to be symbolical, at once specific and 
 generic. Shakespeare did not say to himself, 
 " Here is an occasion to embody a generality, 
 to put forth in individual form what shall be 
 a telling illustration of common human weak- 
 ness." Not in the least. With his profound 
 insight into being, with his vivacity of wit as 
 well as of scenic movement, he drew Caliban 
 to the life. An unbroken consanguinity binds 
 into palpitating oneness the world of man, all 
 its complexities and diversities ; and such is 
 the depth and fullness of Shakespeare's intu-
 
 THE TEMPEST. 1 6$ 
 
 ition, that a fidelity of detail like this lets a 
 didactic type shine through itself. If you wish 
 to show the grace of a beautiful young girl, 
 you do not say to her, " My dear, walk across 
 the room, that my friend may see how graceful 
 you are ; " that would somewhat mar your very 
 purpose ; but you send her across the room 
 on an errand, and as she executes the small 
 commission, she unconsciously displays a grace 
 that would ravish the sense of beholding mul- 
 titudes. 
 
 In the brain of Shakespeare, thoughts, the 
 broadest and deepest, spring up spontaneously : 
 they come to him he knows not how or whence, 
 and gleaming out of upper spheres they yet 
 fit an ordinary fact or motion, suddenly illu- 
 minating it, thoughts high, subtle, imagina- 
 tive, yet apt to the matter, abstractions that 
 yet glow with a familiar light. A common- 
 place is sometimes enlivened by being turned 
 by him into a far-reaching generality. 
 
 Shakespeare digs into the earth for Caliban. 
 Caliban is steeped in sense. With roots deep 
 under ground, he is but a stump of humanity, 
 a growth suddenly truncated, and so without 
 foliage or fruit. He has sensation and some 
 understanding, but no aspiration, no con-
 
 164 BRIEF ESSAYS. 
 
 science, no wide discourse of reason. Ariel 
 springs from the other pole : in him we have 
 a glimpse of what man will be when disbur- 
 dened of his body. He is not unhuman : he 
 is unbodied, and thence is superhuman only 
 in the sense that he is above man in being 
 exempt from the physical obstructions of flesh. 
 The secret of the being and individuality both 
 of Ariel and of Caliban lies, in the subtraction 
 from normal human beings of some of their 
 attributes. In Caliban the higher human, the 
 spiritual and moral, have been subtracted ; in 
 Ariel, the wants and the cumbrance of the 
 body. The one is the type of the earthy, 
 material and gross, the other of the immaterial 
 and subtile ; and yet, neither has any quality 
 or faculty not in human nature. No moral or 
 intellectual quality, not in human nature, can 
 be conceived by the mind of man. Any at- 
 tempt to shape a being with extrahuman quali- 
 ties, would end in nonsense. Soar as it will 
 hundreds of millions of leagues into space, 
 the imagination cannot exceed its humanity : 
 to this it is bound by a thread that never 
 snaps ; at the utmost reaches of its flight, it 
 will find no creature but of its creating. 
 The most of his subjects and plots, Shake-
 
 THE TEMPEST. 165 
 
 speare took from printed tales, or legends, or 
 other plays. " The Tempest " is one of the 
 few that has not been tracked to any of these 
 sources. Collier turned over the leaves of 
 every Italian novelist anterior to the age of 
 Shakespeare, but found no trace of the inci- 
 dents of " The Tempest." On the far confines 
 of his imaginative range, Shakespeare may 
 have espied some dim nucleus, which at once 
 began to sparkle under his gaze, and which, 
 fed on the stores of his invention, so throve, 
 that it grew into " The Tempest." " The Tem- 
 pest " is a translucent splendor, hung between 
 earth and heaven, a glittering crystalline prism, 
 through which from the Shakesperian sun shoot 
 fiery beams, in their many-colored brilliancy, 
 flashing onward forever, to glorify and animate 
 the minds that are so blest as to come within 
 their play. Here Shakespeare substantiates, 
 with exceptional distinctness, his theory of 
 poetic creation : 
 
 " The poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling, 
 Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, 
 And as imagination bodies forth 
 The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen 
 Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing 
 A local habitation and a name ; "
 
 l66 BRIEF ESSA VS. 
 
 and ever, even in the finest frenzy, keeping not 
 only within the bounds of truth, but seizing 
 and embodying the very essence and beauty 
 of truth. This infallible truthfulness it is that 
 constitutes Shakespeare's poetic greatness, his 
 supreme literary elevation. None but the poet 
 can know the whole truth, and when, as with 
 Shakespeare, there is a unique completeness 
 of endowment, the range is thereby so wide, 
 so universal, that the poetic vision falls crea- 
 tively on all kinds of incidents, interests, pas- 
 sions, casting illumination, and making the 
 truth flash out, wherever it falls. 
 
 How Shakespeare clings to, hugs the matter 
 in hand, with what a quickening virtue he 
 transfuses himself into the scene and person- 
 ages, so enlivening reality with poetic breath, 
 that it seems more alive than actual fact, is in 
 no scene that he drew more manifest than in 
 the opening of " The Tempest," the storm 
 at sea brought before our eyes by the words 
 and bearing of the crew and the passengers. 
 The naturalness and fidelity conceal the art 
 In the next scene, where the storm is repeated 
 in the report of it made to Prospero by his 
 agent Ariel, Shakespeare out-Shakespeare's 
 himself.
 
 XXIV. 
 
 MACBETH. 
 
 BETWEEN Macbeth and his wife the murder 
 of King Duncan was projected before the open- 
 ing of the tragedy. In the last scene of Act 
 I., when Macbeth, seemingly relenting of his 
 bloody purpose, exclaims, in answer to Lady 
 Macbeth's scornful reproaches, 
 
 " I dare do all that may become a man 
 Who dares do more is none," 
 
 she rejoins, 
 
 " What beast was't, then, 
 That made you break this enterprise to me ? 
 
 Nor time, nor place 
 
 Did then adhere, and yet you would make both : 
 They've made themselves, and that their fitness now 
 Doth unmake you." 
 
 This cannot possibly refer to any interview 
 between them since Macbeth's return home, 
 for ever since his arrival, time and place do 
 adhere, Macbeth having just preceded Dun- 
 can, who " coursed him at the heels," in their 
 way to Inverness. Observe, in passing, the
 
 1 68 BRIEF ESSAYS. 
 
 friendly, affectionate, and yet kingly greeting 
 of Duncan to Lady Macbeth, and the delicate 
 compliment when he tells her that he had pur- 
 posed being before Macbeth, 
 
 " But he rides well, 
 
 And his great love, sharp as his spur, hath holp him 
 To his home before us." 
 
 This is a sample of that deep serene natural- 
 ness, which is one of the fascinations of Shake- 
 speare, and at the same time of his breadth of 
 treatment, his divine power of grasping a whole 
 in all its complexity and the significance of its 
 detail. This gentle confiding greeting of the 
 king, what a foreground it is to the murder 
 that is just behind it, blackening unseen the 
 heart of the hostess he greets. Of the same 
 kind is, at the opening of this scene, the speech 
 of Banquo about "the temple-haunting mart- 
 let." The poetry is not all in the thought and 
 exquisite execution of the passage ; some of 
 it is in putting such a passage just there. 
 
 The words, "nor time nor place did then 
 adhere ; " that is, when Macbeth first broke 
 his project to Lady Macbeth, point necessarily 
 to a period anterior to the opening scene of 
 the play, ere Macbeth had gone to the field at
 
 MACBETH. 169 
 
 the head of the king's forces. This is clear : 
 these words can have no other meaning. 
 
 Now, go back to the third scene, and note 
 the effect on Macbeth when Banquo and he 
 are waylaid by the three Witches. These greet 
 him with the triple title of Glamis, Cawdor, 
 and king that shall be. What that effect is 
 we learn from the exclamation of Banquo : 
 
 " Good sir, why do you start, and seem to fear 
 Things that do sound so fair ? " 
 
 Startled by the Witches' words, because they 
 suddenly reveal the murderous secret in his 
 bosom, Macbeth " seems rapt withal." While 
 Banquo is questioning the hags, he recovers 
 himself, and then the hopes that had made him 
 conceive the murder return to him, freshened 
 and deepened by the flattering disclosures of 
 the witches. Eagerly he questions them, and 
 is sorely disappointed when, without further 
 speech, they vanish. The whole bearing of 
 Macbeth denotes a foregone conclusion. 
 
 Now mark how he becomes still more deeply 
 rapt when a few moments later he meets Rosse 
 and Angus, sent by the king " to give thee 
 from our royal master thanks," and they, greet- 
 ing him as thane of Cawdor, so far confirm the 
 outgivings of the Witches. Then we have that
 
 I/O BRIEF ESSAYS. 
 
 picture of the guilty self-questioning heart, one 
 of those gorgeous passages, gold-embossed, and 
 thicker studded than is usual even in Shake- 
 speare, with sparkling jewels. Here he toys 
 with the murder that is in his mind, though 
 it makes his heart to knock at his ribs. A 
 bloody gigantic crime does not, in a nature 
 like Macbeth's, if in any nature, grow suddenly 
 into ripeness for execution. The " supernatural 
 soliciting " which at first shakes Macbeth, soon 
 strengthens him, and the murderous plot, long 
 before conceived, and which nearly slept, is 
 reawakened, and reawakened into stronger 
 light, as may be inferred from his speech in 
 the next scene on leaving the king, who 
 has just proclaimed Malcolm successor to the 
 throne. 
 
 Let us now, outriding both Macbeth and 
 King Duncan, reach Inverness in time to hear 
 Lady Macbeth read the letter from her hus- 
 band, and comment thereon. And first we ask, 
 in the tenor and tone of that letter and in 
 its brevity, is there not something taken for 
 granted ? But if the letter itself does not, 
 surely the comment on it does, point to a 
 foregone conclusion. Not a moment does she 
 stop to consider the wonder of the revelation,
 
 MACBETH. I^I 
 
 but instantly on closing the letter, without 
 pause, she exclaims : 
 
 " Glamis thou art, and Cawdor ; and shalt be 
 What thou art promised." 
 
 Most evidently the prospect here opened to 
 her is no new one, but one which she was 
 accustomed to look at. Had the thought of 
 the crown been now first presented to her 
 mind, how could it leap instantly, at one bound, 
 to the great crime of assassination ? This were 
 out of nature. Moreover, how hardened by 
 guilty imaginations, how steeped already in 
 murder, by brooding on the nest of ambition, 
 must be the heart that could prompt that ap- 
 palling soliloquy, uttered the instant after she 
 learns that Duncan is coming, and within five 
 minutes after reading the letter : 
 
 " The raven himself is hoarse, 
 That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan 
 Under my battlements." 
 
 And when, at the end of that soliloquy, Mac- 
 beth enters, with a burst of hellish joy she 
 greets him, which he answers with, 
 
 " My dearest love, 
 
 Duncan comes here to-night. 
 
 Lady Macbeth. And when goes hence ? 
 
 Matbeth. To-morrow as he purposes. 
 
 Lady M. Oh never 
 
 Shall sun that morrow see."
 
 172 BRIEF ESSAYS. 
 
 In the first Act, every time that Macbeth 
 and Lady Macbeth appear, whether they be 
 together, or alone, or in contact with others, 
 each scene corroborates the preceding one in 
 showing that the murder of the King was a 
 project that had been entertained, and, in the 
 minds of both, determined on, before the open- 
 ing of the drama. When in the fifth scene, 
 just after Lady Macbeth has read the letter, 
 an attendant enters, and in answer to her in- 
 quiry, " What is your tidings ? " answers, " The 
 King comes here to night," her passionate ex- 
 clamation, " Thou'rt mad to say it," is the out- 
 flashing of her joy that at once, within a few 
 hours, by this happy circumstance, can be 
 consummated the deed, 
 
 " Which shall to all our nights and days to come 
 Give solely sovereign sway and masterdom." 
 
 More in harmony is it with the habitual far- 
 reaching forethought of Shakespeare, that this 
 great tragedy, built on ambition, and the dark, 
 more deliberate desires of mature life, should 
 have its foundations laid solidly in the being 
 of its two unflinching movers. By him effects 
 are never presented unbacked by correspond- 
 ing and sufficient causes. Shakespeare always 
 sends down roots, strong and deep in proper-
 
 MACBETH. 173 
 
 tion to the breadth and weight of the deeds 
 they underlie and feed. The prophetic and 
 loving interpreter of the human heart could 
 not wrong and trifle with it, by making it im- 
 provise a gigantic crime. 
 
 This throwing of the murderous inception 
 back beyond the time when the play opens, 
 gives to the Witches their proper place. If 
 Macbeth had not for some time carried the 
 murder in his mind, then the seed was planted 
 there by the greeting of the Witches when he 
 first meets them on the heath, and they, bidden 
 by him to speak, hail him as king that shall be. 
 But that this was not the first seed, we know 
 positively from Lady Macbeth's taunts in the 
 seventh scene. And, had we not this convin- 
 cing external evidence, ought we not to infer, 
 from psychological causes, that it was not so ? 
 Would Shakespeare make a hag's prophetic 
 hail the pivot upon which this whole tragic 
 drama turns ? More in consonance is it with 
 the resources and the mysterious initiative of 
 the human heart, to make the mind of Macbeth 
 primary, and the Witches secondary in the 
 forecasting of the murder. The Witches are 
 a fantastic embodiment of the grosser human 
 desires, of evil possibilities. Macbeth has con-
 
 1 74 BRIEF ESS A YS. 
 
 ceived the murder, and these stand for the foul 
 wishes, the black purposes that made him con- 
 ceive it. The Witches are low, squalid, of the 
 earth, most earthy, who burrow into the darkest 
 and foulest fancies for ingredients for their 
 hell-broth. They are an echo to the selfish 
 aims of Macbeth, who is cajoled and flattered 
 by them, just as we all are liable to be by car- 
 nal lusts and selfish wills and unhallowed am- 
 bitions. They suddenly fan into a blaze the 
 fire that lay smouldering in Macbeth's heart. 
 Our evil desires ever seize us in moments of 
 weakness. That with all their earthiness they 
 are unearthly, gives them a poetic efficacy, 
 Shakespeare availing himself of the popular 
 belief in evil spirits to make the instinct of the 
 marvelous aid him in his high purpose. 
 
 The Witches open the tragedy with only a 
 few lines, but these so significant that they are 
 an overture to the whole play. Entering in 
 thunder and lightning, they are met to appoint 
 another meeting on the heath, " There to meet 
 with Macbeth." In the thoughts of Macbeth 
 is an embryo murder: their function is, so 
 skillfully to feed the embryo, that it shall 
 quickly come to maturity in act. Before van- 
 ishing, all the three unite in two lines indica-
 
 MACBETH. 175 
 
 tive of their work and of the moral medium in 
 which they do it, 
 
 " Fair is foul, and foul is fair : 
 Hover through the fog and filthy air." 
 
 Macbeth, the stronger nature, has the initia- 
 tive. He first broke the murder to his wife, as 
 she avers in Scene 7 of Act I. The thought 
 thus lodged in her mind, ambition and sympa- 
 thy with her husband secretly nursed, imagi- 
 nation feeding it so succulently, that at the 
 first vent offered, it rushes out full grown on 
 receipt of the prophetic letter ; and when, a 
 few moments later, she learns that on that very 
 night Duncan will be under her roof, so familiar 
 and vivid had become the image, that mentally 
 she commits the murder, and to her over- 
 wrought mind Duncan's death is as good as 
 accomplished. More impulsive than Macbeth, 
 holding the near and present more closely in 
 her woman's intense one-sided view, while he 
 takes a wider range and can weigh the pros 
 and cons, she is enabled to spur him up to the 
 mark when he falters. 
 
 In awful prominence and significance stands 
 out the moral of this great poem. How the 
 crime, once committed, swallows up the whole 
 being of the two criminals : its absorbing om-
 
 176 BRIEF ESSAYS. 
 
 nipresence isolates each of them. In planning 
 and doing the murder, what intimate union : 
 each could then help the other. Now they can 
 help each other no more ; each is thrown upon 
 the sheer individuality of each, left alone with 
 his or her soul. Macbeth hardens, Lady Mac- 
 beth breaks. The masculine nature braces 
 itself to tougher sinew, to bloodier doing ; the 
 feminine fibre relaxes and gives way. Macbeth 
 keeps alone, restless, possessed as it were with 
 the demon of murder. Even when talking 
 with his wife he soliloquizes. This Continuous 
 introspection, this unquiet abstractedness of 
 Macbeth, is an exhibition of Shakespeare's 
 insight; of his aesthetic mastery, unsurpassed 
 even by himself. 
 
 This tragedy is a sonorous sublime reverber- 
 ation, from the mighty brain of Shakespeare, 
 of the protesting cry of nature and conscience 
 against murder, against 
 
 " The deep damnation of his taking off" 
 
 With what fearful vividness is the crime de- 
 picted by the words and scenes which immedi- 
 ately precede the act, by the awful first effect 
 on Macbeth of the commission, and by the 
 accumulating train of terrible consequences ! 
 Before the dread features of the picture, the 
 mind recoils in consternation.
 
 XXV. 
 
 HAMLET. 
 
 THERE is ground for believing that Shake- 
 speare worked at " Hamlet " during several 
 years. Not that Shakespeare was for several 
 years exclusively busy in writing " Hamlet ; " but 
 that the first draft was at intervals gradually 
 matured and expanded until the last hand was 
 put to it in 1604. Defective or questionable is, 
 in most cases, external evidence as to the life 
 and doings of Shakespeare ; but accumulated in- 
 ternal evidence proves that the author of " Ham- 
 let " wrought upon this play more than upon any 
 other. " Hamlet " is the longest of his dramas, 
 and at the same time the most compressed ; its 
 scenes are more numerous than in any other of 
 his great tragedies, and yet, in none other will 
 you find so many scenes throbbing with life and 
 significance. While for animation, apposite- 
 ness, progressiveness, the dialogue is through- 
 out unsurpassed, there is a larger number of 
 single speeches and soliloquies of Shakespearian 
 depth and comprehensiveness. " Hamlet " con- 
 12
 
 1/8 BRIEF ESSAYS. 
 
 tains more variety and more incident, together 
 with a wider range of reason and experience, 
 than any other drama ; more pregnant thoughts, 
 more sentences of condensed wisdom, more 
 tender buds of beauty to expand through all the 
 seasons of time ; such profuseness in separable 
 individualities of intellect and power, that the 
 play would be overcharged with them, were 
 there not in the substance out of which they 
 spring, and which they beautify, such depth 
 and breadth and warmth and meaning, that 
 they are borne up buoyantly and gracefully, 
 so that the pages look no more over-crowded 
 than do the heavens with the countless stars 
 they carry in their interminable spaces. 
 
 All these divers characteristics combine to 
 prove that the greatest tragedy and poem of 
 Shakespeare, and of literature, was the product 
 of more than usual labor and deliberation, and 
 that, should external evidence fail to make cer- 
 tain that Shakespeare had " Hamlet" in hand five 
 or six years, we are authorized by these many 
 internal marks, supported as they are by pretty 
 well established dates, to infer that he wrought 
 at it during at least three or four. It is the 
 work upon which, more than upon any other, he 
 concentrates himself, into which he puts more
 
 HAMLET, 
 
 of himself, when at his best, and which thence 
 becomes the most consummate product of his 
 genius and of his judgment, the ripest and 
 richest fruit of the most poetic human soul 
 that ever was, the favorite of one who, of the 
 priceless gifts of feeling and intellect had more 
 to give than any other poet, and who here 
 lavished them, pouring upon " Hamlet " in the 
 ecstasy of creativeness, from the deeps of a 
 profound soul and from the folds of a vast 
 intellect, his fairest stores of thought and 
 emotion. 
 
 The most necessary passions of the heart 
 are loaded with inextinguishable fire, which 
 may explode in lurid bursts, to rend and con- 
 sume the possessor, or may burn smoothly, for 
 the warmth and delight of his being. The story 
 in " Hamlet " involves them all, all the great 
 primary loves, the parental, the filial, the fra- 
 ternal, the conjugal ; and each and every one 
 of them is baffled, wronged, wounded, scathed. 
 The complicated violence done to one and all 
 the chief personages, drawing on the poet's 
 highest resources, swells to its utmost his crea- 
 tive power, and thence so fills with urgent life 
 every part and page, that in " Hamlet " there are 
 almost no merely conjunctive passages. The
 
 ISO BRIEF ESSAYS. 
 
 heat at the core carries the drama along with a 
 momentum that keeps the continuity unrelaxed > 
 thus rendering unnecessary those transition 
 scenes, some of which can hardly be dispensed 
 with even in the most compact and rapid dra- 
 matic evolution. Fullness of life there is al- 
 ways in Shakespeare : its brimming excess 
 causes Hamlet to excel in what is a cardinal 
 power of Shakespeare, and is a token of the 
 finest and largest mental wealth, namely, the 
 typical quality of thoughts and sentiments, and 
 of personages, these combining vital individu- 
 ality with generic breadth, to a degree almost 
 surpassing even his usual achievement in com- 
 passing this great virtue of dramatic charac- 
 terization. 
 
 Genuine idealization, that is, exaltation, 
 through poetic insight and visionary grasp, 
 with adherence to nature through fullest sym- 
 pathy with all the promptings of the human 
 heart, this, a characteristic of Shakespeare in 
 all his dramatic work, especially in contrast 
 with his dramatic contemporaries, is in his 
 highest tragedies exhibited in its supreme 
 phase. In Lear, Othello, Macbeth, Hamlet, 
 there is what, without rant, might be called 
 colossal idealization. The agonies undergone
 
 HAMLET. l8l 
 
 affect us so inordinately because, besides their 
 deep truth to nature, the strong hearts that 
 suffer throb with the pulse of the inordinate 
 intellectual power imparted to them by the 
 poet. If Hamlet did not say such great things 
 he would long since have been dismissed from 
 our intimacy. And the Ghost : with what a 
 grand individuality he presents himself! A 
 specific personality, what a towering figure he 
 is. 
 
 Did it ever occur to the reader that in the 
 greatest tragedy, the greatest poem of litera- 
 ture, a ghost, " the majesty of buried Den- 
 mark," is the principal personage ? Prince 
 Hamlet the chief actor in the scenes, the 
 protagonist of the play, is the agent of the 
 Ghost. Without the Ghost there had been no 
 Hamlet. The Ghost not only reveals to Ham- 
 let the murder, but prompts, nay, commands 
 him to avenge it, and thus controls the whole 
 action and development of the play. And 
 note how Shakespeare shields this great ghost 
 from the common charge against ghosts, that 
 they are diseased subjectivities, the coinage of 
 the seer's brain, not objective realities. He 
 first brings him into the presence of the two 
 sentinels, Bernardo and Marcellus, and makes
 
 1 8 2 BRIEF ESS A VS. 
 
 him stalk twice before them. When these tell 
 Horatio what they have seen, he answers, 'tis 
 but their fantasy. Horatio, the calm, philo- 
 sophical friend of the prince, chosen by Ham- 
 let as his confidential intimate, because in him 
 
 " The blood and judgment are so well commingled," 
 
 he was just the man to dissipate an illusion ; 
 and so, at the entreaty of Marcellus, he comes 
 to the platform before the palace, with them, 
 " to watch the minutes of the night." When 
 there, as they seat themselves, that Marcellus 
 may again " assail his ears " with what they 
 two nights have seen, Horatio exclaims, 
 " Tush, tush ! 'Twill not appear." A few mo- 
 ments after he trembles, pale with fear and 
 wonder, for the Ghost does appear ; and as if 
 to make assurance doubly sure, after an inter- 
 val of five or six minutes, reenters, that all 
 three, seeing him once more together, may 
 harbor no doubt of his visible reality. 
 
 To Hamlet they report what they have seen, 
 and nowhere in Shakespeare is there dialogue 
 more vital and springy, nowhere more of that 
 bound and rebound in the quick interchange oi 
 thought and word between the speakers, which 
 is almost an exclusive property of Shakespeare. 
 Hamlet earnestly prays them not to reveal "this
 
 HAMLET. 183 
 
 sight." Secrecy could have been more surely 
 attained by the Ghost's appearing to none but 
 to Hamlet. But then the Ghost would have 
 been chargeable with unsubstantiality, with 
 unreality, with being a phantom of Hamlet's 
 morbid troubled mind, and the ghostly element, 
 now so impressive, would have been reduced in 
 grandeur. Shakespeare was as consummate 
 in artistic judgment as he was profound and 
 true in aesthetic insight. When Horatio and 
 the others are gone, Hamlet exclaims : 
 
 " My father's spirit in arms ! all is not well : 
 I doubt some foul play ; " 
 
 thus giving voice to a strong irrepressible in- 
 stinct of the universal human heart 
 
 In the interview between the Ghost and 
 Hamlet, what is first to be noted is the natural- 
 ness of the Ghost. To the sentinels and Ho- 
 ratio he had shown himself bodily as he was on 
 earth, so that they knew him at sight. In his 
 speech to Hamlet he presents himself alive 
 with all the feelings of the earthly man still 
 fresh upon him. Nor should we think harshly 
 of him, that he prompts Hamlet to slay the 
 adulterate incestuous beast who had murdered 
 him. In this case to revenge was to do justice, 
 which could in no other way be done. Hamlet
 
 I 84 BRIEF ESS A YS. 
 
 beholds and listens to his father as he had 
 known him two months before, only magnified, 
 hallowed, by being transferred from the world 
 of earth to the world of spirit. Nowhere in 
 Shakespeare are words more alive than those 
 uttered by the Ghost. It is as if there was more 
 undiluted soul in them because the speaker 
 is free of the hindrances of flesh. The picture 
 of his state, the description of the seduction 
 of the Queen, of the poisoning, how clear, 
 how actual, how transparent, how concise. In 
 Shakespeare and it is one of the features of 
 his greatness the more intense the action of 
 his mind, from the earnestness, warmth, and 
 importance of the utterance, the more sure is 
 there to be illustration, and remote illustration, 
 which would be harmful arrestation, distracting 
 intrusion, were there not such a glow and ra- 
 pidity that the reader is helped and not hin- 
 dered. Shakespeare's mind in highest action is 
 so abounding, that it seems obliged to relieve 
 itself from the pressure of thoughtful impor- 
 tunity. The increased momentum enlarges 
 his orbit, and in his fiery course he whirls 
 into his vortex new satellites. Thus when the 
 Ghost hints at the secrets of his prison-house, 
 and says, but that he is forbid to tell them,
 
 HAMLET. 185 
 
 " I could a tale unfold, whose lightest word 
 Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, 
 Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres, 
 Thy knotted and combined locks to part, 
 And each particular hair to stand on end, 
 Like quills upon the fretful porcupine ." 
 
 A few lines further Hamlet exclaims : 
 
 " Haste me to know it, that I, with wings as swift 
 As meditation, or the thoughts of love, 
 May sweep to my revenge." 
 
 Who but Shakespeare could, at such a mo- 
 ment, without disturbance, bring to the mind 
 of the reader or listener thoughts of love ? The 
 Ghost answers : 
 
 " I find thee apt ; 
 
 And duller should* st thou be than the fat weed 
 That rots itself in ease on Lethe wharf, 
 Wouldst thou not stir in this. " 
 
 Again, in depicting the seduction of the Queen, 
 he pauses to lay before the reader one of those 
 golden fruits of meditation, where thought and 
 diction marry themselves in a cadency as of 
 heavenly harps, which the language garners up 
 as one of its brightest, weightiest treasures : 
 
 " But virtue, as it never will be moved, 
 Though lewdness court it in a shape of heaven, 
 So lust, though to a radiant angel link'd, 
 Will sate itself in a celestial bed, 
 And prey on garbage." 
 
 In the impartings of the Ghost to Hamlet,
 
 1 86 BRIEF ESS A YS. 
 
 there is a grandeur, a weightiness, a depth of 
 earnestness, that befit the revealments of a 
 wronged and murdered king. 
 
 The significance, the awakening impressive- 
 ness, the awe of the opening scene in " Ham- 
 let," is in fullest keeping with the dread beauty, 
 the lustrous depths of Shakespeare's foremost 
 drama. What tingling life in every line ! What 
 a sudden bursting asunder of the veil between 
 the world of sense and the world of spirit ! 
 In an instant we are translated to realms un- 
 earthly. We feel ourselves shuddering in the 
 spectral mist which enfolds the Ghost, rapt 
 away from earth to spheres untrodden. And 
 the latter part of the second scene, what a vivid 
 reproduction it is of the first ! 
 
 The best commentators, even Goethe and 
 Coleridge, insist that a general moral purpose 
 presided at the creation of Hamlet. True it is 
 that " We have here an oak planted in a costly 
 vase, fit only to receive lovely flowers within 
 its bosom ; the roots spread and burst the 
 vase." True, that there is in "Hamlet" a want 
 of "balance between our attention to the ob- 
 jects of our senses and our meditation on the 
 workings of our minds." But that Shakespeare 
 wrote " Hamlet" to " exemplify the moral neces-
 
 HAMLET. IS/ 
 
 sity " of such a balance, as Coleridge believes ; 
 or that he designed to show the effect of "a 
 great deed enjoined on an inferior mind," as 
 Goethe affirms, this seems to me to be making 
 Shakespeare drive a shaft for the water of 
 life into the plain of the mere understanding, 
 whence no rich poetic current could gain mo- 
 mentum to gush ; a procedure, is it not, I ask 
 in all deference to these two great poets and 
 critics, inconsistent with high aesthetic prin- 
 ciples, principles which both of themselves have 
 done much to establish by precept as by prac- 
 tice. 
 
 If the poet has not within him strong, 
 healthy, moral sensibilities to dominate, half 
 unconsciously, his whole work, all such purpose 
 will be futile and will fail ; and if these sen- 
 sibilities be the staple of his being (as they 
 must be in a great dramatic poet), the placing 
 before himself such purpose will be, not merely 
 superfluous, but obstructive and depressive, I 
 might almost say, depletive. 
 
 To believe that Shakespeare had primarily 
 in his mind a specific moral plan, through which 
 he aimed in Hamlet to set forth the operation 
 of certain mental compounds, were to make the 
 clear-sighted poet put the cart before the horse.
 
 1 8 8 BRIEF ESS A YS. 
 
 This, it seems to me, is Shakespeare's pro- 
 cedure : He seized upon a theme pregnant with 
 passion, capable of impressive presentation, and 
 in unfolding the characters that give to such 
 a theme its weight and purport, that make it 
 indeed possible, he drew them or fed them out 
 of his own profound warm intuitions, intuitions 
 which had been cultivated and concreted by a 
 sure active observation. 
 
 The lowest foundation on which the dra- 
 matic edifice is raised is not laid down before- 
 hand, but lay ready in the depths of his own 
 moral nature, in the same depths whence he 
 drew the material for the construction ; just as 
 if you were to rear a solid gorgeous palace on 
 a mountain of Carara, the compact marble, on 
 which the base of the building would rest, 
 furnishes the materials for the superstructure. 
 In creating Hamlet Shakespeare had no special 
 moral aim. In this, as in all his great tragedies, 
 there is a deep sound moral, deeper, it may 
 be, than in any other, there being in no other 
 such portentous and manifold collisions, collis- 
 ions in which the great poet shows his highest 
 greatness by working them out in healthy har- 
 mony with providential wisdom. Hamlet was 
 brought into being for Hamlet's own sake ; and,
 
 HAMLET. 189 
 
 breathing and moving before us in fresh pal- 
 pitating life, his fellow men, by intimately con- 
 sorting with him, can ever strengthen their 
 moral as well as their intellectual being.

 
 BREVITIES.
 
 BREVITIES. 
 I. 
 
 SPIRITUAL, MORAL. 
 
 OUR habitation, the Earth, is not self-sub- 
 sisting ; it moves in dependence on a fiery orb 
 far distant: the Sun's light helps to feed the 
 breath of our bodies. And shall we from the 
 soil beneath our feet, from the dust into which 
 our bodies dissolve, draw the breath of our 
 souls ? If millions of miles off is one of the 
 chief sustainers of our flesh, where should we 
 look for the source of the spirit we feel within 
 us ? 
 
 The ideas of eternity and infinity are innate 
 in the human mind as attractions towards per- 
 fection, as indications and promises of incal- 
 culable progression and elevation. 
 
 Religion needs to be purified and steadied 
 by culture and science. 
 13
 
 194 BREVITIES. 
 
 We must be realists, not dreamers : we must 
 found our convictions on facts, not on imagina- 
 tions which are dreamlike. Nothing is nobler 
 than facts. Facts are God's ; imaginations 
 are man's, and are only godlike, when they en- 
 fold coming or possible facts, or adorn existing 
 ones. 
 
 Widely and kindly around us should we look 
 as well as inwardly and upwardly, or we leave 
 untenanted some of the heart's best chambers. 
 Our breasts are large enough to entertain mul- 
 titudes, and only when thus rilled is our daily 
 life a blessing. 
 
 The increasing delight in natural scenery is 
 one of the proofs that man is growing nearer 
 to God. 
 
 Possibly the mind cannot, in its most hope- 
 ful and its most far-reaching imaginations, out- 
 run its capabilities. Were it a law of being 
 that the most fabulous flowers, unfolded in the 
 sun of the heart's warmest day-dreams, contain 
 the seeds of substantial realities ! 
 
 Just ideas are the only source of healthy
 
 SPIRITUAL, MORAL. 195 
 
 moral life. By them institutions are moulded, 
 and to uphold institutions which ideas have 
 outgrown, is to be destructive, not conserva- 
 tive. They are the best benefactors of their 
 race who can discern and apply the deepest 
 ideas ; and thus the boldest reformer may be 
 the truest conservative. 
 
 To see things as they are, one must have 
 sympathy with the spirit of God, whence all 
 things come. Then can be discerned to what 
 degree there is remoteness from divine design, 
 and thus actual conditions be rightly judged. 
 
 When you build selfishly, you build frailly. 
 When your acts are hostile to the broad in- 
 terests of your fellow-men, they are seed that 
 will one day come up weeds, to choke your 
 own harvest-field. 
 
 One has at times a desire to cast away all 
 the petty memories and imaginations that cling 
 around self, and to bound off into the empy- 
 rium of the Universal. Thus disencumbered, 
 the Intellect and the Soul might make great 
 discoveries. Is not this the secret of the clear- 
 seeing glances of some of the mesmerized,
 
 196 BREVITIES. 
 
 that they are emancipated from the bonds of 
 self, and for the time lifted out of the obscuri- 
 ties of fleshly life, into the translucent sphere 
 of the disembodied ? 
 
 Beliefs imply non-beliefs. Creeds are com- 
 pounded mainly of negations. 1852. 
 
 Religion is the binding of the human mind 
 to the invisible. A man is religious in pro- 
 portion to the fullness wherewith he acknowl- 
 edges this bond and to the degree in which 
 his life conforms to the conditions implied in 
 that acknowledgment 
 
 Humanity is ever yearning and struggling 
 for its higher life. Religion, love, truth, jus- 
 tice, liberty, these it instinctively seeks, gets 
 first glimpses of, then views broader and less 
 dim, then exalting convictions of the possi- 
 bility of lifting its life into their dominion. 
 
 Most people are Christians by inheritance, 
 not by acquisition ; involuntary Christians, not 
 Christians by will, individual feeling, and deed. 
 
 Sin came into the world, not through the
 
 SPIRITUAL, MORAL. 197 
 
 Devil, but through a nearer approach to God. 
 It is darkness made visible by light. Before 
 the light, no one knew of the darkness or felt 
 it. Savages are not sinful. Sin is especially 
 Christian, because the unfolding of the higher 
 nature, through genuine Christianity, so raises 
 the standard of life, that the lower nature is 
 rebuked, as it was not before, becoming thus 
 not only conscious of sin, but sinful ; for until 
 there was the higher light, the lower nature 
 deserved not condemnation for its low deeds, 
 these being then not measurable by the doer. 
 
 The wish to be free must not be confounded 
 with a longing for exemption from restraint 
 on appetite and willfulness, for such longing 
 points downward ; whereas, desire for freedom 
 is a striving upward. 
 
 People selfishly ambitious think they are 
 mounting a ladder ; whereas, with every round 
 they touch they get lower, each step carrying 
 them further from the zenith of innocence. 
 
 Socrates denounced as the most fatal of con- 
 ditions, " the conceit of knowledge without the 
 reality."
 
 198 BREVITIES. 
 
 A fruit of partial mental development, of 
 ignorance, and somewhat of arrogance, a fruit 
 of the tree of evil, still much eaten and relished, 
 is, that men strive to guide themselves by their 
 imaginations and inventions and conventions, 
 instead of by Nature's laws and precepts ; that 
 is, by the shallow and mutable, the fragmentary 
 and fugitive, instead of by the deep, the com- 
 plete, the perennial. To pride, coupled with 
 one-sidedness, much easier is it to imagine and 
 presume than to discover and obey. 
 
 To found your faith on dogmas, conceptions, 
 imaginations, instead of seeking truth through 
 meditative investigation, with direct, earnest, 
 conscientious search, is as though a mariner, 
 instead of looking to the sun and stars, should 
 strive to guide his ship by the clouds, which 
 are but shifting exhalations from the very sea 
 whereon he is tossed. 
 
 The simplicity and fewness of the physical 
 elements wherewith, in the mineral, vegetable, 
 and animal kingdoms, are compounded such . 
 countless varieties and degrees of life, prove 
 the immense activity, resource, and sovereignty 
 of the immaterial soul that wields and welds 
 them.
 
 SPIRITUAL, MORAL. 199 
 
 True religion develops and deepens the con- 
 science : it helps the heart both to be just and 
 charitable. 
 
 Think of the exultation, tinged with a blush, 
 there must be in the thought of one, a purified 
 spirit, who looks back to earth to see there her 
 name still linked to shame for deeds done in 
 the flesh, which novjr her soul has repented of 
 and purged away. 
 
 A lively sense of moral responsibility neces- 
 sarily involves dutifulness to our fellow-men, 
 and thence dependence on them, and is the 
 firmest, deepest, broadest, most indispensable 
 foundation for individual worth and social well- 
 being. 
 
 Some people seem to think that all religion 
 is shut up in churches. They might as reason- 
 ably believe that all vital air is shut up in 
 parlors and chambers. What is so shut up 
 soon gets foul, and, unless daily refreshed from 
 the great natural reservoir, breeds disease and 
 death. 
 
 The dog and the elephant are finitely cir-
 
 200 BREVITIES. 
 
 cumscribed : they have no above and beyond. 
 To live consciously amid the unseen and the 
 unknown is the sublime privilege of man. 
 
 The attempt to know the Infinite, were a 
 most futile misdirection of human faculties. 
 As well attempt to perceive melodious sounds 
 by the eye. Ideas of God come to us only 
 through our emotions. Reason about what 
 the emotions furnish we can profitably ; but 
 most unprofitable is the attempt by reason to 
 weigh, define, and fathom what, being purely 
 objects of emotion, can neither be defined nor 
 fathomed. 
 
 Only when religious organizations are sources 
 of intellectual culture and schools of instruction, 
 do they a high service. A priest or minister 
 of religion who is a dullard is of no account. 
 The religious sentiment, being innate in man, 
 manifests itself in all times and latitudes ; but 
 that its spirituality have scope it needs union 
 with intellect and moral thought. 
 
 The power of the Bible is in its cordiality. 
 
 Shame is a veil thrown by the spiritual man 
 over the animal man.
 
 SPIRITUAL, MORAL. 2OI 
 
 In early manhood some souls get locked up 
 in ecclesiastical prisons, and the bolts rusting 
 from the stale exhalations of stagnant theolo- 
 gies, the prisoners languish their lives out in 
 spiritual chains. 
 
 Curs yelp at the sage as loudly as at the 
 thief. 
 
 A pity when men do not grow into light as 
 they grow old, but mostly grope in a still colder 
 darkness. 
 
 No man who has a humane spirit, and leads 
 a practical life, but will be often an uncruci- 
 fied martyr, so saddened will he be, and some- 
 times excruciated by the vice and suffering and 
 anguish and injustice and inhumanity around 
 him ; unless, like Oberlin, he withdraws into 
 the mountains amid a primitive people, and 
 thus restricts his life and his experience. 
 
 The most fearful thing in life is the dread ot 
 death ; and this dread which theologies have 
 fostered, is getting dispelled by Spiritualism. 
 
 We do not value, or even know, our inward
 
 2O2 BREVITIES. 
 
 worth and sacredness : we waste ourselves on 
 the outward. 
 
 Truth is a fruit that ever hangs ripening 
 above us, expectant of our harvesting. 
 
 There are words and doings so intensely 
 natural that they seem supernatural. 
 
 The dear ones gone are living links between 
 us and heaven. 
 
 Think of the interminable lengths of human 
 relations in time and space ! 
 
 The glass is not worn out by your looking 
 through it ; nor is the soul. 
 
 Some men despair of the future ; as if God, 
 Nature, and Humanity were at the end of their 
 tether ; as if Providence had in its hand no 
 more trumps. 
 
 In the Stoic philosophy Physics and Theol- 
 ogy, or the study of the nature of things and the 
 divine government of the Universe, went wisely 
 together. Nature, including in the term all
 
 SPIRITUAL, MORAL. 203 
 
 that is cognizable by man, all physical, physio- 
 logical, intellectual, psychical phenomena and 
 laws, Nature, in this full sense, is the Book 
 of God, a bible direct from his hand, not liable 
 to erasure, interpolation, or falsification. Our 
 printed Bible is at second hand, through human 
 organs, colored by the minds through which 
 the revelations passed. Nature is an ever- 
 present, daily, living, teeming, beautiful, signif- 
 icant, prolific, incorruptible revelation. 
 
 Oh, the curse of egotism, the deadly poison 
 of self-seeking ! A man is but the fraction of 
 a man, until he goes out of himself. 
 
 Creation is goodness in its most forceful 
 phasis. To create is to be beneficent : to 
 bring into being, to launch upon the boundless 
 sea of life, is the highest act of love. Thence, 
 to do acts of love, genuine acts, is to be crea- 
 tive. Every, even the smallest kindness we 
 do, is to work in harmony with, and in further- 
 ance of, the divine creative energy. 
 
 I have on my mind an image, brought from 
 far childhood, of a rude woodcut, representing 
 a man half buried in the ground and struggling
 
 204 BREVITIES. 
 
 to get out. What was typified I cannot recall ; 
 but I am reminded of this picture by contrast 
 when I see people and communities half buried 
 in animalism and conventionalism, who are not 
 struggling to get out, but sit in as much con- 
 tentment as people can sit who, with all their 
 self-satisfaction, can never utterly stifle the 
 meanings of the soul in its slavery. 
 
 A man's well-being is only then attained 
 when he is in upward movement, the human 
 organization being happily such that his ten- 
 dency and necessity is, to be always changing, 
 and, when in sound condition, to be always 
 ascending. 
 
 The maxims of La Rochefoucauld are an 
 impertinence to humanity. 
 
 The Bible is the wisest companion and guide 
 that men have had in their darkened pathways 
 through the ages. Beheld in comparison with 
 the consecrated books of other Peoples, the 
 Bible glistens. That men are now getting dis- 
 satisfied with much of it, and have begun to 
 criticize it, is a sign that their path is less 
 dark.
 
 SPIRITUAL, MORAL. 205 
 
 So late as the fifth century the heathen 
 gods arid Jesus were publicly adored in the 
 same town. In the Sermon on the Mount 
 is there any word about adoration, or about 
 worship by the help of priests ? The whole 
 system of worship as now almost universally 
 practiced in Christendom is of heathen origin. 
 Is there not, in formal outward worship, an in- 
 evitable materialism, which arrests and absorbs 
 spirituality. 
 
 Sir Thomas Browne calls the soul, " that 
 translated divinity and colony of God." 
 
 The greatest gift to man, from God the giver, 
 is love of truth. 
 
 It is because the life beyond the earth-life is 
 of such immeasurable importance to man, that 
 in his less developed stages he has been a prey 
 to priestcraft. Priests, pretending to be the 
 privileged interpreters of the divine, have made 
 man believe that they hold the keys to the pas- 
 sage which leads to the mysterious future. 
 
 To purge the world of lies, this is the great 
 achievement of progress, progress being the
 
 206 BREVITIES. 
 
 effort of life to shelter itself under more and 
 more truth. Theology, being based, not on 
 high facts and absolute truth, but on man's 
 fancies and changeful opinions and even preju- 
 dices, has done much, in its obstinate limita- 
 tions, to keep men false. Church-votaries it 
 has filled with self-righteousness and hypoc- 
 risy. 
 
 Confucius said : " An ocean of invisible in- 
 telligences surrounds us." 
 
 With semi-animal imaginations people figure 
 up a sum which they call Deity, and then strive 
 to believe that their deepest, noblest thoughts 
 and emotions, and their whole being, are but 
 fractions of this sum. "Pis as though they 
 were to stretch into the air a fantastic appa- 
 ratus of wheels and pulleys, and to strive there- 
 with to sway the motion of the earth. The 
 only strength such an apparatus could have 
 would come from the earth whereon it rests. 
 Out of yourself you stretch wires towards 
 Heaven, and then you persuade yourselves that 
 they have been stretched from Heaven towards 
 you ; and by the pulling of these wires you 
 would direct your life. Who are the wire-pull-
 
 SPIRITUAL, MORAL. 
 
 ers is as easy here to discern as in political 
 jugglery. The proceeding is contrary to eter- 
 nal law: it is an attempt to subordinate dy- 
 namics to mechanics. 
 
 The one only thing that is is truth : what- 
 ever is not true is not. 
 
 How were it if Copernicus, or some other, 
 had not upset the Ptolemaic misbelief about 
 the solar system, to which the Church held 
 so obstinately ? Goethe looked upon the dis- 
 covery of the revolution of the Earth round 
 the Sun as the greatest, most sublime, ever 
 made by man ; as boundless as beneficent in 
 its consequences. 
 
 The men who lead a second, inner, higher 
 life are they who fecundate their age and the 
 minds of other men in after ages. Only from 
 this inner perennial spring flow streams of 
 spiritual and intellectual wealth to enrich man- 
 kind with deposits from their currents.
 
 II. 
 
 LITERARY, jESTHETICAL. 
 
 POETRY is not put into verse to please the 
 ear : it is in verse because it is the offspring 
 of a spirit akin to that which dwells ever in 
 hearing of the music of the spheres. To 
 poetry, rhythm is as natural as symmetry to 
 a beautiful face. Genuine verse delights the 
 capable ear, because, like the voice of child- 
 hood or of woman, it is in itself delightful. 
 Why does the setting sun, a lively landscape, 
 a worthy deed, give enjoyment ? Because they 
 speak to, and are in harmony with, our higher 
 being ; and so is poetry, and therefore it too 
 gives enjoyment. But to say, that the object 
 of poetry is to please, ranks it with the shallow 
 presentations of the showman. 
 
 The Poet is an apostle of truth ; and the 
 false can never be poetry. 
 
 A good book is a distillation.
 
 LITERARY, &STHETICAL. 2Og 
 
 In poetry much of the meaning is conveyed 
 by the sound. Transpose the words of a fine 
 passage, and you impair its import. 
 
 In the style of Shakespeare there is oceanic 
 undulation. In that of Corneille and Racine 
 the surface is level, or if broken, it is not with 
 billows. 
 
 A sonnet should be like a spring, clear and 
 deep in proportion to its surface ; and like a 
 whirlpool, in a certain silent self-involved move- 
 ment. 
 
 Shakespeare's words, when boldest and rich- 
 est, are but ambassadors, behind whom there 
 is a greater than themselves : Racine's and 
 Alfieri's, though not so erect and gorgeous, 
 are the kings themselves ; they leave nothing 
 untold, and give no impulse to the imagination. 
 
 Good rhetoric is a good thing in a good 
 cause. 
 
 Rhymes should sit as lightly on verse as 
 flowers on plants. 
 14
 
 210 BREVITIES. 
 
 In English Prose where is there a diction 
 so copious, apt, forceful as Carlyle's, at once so 
 transparent with poetic light and so compact 
 with a home-driving, idiomatic solidity, doing 
 the errand of a thoughtful fervent nature with 
 such fullness and emphasis ? 
 
 Goethe goes out of himself into the being 
 of nature and of other men : Wordsworth takes 
 their being up into himself. These two poets 
 illustrate sharply the difference between the 
 objective and the subjective. 
 
 In the plainest of Wordsworth's many hun- 
 dred sonnets there is more or less of the fra- 
 grance of high humanity. 
 
 Some of Wordsworth's poetry is, as his per- 
 son was, too gaunt : it wants a fuller clothing 
 of flesh. 
 
 A fit ideal embodiment of the Artist were 
 a countenance upraised, beaming, eager, joyful, 
 moulded with somewhat of feminine mobility. 
 
 Thought is ever unfolding : a good thinker 
 keeps thinking.
 
 LITERARY, MSTHETICAL. 2 1 1 
 
 To write a good literary book, whatever the 
 subject, requires the " instinct of the beauti- 
 ful." 
 
 Music is a marriage of the sensual with the 
 spiritual : each is merged in the other. In 
 perfect harmony there will be neither sensual 
 nor spiritual, but the two will be made one in 
 the fullness of life and purity. 
 
 We talk of this man's style and that man's, 
 when, rightly speaking, neither of them has a 
 style. Style implies a substantial body of self- 
 evolved thought. Now, from so few minds 
 come fresh emanations, that most writings are 
 but old matter re-worded, current thought 
 re-dressed. Each one's individual mode of 
 re-wording and re-dressing is, and should be 
 called, his manner, not his style. In Writing 
 as in Painting, every man, the weakest as well 
 as the strongest, must have a manner ; but few 
 can have a style. 1852. 
 
 I write the opinion with diffidence, but to 
 me it seems that Italian poetry wants depth : 
 its roots are not sunk in the soil : too much of 
 it is but ornamented versification. Dante bor-
 
 212 BREVITIES. 
 
 rows from or imitates the Latin poets on every 
 page. Petrarca's sonnets are as much an em- 
 bodiment of what is called Platonic love as 
 of passion for Laura. In Ariosto there is 
 abundant fancy, but little poetic imagination. 
 Alfieri's horizon is definite and earthly ; it 
 does not stretch into the infinite. 
 
 In the " Divina Comedia," the supernatural 
 is not the framework merely of the Poem, it 
 is the chief constituent of its essence. In the 
 plaint of Francesca, in the beatitudes of Bea- 
 trice, pathos and beauty are emblazoned by 
 the glow from a supersolar sphere. To show 
 them, and a crowd of other personages, alive 
 in transterrestrial being, throbbing with human 
 feelings, demands a poet of sensibilities rich 
 and tender, and of graphic intellect. But the 
 launching of the whole beyond the earth-orbit, 
 this it is that sustains it and makes it poetical 
 as a whole and in its multifarious details. As 
 narrative of man's sorrows and joys while in 
 the flesh, it were prosaic. The super-earthly 
 firmament lends light to the picture. But for 
 the supernal plane whereon every line rolls, and 
 to which the reader is imaginatively lifted, the 
 words, just as they stand, would be flat and 
 opaque in nineteen lines out of twenty.
 
 LITERARY, &STHETICAL. 21$ 
 
 The men of letters who are contempo- 
 raneously overrated, are the men of talent. 
 Men of genius are liable not to be rated high 
 enough in their generation. More accurate 
 were it to say, that men of genius can be ap- 
 preciated only by the few ; while men of talent, 
 being within reach of the many, are by them 
 self-complacently exaggerated. 
 
 The vice of written histories is, that they 
 are not History. 
 
 Goethe's profound title to his Autobiography, 
 " Dichtung und Wahrheit," Imagination and 
 Truth, would be appropriate for every biog- 
 raphy, memoir, or history that ever was writ- 
 ten. 
 
 Only the men who can originate are fully 
 competent judges of what has been originated 
 and done. Talent alone can never make a 
 thorough critic. For that enough genius is 
 needed to sympathize with genius. 
 
 A beautiful face is fascinating more by what it 
 promises than by what it is. To the beholder 
 corporeal beauty suggests all other beauty.
 
 214 BREVITIES. 
 
 When first gazing on a beautiful person, what 
 an impertinence were a thought of his or her 
 moral deformity. On the physical basis im- 
 agination builds all other perfections. 
 
 A fictitious story, to be worth attention, 
 should have a heart in it, and be artfully un- 
 folded, and be supported, not on slender tem- 
 porary timbers, but on solid arches of thought 
 and imagination. 
 
 True Art helps and upholds the higher part 
 of our nature : the lower being aggressive, 
 needs check not spur. The ideal involves ele- 
 vation through emotion ; and emotion, being 
 caused by a stir of the unselfish feelings, is 
 always purifying. There is no Art without 
 some breath of the ideal. 
 
 Poetry is the aromatic essence of life. 
 
 The imagination unites, orbs, several into 
 one : the fancy divides and individualizes. 
 
 Thackeray and Dickens are so popular in 
 England (and America ?) on account of their 
 thoroughly English natures, both being some-
 
 LITERARY, &STHETICAL. 21$ 
 
 what material and matter-of-fact, with a strong 
 earthy flavor, and not finely imaginative. 
 
 Some minds are filters of other men's 
 thoughts. They add nothing : they clarify 
 what passes through their pens. 
 
 The motion of a deciduous cypress illus- 
 trates grace. Under a breeze the whole stem 
 sways, animating every branch and spray with 
 its own slow, stately, reserved movement, which 
 seems to come from within. 
 
 To those critics who, totally lacking poetic 
 imagination, yet pretend to a fine ear in poetry, 
 may be applied a " thought " of Pascal : " On 
 ne consulte que 1'oreille, parcequ'on manque 
 de co2ur." And the want of soul makes the 
 ear untrustworthy. 
 
 The sun-fired focus of a lens consumes pa- 
 per or wood, but falling on a diamond, makes 
 it sparkle the more. So with books, under 
 the focus of genuine criticism. 
 
 Some poets one outgrows. Scott, Moore, 
 Campbell, even Byron, if I read them now at
 
 2l6 BREVITIES. 
 
 all, I read momentarily. Their verse is not 
 deep enough, not compact enough with mind, 
 that in maturer years we be enlightened by 
 it, and thence delighted with it. Beneath the 
 web of incident and sentiment and passion, 
 there is not warp enough of thought. Their 
 pages are not enduringly suggestive. Dimmed 
 to the eye of manhood is the brilliancy they 
 shone in to the eye of youth. Their words 
 are too little swollen from inward sources of 
 sensibility that many lines should glisten with 
 inexhaustible meaning, as in Wordsworth, Cole- 
 ridge, Shelley. Keats died at twenty-five, and 
 yet, to men past sixty he is fresh, freshening. 
 
 There are writers whose minds have no hori- 
 zon : they do not let you see far, but keep your 
 looks on near objects and on bounded pros- 
 pects. 
 
 The best business of the poet is, to spin 
 golden threads between earth and heaven. 
 
 No high literature can be produced or en- 
 joyed but through delight in the true and the 
 beautiful.
 
 LITERAR Y, &STHETICAL. 2 1 / 
 
 A great function of sensibility to the beau- 
 tiful is, to be ever prompting a better, finer 
 something not yet attained. 
 
 In theatric pieces common reality is every- 
 where copied ; hence flatness, and a necessity 
 for accidents and extravagances, monstrosities 
 even, to keep alive a sensuous attention. The 
 Stage should always be ideal, in the sense that 
 Shakespeare is ideal, that is, it should present 
 the real exalted, spiritualized. Literal repro- 
 duction is low literature. 
 
 To the poet who is a thinker, to Wordsworth 
 or Goethe or Shelley or Dante or Coleridge, 
 metaphysical speculation, if he chooses to give 
 in to it, is an unbending. Nothing draws upon 
 the mental life like poetic creation. 
 
 One of the great disappointments in Litera- 
 ture is the coming upon the stars which show 
 that the " Hyperion " of Keats is a fragment. 
 
 Shelley balloons it too much. He ascends 
 easily, gracefully, and then is swayed by scented 
 breezes from an exuberant imagination. It had 
 been a gain could he oftener have dipped his
 
 2l8 BREVITIES. 
 
 mind deeper into the core of common things. 
 He has too much elevation and not enough 
 depth, that is, not enough depth for his ele- 
 vation. 
 
 An elderly poet, who has written chiefly out 
 of his fancy and memory, and whose borrow- 
 ings are not the worst of him, may be called 
 an exhausted receiver. 
 
 The pages of some writers, like the discourse 
 of some men, are prickly with self-conceit. 
 
 The first question to ask of a new book is 
 Does it give out new light ? Are novel aspects 
 won from old things ? or, better still, is it racy 
 with original views and principles ? 
 
 Men who have not the mental largeness or 
 spiritual momentum to go out of themselves, 
 who cannot lift them reverently towards a 
 greater than themselves, are liable, if intellect- 
 ual, to be pantheists. By this opaque doctrine 
 they are blinded to believe that they are a 
 part of the Godhead, in the sense of being 
 identical with Deity. Whatever they may 
 think, they do but shut themselves into them-
 
 LITER AR Y, &STHE TICAL. 2 1 9 
 
 selves, and therein see but themselves, and 
 that darkly. 
 
 Anybody, with a pen in his hand, can write 
 about a given subject : few can write into it. 
 
 Common sense should lie at the bottom of 
 all enterprizes, the literary and poetical as well 
 as the practical and scientific. Good sense is 
 the ballast of genius ,* nay, we might say, it is 
 the cargo itself out of which genius works its 
 successes. 
 
 To move on a high plane of sentiment and 
 thought is a privilege of the personages of 
 Shakespeare. 
 
 " Great thoughts come from the heart," says 
 Vauvenargues. 
 
 Hardly anywhere have we education, prop- 
 erly speaking ; that is, an educing, a drawing 
 out of the inward powers. We teach, we do 
 not educate ; we inculcate, we do not unfold ; 
 we shape more than we dilate. 
 
 By the rarely beautiful we are subdued, over-
 
 220 BREVITIES. 
 
 powered. In its glow we feel that there might 
 be a degree of it on which we could not look : 
 the mind would be smitten and blasted, as the 
 body may be by a flash of physical lightning. 
 
 In order to give life to their straight lines, 
 the Greeks drew them with the hand and not 
 with a rule. 
 
 That is never a bad book which sets us to 
 thinking ; but that is which makes us feel 
 wrongly. 
 
 Capacity of admiration, delight in admira- 
 tion, is essential to the poet When a poet 
 ceases to be capable of admiration, he ceases 
 to be a poet. 
 
 How much is from himself, and how much 
 has he drawn from others these are cardinal 
 questions to be put to him who offers us a new 
 page of literature. Of genuine literature fresh- 
 ness is the first quality. Along the lines should 
 glisten a life imparted from the writer's inmost. 
 
 Analysis is decomposition and, unchecked, 
 leads to nullity. In literature as well as science
 
 LITERARY, &STHETICAL. 221 
 
 the synthetic force must counteract and balance 
 the analytic. 
 
 So much verse is but embroidery ; some 
 wrought with golden threads, some with silver, 
 but mostly with fading silk. 
 
 To put novels into the hands of the young 
 is to fire the feelings through the imagination, 
 which is like applying a match to the com- 
 bustible materials you have collected for build- 
 ing a costly mansion. 
 
 In the lines of genuine poetry is ever per- 
 ceptible the undulation inherent in life ; and 
 this however calm may look the exterior. So 
 much verse being drapery, thrown with more 
 or less art over a subject, there is in such none 
 of that spring which only issues from interior 
 movement. 
 
 To deal competently with a subject the 
 writer must first get into its centre, so as to 
 write from within it. 
 
 To the brain-fibre of literary men may be 
 applied the distinctive epithets of the cotton-
 
 222 BREVITIES. 
 
 planter to his crop : short staple, medium, long 
 staple. 
 
 Metaphors give spring and buoyancy to sen- 
 tences, widen the horizon, let in light and air, 
 draw the reader from too close a look on the 
 ground before him, and when fresh and ap- 
 propriate, lift the style at once into significance 
 and luminousness. 
 
 A profound characteristic of divine govern- 
 ment is the indirect means for compassing ends. 
 To work by indirection is to work after the 
 method of Providence. If to the selfish and 
 the sensual I hold out immortality as a threat, 
 I abuse it and misuse them : if through per- 
 suasion of its reality I bring their minds into a 
 broader, freer state, I use it wisely and serve 
 them. Art acts indirectly : it lifts the mind to 
 a higher mood, and out of that springs the will 
 and the power to do higher things. 
 
 Kant has a fine definition of the naif : 
 " Nature putting Art to shame." 
 
 To say a good thing fitly, demands some 
 poetic gift.
 
 LITERARY, &STHETICAL. 22$ 
 
 When you come upon a poetic sparkle you 
 feel suddenly illuminated. 
 
 So much verse has shallow roots. 
 
 Poems differ much one from the other in 
 what may be termed their specific gravity. 
 For example, " The Burial of Sir John Moore 
 at Corunna" has much more specific gravity 
 than Campbell's " Battle of the Baltic." 
 
 Profoundly does Sir Egerton Brydges say : 
 " There is implanted in the poet a spiritual be- 
 ing, which adds to the material world another 
 creation invisible to vulgar eyes." 
 
 The description of* Valeria by Coriolanus 
 vividly exemplifies /0^/V imagination : 
 
 " Chaste as the icicle, 
 
 That 's curded by the frost from purest snow, 
 And hangs on Dian's temple." 
 
 The drama, the poetic drama, clings closest 
 to the heart ; clips the man in its arms ; is one 
 degree less removed from the inmost. 
 
 Deep in the personality of the poet a poem
 
 224 BREVITIES. 
 
 must have its roots, in a soil rich and mellow. 
 Out of himself it must come, not out of his 
 memory and fancy. 
 
 A poem demands roundness, a circular com- 
 pleteness in itself and in its parts, such organic 
 fullness that there be naught but lines like 
 those of the egg, all representing a living ro- 
 tundity, a palpitating unity. 
 
 The moral of a poem should lie at the bottom 
 of it, like the stones of a limpid stream. Look- 
 ing intently, you see the stones, solid and still, 
 the basic boundary of the stream. By them 
 its pureness is preserved when the water 
 courses rapidly ; for were they not there, the 
 forceful rush would stir the mud beneath, mak- 
 ing the whole current turbid. 
 
 At the core of all verse there should be emo- 
 tion, sentiment, or however may be called the 
 offspring of healthful sensibility. The intellect- 
 ual part of poetry should be but the transparent 
 medium through which you are enabled to be- 
 hold the treasures of feeling, as you gaze at 
 precious solid things that lie at the bottom of 
 clear water.
 
 LITERARY, &STHETICAL. 22$ 
 
 Utterance is the one end of a poetic thought, 
 whose other end is deep in the soul of the poet, 
 at times so deep that he himself knows not 
 where it ends. To take in the full meaning 
 and beauty of such verse, the reader must 
 follow it into the depths whence it shoots. 
 Thence, it is that the best poetry is slow to be 
 recognized. 
 
 Poetic genius is a lively soul uttering itself 
 through the organ of the beautiful. 
 
 Tennyson is one of the poets who, like 
 Virgil, have more art than inspiration. 
 
 Goethe says, there is poetry which is null 
 without being bad ; null, because it has in it 
 no fresh substance ; and not bad, because the 
 writer had, from familiarity with genuine mas- 
 ters, fine forms ever present to his mind. 
 
 It is safe to judge a writer by the company 
 he keeps ; that is, the thoughts he habitually 
 entertains, and the authors he likes most to 
 hold communion with. 
 
 That only is literature, in the refined sense, 
 '5
 
 226 BREVITIES. 
 
 which continues to be read : it so continues, 
 because it embodies in the best form the best 
 thoughts of the best men. 
 
 A man's mental tools have their finest edge 
 put upon them by his sensibility to the beauti- 
 ful. Many subjects he cannot penetrate at all 
 without this sensibility, and into all he strikes 
 the deeper for its edge. 
 
 The poet deals with the new, with what is 
 freshly formed and forming within him ; the 
 man of understanding with what is old, fin- 
 ished, hardened. 
 
 In the best literary work there is a great 
 deal of spiritual joinery. 
 
 Art implies fine nature well tilled : with all 
 your tending you cannot have exquisite flowers 
 without good soil. 
 
 In the fervor of work Shakespeare had little 
 thought of style ; writing out of a mind so full 
 and so poetical, style was a power inseparable 
 from his utterance. When he had written a 
 scene or act he went over it, and then he had
 
 LITERARY, &STHETICAL. 22/ 
 
 a thought of style, and made changes to give 
 additional depth, light, buoyancy. 
 
 Sense of beauty does not gild the variegated 
 worlds of thought, feeling, and perception ; for 
 gilding is too shallow, artificial, and perishable 
 a process to typify the action of this great sen- 
 sibility. It illuminates with unexpected joy 
 some of the darkest throes of human move- 
 ment, suddenly lights up with hopeful hue 
 thoughts and deeds that a moment before were 
 black with gloom, like mountain-peaks, emerged 
 from storms, suddenly shone upon by the calm 
 beautifying sun. 
 
 In Hallam's " Literature of Europe during the 
 Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Centu- 
 ries," there is shown a sound, but not a fine, 
 still less an active sensibility. Now an active 
 sensibility is one might it not be said the 
 chief one ? of the pre-requisites for a good 
 style. 
 
 Personages, characters, make a drama, and 
 to make it they must be marked individualities, 
 not mere labeled mouth-pieces.
 
 228 BREVITIES. 
 
 Out of the extemporaneous flow of his men- 
 tal abundance, Shakespeare enriches barren- 
 nesses, peoples wildernesses. 
 
 In writing, especially in poetry, the transi- 
 tions are vital ; and most vital are the transi- 
 tional leaps, which only genius can make. 
 
 In writing, how few styles have nerve and 
 sensibility ; without these the best and highest 
 style is not reached. 
 
 In some minds there are no recesses, where 
 stores, often unconscious stores, lie waiting for 
 their occasions. 
 
 Poetry without personality is thin. To bring 
 forth his personages, the mind of Shakespeare 
 was big with humanity. When Shakespeare 
 had dramatically given birth, his being was en- 
 larged ; he felt himself reempowered by the 
 soul wherewith he had imbued his creation. 
 
 Poetry needs primarily the sequence of feel- 
 ing ; and this sequence only flows from a full 
 inward spring.
 
 LITERARY, &STHETICAL. 22<) 
 
 That there be a poem, strictly a poem, the sub- 
 ject should have a rooted steadiness, an internal 
 repose, a generic solidity. " Aurora Leigh " and 
 " The Gypsey," works of poetic genius though 
 they be, are too tremulous with feeling, too un- 
 steady with superficial incident. They are like 
 a fine head sculptured out of conglomerate ; the 
 vision is confused by the want of unity and 
 purity of surface, and the lines and outline are 
 broken by the shifting variety in color. 
 
 The scholastic, mediaeval system of educa- 
 ting through Greek and Latin, is the superficial, 
 hollow system. Little more than a thin shell 
 is imparted. The learners get no Sophocles, 
 no Virgil; no, not one of them in twenty. They 
 do not even get possession, practically and 
 permanently, of the languages in which Sopho- 
 cles and Virgil wrote. A teaching not super- 
 ficial, but penetrative and procreative, would 
 be to take up Milton or Wordsworth, and lay 
 his language, his thought, his poetry, open to 
 the hearer. Aye, but who can do this ? How 
 many professors in all our colleges and univer- 
 sities (so called) can deal in thoughts, ideas, 
 expression and poetry, with critical discernment 
 and mastery ? But such teachers, teachers of
 
 230 BREVITIES. 
 
 literary insight and range, are just what are 
 wanted in our higher institutions of educa- 
 tion, and these institutions, wanting such teach- 
 ers, are but nominally high. 
 
 The first requisite for simplicity of thought 
 r. J style, is truth of feeling. 
 
 There is no best poetry without flights, with- 
 out steady, sinewy soaring up to plains where 
 gleam lights spiritual, that flash new meaning 
 upon life. 
 
 In poetic creation the feelings use the intel- 
 lect as their instrument ; in poetic composi- 
 tion the intellect uses the feelings. Schiller 
 was less of a creator than Goethe, and more of 
 a poetic composer. 
 
 Whatever he handles, the true poet illumi- 
 nates with his own soul. 
 
 Consider what goes into the making of one 
 of Shakespeare's best similes or metaphors. 
 To follow these sunlit wings to their teeming 
 nest, there needs a kindred imaginative nimble- 
 ness.
 
 LITERARY, ESTHETIC A L. 2 3 I 
 
 In Wordsworth there is a poetic thoughtful- 
 ness, and, in his higher moods, the polished 
 compactness that results from this fine rare 
 combination. His best passages have the 
 smoothness and elasticity and roundness of an 
 ivory ball. 
 
 From the pen of none but a great meditative 
 poet, could have come this profound thought of 
 Wordsworth : 
 
 " Instruct them how the mind of man becomes 
 A thousand times more beautiful than the earth 
 On which he dwells." 
 
 Rhythmic flow, in some form, is part of the 
 incarnation of poetry. 
 
 Any feeling which can be lifted high enough 
 to be married to emotion, becomes thereby fit 
 for poetic use. Emotion results from move- 
 ment in the higher, more generic feelings. 
 
 They can hardly be called poets who have 
 neither intellectual vivacity nor poetic glow 
 enough to make flexible and distensive the 
 bonds of words in which it is necessary to bind 
 sentiment and thought.
 
 232 BREVITIES. 
 
 The best of poetry is the mood it creates ; 
 and herein the spiritually-minded poets are the 
 most privileged. Not only do they tune the 
 reader to a higher mood, but through his 
 happy memory of this condition, they draw him 
 back to their page, which, embalming in fit 
 melody the better life of the mind, grows never 
 stale. 
 
 Poetic ornamentation, like the relief on a tea- 
 pot, is hollow. 
 
 Having no rhythm in their thoughts, the 
 poetically unimaginative try to make up for 
 this cardinal want with metrical smoothness ; 
 but smoothness causes no radiance, that pro- 
 ceeding only from internal self-kindled fire ; 
 and radiance attests poetry. In their verse 
 there is no sign of bemastered emotion, of full 
 feeling wrought in its plastic warmth into 
 graceful strength. 
 
 For a word that is prosaic you can only get 
 a poetic by going farther and deeper. 
 
 Under the touch of warm active thought 
 words are malleable. Thought is their com-
 
 LITERARY, MSTHETICAL. 233 
 
 mander, and not only enranks them, but, like 
 a Caesar into his soldiers, breathes into them its 
 own spirit, so that the dull become lively, and 
 the weak strong. 
 
 By poetic imagination it is that recondite 
 relations are detected. 
 
 In the poetically imaginative stroke many 
 rays flash together from various quarters upon 
 a single point, making that point to sparkle 
 with concentrated lustre. 
 
 The composer says, " Here is a proper place 
 for a figure," and straightway he manufactures 
 one ; but figures, to do their duty of enlivening 
 while they illustrate, should flame up out of 
 the warm air that has just been liberated by 
 the busy play of thought. In poetry the play 
 of thought is everything. 
 
 Of a truth, says Goethe, the head takes in no 
 work of Art but in company with the heart. 
 
 Through the music there is in him, the poet 
 is enabled to make each natural thing utter the 
 music there is in it. He is the enraptured 
 spokesman of man and nature.
 
 234 BREVITIES. 
 
 A good reader should have lights and shades 
 in his voice, and what Sainte-Beuve calls in- 
 sinuations. 
 
 Excellence in style depends primarily on 
 clearness in thinking, and fineness of percep- 
 tion, this fineness implying some glow as well 
 as health of sensibility. 
 
 Style goes beneath the surface : manner is 
 superficial. 
 
 To write good poetry, the writer must have 
 not only a good ear, but something very good 
 to listen to internally. 
 
 The office of poetry is to set forth the best 
 possibilities of the feelings. The poet is poet 
 by having within him more of the finer life of 
 feeling. 
 
 Sustained rapidity in poetry implies volume 
 of thought, and thought so animated by feeling 
 as to be urged ever fervently onward. 
 
 Naught is perfectly simple : every thing or 
 thought is more or less combined, complicated,
 
 LITERARY, &STHETICAL. 
 
 with others. The more intense the concentra- 
 tion of many in one, the more life and power ; 
 witness the similes and metaphors of Shake- 
 speare. 
 
 The want of the sense of the ideal is a chief 
 cause of the unprogressiveness of certain tribes 
 and races. 
 
 The spontaneous has the highest quality. 
 Foremost of human products is ranked a great 
 Poem, the offspring of disinterested impulses 
 and deep emotions, wrought into shape by in- 
 tellect keen and clear. 
 
 Mannerism is a declension resulting from 
 one-sidedness ; but superior men are subject 
 to it, because, although a defection from the 
 purest style, it is a help to some who have more 
 will than symmetry. It helps them with them- 
 selves, by allowing their faculties freer play, 
 through the indulgence of their stronger incli- 
 nations, their disproportioned predominances 
 of gift, which indulgence is the basis of man- 
 nerism ; and, by thus giving more fluency and 
 muscle to their movements, it helps them with 
 readers. They write more and better than if,
 
 236 BREVITIES. 
 
 by a severer curb on their proclivities, they 
 subdued their utterance to the clear quiet tone 
 of simplicity. This is exemplified in Carlyle, 
 and, in a finer way, in Tennyson. 
 
 Good poetry is the highest abstraction. The 
 poet lives most in his mind ; for a mark of his 
 being a poet is, that his mind be lighted up 
 with visions and imaginations, which draw him 
 to them as his best company. On his brain his 
 need of the beautiful is ever breeding fresh 
 figures and conjunctions ; and when these are 
 vivid enough to take shape under the pen, he 
 is abstracted from the earth and its forms, and 
 swings up into an Empyrean of his own cre- 
 ating, where he moulds other forms, and, out 
 of his thought, forges other realities and pos- 
 sibilities. 
 
 In some poetry there is too much individu- 
 ality, and not enough universality. 
 
 In "Midsummer Night's Dream" it is as 
 though in a calm summer night, standing on 
 an eminence, were revealed to us by distant 
 lightning, without noise, first in one quarter of 
 the horizon, then in another, rich variegated
 
 LITERARY, MSTHETICAL. 237 
 
 scenery, every burst of glow laying bare a dif- 
 ferent landscape, each landscape vying with 
 each for the palm of beauty. 
 
 The poet whose mind is become corrupt, as 
 surely forfeits his creative birthright, as the 
 rose its perfume through blight, or the fingers 
 their cunning through palsy. 
 
 Is there not more poetry in Bacon's Essays 
 in prose than in Pope's in verse ? Pope said 
 his say better in verse, because he had a met- 
 rical gift, a gift, be it said, very different from 
 the rhythmic gift, and as inferior to that as 
 talent is inferior to genius. This metrical gift 
 helped to polish and condense his thoughts, 
 besides giving them the benefit of measured 
 cadence and the piquancy of rhyme. Men who 
 have " the accomplishment of verse" in larger 
 measure than poetic imagination, will, with a 
 slight infusion of poetry, seem to be better 
 poets than they are, being to the many ac- 
 ceptable from their very deficiency in the 
 higher endowment, the major part of readers 
 understanding and assimilating talent more 
 readily than genius. 
 
 The dramatic claims to be the highest form
 
 238 BREVITIES. 
 
 of poetry, because, that a drama be good, the 
 poet must condense into small space characters 
 that shall be life-like and poetic, at once in- 
 dividual and generic. Cardinal qualities of 
 good dramatic poetry will be the liveliness, 
 pointedness, rapidness, caused by interplay 
 among individualities that are evoked, pro- 
 voked, by contrasts and collisions, the wrest- 
 lings of talk and the rivalries of action, action 
 giving to words, phrases, and rhythm, a brisk 
 percussive movement. Without characteriza- 
 tion there is no genuine drama : the evolution 
 of character through close, frequent, diversified 
 contacts, is the essence of dramatic as dis- 
 tinguished from lyric and epic treatment. But, 
 besides sprightly individuality, springing, as it 
 were, outward, there must be generalization, as 
 profund as apt. Each personage, while distinct 
 and individual, should be so thoroughly human 
 as to be the easy mouthpiece of thoughts and 
 sentiments that reach far. The weightier sen- 
 tences will be unconsciously symbolical. 
 
 From the mind of Shakespeare, thoughts, 
 sentiments, men, women leap forth, each into 
 its right place, aglow with life, and motion, and 
 grace ; Shakespeare's brain is splendidly vivi- 
 parous.
 
 III. 
 
 CONDUCT, MANNERS. 
 
 PEOPLE in high places, who are not benef- 
 icent, are out of place. 
 
 In this " villainous world " there is almost as 
 much unclean praise as malevolent censure. 
 
 To the opinions and creeds received from 
 their fathers, men hold as to the houses and 
 lands they have inherited. Spiritual and ma- 
 terial they lump together, treating him who at- 
 tacks their opinions like him who steals their 
 cattle, not perceiving that, instead of a theft, 
 the destruction of opinions is a barter, whereby 
 they may gain a hundred fold. Thoughts are 
 subject to higher laws than things. 
 
 In many an instance, when a man speaks 
 of his conscience, conceit is mistaken for con- 
 science. 
 
 By continuous breach of the moral law, men
 
 240 BREVITIES. 
 
 forfeit mental growth. Napoleon and Cromwell 
 grew not wiser as they grew older. Their 
 minds did not ripen, they hardened. 
 
 Many of the old monasteries were founded 
 by repentant reprobates ; and the early sins of 
 their founders bore, in many cases, fuller crops 
 than their later virtues. 
 
 When a man readily gives ear to a slander, he 
 betrays fellow-feeling with the malice whence it 
 sprang. 
 
 We seek happiness by outwardly heaping on 
 our puny selves all we can, each one building, 
 with the joint force of his intellect and selfish- 
 ness, a reversed pyramid, under the which the 
 higher it rises, the more he is crushed on the 
 small spot his small self can fill. 
 
 We are capable of life-long joy. Continuous 
 varied fruition might be the sum of earthly 
 existence. If our lives do not bring out this 
 sum it is because we have misplaced, or mis- 
 laid, or overlooked, or misreckoned with, some 
 of the counters.
 
 CONDUCT, MANNERS. 24! 
 
 " You cannot serve God and Mammon : " 
 nay, you cannot serve yourself and Mammon. 
 
 The spokes of the wheel are helpless until 
 bound together by the rim. 
 
 Christianity promises such moral splendors, 
 that men, refusing to credit these as an earthly 
 possibility, translate its consummations to the 
 superearthly sphere. Priesthoods have always 
 fostered this incredulity, which opens to them 
 the imagination as their work-field, where til- 
 lage is much lighter than in a tangible soil. It 
 is easier to saw air than to saw wood ; easier 
 to put the wretched off with sanctimonious as- 
 surances of celestial compensations, than to 
 wrestle with earthly ills ; easier to preach of 
 Heaven to come than to abolish a present Hell. 
 The conscientious pastor knows how almost 
 fruitless a task it is, when, not content with 
 stale ritual repetitions and wordy exhortations, 
 he labors practically to purge and vivify his 
 flock. With all his will and toil he brings little 
 to pass. His theological tools are dull : what 
 steel there was in them has worn off. 1852. 
 
 Children keep us at play all our lives. 
 16
 
 242 BREVITIES. 
 
 Rich, inactive people, whose main business 
 is the spending of money, lose their sense of 
 the value of time, and lead a lethean life. 
 
 When we cease to learn, life loses its salt- 
 ness. 
 
 Allopathy is monarchical and ecclesiastical, 
 inasmuch as it looks to something out of the 
 body to cure the body. Under the action of 
 drugs the body is passive, only rousing itself 
 against their disturbing or poisonous action. 
 Hydropathy is democratic : the body must bestir 
 itself for its own salvation. Self-reliant, it must 
 use, for its protection and re-instatement, its 
 native internal resources. Allopathy, acting 
 from without, and by means of foreign sub- 
 stances, is one-sided, depressing, weakening : 
 Hydropathy is all-sided, invigorating, purifying. 
 Of a human body weighing one hundred and 
 fifty pounds, one hundred pounds are pure 
 water ; hence the efficacy of water as a curative 
 agent. 
 
 Idleness is the root of most evil ; and the 
 minds that are busy to keep other minds idle, 
 are doing the basest work that men can do.
 
 CONDUCT, MANNERS. 243 
 
 Give me the man who will not desert him- 
 self. 
 
 A human being can only be developed by 
 work. He who will not work fails to fulfill his 
 manhood : he who cannot work is less than a 
 man. 
 
 There is a logic in everything. The best 
 knowledge is that by which this logic is mas- 
 tered. 
 
 Among our American rights is not the right 
 of ignorance ; for ignorance is an absolute 
 obstacle to self-government. To keep our track 
 clear of this grossest obstruction, individual 
 means are insufficient. For its own weal's sake, 
 for its life's sake, the State must work actively 
 against ignorance. 
 
 A lie is the most hateful of things. We say, 
 As true as the Sun. A lie is an eclipse of light. 
 Were all people to lie, we should be shrouded 
 in a moral darkness blacker than a starless and 
 moonless midnight. 
 
 Allowing for imaginative amplification, still
 
 244 BREVITIES. 
 
 the chivalrous protection of women in the 
 thirteenth and fourteenth centuries denotes a 
 vast enlargement of humanity at that period > 
 and, like all manifestations from the depths of 
 human feeling, is a splendid promise sure to 
 be fulfilled. 
 
 Never did the greatness of a cause, or of 
 ideas, or of principles, lift Napoleon above him- 
 self. He was never inspired. 
 
 The union of many weak threads makes a 
 strong rope ; but the union of many fools be- 
 gets not wisdom, but only worse folly. 
 
 Lafayette was not a great man, but he was 
 a man of great friendships. He was the friend 
 of struggling America, the friend of freedom, 
 and the friend of Washington. 
 
 The Greek for man is anthropos, which means 
 looker up. 
 
 The human mind is so constituted that i 
 must busy itself much with small things. If 
 wholesome details are not within its reach, it 
 will resort to frivolities, gossip, worldly petti-
 
 CONDUCT, MANNERS. 245 
 
 ness. Give it productive attractive work, in 
 and with nature, and you forestall empty of- 
 ficiousness, unprofitable busy-ness, morbid self- 
 gnawing. 
 
 Few minds are capable of broad generaliza- 
 tion. Of prominent public men not one in 
 ten has a comprehensive grasp and innate 
 room for expansion. High places are mostly 
 attained, not through mental superiority, but 
 through impudence, activity, and talent for 
 pushing. 
 
 Love kindles love : hate engenders hate. 
 
 Work is a tie between man and nature : it 
 should be a bond of brotherhood among men. 
 Through heartless unmitigated competition it 
 is a source of envies, jealousies, hates. 
 
 If a man shuts his religion up in a pew, or 
 keeps it as a solitary solace, which sheds hardly 
 a ray on others, he hides his light, not under 
 a bushel, but under the smoke and ashes of a 
 barren egotism. 
 
 Whenever there is a deep disturbance and
 
 246 BREVITIES. 
 
 broad displacement among the elements of any 
 large whole, there will be violent explosive con- 
 vulsions, in order to restore the equilibrium 
 needed for health and even for life. Such dis- 
 turbances imply strong organic vitality in the 
 constituents. To this deep general perturba- 
 tion, a people incapable of long development 
 and high culture will not be subject, its ele- 
 ments not being quick and various enough for 
 large and pervasive breach of equilibrium. 
 But for a great progressive people, ascending 
 or already ascended, to a high civilization, equi- 
 librium can only be restored by an English re- 
 bellion of 1640, or a French Revolution, or an 
 American civil war. 
 
 So many men there are about whom the 
 most interesting thing to other people is their 
 last will and testament. 
 
 The child is not only father to 'the man, but 
 brother, too, most men in mature years approv- 
 ing themselves childish. Their natures not 
 having ripened and deepened with years, they 
 continue to be willful and passion-governed, 
 much busied with trifles, exhibiting an infantile 
 tenaciousness for their petty pretensions, an
 
 CONDUCT, MANNERS. 247 
 
 unreasoning persistence in narrow opinions, an 
 unabated interest in the ephemeral. 
 
 The basis of cooperative success is sym- 
 pathy. The conditions of wise associative work 
 insure progress and purification. 
 
 The soul, being endued with a beautiful body, 
 seeks to improve the body by dress and adorn- 
 ment, which may be looked upon as a con- 
 tinuance of the soul's incarnation. This is a 
 transcendental excuse for the time and pains 
 women give to the arts of the toilet. 
 
 " It has been noted," says Lord Bacon, " that 
 those who ascribe openly too much to their own 
 wisdom and policy, end unfortunate." A good 
 epigraph for an essay on self-conceit. 
 
 History abundantly proves that priesthoods 
 exhibit supreme unscrupulousness, audacity, im- 
 piety ; unique invention in torture and murder ; 
 utter undutifulness and shamelessness in their 
 means to gain and keep power ; the coldest 
 selfishness ; unfailing readiness to subject the 
 spiritual to the carnal, from motives of greed or 
 ambition.
 
 248 BREVITIES. 
 
 The best men of " society " have all travelled ; 
 if not geographically, at least they have been 
 far, and have learnt much from converse with 
 all sorts of people, and from study of the deep- 
 est and wisest pages. 
 
 Men cling to the past, not because it is old, 
 but because it is part of themselves. They live 
 under and sleep under it, as under a roof that 
 belongs to them. It becomes a form of that 
 Proteus, selfishness. Nothing is more egotistic 
 than stiff conservatism. 
 
 Among some of the cultivated heads in 
 America there prevails a spiritual egotism, 
 whereby, instead of referring all things and be- 
 ings (themselves included) up to God, they 
 would draw God down to them, and would 
 imbue Him with themselves. It is the rednctio 
 ad absurdum of individualism, subjectivity de- 
 lirious ; and it sways at times even sober sane 
 men. Believing themselves to move under 
 upright motives, some are inly demoralized 
 (just as Robespierre was) by a self-estimation 
 so intense as to be unconscious, impelling them 
 to make their own thought and will supreme. 
 When it happens that one of these is justly
 
 CONDUCT, MANNERS. 249 
 
 conscious of not being sordid or greedy or 
 vulgarly ambitious, he is driven to still greater 
 extremes by this very consciousness, which, 
 through the subtle yeast of egotism, becomes 
 the fomenter of only a deeper selfishness. He 
 will push his theories and convictions into 
 practice at whatever cost. One proof of the 
 vice in the extreme principles of such men 
 (and it is overwhelming proof) is, that in pursu- 
 ing their ends they exhibit more hate than 
 love. 
 
 More people are kept from injustice by pru- 
 dence than by principle. 
 
 Taking medicine is another form of the 
 weakness that makes us look out of ourselves 
 for help. 
 
 By some who would weigh Washington his 
 nobility of nature is overlooked ; and some do 
 not give prominence to his integrity and large- 
 ness of soul. I have read one attempt to char- 
 acterize Washington by a writer who thinks 
 his chief quality was constancy ! 
 
 If you wish to mark your contempt for a 
 man, tell him a lie.
 
 2. 50 BREVITIES. 
 
 Introverted attention, referring to self all 
 that is said, inattentiveness from want of sym- 
 pathy, causing indifference of manner, these 
 are signs of habitual inward self-engrossment, 
 outwardly exhibited in bad manners, which 
 have their chief source in too much self-regard 
 and not enough regard for others, too much 
 inlook and not enough outlook. Good manners 
 are objective : many people are not only too 
 subjective, but narrowly, churlishly subjective. 
 
 To make a " good society " are wanted people, 
 and a good many of them, who live, not upon 
 their money, but upon their minds ; not even 
 upon the money their minds may earn. 
 
 The Egyptians used to call a library "the 
 remedy for diseases of the soul." 
 
 The larger and richer a nature is, the more 
 objective it is ; that is, the more easily and 
 fully are its sympathies enlisted for objects and 
 beings beyond itself, and the more clearly can 
 it see what is outside of itself. There is to a 
 fly no objective, except where his feet stand or 
 his mouth sucks. Exclusive subjectivity is 
 egotism strung to intenseness. We are all too
 
 CONDUCT, MANNERS. 2$ I 
 
 much contracted and heaped up into ourselves, 
 having > as Montaigne says, our sight shortened 
 to the length of our noses. 
 
 All society, whatever its form, rests on work, 
 grows out of work. 
 
 The victim of envy is not the envi^, but the 
 envier. 
 
 In many men there is no echo to one who 
 speaks wisely ; in some from want of thought, 
 in some from want of the right kind or degree 
 of feeling. 
 
 In the personality of a man we take a loving 
 interest, in proportion as in his doings or his 
 writi ngs he has expanded beyond himself into 
 acts and thoughts of cordial value. 
 
 We are ever interposing and obtruding our- 
 selves between us and our good. 
 
 To manners, as to literature, grace is a 
 quality needed to complete them. Grace is 
 from within.
 
 252 BREVITIES. 
 
 If men would but be upright and fearless. 
 Fear not, and work on at thy mental enlarge- 
 ment, trusting to the Most High. Above all, 
 fear not. He who fears is possessed with a 
 devil, and a mean devil. 
 
 Man is distinguished from animals by fore- 
 sight, and man from man by foresight. All 
 wrong, injustice, selfishness, is shortsighted. 
 
 The worldly gentleman is apt to wear a coat 
 of coldness, woven from within. 
 
 Detractors are great levelers, downwards. 
 
 In some people what is called manners is 
 an excess of manner. 
 
 Proportion is a mighty power. Onesidedness 
 makes and keeps many people wrong in regard 
 to great principles. 
 
 Good intellectual faculties give sight : noth- 
 ing but sensibility gives insight. 
 
 So many able men are always seeking them- 
 selves and not the truth.
 
 CONDUCT, MANNERS. 2$$ 
 
 Is not Guizot's a rather shallow hard head ? 
 
 Life has many deep, rich rhythms which are 
 as yet only heard by a few, through a rare in- 
 ward hearing. 
 
 Wishes, desires, that we ought not to gratify, 
 we can turn to account for our good, if we will 
 arrest their hurtful outward flow, and, by con- 
 trolling, make of them sources of inward for- 
 tification. 
 
 In the long run everything depends upon 
 the sel The inward of a man must be active 
 and cooperative, in order that the best oppor- 
 tunities be profited by, that the most pros- 
 perous circumstances be not baffled or wasted. 
 
 The spirit of Christian charity, of brotherly 
 respect, is finely exhibited and characteristic- 
 ally expressed in the following passage of a 
 letter from Goethe to Lavater. Sentences like 
 these are often met with in Goethe, and make 
 one think of him as a higher Franklin. " Most 
 thankful should we be that into every living 
 being Nature has put so much healing power, 
 that when there is a lesion anywhere it can
 
 254 BREVITIES. 
 
 knit itself together again ; and what are our 
 thousandfold religions other than thousand- 
 formed manifestations of this inward healing 
 power ? My plaster does not suit thee, nor 
 thine me : In our Father's apotheca are many 
 recipes. So I have nothing to answer to your 
 letter, nothing to contradict in it : but on the 
 other hand much to place beside it We 
 should put our confessions of faith side by 
 side in two columns, and thereupon build a 
 bond of peace and tolerance." 
 
 Especially in regard to the relations of the 
 sexes, people will one of these days be in all 
 their inward motions and outward doings as 
 virtuous as a dressy congregation looks when 
 it has just seated itself, some spring Sunday, in 
 a carpeted pew-cushioned church that has a 
 richly-paid rector. 
 
 A man who has a sense of the ideal carries 
 about with him an hourly educator.
 
 IV. 
 
 MISCELLANEOUS. 
 
 THE mummies of Egypt are a type of un- 
 enlightened conservatism, a childish effort 
 to perpetuate corporeal bulk, to eternize the 
 perishable, to subordinate essence to form, to 
 deny death. The result is a mummy. 
 
 Hereditary oligarchs are puppets to whom 
 motion is imparted by wires inserted under 
 ground into the dead bodies of their fore- 
 fathers. 
 
 The remedy for England is to turn, not her 
 waste lands to use, but her waste mind, her 
 waste intellect and feeling. This, her priceless, 
 inexhaustible domain, is half tilled in patches. 
 
 In England so many people look as though 
 they were waiting for my lord. 
 
 On the continent of Europe it looks as
 
 256 BREVITIES. 
 
 though government had been made first, and 
 man afterwards. 
 
 The great recent discoveries of Gall, of 
 Fourier, of Priesnitz, all combine to make ap- 
 parent the resources, the incalculable vigors, 
 the inborn capabilities of man. 
 
 Forms soon usurp upon the substance they 
 were designed to hold. Ceremony and hy- 
 pocritical corporeal salutations get to be a 
 substitute for genuine politeness ; religion is 
 smothered under ritual observances ; paper 
 money drives out metal, which it was devised 
 to represent. 
 
 The Greeks and the English seem to be the 
 only two nations possessing enough sap and 
 vigor and fullness of nature to reproduce them- 
 selves in distant soils, through colonists that 
 swarmed off from the parent hive. 
 
 Cherished should be the man whose mind is 
 too large to be filled by creeds, and too manly 
 to close itself against any wants of humanity. 
 The mental home of the truest men is among 
 principles, and principles are infinitely ex- 
 pansive.
 
 MISCELLANEOUS. 
 
 People nominally worship God one day in 
 the week, and really worship Mammon seven. 
 
 The Bible should be studied with activity of 
 spirit. Its great heart will not beat but to 
 the throbbing of yours. Just to read it pas- 
 sively, traditionally, dulls the very susceptibility 
 through which it is to be taken in. Not thus 
 will you find God in the Bible. Who has not 
 first sought Him in his own heart and in the 
 life around him, will scarcely find Him there at 
 all. God is not locked up in the Bible : He is 
 at all times around, within us. Strive with 
 Jesus to feel his presence. Then you may 
 hope for promotion, purification, inspiration : 
 then your heart may bring forth biblical chap- 
 ters ; for, the best there is in the Bible came 
 out of the human soul, touched to inspired 
 utterances by the awakened inward divinity. 
 
 The priests of Rome discourage intercourse 
 with God through the Bible, which is already 
 at one remove. Themselves they constitute 
 the sole interpreters of the divine. The heav- 
 enly will can only be expressed by distillation 
 through the foul alembics of priestly greeds 
 and ambition. Hence, where they long dom- 
 '7
 
 258 BREVITIES. 
 
 inate, religion becomes materialized, and, for 
 uplifting, soul-purging communion with God, 
 is substituted abject, demoralizing, belittling 
 submission to priesthood. 
 
 An ape is a creature that has approached 
 the gates of reason, and stands there grinning 
 and jabbering in tragi-comical ignorance of 
 his nearness to the regal palace. 
 
 Envy, like venomous reptiles, can only strike 
 at short distances. 
 
 There is no deeper law of nature than that 
 of change. 
 
 Everything that we do being a cause, he is 
 the most sagacious who so does that each 
 cause shall have its good effect. This practical 
 long-sightedness is wisdom, the want of it fool- 
 ishness. To-days are all fathers of to-morrows, 
 but like many other fathers, they sadly neglect 
 their paternal duties. To-day, if it thinks at 
 all, thinks of itself, and leaves to-morrow to 
 shift for itself. Life is a daily laying of eggs, 
 some to be hatched to-morrow, some next 
 month, some next year, some next century.
 
 MISCELLANEOUS. 2$$ 
 
 Many are not hatched at all, but rot or are 
 broken ; many come prematurely out of the 
 shell, and perish from debility ; and thus that 
 much life is wasted. Charity is long-sighted, 
 selfishness is short-sighted. And yet, so de- 
 fective is our social constitution, that a man 
 may be long-sighted in using his neighbor for 
 his own ends. Thus doctors who are short- 
 sighted when they take their own physic, which 
 they seldom do are long-sighted when they 
 give it to their patients ; for the more of it 
 these take, the oftener the doctor is called. 
 It were a mistake to suppose that parsons are 
 long-sighted because they set their minds so 
 much upon the next world ; their long-sight- 
 edness consists in directing other people's 
 thoughts to that quarter, while from the super- 
 mundane spectators they draw the wherewithal 
 to be content with this. Lawyers are short- 
 sighted when' they encourage litigation ; the 
 long-sighted know that the perverted passions 
 of civilized men will bring grist enough to 
 their mill without their stir. The man who 
 sells rum is short-sighted, but less so than he 
 who drinks it. Authors are very short-sighted 
 when they write to please the public, instead 
 of writing to please the truth. Expedients are
 
 26O BREVITIES. 
 
 short-sighted, principles long-sighted ; and not- 
 withstanding the apparent prosperity of some 
 liars, nothing is so long-sighted as truth. 
 
 We Americans let not the past accumulate 
 upon us : we make clean work as we go. We 
 keep the present lively, because we are ever 
 snatching a new present from across the con- 
 fines of the future. We are always " going 
 ahead ; " that is, building up the future out of 
 itself and not solely out of the past. We don't 
 wait for the future : we rush in pursuit of it. 
 
 Classification is the highest function of in- 
 tellect ; it brings order out of chaos. It is 
 both analysis and synthesis. The higher the 
 department of universal life, the keener of 
 course must be the intellectual insight that can 
 detect its organic law. To order minerals is 
 feebler work than to order morals. The man 
 who classes, needs to have a kind of creative 
 mastery over his material. He intellectually 
 recreates. The savage, who has mastery over 
 nothing, but is a serf of Nature, has no power 
 of classification. 
 
 To weave the wondrous form wherewith life
 
 MISCELLANEOUS. 26 1 
 
 invests itself in humanity, the heart works 
 ceaselessly, and every organ, member, part and 
 particle of the living frame works, each joyfully 
 in its sphere, in unison with the heart, for the 
 maintenance of the common fabric. But a 
 continuation and extension of the unconscious 
 work of the heart and lungs is the conscious 
 work of the head and hand of man, whose end 
 is, to feed, to clothe, to lodge, to develop, to 
 delight his body and his mind. All work, the 
 unconscious and the conscious, is but life meth- 
 odized, that is, life made more living, more in- 
 telligent, and thence more productive. And 
 thus work, which is the condition and result 
 of life, becomes the means of its perpetuation, 
 its extension, its elevation. All work may be 
 delightful ; and as, the healthier the body is, 
 the more joyfully and thoroughly the heart and 
 its allies perform their unconscious task, so 
 in a healthy social organization all work, the 
 greatest and the least, ceasing to be repulsive 
 and becoming attractive and delightful, would 
 be proportionately productive. A consumma- 
 tion this, not barely, most devoutly to be wished, 
 but most surely to be accomplished, by that 
 high work which the intellect exalted by love 
 and faith is equal to performing.
 
 262 BREVITIES. 
 
 Nature rejects with contempt hereditary aris- 
 tocracy. 
 
 In our present misorganized society helpless- 
 ness is the condition, not of nine in ten, but 
 of all. The wisest and wealthiest are encom- 
 passed by exposure, dangers, calamity. The 
 most of what is done on earth is of our own 
 making or allowing. Heaven is just, lets us 
 do for our good or ill, and helps us when we 
 help ourselves. Put we our shoulders to the 
 wheel, the Hercules is instantly at our side. 
 We make the beds we lie in ; not you or I, 
 but you and I, and all the you's and I's that 
 surround us. Against our needs and woes you 
 or I can do little, but you and I everything. 
 Association, which has made banks and rail- 
 roads, can do much better and higher. 
 
 There is nothing that some people are more 
 ignorant of than their own ignorance. 
 
 Unsightly is an old face haunted by the vices 
 of youth. 
 
 Credulity is a characteristic of weakness. 
 Imagination precedes Reason. Fancies are a
 
 MISCELLANEOUS. 263 
 
 loose substitute for knowledge. Hence the 
 unreasonable creeds of young nations, fastened 
 upon them by priestcraft, whose criminal prac- 
 tice it has been, and is still, by terrifying the 
 imagination to subjugate the reason. The first- 
 born of priestcraft was the Devil. 
 
 Priests are ever shuffling over the leaves of 
 old books : they seek God in traditions and 
 hearsays, and the dim utterances of the livers 
 of old ; they abide by the outgivings of obsolete 
 mystics : they re-assert the beliefs of anti- 
 quated seers : they grovel and grope in the 
 darkness and dawn, to find stakes planted by 
 the crude beginners of the world, to which, by 
 grossest cords, they would bind to the past our 
 forward-reaching souls. The future, too, they 
 suborn and would monopolize. Out of imagi- 
 nations that are shallow, unhallowed, meagre, 
 foul, they would construct both the past and the 
 future. That they may be paid for furnishing 
 rush-lights, they cultivate darkness, and becur- 
 tain with creeds and dogmas the human taber- 
 nacle against the sun of truth. Those who ap- 
 peal to the God of light, and to the upright soul 
 of man, against their sophistications, and usur- 
 pations, they crucify. Audaciously they dub
 
 264 BREVITIES. 
 
 themselves the ministers of God, they who are 
 especially not God's ministers but men's. Spir- 
 itual insight, moral elevation, rich sympathies, 
 these are the tokens whereby the divinely or- 
 dained are signalized. Are candidates for any 
 priesthood admitted or rejected by these signs ? 
 Not by inborn superiorities of sensibility, but 
 by acquired proficiencies, by intellectual adop- 
 tions are they tested. This creed, these ar- 
 ticles, this ritual, do they accept these, then 
 are they accepted. To be learned in humanity, 
 a vivid learning, which the large heart imbibes 
 without labor, this is not their title ; but to be 
 learned in theology, a lifeless learning, which 
 the small head can acquire by methodical 
 effort. They would live and make others live 
 by the dead letter, and not by the living law. 
 The dead letter is the carcass of what has been, 
 or what is imagined to have been. The living 
 law is what is : it is not written, it is forever 
 in process of being written, on the heart of 
 man by the hand of God. 
 
 Disproportion is disqualification. Too much 
 is unwieldy : too little is feebleness. A giant 
 is of no more use than a dwarf. A man seven 
 feet high finds his extra foot a daily incum-
 
 MISCELLANEOUS. 26$ 
 
 brance. A man of more head than heart is 
 dangerous : a man of more heart than head is 
 a victim. 
 
 In one of the " Latter Day Pamphlets," Mr. 
 Carlyle asks tauntingly, What have the Amer- 
 icans done ? We have abolished Monarchy ; 
 we have abolished hereditary Oligarchy ; we 
 have sundered Church and State ; we have so 
 wrought with our English inheritance, that 
 most Englishmen better their condition by 
 quitting the old home and coming to the new. 
 We have consolidated a State, under whose dis- 
 interested guardianship the cabined and strait- 
 ened of the Old World find enlargement and 
 prosperity. We have suppressed standing ar- 
 mies ; we have decentralized government to 
 an extent that, before our experiment, was 
 deemed hopeless ; we have grown with such 
 dream-like rapidity, as to stand, after little 
 more than a half-century of national existence, 
 prominent on the earth among the nations ; 
 and this, in large measure, through the wisdom 
 of political organization, whereby such scope 
 is given to industry and invention, that not 
 only are our native means profitably developed, 
 nut the great influx of Europeans is healthfully
 
 266 BREVITIES. 
 
 absorbed. We have in seventy years put be- 
 tween the Atlantic and the Pacific an Empire 
 of twenty-five millions, who work more than 
 any twenty-five millions on earth, and read 
 more than any other fifty millions. We have 
 built a State at once so solid and flexible, that 
 it protects all without oppressing any. Our 
 land is a hope and a refuge to the king-crushed 
 laborers of Europe, and from the eminence 
 above all other lands to which it has ascended, 
 by our forecast, vigor, and freedom, it is to the 
 thinker a demonstration of the upward move- 
 ment of Christendom, and a justification of 
 hopes that look to still higher elevations. 
 
 Mr. Carlyle's sneers at our lack of heroism 
 would be unworthy of him, from their very 
 silliness, were they not more so from their sour 
 injustice. Let any People recite its heroic 
 deeds, on flood or field, since we were a nation, 
 and we will match every one of them. And in 
 the private sphere, where self-sacrifice, devo- 
 tion, courage, find such scope for heroic virtues, 
 our social life is warm with them : but this is 
 no theme for words. For his unworthy ones, 
 we deem well enough of Mr. Carlyle to believe, 
 that, when disengaged from the morbidly sub- 
 jective, and therefore blinding and demoraliz-
 
 MISCELLANEOUS. 267 
 
 ing, moods, to which he is liable, he is ashamed 
 of having printed them. It looks somewhat as 
 though this passage had been written just to 
 give us an opportunity of victorious retort, or 
 to tempt us into an exhibition of our national 
 propensity to brag, a propensity, be it said, 
 which is national in every nation we know 
 anything of, whether English, French, German, 
 or Italian. We only beat them in bragging, 
 just as we beat them in ploughs and statues, 
 in clippers and steamboats, in whalemen and 
 electric telegraphs, in cheap newspapers and 
 cheap government. They all do their best 
 at bragging, and so do we, and we beat 
 them. 1852. 
 
 The moral world is better lighted than here- 
 tofore. Selfishness succeeds somewhat less 
 grossly : conscience has a louder voice. 
 
 Such is the power of relative proportion that 
 the same chemical atoms, commingled in differ- 
 ent ratios, give substances of most diverse na- 
 tures. Of men the same holds good, and in a 
 still higher degree. 
 
 The truer religion is the simpler and more
 
 268 BREVITIES. 
 
 silent it is ; but simplicity and silence suit not 
 priestcraft. 
 
 Never make pretentions which you cannot 
 justify. Therefore never strive to seem young 
 when you are not young : time will expose you 
 to'daily mortification. Time is vital to us : by 
 trying to live against time we maim ourselves. 
 
 The lawyer is retrospective : his masters are 
 behind him : the authority of the past controls 
 him : his studies are of the decisions of dead 
 men and their interpretations of other dead 
 men's ordinances. Thus his mind is apt to be- 
 come inclosed within conventional juridical 
 bounds. Hence lawyers are seldom great 
 statesmen, the function of the statesman being, 
 to grasp large present relations. The lawyer's 
 domain is chiefly what has been : the states- 
 man's what is, and what is to be. 
 
 Man is of the vine nature : he puts forth 
 tendrils that need props and supports in his 
 fellow-men : and, failing these, he misses his 
 altitude and proper prosperity, and droops and 
 creeps.
 
 MISCELLANEOUS. 269 
 
 When with thoughtful watchfulness we study 
 creation and its processes, we find true the re- 
 mark of Playfair, " How much further reason 
 may sometimes go than imagination can ven- 
 ture to follow." 
 
 The " cloth" of the clergy is too often cut 
 into a cloak. 
 
 Life is a universal boundless whole, whereof 
 each one as a part is valuable in proportion 
 to the quality of his relations to the whole. 
 
 Satire implies a high state already attained 
 and a higher attainable. Humanity is never 
 satirized in its lower conditions. 
 
 Between truth and freedom there is a close 
 interdependence and union. Jean Paul says 
 that to romance (or to lie) is derived from 
 Roman, the word with this signification having 
 come into use after the Romans had become 
 enslaved. 
 
 In air made foul by human exhalations, a 
 material filth penetrates to the finest fibres of 
 the brain, weakening and impeding the mind's
 
 2/0 BREVITIES. 
 
 action. The difference between the " black 
 hole of Calcutta " and many of our school-rooms 
 is this : in the black hole scores died in a few 
 hours : from the school-rooms hundreds go 
 forth to die in a few years, from effects of the 
 same cause. A building, especially a public 
 one which is liable to crowds, should be a 
 breathing organism, ever, like the lungs, throw- 
 ing out used air and drawing in fresh. 
 
 Present intuitions of genial deep-thoughted 
 men, even of the deepest, are in part a fruit of 
 past intuitions, culture generating an atmos- 
 phere whereon the largest brains are uncon- 
 sciously fed. 
 
 In the frenzied heat of brain-fever France 
 engendered Marat and Robespierre, deformed 
 monsters of self-sufficiency, whom in her de- 
 lirium she hugged as comely healthy children. 
 
 Some people are practically honest from rev- 
 erence for property. They will sin against 
 you or me, against truth, against the Holy 
 Ghost, but not against property. 
 
 Napoleon was a colossal torso.
 
 MISCELLANEOUS. 2JI 
 
 From one of the pages of Lacordaire's " Con- 
 ferences de Toulouse," I copy this tremendous 
 sentence : " Mahomet, initie a 1'Evangile, a re- 
 vetu de chair la felicite souveraine ; et ce 
 fantome de son Paradis persecute encore la 
 honteuse imagination de ses croyants, seul 
 peuple qui n'ait pas connu la pudeur." 
 
 Reason should always hold the reins of the 
 mind. If they are loosely held, the mind 
 stumbles, or runs off the track, or runs away. 
 
 We speak of " here and hereafter ; " but 
 man's life is an everpresent here, an everlast- 
 ing now. The hereafter is ever turning into 
 here: the future is forever becoming now. 
 
 Few men have the kind and degree of mental 
 vitality needed to throb with the life-currents 
 which slake and vivify the organism. The 
 minds of most men being rather mechanical 
 and material than dynamic and psychical, to 
 them the human organism is too much a 
 mechanism. Medical practitioners work by 
 rule and routine more than by insight and law. 
 They can analyze the dead blood : they can- 
 not track the pulsing life-stream Few of them
 
 2/2 BREVITIES. 
 
 fully apprehend the plastic power of nature ; 
 and hence they so often pull down where they 
 should build up, mutilate or destroy where they 
 should save. 
 
 The next generation will have to reverse the 
 accustomed phrase at the beginning of many 
 biographies, and say, " His parents, though rich, 
 were honest." 
 
 The universally innate human religious ap- 
 titude was in the Semitic people intensified by 
 the aridity of part of their soil and the neigh- 
 borhood of vast deserts. By the daily malefi- 
 cent presence of these, their helplessness and 
 their dependence on the unseen were brought 
 fearfully home to them, and incessantly. From 
 the want of resources and of breadth in their 
 territory there was among them an enforced 
 simplicity of earthly occupations, which left 
 them leisure, and gave them disposition, to fill 
 their minds with thoughts of the power that 
 seemed to press on them in the desert and to 
 stint them in their fields and streams. Thence 
 their notion of Deity was more of might than 
 of beneficence. Their God was a God of 
 anger rather than of love. Their conception 
 of a life beyond the grave was null, or faint.
 
 MISCELLANEOUS. 2/3 
 
 There are people in whom the best thing is 
 their appetite for dinner. 
 
 Equality before the law, man-made law, is 
 one of the great conquests of latter times, a 
 conquest bearing in its train inestimable prof- 
 its. A relative equality is this, equal rights 
 in presence of all human tribunals ; and such 
 impartiality is a prerequisite for full liberty. 
 But absolute equality is an absurdity, and 
 men's attempt to establish it is destructive of 
 free development and free use of faculties de- 
 veloped, a revolt against nature involving tyr- 
 anny over man. Men are born with unequal 
 gifts, moral as well as intellectual, and this 
 inequality involves vast consequences, personal, 
 political, and social. Moreover, the wider the 
 range of this inequality, the better the ma- 
 terials for a solid and attractive and elastic 
 social structure. 
 
 To show man's innate capacity of goodness, 
 to exhibit him as born of God and not a cross 
 between God and the Devil (as he is repre- 
 sented by what is called Christian theology), 
 this is a task for the present and coming gene- 
 rations. 
 
 18
 
 2/4 BREVITIES. 
 
 Providence is large in its designs, and uses 
 minute instruments. Common statesmanship 
 is small in its designs, and uses large means 
 for shallow plans. 
 
 When you talk to a Romish priest and, in a 
 less degree, to a Protestant clergyman, you feel 
 that you are talking, not to a self-directed in- 
 dividual man, to a whole human being, but to 
 the fraction of a partial sum of men, to a bit 
 of a segment of a limited circle, to the cog of 
 a wheel, whose action is circumscribed and 
 defined by its position. And is not this the 
 case when talking to most men, lay as well as 
 clerical ? Few but are mere fragments of 
 humanity, cabined in set opinions, tethered to 
 inexorable creeds and constitutions. 
 
 The Puritans were a one-sided race, and 
 that one side was much on the side of self. 
 Yet, in modern development, what a great and 
 indispensable part they played. 
 
 The man who cannot learn new thoughts 
 becomes stagnant. If he lives in a progressive 
 community he is left uncomfortably behind, he 
 and his. The generations that stride forward
 
 MISCELLANEOUS. 2/5 
 
 walk past him or over him. Thus it was with 
 the French noblesse after 1789; and so it is 
 now with " old families " that will not learn. 
 In these electric times they are thrust from 
 their thrones by families that have aptitude for 
 new things. An old race that cannot take in 
 new principles thereby shows . that it is ex- 
 hausted, is become mentally barren. Witness 
 China, and the East generally. 
 
 The life of man on earth is but a beginning ; 
 and beginnings are tentative, crude, imperfect. 
 Hence, blunders, vices, crimes ; and hence, men 
 being so frail and shortsighted, so many bad 
 men are allowed to get into high places. 
 
 Is not the addiction to rites and cermonies, 
 the attaching of essential importance to forms, 
 a sign of the want of sensibility ? An inward va- 
 cancy manifests itself in an outward ostentation. 
 
 Noteworthy is it how our civilization is built 
 on piles, so to speak, resting so much on human 
 imaginations and ordonnances, on ecclesiastical 
 dogmas and legislative enactments. Out of a 
 crude natural state man rises gradually into a 
 cultivated artificial state. Out of this, too, he
 
 276 BREVITIES. 
 
 will pass, and through self-projections and 
 emancipations reach the ripe natural state, 
 where dogmatic theology and jurisprudence 
 and all makeshifts will have been outgrown, 
 and humanity will securely rest on the God- 
 given law. 
 
 The imagination is the truest of mental 
 powers. It reveals to us our inmost self ; and 
 so truly, that we dare not make known all its 
 promptings and pictures. 
 
 Dreary and dark is the outlook of the ma- 
 terialist : closed is his mind against the light 
 and warmth of higher spheres, which poten- 
 tially belong to mankind : to him there come, 
 from the unknown vast, no flashes too brilliant 
 to be borne, save for a moment, by earthly 
 man, hinting at and prefiguring radiant trans- 
 earthly possibilities. When in " Achilleis " 
 Goethe describes the Hours as lavishing upon 
 and within the abode of Jupiter " so much light 
 and life that man could not have borne it, but 
 the gods it delighted," he depicts the life of a 
 higher state of being, which low-thoughted 
 materialism will not entertain, but something 
 of which there must have been at all times
 
 MISCELLANEOUS. 2/7 
 
 many to conceive, or man would have groped 
 forever in the caves of savagery. Had man 
 not been the subject of restless spiritual up- 
 reachings, of instinctive heavenward aspira- 
 tions, no philosophical plane could ever have 
 been reached ; and thence, no materialist would 
 have gained the culture which enables him to 
 strive to span the universe with his tape-line 
 of phenomenal sequences, to seize the mystery 
 of being through chemical manipulations, to 
 weigh the essences of life in grocer's scales. 
 
 In 1456 Pope Calixtus III. issued a bull 
 against a comet. The absurd impotence of 
 this proceeding was some antidote to its blas- 
 phemous venom. The four centuries that, 
 since the day of impious Calixtus, have rolled 
 themselves out of the bosom of eternity, spark- 
 ling more and more with the divine light of 
 poetic and scientific revelation, have left un- 
 healed, untouched, the presumptuous vision of 
 the Papacy. Its bad distinction is that it will 
 not, cannot, be enlightened. In Nature, in 
 Civilization, in Christendom, it stands alone in 
 stolid unchangeableness, self-exiled from the 
 Paradise of progression by ecclesiastical ambi- 
 tion, by self-worshipping loneliness. As bias-
 
 2/8 BREVITIES. 
 
 pheraous to day as in the age of Calixtus, it 
 looks upon every free-thinking; free-speaking 
 mind as a cometary intrusion, a menacing irreg- 
 ularity, a defiant insolence, whose light and 
 being it would, if it could, extinguish by a bull ; 
 in its arrogant irreverence blind to the deep 
 religious fact, that every such mind is launched 
 by the same infinite Might that projects comets 
 and places the stars. How many Protestants 
 are there who denounce Popery, and yet prac- 
 tice its blasphemy against free thought and free 
 speech ? 
 
 In every department of work the highest 
 achievement implies the organizing, coordinat- 
 ing power. Without it a man can hardly be 
 great, whether 'he be scientist, statesman, or 
 poet. 
 
 The power of capital lies in the intelligence 
 which creates and preserves it. 
 
 The minds of many people are so imprisoned 
 in narrow, false theologies that they look out 
 upon the world as a convict does through his 
 prison-bars.
 
 MISCELLANEOUS. 279 
 
 So many men are afraid of God ! Most tragic 
 cpndition ! They stick to the old man-made, 
 miry, thoroughfares, too timid to strike into the 
 God-given paths that open on all sides, smil- 
 ing and glittering with safe solicitations, with 
 promises as brilliant as sure. Disabled, hectic 
 theologies they prefer to science, contracted 
 dogma to expanded reason. More pitiable are 
 they than monkeys, who stand senselessly 
 chattering before the temple of Thought and 
 Speech, and have no power to enter. 
 
 The men who, lacking the insight which 
 comes chiefly from sympathy, are by nature 
 incompetent to grasp and appreciate the pro- 
 found principles and springs of life and motion 
 that underlie and energize all being, especially 
 human being, these are the men who put them- 
 selves forward to read and interpret the secrets 
 and the will of the prime Motor, men for the 
 most part as limited in intellectual range as in 
 sensibility. 
 
 One. thing keeps fresh a day, another a 
 month, another a year, another a century, an- 
 other a thousand years : truth, justice, love, 
 keep themselves forever fresh.
 
 280 BREVITIES. 
 
 A man cannot better spend his life than in 
 learning how to live. 
 
 Oriental despotism dominating the law and 
 ritual of the Jews, minute directions were pre- 
 scribed for all individual doings, compressing, 
 smothering personal liberty and self-direction 
 The tendency of the spiritual teaching of 
 Jesus was to emancipate men from this priestly 
 domination and interference. 
 
 There should be no hostility between the- 
 ology and science ; for theology, or knowledge 
 of the ways and will of God, should be, and, if 
 sound, will be and must be, founded on science ; 
 that is, on sifted, methodized knowledge. 
 
 Violent death is a proof of incompleteness, of 
 failure. Two men or two armies, destroying 
 one another, show that man is not yet out of 
 the phase of animalism, and needs farther purg- 
 ing through swift destruction. 
 
 Human society is founded on sensualism ; 
 sensualism in a healthy sense. The structure 
 is weakened, or threatened, or deformed, when 
 the foundations obtrude above the ground.
 
 MISCELLANEOUS. 28 1 
 
 Water is more strengthening than whiskey, 
 more exhilarating than wine. 
 
 Every dollar of capital extant is the product 
 of work, work of muscle and work of mind ; 
 and a part of the function of capital, its chief 
 part, should be, to react upon the mind and 
 muscle of a community, for the profit, improve- 
 ment, and elevation of all its members. The 
 material is the creation of the spiritual, and 
 should serve its maker. 
 
 No new thing under the sun ! Everything 
 under the sun is new, except what is dying or 
 dead ; and death itself is but a passage to a 
 new condition of life. Whatever has life re- 
 news itself momently : when it ceases to renew 
 itself, it is losing its present form of being. 
 Constant renewal is the very life of being. 
 Every sunrise is new, every soul is a new soul. 
 Because all men and things are alike, each is 
 therefore not the less new : no two among the 
 myriads that are and have been are precisely 
 alike, and this infinitude of unlikeness is a 
 token of the newness of each. Here is ex- 
 hibited the boundless prodigality of mate- 
 rials and resources at command of the sleep-
 
 282 BREVITIES. 
 
 less productiveness in the animating principle. 
 " Behold, I make all things new." Timoleon 
 was a new man : Are William the Silent of 
 Orange and Washington, because they bear 
 strong likeness to Timoleon, less lustrously 
 new ? Was not Patrick Henry a new orator ? 
 Was not Shelley a new poet ? Unceasing cre- 
 ativeness is the very essence of the originating, 
 sustaining, informing, Mind. Hence the daily, 
 hourly rejuvenation of the earth, and all that 
 is on it, by the pauseless pulse of the Eternal 
 Soul. 
 
 THE END.