i H 1 M Hi i I I I THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESENTED BY PROF. CHARLES A. KOFOID AND MRS. PRUDENCE W. KOFOID jktam 0f FRAMED IN IDEAS BY C. A. BARTOL. " What thy soul holds dear, imagine it To lie that way thou go'st." SHAKSPEAEE. SECOND EDITION. BOSTON : CROSBY, NICHOLS, AND COMPANY, 111, WASHINGTON STREET. 1856. Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1855, by CROSBY, NICHOLS, AND COMPANY, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts. BOSTON : PRINTED BY JOHN WILSON AND SON, 22, SCHOOL STREET. CONTENTS. PAGE. THE Two JOURNEYS 1 ABROAD AND AT HOME 3 BEAUTY OF THE WORLD 33 THE MOUNTAINS 55 THE RIVERS 87 THE LAKES 105 THE SEA 129 SUPERIORITY OP ART TO NATURE . . . . . 155 TESTIMONY OF ART TO RELIGION 179 THE ENDURING KINGDOM . . . . . 213 THE CHURCH . . 235 SOCIETY 251 COUNTRY 269 MANKIND 293 HISTORY 317 DESTINY 347 THE GUIDE . ,373 THE ASCENT OF MONT BLANC, by I. T. TALBOT, M.D. . 375 THE TWO JOURNEYS. FORTH to the East ! Revivings of the day Break, pouring promised strength upon my way j Another line thy weary footsteps pressed j Thy sun of life was lowering to the West. Ah, gracious Nature ! ah, soul-cheering Art ! Was it for this you did your healing part, Lengthening my lease for destiny so poor, To see his ashes carried from his door ? O earthly father ! whom the heavenly gave, And yet can from the mortal sentence save, Thou wilt forgive the sigh that damps my songs, To think that title all to Heaven belongs. Sad tears, with joyful, dropped from me apace, While thou thy chequered history wouldst trace : Thy words sublime, my parent, oft shall rise To keep some blessed moisture in my eyes : " The hireling's day I have accomplished now ; The evening shadows gather on my brow ; The hireling for the shadows longs, my son : They tell him that his task at last is done. 1 THE TWO JOURNEYS. " Shadows of five and seventy years are dark, Yet Jordan's stream I clearly through them mark j ' And, seeing little, this in death see well, No stop, but crossing, whither, one can tell." Strong in my memory thy tones abide ; Deep in my heart thy gentle looks I hide ; And this returning birthday celebrate With thoughts of thee, whose sojourn fixed my date. A courteous pilgrim, with a walk upright ; A lowly soul, ne'er stooping from its height : The outer man expressed the hidden frame ; Thy seeming and thy being were the same. No longer for this fleshly eye and ear That aspect so pathetic, speech sincere ! Oh, in that other voice and face be found Some lingering traits of former sight and sound ! In glorious reaches of my journey led, With ceaseless joy and various wonder sped, The gates of beauty opening to my glance, A constant motion in perpetual tranqe, - 1 gazed o'er all the mighty endless plan, Pictured and wrought by hand of God or man ; Yet, as through swelling land and sea I went, Saw not the splendors of thy Orient. Something between me and the grave is gone j Plainer I can discern my own tombstone ; But now more pleasant thither looks my road, To journey with thee when I drop my load. ABROAD AND AT HOME. Columbus courts the angry breeze, New worlds to win through Western seas : Fain would returning pilgrims gain The old world, haunting so their brain. Seeketh the traveller lands afar ; Following the light of every star, Borne on the wings of every wind, He learneth what he left behind. ABROAD AND AT HOME. DE QUINCEY, I think, somewhere describes the curious process by which an ancient parchment was made to carry several successive meanings. One inscription, being partly effaced, allowed the legible entry of another upon the same surface, which, in turn, likewise gave place to a third and fourth. Then a reversal of the process, or rubbing out of the last inscription, revealed the marks of the pre- ceding, even to the first. Such a parchment is called a palimpsest, or something retouched. A tra- veller, coming back from a long journey, may well think he finds the best of all palimpsests to be his trunk. Each city or inn, road or frontier village, or custom-house, pastes itself on his baggage. One inscription over another tells whither he has been, where he has stayed, what land or water conveyance he has chosen, or kingdom he has passed through. England and France and Germany and Italy leave their prints upon his valise ; the memorials of a continent shrink to the circumference of his carpet- bag ; nor could any runaway ever be known by l* 6 ABROAD AND AT HOME. more tokens than is a modern pilgrim ; so that, from patiently removing one after another of these paper guide-posts from his pieces of luggage, and also con- sulting the ever-repeated authority for him to travel, recorded by every nation or town in his passport, he might make out a tolerable history of his course. Gazing at the red and black letters and figures has at least a magical power of association to bear him back through the long track he has measured ; and makes him fain wish he could, for the information of others, discover such a significant palimpsest in his mind. During the last year, it was my privilege to travel through most of the countries of Europe, and to see the remarkable objects, which a line of many thou- sand miles, running through great cities, along fa- mous rivers, over lofty mountains, or by magnificent passes, and leading me into some of the chief galle- ries of art as well as nature in the world, could reveal. Occasional sketches, more or less public or private, already given of my experience, have brought me frequent inquiries whether I would not offer my narrative through the press. This volume is the reply. Among the considerations which induce me to put it forth, I trust I may, without immodesty or appearance of presumptuous claim, be permitted to specify as a chief motive my not being aware of the existence of any book, which, touching the same theme, is composed upon the same principle ; though the peculiar aims and merits of many, doubt- less, wholly exceed my poor title to regard. At ABROAD AND AT HOME. 7 least, for the sake, at the outset, of a right under- standing, I desire to say to such as may be my read- ers, that I have not attempted a circumstantial history of my tour. I have written no exact Itinerary ; I have drawn no word-maps of geography; I have not been careful to tell where I went or what I did next ; but, venturing to imitate some of the poets, have left the unities of time and place when- ever I could so observe the higher unities of thought and reality, without, I trust, ever violating the pro- portions of any fact within my reach. In short, I have not told every thing, but the things which made on me the strongest impressions ; letting all the rest, like the showers I passed through on my way, flow off. Like the paddles of the ship, I have taken hold of nothing which did not move me ; or like a child, who, from a thousand scenes he has witnessed in the street, comes back to tell his mother, in the loud eagerness of juvenile eloquence, what especially caught his fancy, so I hope only to inte- rest others in what interested me. I have found the almost chaotic mixture of numberless particulars in my mind under reflection, stirring itself and forming into distinct crystallizations around separate points. I have given many delineations of my experience; but my pictures, such as they were, framed them- selves in my contemplations, and hung of their own accord under the light of ideas which showed them better to me, as I believe they may to others. Ac- cordingly, they will succeed each other in separate headings, like the several apartments of a hall, in 8 ABROAD AND AT HOME. which I have endeavored to include, under each par- ticular theme, only what touches the broadest human concerns. If, notwithstanding these explanations, any one say, "Why tell another traveller's story? Why add one book more to the huge catalogue, already rivalling Roman and Alexandrian collections, of the traveller's library ? " I certainly can only answer furthermore, that every author's own book, by what it may have of peculiarity, or prove of addition to existing stores, must resolve the best it can such sharp queries. Let the present writer's apology for the sober tone of his opening essay be only his wonder, that travellers, among all their tales, do not think it worth while to tell the story of their own character, of the mode of their life as distinguished from its incidents. We encounter many experiences on the road ; but the road itself is an experience, of what sort it is important for those who go or pur- pose to go abroad, well to understand. Excellent guide-books and guides we may find everywhere ; but Murray and Galignani cannot communicate every thing we ought to know ; nor any couriers or valets- de-place, however experienced to take us through museums and up mountains, teach to what our steps will bring us in our own minds. If my reader im- patiently exclaim, "Why care for that? the only thing is to get on ! " though this boast of swiftness is what the world now rings with, and fast motion has become the very idolatry of the nineteenth cen- tury, a doubt may be permitted whether the rapidity ABROAD AND AT HOME. 9 is so very glorious, unless we consider what, at the end of the race-course, we are to do with the time so magnificently saved ! If space be rushed through and the day rescued, only to indulge our appetites, to eat and drink and smoke, it would not appear that we had got so far and sublimely beyond the tented patriarchs after all, though we glide so much farther in our short lives than they could creep in their long ones, and thus make a fair show of more than atoning for the diminished term of human exist- ence. However this may be, the fact of our exten- sive travelling is reason why we should ask what travelling is, and ought to alarm a travelling age to reflect whither it is going. If any, with Horatio, think " 'twere to consider too curiously to consider so," omitting the graver discourse in which I dis- charge my conscience, they must even enter the grounds of my field of observation, without minding the sentinel. Disposed neither to magnify my office nor to cheapen my wares, I must yet consider fairly these two relative states of Home and Travel. Any one who, at sea, has watched the birds fly from afar, to hover round his bark, especially some land-bird fluttering towards the mast, will not won- der that Noah's dove, however fleet and strong, should at length come wearily back, when she found that, wherever she turned, all was ocean. Then, if he has been far and stayed long, it may occur to him that the little bird is an image of himself. But is this, then, the state of the case for the traveller, for the privileged, the perhaps envied, 10 ABROAD AND AT HOME. man who has had this splendid opportunity of beholding the world, for the favored mortal, after long confinement, let loose to realize a thousand dreams and fulfil romantic hopes cherished from childhood, by setting his eyes on the multitude and. procession of glorious objects that have danced before his imagination? Is he disappointed, after all, with the introduction for which he had longed ; fatigued with the magnificent show after which he had run ; and his appetite not satisfied at the table where he had crowded for a seat, and which all nature and art, and human society, and the monu- mental history of the race, had spread for his supply ? Contrariwise, far exceeded are all his ex- pectations ; nor, in sooth, is there any language or expression which can set forth the rare pleasures, the intellectual stimulus, the intense life, crowded with novel impressions, more numerous in a month than are ordinarily experienced in years, of the wise and prosperous traveller. But another feeling, commonly seeming to sleep, if long unfed, rises from its quiet brooding over the heart, to scat- ter inferior sentiments, quench feebler excitements, and, in its grand chord, to prevail over all worldly delights. Who shall tell the unspeakable and un- paralleled emotion of joy, when, after any consider- able absence, home comes again in sight? When the huge body of the sea, by whose broad girdle we had crept to the regions of the rising sun, again shifts eastward its convex bulk, and we ride over the banks and by the capes which the great conti- ABROAD AND AT HOME. 11 nent we were born on stretches forth in token of her protection to the navigator ; when, after those reaches of the briny waste, which, to the supersti- tious and disheartened seamen of Columbus, seemed literally without end, the firm shore in some head- land looms up, though dim and vague, to the wistful sight, indescribably dear and precious, with its rug- ged, barren outline fixing a spell upon us exceeding that of English shaven lawns or brilliant Italian sunsets ; when, for the solitude, the solemn, pecu- liar, terrible loneliness of the sea, voiceless but for some rare trumpet through the whistling winds, and blank but for some glimmer of a sail that shines and fades on the horizon's edge, re-appears the white- winged, sociable flock of ships ; when, sailing above the bones of the majestic vessel and her ill-fated crew, and giving one shudder of sympathy as we stop to sound the depths, we then glide safely on, till a little coast-light, more glorious than the morn- ing star, a lamp brighter to us than Orion, blazes perhaps in the last watch of the night, and soon the smoothness of the bay and the narrowing harbor takes the place of the tremendous pitch and plunge between the poles of the world of the monstrous Atlantic, and the forts, like stony, stiff sentinels, with brazen dogs of war, lie asleep full in view at the nation's old, dear doorway ; ah ! and when roof and spire and dome, from Bunker Hill to the smoke of our chimney, reveal themselves, there is a sensation in our being, transcending the effects of all foregoing splendors and sublimities, and which 12 ABROAD AND AT HOME. boyhood's unsophisticated sight of those seven won- ders of the world its primer had told of could not equal. As our foot presses the ground, we feel as the dove did, when, from wheeling over boundless water, through the treeless sky, she lighted in the window of the ark. Our city is a lovely Zion to us. We clasp its whole circumference to our hearts. We are of David's mind about his Jerusalem. The very stones are precious to us, and we love the dust thereof; nor is there a wall or corner, portal or pillar, be it friend's or stranger's, that does not find favor in our sight. Our own dwelling, with every gray look and weather-stain upon it, that seems to have mourned our desertion, and to have been long yearning for its inmates, who shall describe the transport of its living or even its inanimate wel- come ? The swell in the breast, instead of that on the sea ; the tears that answer to the stormy shower ; the low breathing of thanksgiving into which the gale has sunk ; the heaving and melting of the whole nature after its struggle with the elemental forces, that, with snow and wind and cloud and rain, thoroughly sweep the floor of the creation, testify that nothing beneath the sun, on this material stage, can match the interest of that scene, wherever laid, however produced, in which the very bosom of man makes its confessions. But now wherefore is all this ? What does it signify, that our greatest discovery in all the world, of worth and grandeur, should be precisely of that which was most familiar to us ; nay, of what we left ABROAD AND AT HOME. 13 behind us when we departed, and fancied perhaps we were tired of staying in ; that we should discover, not so much foreign cities, with lakes and forests and mountains, as our own homes, our kindred and acquaintances and friends, all rising to us in a new light of intenser meaning ; nothing be so novel, exciting, attractive, absorbing to the attention and curiosity of our whole mind and heart, as precisely what was most common and habitual in our experi- ence ; and no voyager, as he discerns yet untrodden islands or plants his flag on unclaimed continents, sensible of an ecstasy like that with which we see our ancient birthright ? Oh, veritable and sublime revelation from heaven in the social nature of man ! Oh, old and new, customary yet unpenetrated, su- perficial and fathomless, mystery of human life ! Oh, strange and not understood source of joy and sorrow in the great deep of the human breast ! Oh, marvellous creative power of God, that can sink in the most ordinary realities and feelings of our exist- ence a spring whose fulness all the other wells of nature cannot equal, whose freshness all the heat and dust and trample of years cannot crust over or quench ! What is this singular quality of our constitution, to fix the brand of discontent upon the most allur- ing prodigies, and put the kindling of desire into the trite circumstances of our lives ? It is none other than the simple heart and moral nature of man, which no travelling for pleasure and recreation, the world over, can quite satisfy. It is that we have a 2 14 ABROAD AND AT HOME. conscience to be fed; and neither Rome nor the Alps can feed it. It is that we have affections to be exercised ; and all the halls of Europe, with all the wild charms of the East, cannot furnish their ob- jects. Ah ! this soul of ours is hard to entertain, when we seek to fill it with entertainment. It scorns to be conciliated with expeditions and bland- ishments, even infinite and numberless, in place of the forsaken offices of daily obligation. Truly it requires an enormous flattery. It takes up rivers and seas as a very little thing ; and all the pomps of the world are as a drop on the sponge to its devour- ing thirst. Thus the traveller, who had expected exemption from all toil and weariness, in unmingled and abounding rapture, is troubled with his soul to take care of and content, abroad as at home. The Gold Coast he sailed for turns to a sandy beach. A refugee from labors and pains, he finds himself un- der the same inveterate penalties ; and, what was most important for him to do before he started, he sees is most important still, namely, to be sorry for his sins, and 'make his peace with God. So he shuts his lids upon the splendors of Paris and Dres- den; is tired of Versailles and the Vatican; and, from jewelled chambers and vaults of lavish cost, longs to retire, and adjust the serious claims of existence. Love and duty, the great bonds and underlying foundations of our thought and action, necessities of life to a moral creature, first of all indispensable to be supplied, ah! they cannot find their scope in the spaces hung with works the ABROAD AND AT HOME. 15 most magnificent of human hands. They cannot gather their food from the heights sublime, where the mountain goats browze, or the patches of glit- tering snow, where the chamois, looking like spots in the sun, suck sustenance ; but only in the habita- tions and paths where human relationships grow, and the intercourse of friendly service goes on. The traveller learns many precious lessons ; but perhaps the most precious of them all, for which alone it is well worth one's while to take a long journey, as perhaps else it cannot be learned, is that the crown of life is in no change of place, but is to be in one's home. In this statement is not meant by being at home merely to dwell in cham- bers of wood and stone, to stay in one spot, to keep within city-limits, to pace a uniform track to and fro in the street, and move in a narrow circle of persons ; but to have a sphere for the exertion of our powers, for discharging, through regular labors and by the manifestation of lofty and disciplined sentiments, the obligations of existence to the com- mon blessing. For awhile the traveller drops this fine and beautiful bondage of toil, in his business or profession, for the general 'good. Instead of look- ing after others, he looks out for himself, for his own amusement or benefit. He seeks to be stirred by this or that object, and astonished in one or another situation. He stands to be thrilled by the flash of torrents, and roused with the roar of cas- cades. He gazes, for his own enchantment, from the top of mountains ; pierces, after strange stimu- 16 ABROAD AND AT HOME. lus, into the sparkle of mines ; walks through miles on miles of canvas, or amid a population of marble, to entertain his eye and luxuriate his fancy; or, going from the sublime to the ridiculous, exercises his economic wit to drive bargains as to the sum for which all this glory is to be bought. The noble traveller will indeed somehow convert whatever he enjoys to others' welfare. But if not noble, and, when not noble, he is very mean, then he covets only his own gratification. Sometimes he loses a former love and loyalty which had inspired him, and falls from the grace of his childhood and youth. With worldly wisdom; he becomes falsely wise to explode as follies the best practices and feelings of his foregoing life ; in the hurry of his movements and adventures, leaves behind his Bible, and forgets his prayers ; amid glare and circumstance, despises the simple worship in which he was bred. He lets a superficial and taking glory, like the gaudy color of a candle, put out the daylight of the spiritual church. Perhaps he counts it a foreign and travelled dignity on his return to leave' his once-accustomed seat for devotion unoccupied ; looks contemptuously at common men, who have not been so far as he has ; and then, of course, loses the thought of God, the Father of men, and deems the whole march of virtue and religion but the imposition of an empty show. Nay, the reckless traveller may miss the direct objects of travel itself. If the animal nature in him be strong, you will see him going to the rich variety and pampering delicacy of the feast with more relish ABROAD AND AT HOME. 17 than to the treasures of the Louvre, or the passes of the hills ; if he be selfish and irritable, you will see him indulging with impunity, and borne unchal- lenged and miserably safe to moral ruin by the passions that had made him odious and sorely ques- tioned in his own house. I am sorry to say it, but it is morally dangerous to travel ; for the traveller's object, more than the citizen's, is himself. He is usually travelling, as to a proverb we call it, for pleasure. As he peers keenly out for his own ad- vantage to compass best and cheapest all he is in search of, though the very top and flower of the outward universe be his pursuit, his character is peculiarly exposed; and often, after a considerable period, growing dry and hard, plainly evinces that it has been taken out of that cool shelter of the do ( - mestic charities, which is the best garden in the world, to bake in the blazing sun. If one, then, fairly encounters all the liabilities of a long journey, makes and settles all the contracts of his way, greets and says farewell to the official multitude, runs the gauntlet of trial and exposure that stretches from one end of Europe to the other, and comes out heart-whole, with his simplicity uncor- rupted, his feelings fresh, and his innocence without a stain ; with the warm gush still unobstructed of that double fountain that leaps at once to God and man ; keeping his old Sunday-feelings unhurt through the martial parade, theatric pomp, and sensual excess of continental life ; contrary to the polluting proverb, among the Romans refusing to do 2* 18 ABROAD AND AT HOME. as the Romans do, unless when the Romans do right ; in fine, losing none of the inner health while he re-establishes that of the physical man, I have sometimes thought he must be a wonder of excel- lent nature or a miracle of preserving grace. If any one charge extravagance upon this language; if, out of the great host of past or present travellers, rise up avengers upon me of what they hold to be a libel ; or if some, who have stayed at home, remon- strate against the ungraciousness of such a seemingly thankless return for the privilege of travelling ; or there should be mischievous interrogators, curious about personal illustrations of this doctrine, I be- seech them, one and all, to remember that I arraign nobody in particular, but speak in general, as I saw them, of the comparative exposures of a civil and settled, as compared with a wandering and migratory, life. Let him who has a different testimony be equally free to bear it. Were crossing the sea and sojourning in foreign lands a specific for wisdom or a high school for virtue, in the name of Heaven, should everybody, who can be< excused, set out. But, alas! wisdom and virtue are not so cheap. They are not goods sold in the market. I have not found them among the manufactures of any country I have visited. Most men seem no better or wiser, no more eloquent or devout, no more able or useful, after they come home than when they went away. Still true is what the classic poet wrote, " The sky, and not the mind, they change who run over the deep." A great display, a vast field of knowledge, ABROAD AND AT HOME. 19 no doubt, it is to be shown all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them. But nothing in them all countervails the Master's sublime declaration, that the kingdom of heaven is within. If a man is tired of home, and considers his task and profession but a grinding in some mill of the Philistines, it may be well for him to go abroad, just to see how his house looks from the other side of the globe, through the magic glass of mists and mountains and waves, and how his business appears to him in the light of his leisure and pleasure and roving at will. It is good economy to go round the world ; less to marvel at its spectacles than to be convinced that none of its endless exhibitions, but only the moral nature, with the loving heart, in the actions they prompt, can truly cheer, transfigure, and glorify our human life. I saw a woman on foot, amid the slopes of Northern Italy, leading along by a halter of rope an ass, on which sat her pale, con- sumptive son, he in his youth, she in her age ; and, as I reclined well at ease in my coach, and, through the sunny air, gazed at the tremendous snowy peaks beyond, I thought them more blessed in their way of travelling than I in mine ; for I was reminded of the spirit of him who once travelled likewise in Judea. I saw a man coarsely plastering the posts of a little building in the great commercial city of England ; and, after the hard day's toil, he surveyed his humble work with a sort of satisfaction illumining his face that I could not remember to have derived from York or Milan, Cologne or Stras- 20 ABROAD AND AT HOME. burg. It was the moral satisfaction of faithful effort to do his part for the improvement of the world. I talked with one, bronzed with all the climates of the West and the East, looking like a column of strength, proof against any kind of dissolving or harm. I ventured, however, to congratulate him on his coming back to his home. " Ah, sir ! " he an- swered, " but to a home how altered ! my family broken up, my kindred gone, my mother vanished unseen ! " " These feelings about home are deep," I murmured forth, as he came to an embarrassing pause. " Very deep, sir," he rejoined ; and rose, and walked away. In the far-off city of Salzburg, alone in my room, my companions out, I listened to the chimes of peculiar sweetness and pathos, that, from the belfry there, ring out tune after tune, in melody unrivalled, through large part of some of the passing hours, till they seemed sounding on to me from five thousand miles away ; and those airy, invisible notes, better than could the touches of any pencil, gave me, full and clear, the colors of my abode and birthplace and dear native land. I leaned to read the letters, those little messengers, that like a bird of the air carry the matter, and so surely sur- mount the billows and scale the summits of the globe, with tidings from our beloved, whose pre- ciousness none but those who have been far away can understand, pursuing their swift path undaunted day and night, as though, in their cold tissue, they bore a flaming fire, kindling human hearts to respon- sive glow through the vastness of the globe. While ABROAD AND AT HOME. 21 I took my share of the vital heat they circulate through the massive frame of the world, tributes from my eyes, pure, I think, though I would not be presumptuous, as libations that old worshippers poured upon their altars, flowed out, as the mingling, a mixture that will not be despised, of earthly sym- pathy with gratitude to God. As these pictures of real life asserted precedence in my soul of all that adorn the ample galleries of the old world, I cried out, in solemn invocation, " O duty, duty, that hast thy seat in the divine Mind, and art born of the everlasting holiness of God, duty, whose root is planted deepest of all things in the soul of man, bind me, too, and rebind me with thy cords ! Set for me, to the end of my life, thy daily stint again, and consecrate me to my Maker's service in that of my fellow-men ! Yea, rather than all smoothness and comfort, lay, I entreat thee, upon my shoulders thy rough benediction, if only thou wilt let thy peace, that passes understanding, be in my heart ! And O love, duty's companion ! before the glories of the world, I choose thee. From the ends of the earth, I come back to thee. I pray thee inspire once more my breast, and set me in thy complete circle. I implore thee not to move others' hearts towards me, but my heart towards others ; for, made to thrill at every sign of good will, and trem- ble at every motion of kindness, I know it is not safe to be loved, without loving an over-proportion in return. Grant me, therefore, thy spring from ABROAD AND AT HOME. the infinite Goodness, to be in my bosom, with its pure, spontaneous, eternal stream ! " Such may be, and doubtless often is, the travel- ler's honest feeling, notwithstanding what he leaves behind, and sacrifices by his return. Incomparable scenery of mountains and gulfs ; matchless build- ings, to whose vast solidity all our edifices seem ephemeral insect-formations ; works of beauty, in oil and marble, to whose standard nothing here makes any approach ; natural and artistic lustres gleaming out, just glanced at and passed by, for nobody who travels for a few months, though he may boast the extent of his course and the many points it has taken in, gets more than a glimpse of the inexhaus- tible beauty, taking in but as a drop of the sea; with many other things of fame, almost within grasp, yet unvisited ; beside all the allurements, to an intelligent observation, of diverse nations, cus- toms, and institutions; all these things he may leave and give up. And he may come to a post of severe and unremitting labor. The- troop of ardent travellers, the merry company at the inn, he may forsake for the society of the sick and sorrowful, the aged and poor, the troubled and perplexed children of men. Beds of disease, coffins dressed for the tomb, chambers of mourning, confinement, and want, may furnish the scene and the drapery for which he exchanges whatever is grand and graceful in Tyrolese lakes and Swiss summits, with whatever there may be of dignity or gayety to admire or par- ticipate in the chief cities of the world ; while ABROAD AND AT HOME. 23 almost the only alternation he expects from this kind of social occupation may be hewing out, with solitary sweat, in patient privacy, for his fellows' edification, some little stones from the everlasting quarry of truth. With his first steps in his old familiar circle, such things as these may cast no light sunny pleasure round him, but sober shadows on his brow. Yet to the wisest judgment, there may be reason why he should not have one regret to utter, or a single complaint to make. Calmly he may prefer the task to the pleasure. He may love his business more than his entertainment. He may magnify his office beyond all the boastings of any pilgrimage, though to the very gates of the sun. And his home, oh ! he may set his home above all the haunts of strangers and the proudest and most eminent sites of the globe. And if asked, as he sometimes is, why he has returned so soon, when he might have stayed longer abroad, he may ration- ally reply, because he did not want to stay any long- er ; and that, had. he pitched his moving tent, season after season, away from his connections of service at his station of duty, whatever, in the great system of human welfare that station may be, he fears he too might have heard the voice that thousands of years ago startled the rocky echoes of Mount Horeb, " What doest thou here, Elijah? " Justly to balance my general argument, I must not, of course, omit to say, very distinctly, of the relative claims of home and travel, that I have con- sidered these two as ordinary, continuous modes of 24 ABROAD AND AT HOME. existence. But I am, of course, aware that travel- ling is commonly but a rare and brief exception to the domestic state ; and that its occasional interval in the cares and endeavors of life may, to laborious and earnest men, be a season of unspeakable value for health, refreshment, instruction, and preparation to greater vigor and usefulness. To a quiet and affectionate nature, indeed, it is no very pleasing thing to be for ever pushing on ; mixing in the noise and bustle of hotels ; arranging with agents and conveyers ; calculating foreign coinages ; stam- mering strange languages ; braving heat and cold, rude and stormy weather ; clinging as a perpetual appendage to a passport, although, thank God, not in dear old mother England any more than in our own precincts ; looking after and lifting and counting pieces of baggage ; remembering a thou- sand things of purely material quality ; a sudden unskilful financier binding gold and paper money round his body, and having a petty anxiety of detail and routine for ever tied to his soul. But all these are but the disagreeable means of compassing great and precious ends. Those most sensitive to the trouble and inconvenience may be most susceptible of the benefits ; for suffering often burns lessons deeper than they can be impressed by joy. You become a fifth, wheel to the carriage, worn and bruised and restless, in order that you may roll on into beauty and sublimi- ty, once seen never to be forgotten ; an inalienable pos- session, to delight with unfading charms the memory, and stream forth richly into all future days. Well, ABROAD AND AT HOME. 5 in the old Bible, is it said that there is a price for knowledge. Rightly to travel is to pay a dear price to purchase a great privilege and pleasure, to be taught what might never be communicated by books, even the greatest and wisest. The intellectual na- ture, long sunk perhaps in the dull rut of mechani- cal conduct, receives from it an emancipating shock. The whole man experiences a revolution, sundering that power of habit which puts a new coil of its chain around us with every advancing year. A kind of regeneration goes on in his thoughts. Weaned from local prejudices and provincial pecu- liarities, he may begin a new life of reflection with more vivid imagination of his relations, and truer devotion to a discharge of the tasks they impose. All this, however, provided strictly that to realize it be in his aim. If he goes, in the vulgar saying, merely to have a good time ; to spend the money no charity could ever win from him ; to get rid of the load of idleness under which he could not tell what to do with himself; to eat and drink, and keep the company of the slothful and dissipated; to sit at his cups or his cards, while the richest and rarest charms wait unregarded without, the ocean tossing, the river rolling, the mountain soaring, and picture and statue shining to solicit his attention, otherwise engaged, in vain, then is he not furthered, though he measure all the parallels, and traverse every meri- dian, but substantially the same worthless creature everybody knew him before he started. But if he have a cultivated sensibility, or what the simple 3 ABROAD AND AT HOME. Scriptures call a seeing eye, a hearing ear, and an understanding heart ; if he is taking only a vacation from serious duty in temporary absence ; if he re- member that, at home or abroad, the first duties of a human being remain the same, to repent of his errors and do God's will, and multiply the amount of human happiness ; and if, in all his way, he seek to be taught their wider fulfilment, he will experience in his entire frame of body and mind an extraordinary profit for all coming time. A needless giving-up of home to roam the world for self-grati- fication evinces only an ungenerous nature, that will lose humane moisture at every step. But they who, from all their career, gather wealth for their homes and their fellow-creatures, as I am glad to believe a considerable proportion of travellers do, are blessed pilgrims and righteous sojourners with them of old. In fine, therefore, let my readers accept what I have here set down, not as a wish to turn the travel- ler from his course, but to warn him how he pursues it. I have but posted up cautions on a highway which must be passed over, and by which excellent and precious ends are to be reached. Having passed over it, with much to say of what it has revealed, I should be sorry to have my friends conclude, at the outset of this their visionary journey with me, that I was myself led to only profitless conclusions ! No : the hermit-age is gone ; it is our doom to keep moving, and I cannot look with an evil eye on this spectacle of the travelling world, which becomes ABROAD AND AT HOME. 7 ever more wide and mighty with each successive modern year. Indeed, the best of all reasons, how- ever we may speculate, are in the very inclining of our nature ; and, if man has a strong and irresistible tendency to rest, he has another strong and irresisti- ble tendency to motion. The child loves to lie still in its mother's arms. But, as soon as it can use its limbs, you will see it make earnestly and bravely, though tottering, for some object on the nursery- floor. This is the beginning and signal of all tra- velling : the exact type of the feeling with which, in the infancy of the race, the adventurous Phoeni- cian steers his bark round the promontory, or the Syrian puts forth his caravan across the desert, till upon progress comes intercommunication ; and, upon intercommunication, commerce ; and, upon commerce, the breaking up of barbarism, and the colonizing of remote borders : all that we call civili- zation, with wave on wave of influence, finally reaching a new world, bringing up to play its part the generation we belong to, and wondrously at last sending back the pilgrim, who once sought here the disclosures of the setting sun, to explore Asiatic territories, and find his fortunes in the oriental cradle of the race. Let me, then, not offend, but rather pay homage to, the genius that has so altered and improved the sphere, and has brought in such wonderful inven- tions to serve his purposes, using half the means of the race for mere locomotion, to get from one point to another, and spreading myriad wings to second in 88 ABROAD AND AT HOME. its flights the winged soul, for, as Plato reasoned and Homer sang, the soiil has wings ; and, if it crave rest, in the somewhat paradoxical language of the Psalmist, it would " fly away, and be at rest." So, homage to the genius of science and art, that, to its corporeal weight and slowness, adds the pin- ions ; nay, in chariots of fire speeds it at its will, and on revolving wheels, through opposing wave and breeze, bears it on to conquer difficulties in token and presage of its universal victory ; drawing aid for it by a million threads, without confusion, through the circle of the earth ; placing one crea- ture in this position and another in that, by hills or in valleys, in cities and along shores, as though na- ture's own carriage were employed, with a lordlier privilege than ever belonged to princes in cars of silver and gold, to transport all her offspring to their several destinations, with the power of gravity and the precision of light. No : I will not insult, but speak fair, the rising genius, that I and we all are so indebted to ; the genius which, as I am well aware, the foremost nations of the world have principally cherished and obeyed ; which England so much, and now America no less, if not even more, it is said, fol- lows. I will not, with any disparagement, call in doubt the predominating beneficence, in our age, of his reign. Only let the genius allow me to put my home first, to prize it beyond all his excursions, and return to it, from the ride he gives me, as the settled choice for peace and gladness of my soul. Nay, so far from really intending to do any despite to this ABROAD AND AT HOME. 9 fine benefactor of the motive force, what is the very thing I here propose but to unfold some of the les- sons which, through its mediation, I seem to myself to have learned respecting the beauty of the world, the achievements of human art, the demonstrations of religion, and the nature, history, and destiny of mankind ? I only in the premises plead that it is not incon- sistent with such a design, or any disparagement of its importance, for the traveller, like the dove that flew over the primeval deep, to rejoice in his return to the ark, the ark of his house, to live and die in ; the ark of his church, for prayer and praise ; the ark of his country, which, though, like Noah's ark and every earthly structure, it contain of all kinds, clean and unclean, is yet a refuge and breath- ing-spot for wanderers from the whole waste of the world ; which feels to the sole of its children's feet as does no other soil beneath these covering heavens ; and the filial love for which, if it can be increased in a true American's bosom, is increased abundantly by all he sees in every other nation and kindred and tribe and tongue. If the present reporter were required to give prac- tical counsels respecting the expediency of travel, and to say who are the proper persons to set out, that is, to compose a moral guide-book to accompany local ones, he would be happy to contribute his mite of counsel, were it likely anybody would take it. But the motives in this case do not commonly refer them- selves from one man's mind to another's judgment. 3* 30 ABROAD AND AT HOME. Sometimes the young lad is possessed with the sea : old ocean has laid upon him a kind of spell and witch- ery which draws him away, and makes the sailor's terrible hardships more welcome to him than any domestic comforts. Behold, beside, the hosts of those younger or older, who are haunted with the vision of other climes and nations and the imagined splendors of foreign nature and art, so that, at the sight of every ship hoisting her sails, their soul flutters to stretch its wings, and envies each parting passenger ! It can only be said to such, " If no duty holds you back, if a desire for improvement more than for pleasure move you, if you have learned what your masters can teach you, and the wise conclude it is best for you to travel, go in God's name, with God's blessing ! But, if you have not disciplined your powers or got possession of yourself, go not save under strict guar- dianship. If you have never girded up the loins of your mind, do not travel ; for this would be like setting off with a half-harnessed creature, or upon a wheel without a tire, sure to fly to pieces ; and verily much of modern travelling is not education, but dis- sipation. If you travel merely to indulge a roving disposition, you are not only travelling, but living, to little purpose. If you go to escape the weight of public opinion or the watch of social observation, and because you can do in Paris, Vienna, or Rome what you would not venture upon in your own neigh- borhood, I need not describe the character of such a motive. If you travel to be a better, humbler, humaner man, the aim will insure the effect." ABROAD AND AT HOME. 31 For the rest, let me hope that these sketches, as a kind of ideal journey for my readers, may prove to be no waste of their time. In the continental gal- leries, as you pass through their splendid halls, you will observe many young artists on particular days copying the works of the great masters. I have tried in my poor words here to copy some of the master- pieces of nature and art. Sometimes, to my imagina- tion, I confess these memorials look less like pictures than like the withered shrubs and leaves which tra- vellers pluck from the sides of mountains and streams, or famous ruins of towers and towns. Yet even such relics are not at home refused as gifts. If I ever succeed in conveying a lively image, let it be accepted as a picture or photograph ; if my words more often are only faint hints and faded specimens, let charity consider whether it is always possible to preserve any thing more. Above all might it please Him whom I own in all my labors to grant to my attempts at portraying the beauty he has created or inspired, some reflection of the good light of his Spirit ! I cannot close this preliminary essay without ex- pressing the pleasure I have in enriching my volume with an account, by my friend, Dr. I. T. Talbot, of this city, of his ascent of Mont Blanc. My gratitude will become that of my readers for this very valuable addition. The extraordinarily favorable circumstan- ces of his expedition have given him an advantage not surpassed by any who have ever attempted to introduce this great and rare achievement of the tra- veller into literature. I believe so fair and good a 32 ABROAD AND AT HOME. description is nowhere else accessible. For my own endeavors to disclose the significance of natural objects, and bring the meanings of the world into correspondence with the powers of the human mind and the purposes of life, I could not conceive a better completion, or covet a nobler crown. BEAUTY OF THE WOELD. Behold, but motes of animated dust, The sons of men upon this whirling ball ! Yet to each mote, thou in whom we trust, Lord of the sphere so vast ! dost show it all. Still brooding over beauty, thou dost bend, In thy delight dost our delight intend ; Immense the scale, how graceful still thy work ! In smallest things unmeasured grandeurs lurk. For no fond favors, Father of mankind ! We bless thee, but for thine impartial mind : Thanks for the equal splendor of the sun ; Thanks for thy love to all, respect to none. BEAUTY OF THE WORLD. IT is not strange the Greeks should have given to the world " Beauty " for its name. Thank God for the proof that he made us for something more than a workhouse drudgery, or even the struggles of our moral nature ! Some one has said that a conscien- tious angel would be a monster ; and mortals may feel allured by those charms, in the creation, of the Divine Spirit, which make goodness no effort, but an inspiration of joy. When we are weary of toil- ing, counselling, aspiring, this messenger of beauty comes to minister to us, as it may have been among those that, after his temptation, refreshed the Lord. The wings of prayer itself, long lift- ing us, being at last faint with their burthen, let us down into the lap of material fairness and grace, where nature and the mind seem to hold each other in contented contemplation. God has not inserted one faculty, such as the devotional, in our frame, and trusted* to some other lesser creator to add the rest ; but has left on all our powers the stamp of his Divinity, and made it as pious to admire and purely 36 BEAUTY OF THE WORLD. enjoy his workmanship as to engage in direct adora- tion of his power. How he takes us along the paths of his own glory ! Not alone in vehicles of land or sea do we journey ; but, exhausted with thought and care, we ride upon the shining planetary wheels ; sail with wind-borne vapors ; and are invited, as little children, to sit with the Almighty in his cha- riot of a cloud. Our fancy is playmate with the billowings of grassy fields and untired waves ; our heart closes upon the winged creature that nestles in a flower-cup ; and intellect, with the eye, willingly loses its sharpness to sport with shadows, and dream over ideal shapes in the morning and evening twi- light. , The most remarkable thing respecting beauty is its common and universal character. Beauty is no local deity, like the Greek and Roman gods, but omnipresent. Its true worshipper beholds it no- where insulated, and sets up for it no exclusive shrine, because he discerns its unvarying essence and immortal sameness through its highest and humblest shapes in all the amazing infinitude of its variety ; and he that is disposed to confine it in any specific dimensions only betrays his coarse and sen- sual homage. Glorious side, winning attribute, of God, it is absent in no place where we may find him. Accordingly, its great admirers and celebrators have not been those who have run through the uni- verse, hunting after it. They have not been vulgar sight-seers, hasty perambulators, anxious or ambi- BEAUTY OF THE WORLD. 37 tious explorers of prodigious scenery through every nook and corner, peak and gulf, that points or hol- lows the globe ; but mostly quiet dwellers in the bosom of mother earth, in plain or valley, by hillside or shore, wherever the lot of their birth was cast. Homer was not enough of a traveller and busy- body to be himself distinctly known, but is rather an obscure influence of glory out of Greece, the luminous core of his country. Shakspeare, going from the city to the hedge, lay down in the field beside his rustic stream, and saw every thing he wanted to see, scarce caring to shift his position.. If we descend in the scale of poets, Cowper culled his fresh and tasteful wreaths for immortality within a very narrow circle. If we rise to the prince, with the crown of nature as well as of empire on his head, and, listening to some one of the majestic strains with which David's muse makes the world's frame ring, then ask, " How came the psalmist to be so moved ? whither had he been ; from what marvellous scene returned ; what tremendous peak ascended ; through what black forest wound ; the mazes of what glistering cave threaded ; or the roar of what awful cataract heard ? " we could get no answer more satisfactory than that he might in his lifetime have gone so far as to explore the hill-coun- try of Judea, to measure the banks of the Jordan, to traverse the Sea of Galilee, or roam through the woods of Lebanon. There is no proof that what are considered the displays of the earth's grandeur came within his scope, or were at all requisite to the 4 38 BElUTY OF THE WORLD. matchless inspiration of his religious muse. To feed his devotions, and fan the fire of his genius, the ordinary objects around him quite sufficed: for a river, the brook Kedron ; for a spring, Bethesda ; for a mount, Olivet ; for a grove, Gethsemane ; such things, with those vast glories of the creation, which are open at every point. Enough for him that the day dawned, and the golden sun rolled over Jerusalem, and the evening twilight, at the western gate, thickened, and the stars came and looked in at his palace window, and the Almighty sent the winds for his messengers, or himself rushed on the chariot of the clouds through the heavens. Enough for him to mark the spiritual design of this whole mate- rial system of things, to observe how little of it is intended for man's bodily use, what a mere parti- cle of it can be eaten or worn or occupied, and how the whole immeasurable glory exists for the mind. So, in general, the splendor of the divine handi- work is not unrolled to a few favored or finely situated mortals, in the way that a foreign showman some- times takes the veil from a piece of marble or canvas for a stipulated payment ; but, without money and without price, the broad and lustrous majesty of the universe revolves full in every one's view, making only that perhaps severest of all demands for an eye adjusted to perceive it. The proprietors of spots of natural beauty often lock them up from vulgar notice ; and, for gain, turn the path to them into a toll-gate. Eepeatedly, in Great Britain or on the Continent, I paid the fees to these singular and mo- BEAUTY OF THE WORLD. 39 nopolized charms ; but never found, for the cost and pains, the finest exhibitions of God's works. These are patent and manifest. Their bountiful Author does not hide them away in any corner, or suffer anybody to hide them away. The innermost and least accessible windings of the shell are not splen- didly shaped and colored like its freely open lip. So the trade driven in mountains, the revenue sought from cataracts and glaciers, can, for the most part, touch only the least precious parts of nature. The Lord allows no merchandise of buying and selling in the real glories of his temple. The falls of Schaffhausen, Eeichenbach, and Low dor e, by their associated interest or intrinsic pleasantness, may reward your purchase-money to the guard ; but the wild charms of nature surround with greater picturesqueness a thousand undefended spots. Some Blackford's Hill may not be ascended without a ticket ; and a ludicrous demand for remuneration is made for going up a little ledge by a Scottish road-side, commanding nothing but what is obvious from the level ground. The landlord fences in his field so as to conceal some little natural curiosity; but what bolt can be drawn upon Niagara, or the mountains of Oregon, or the sea raving round beach and crag, or any thing in the great proportions of that universal temple, to whose vast glory all exclu- sive discourse about one or another natural object, which we may have had the privilege to examine, indicates an insensibility ! He, who has seen all the prodigies of the world, learns that no one feature 40 BEAUTY OF THE WORLD. can equal the entire countenance of nature unveiled every morning. Talk of your sparry grotto or Mammoth cave ! "What is it to that cavern studded with heavenly fires, into whose mysterious gloom we are every evening led ? To one who, with some- thing of the traveller's feeling of superiority, boasted to me of the Alps, I queried in reply, " But it is not finer than that western sky yonder seen from my door-step ? " " You would not think so," was the rejoinder, " if you saw the Alps ! " Well, as I have seen the Alps, I suppose I may now say that the sky is finer. On the peak which rises to command, across the tremendous vale of Chamouni, the summit of Mont Blanc, I beheld the snowy mass of congregated peaks, all pure and crystalline, sparkling in a cloud- less sun, with majesty not to be surpassed, one might think, by the roof even of the New Jerusalem in heaven. The monarch of the hills seemed to wear an everlasting crown upon him, from which no jewel could be struck; in which not a ray of lustre, for countless ages, had been quenched. His lesser supporters stood motionless about. Mon- strous needles of rock as though foot-guards of his dignity thrust their long lances into the air, high almost as the brow of the throned king him- self. Enormous glaciers, as grounded arms, glitter- ing like steel, lined his seat, and the far-heard rush of torrents murmured his applause ; while the occa- sional loud crackling of the fathomless ice, in every ravine, was a salute to his honor, or a warning BEAUTY OF THE WORLD. 41 against rash approach. It was as though God him- self were representing his royalty, and setting up a material figure of the King of kings, and I were admitted into the ante-chamber to bow and adore Him, of whom there is no graven image, through a type fashioned by his own hands to help his feeble creatures by a ladder, finer than dreaming Jacob ever saw, up into heaven. For awhile, entranced in the spectacle, fancy climbed up the magnificent stair- way of the sovereign's courts, and ran through the hollow chambers whose frost-work rang with the rapid streams, to light on the top of those sharp spears, edged with hail, that leaned towards the mountain's head, and then to settle on the hoary front of sun-lit splendor that so placidly overlooked all. Long was the working of the spell, and late the recovery. But shall the spectator himself be al- lowed to testify that he awoke but to be carried into a nobler trance than that in which the snowy chain had held him ? for he awoke to lift his eye from earthly heights into celestial depths, the spirit that filled which took him to a sublimer fellowship in its house without pillars or walls, than he could find in the loftiest columns of earth's architecture; and made him feel as if it had been a kind of idolatry rather than the purest worship, to be in lesser space of finite forms so absorbed. The end of the pil- grim's journey could not exceed the beginning. The wonderful works of God had been shown him, before a wheel turned or sail had been set for his conveyance. 4* 4 BEAUTY OF THE WORLD. An enthusiast about Switzerland once said to me he should like to die in sight of the Jura. But, if a glimpse of the beauty of the creation could soften the pangs of death, one might die in peace wherever his eye was quickened and anointed to catch the uni- versal expression of the face of nature. We need not run and hurry after the beauty of the world. Nature is an equilateral figure, always equal to herself. Will one say he goes in pursuit of her sublimity? That, too, like her grace, is near by, asking no long pilgrimage. What in the world more magnificent than the tempest that yesterday rose and died on the gale farther off than thought can follow ! Such a storm was, indeed, set off with some special attractions, when, after a sultry day, on the hot south-western lee of the Alps, it swept down upon me in the village of Meran ; for I could see it long and grimly brewing its wrath on the high edge of the tremendous amphitheatre. Awfully poised it sat, and stretched out wider and wider the wings upon which it was to stoop into the valley. From the little bridge/ which was my sta- tion, I could observe where, in previous seasons, the demon of the elements had poured down his sudden and resistless torrents to flood the vale and tear in pieces the very bed and banks of the river, and could trace the fortifications of timber and stone which the inhabitants had laboriously reared against the fresh outbursts of his fury. And now again the huge hollow was filling up witrf .threatening gloom. But these were accessories, and not the substance. I BEAUTY OF THE WORLD. 43 could well see that no small part of my delight in the tempest arose from its essential resemblance to all the commotions of nature that had shaken me ever since my childhood. It was the same old de- mon, as though there were but one storm, breaking out repeatedly, in all the world. So continually the traveller, who is keen to notice facts and his own corresponding sensations, is driven back, far more than the peaceful denizen would sup- pose, upon ancient experiences. The world becomes to him a spinner's wheel, which he watches as the little boy does at his industrious mother's side, to see a particular mark or color in the band come round again. Nature contrives to show her most striking points everywhere. We go far to see her up-piled rocks and green protuberances, magnificent breaks in the monotonous sphere. But the clouds, heaped on the horizon, pitching their tents of mea- sureless fleecy folds in the suspensions of a summer sky, or driving with incalculable fury on the wintry blast, exceed any mountains, Chimborazo or Hima- laya. It was a scene of terrible impressiveness, when, in a storm, towards nightfall, with others I walked up that Wengern Alp, whose steep and lofty height is yet but a stepping-stone whence to view the Jungfrau. The rain dashed slanting like successive strokes of a flail. The wind rose in anger to blow the feet from their path. Bleak and brown, reach after reach of hilly waste ran before. " The mists boiled up around me, Like foam from the roused ocean of deep hell." 44 BEAUTY OF THE WORLD. As the vapor shifted or was torn off, the neigh- boring cone was revealed, as though rising from a stooping posture, and shooting up at the moment into the air, miles from its deep base, till, at the baring of its gigantic shoulders, I shuddered to think any thing earthly could be so high ; and ques- tioned by what worldly right or lawful business it could so perilously rise ; and still, as the mist rolled off, amazingly farther it ascended, and the self-lumi- nous head seemed literally piercing the heavens or hanging down, an awful apocalypse from above ; while, over the broad descents of the mountain, that looked as if an arrow from a bow would strike it and yet was leagues away, thundering avalanche on avalanche, from the smoking batteries of heaven, went amain, and smote the ear with their terrific crash. It was an astonishing grandeur, heightened by fear, even as the mists exaggerate the mountains. But yet the pilgrim cannot repeat the common- place saying, that he never was so moved before in his life. For he remembers the damp whirlwind that, almost scores of years ago, weltered by his windows, and shook his bed at midnight, and bore off his imagination captive on its wings over the smitten land and across the raging sea, its birth- place, till, as his senses came back, his soul was sub- dued into reverence before God, never since more simple or profound. Many an arousal of the elements, within the notice of us all, outstrips in sublimity the most emi- nent of those ridges which are the hard bones and BEAUTY OF THE WORLD. 45 rocky joints of the earth. Nor is it the noisy hurtle of nature's alarm which truly is most grand. I have stood, in a gale, on the vessel's deck, when the rigging was as necessary to my support as to that of the mast ; and the deep, far as the eye could see, was white with rage, save only when some black, heaped-up, billowy mass, revolving on its axis, hus- tled after our stern to overwhelm the little chip on which swam our life. Amazement swallowed up terror at the sight. Yet, as I have lain in my berth, and, through the little sky -light in the planks above, watched the noiseless coming-on of day, beam after beam stealing through the thick pane of glass, and shadow after shadow within flying off, I knew not how or by what exit, till the red lantern, that swung near by, had its flame quite put out in the colorless rays ; and, as I have reflected how this imponderable, mysterious essence was for ever displacing night, and building up the arch of day through the hemisphere, it has appeared to me a greater phenomenon, mani- fest to every eye, than all the yeasty turbulence betwixt the ringing shores of the globe. Nay, if I may escape a quarrel with the artists and poets, I must say that the beautiful, never far from us, is more than the sublime, which we think to be so rare. The beautiful, the fair, expresses God's love ; the wild and sublime, his power. The abrupt and broken scenes in nature, although they may have more interest to a coarse sensibility and a comparatively uncultivated taste, are inferior to its undisturbed proportions. What 46 BEAUTY OF THE WORLD. rent or ragged wound in nature can match the blue vault, without chasm or seam, the planetary orbits, the rim of meeting earth and air ? Nay, the close observer sees well that the sublimest things them- selves are always clothed with a surpassing beauty. When the mountain rises beyond a certain point, a dazzling robe from the hand of God drops out of the sky to smooth every angle, and fill up, with infi- nite sweetness of form and hue, every rift. Survey the most tempestuous sea, beyond limits and break- ers sufficiently far, and it is a wheel within a wheel, all rolling without a fault or jar. Could any tornado ever do more than obscure for a moment the inimi- table painting of the hollow ceiling of our terrestrial abode ? The traveller sees marvellous things on his journey. I understand it well ; I will be the last to contradict it. But he does not come back to tell of another sun or a more unfathomable sky than the old familiar face and hand of our original timepiece. Beauty, unconfined beauty, token of the omnipre- sence of God, is the charm, chief, and chosen to each justly exercised human soul. The locally monstrous and jagged spots, clefts and gulfs, precipices and walls, giving signs rougher and more distinct of creative strength, are of great use, no doubt, to rouse a dormant and stupid nature to some sense it may not before have had of the divine agency, and gradually train it to appreciate the milder and ever- lasting charms in which the Maker evidently most delights to be revealed. So he designs. By what is dreadful or strange, he fetches us to our knees in BEAUTY OF THE WORLD. 47 worship, that the knees may afterwards, in the pre- sence of common and infinite beauty, bend of their own accord. The whirlwind and the fire prepare us to listen to the still small voice. Our exclama- tions of surprise are refined into articulate praise, and end in accents of gratitude and love. So the enormous exhibitions of nature do not extinguish, but rather educate, our esteem, and increase our en- joyment of the gentler, which are the main, traits of the world. God holds out awful spectacles. But he would not leave impressions of terror, or give us merely a sense of power ; and therefore, after the mountains, he shows us the grass and the flowers. Wonderful is the diversity of objects, and the pecu- liar claim of each one. Every scene has its own charm. If you will have more of the upland, you shall have less of the sky. If the land rises into dark, perpendicular walls, elsewhere is the exquisite, more precious, sunny slope. After being long pent up among mountains, the level ground, with the over- hanging atmosphere, pleases beyond fathomless vales or ragged defiles. A boundless plain, like that on the way to Strasburg, was an infinite delight after the jagged Swiss walls and gloomy defiles. Light and shade, dancing together, will sometimes play tricks, mocking all the attractions of earthly shape that boldly demand our regard. I saw nothing abroad more sensibly winning and welcome than a green field ; passed through nothing more enchant- ing than the light ; felt nothing more refreshing than the cool and simple air, the breath of God ; 48 BEAUTY OF THE WORLD. and once, riding in sight of Monte Rosa, towards Milan, confessed that the splendor of a calm and spotless day was victorious over peak and valley, over river and stream, which it yet illustrated and enriched with the wondrous alchemy that from the barren sand can make scenery finer than chains of lakes and ranges of hills under a dull sky. Our judgments, like loaded dice, carry in them a bias from our childhood, yet a bias not to error but to truth, making the beauty of things no matter of chance, but of certain reality. Was it not right that the boy whom I saw blowing in Savoy, as it were, the very same vine-trumpet I blew in my childhood, should add a charm for me also to his native fields ? Did not the old taste there of the juniper berry better define the landscape ? Was it any injustice to the Frith of Forth that the purring of my landlady's cat made it seem more like home to me ? Or did I buy more than my money's worth when some fami- liarity of bargaining with a stranger carried me so back to the village-booth that the transaction was no longer as one between the Jews and the Samari- tans ? It is a vivid illustration of this doctrine, that beauty is a spirit and unconfined presence in the world ; that scenery the most striking does not, to a true mind, extinguish the lustre of the mildest. It might be thought a visit to Tyrol and Switzerland would spoil the Scotch or English lakes and hills of all their allurement ; and not a few travellers will be quite scornful upon the idea of paying any attention BEAUTY OF THE WORLD. 49 to the latter, after having surveyed the glories of the former. But this is a coarse and superficial cri- ticism. No one portion of the universe is robbed of its peculiar and characteristic beauty by the arro- gant intrusion of any other. All contrasts, though of the gentlest with the boldest traits, so far from diminishing, only enhance, the attractions of nature ; and all beholding of beauty, in any shape, but edu- cates and renders more keen the sensibility to it in every other shape. In the grand portfolio of the world are no two pictures alike. He that disdains one appreciates none. A cultivated taste may be enamored of comparatively obscure as much as of famous scenes, as I was told of an intelligent man who declared nothing in Switzerland exceeded his favorite corner of Wales. So the little, unsophisti- cated girl at Trafoi, that ran after me with a blue bug, thought she had something in her hand finer and more worthy my regard than the awful ice- capped Madatsch that overhung her home. All our thought of this theme ends in one lesson. If the grand things you go far in search of, the falls or the hills, open not your mind to the teachings of God everywhere, but make you dissatisfied with or scornful of common spectacles and ordinary passages in the great volume of his works, your visit is fool- ish and vain. If the Bernese Alps and the Valley of the Rhine took away my enjoyment of Mount Holyoke, or made me despise the interval of the Nashua, I should think they had done me a most unnatural and ungracious turn; and I would so 5 50 BEAUTY OF THE WORLD. God help me ! repudiate their selfish favor and jealous boon. Amid all the ignorance of the older nations, the cultivation of a refined taste appears more than in our own land. The windows of the little villages all through lower Germany, in the meanest houses, burst into bloom with the most deli- cate and fragrant flowers, hanging down all sorts of colors among the hills, as though, amid the unmea- sured gorges running between fearful altitudes, were the strongest disposition to seize these softer, wider- spread types of the gentler qualities of the Deity that is over all. With this enjoyment, human despo- tism will not interfere, unless the rose or lily or pink, with its signature of a heavenly mercy, bear also the conventional mark of some concert of an oppressed people to strive to win their earthly rights. A spring of water is a very ordinary thing. But not seldom is the traveller's attention diverted from the towering, far-shining heights, by the foun- tain visible in any one of a thousand towns, break- ing out from those very heights into the centre of human habitations ; and drawing, apparently, one by one, the whole population, to take the cooling draught or fill the pitcher, to wash themselves or cleanse their robes ; till the flowing current becomes emblem of that fountain of mercy and river of God, which, for ever alike inexhaustible and unpolluted, is for the refreshment and sanctification of our souls. Indeed this is but one illustration of a fact ever recurring to the student of nature, that she exists less for our entertainment than for our instruction ; BEAUTY OF THE WORLD. 51 not for a picture to the eye, but for a lesson to the soul. Scarce do we scan any object without perus- ing this language. The temple not made with hands, of which we read in the Bible, is on the earth as well as in the heavens. The entire frame of nature is often compared to a book. It is a book of prayer, a service, of praise \ and, be one leaf more or less illuminated than another, there is alike im- portant meaning on every page. In its cipher, traced by the Divine Hand, are legible numberless representations of our human lot. I do not venture even to name the multitude of those which have crossed the line of my observation. With one, how- ever, of these moral transits, let me hasten towards a conclusion of this essay. Far away, alone I ascended a ragged wall of a ruined castle on a mountain-side. It was afternoon. Light clouds were above, and their dim flying shapes cast on the landscape below. Under me ran a stream, the river Rhone, spanned with a bridge, whose shadow fell on the rippling water. As the sun declined, the shadow of the bridge moved across the stream. And, lo ! as I looked, the shadow of the castle-tower moved after that of the bridge, till it overtook and swallowed it up. Then the vast shadow of the mountain followed on to overwhelm both together in its depth. Anon advanced the night apace to cover even the mountain's image on the plain beneath. So is it with human life. On our childish, trifling pains succeed greater trials, disease, disappointment, sorrow ; and the night of 52 BEAUTY OF THE WORLD. death, sweeps in, and concludes all. But the orb of day shall rise again to scatter all earth's shadows ; and the morning of eternity will dawn to disperse, with never-setting lustre, all our glooms. Is it because nature not only gives us a grave, but by countless living emblems also promises us a resur- rection, that in nature, among her leaves and clods, the grave does not look otherwise than beautiful and pleasant ? The sepulchral vaults, dug under dark foundations, to the soul appear horrible and repulsive, as though it could never from them get out. But the soul does not refuse to lie down where the trees shed their glory ; and the parent earth, from whose womb we were taken, folds us to sleep once more in her lap. Yes, verily, God, the Father of our soul, has made even nature, who is but the mother of our body, to intimate, in fine, that our connection with her fair and glorious scenes is not finished thus ; that this hold of the beauty of creation, not with our hand but our spirit, is too firm to be by mortal decay unloosed ; this religious obligation to remem- ber God's works, too binding to be dissolved with the dissolving flesh; this invitation to go on into further discoveries of the shining riches of the uni- verse, too clear to be withdrawn by Him that gave, and is able to make it good. Yes : the Being that wrote this spell of unfolding grace and grandeur can scarce suffer any minor power to read it back. Having inspired, by his infinite doings, the hope of endless knowledge, he will not let his promise be broken and the victory over his intellectual creature BEAUTY OF THE WORLD. 53 won by a phantom issuing out of darkness and re- treating into the pit. No : there is a relationship between mind and the matter, shaped into this won- derful frame of things. Both are the offspring of God. The clothing of one or the other may change, wax old as doth a garment, and be folded up. But the substance of either is indestructible, though the elder-born alone and for ever more can feel and rejoice. 5* THE MOUNTAINS. Old mountains ! dim and gray ye rise As ceaseless prayer, earth's sacrifice : Sharing your breath, the soul adores, And with your soaring summits soars. Where Moses taught, where Jesus trod, Your tops stand altars unto God. shapes of glory, sacred all, From every height heaven's blessings fall. The minaret- watchman's punctual cry Summons loud worship to the sky : Voiceless appeals, from you sent down, A million silent throbbings own. THE MOUNTAINS. FROM general views of the beauty of the world, I would fain proceed to describe those particular fea- tures of it which have left on the mind their strong- est imprint. But one consideration occasions a doubtful and embarrassing pause, namely, the difficulty, in regard to natural scenery, of interesting others in representations whose reality may have greatly interested one's self. Lifted to rapture by the glories of form and color, by the shifting spec- tacles of life and motion, in the material world, we endeavor to convey our experience to others, that our transcendent delight may be shared. But, whether our language seek their eye or ear, we are usually doomed to a mortifying failure. The reader or hearer remembers a few large expressions and poor repetitions; but has not received into his imagination the magnificence and variety of the sub- jects of our discourse. Wherefore is this ? Why is so simple a thing as the face of nature so intrans- ferable ? How does the earth-spirit elude our grasp, 58 THE MOUNTAINS. cheat us of the friendly introduction we hoped to make, and vanish behind even while we were pro- nouncing his name, leaving us with an awkward consciousness of but a word in our mouth or a phrase from our pen, while the thing, the soul we were after, has given us the slip ? Where, in the eye or mind, in our frame of body and soul, did the glory we would retain and communicate lay hold of us ? How does it stay by us so vividly while we keep it quietly in our conception ; and yet how be- come a blur when we would take it out, as an exhi- bitor does his curiosities and prodigies, to show to another ? Whatever may be the secret of this sin- gular and common disappointment, we must still try to tell what we have seen of the marvels of the world. Though even more doubtful of success in my endeavors to reproduce the impressions of the outward world than in the handling of deeper themes, yet cannot I avoid a feeling of obligation to such endeavors, as I believe it to be the design of God, that whatever we see in his wonderful creation we should transform into some shape or occasion of his love and service. When the worm has eaten the mulberry leaf, we demand of it silk. So, if one has fed on the beauty of the world, he should ren- der back what is more beautiful and enduring than itself in ideas for the immortal spirit. If I can suc- ceed in associating any instruction with some of the 'main features of the globe which is our dwelling, I shall be grateful to Him who has made it our abode, and alone enables us to see and do all in it. If THE MOUNTAINS. 59 there are any who will esteem such an attempt a mere piece of flowery rhetoric, any so inveterately prosaic that they cannot be brought to see in a mountain any thing more than a great heap of earth, or in a spring of water aught beside a place where men and cattle may drink, or in lakes and rivers and seas a purpose beyond water-carriage for husbandry and trade, to do on a broader scale what is done every day by a garden-sprinkler or a cart in the street, for such I cannot speak, as my words will appear to them but visionary folly. I begin with the mountains, well of old called holy, as, on these lofty heights, there may be more than a purer quality of the air, a finer breath for the nostrils, even an inspiration for the mind. We recognize, indeed, the literal significance of moun- tains, and find, even in their vulgar uses, tokens of the goodness of God, as the incorruptible sources of fountains and streams, as the natural boundaries and vantage-grounds for the fortification of king- doms, as the efficient regulators of climates, or up- liftings of the valuable strata and the mineral or metallic treasures of the terrestrial abysses ; but let us prize them still more, as the altars of the Most High, the immemorial shrines of freedom and reli- gion. A moment's thought will show the figure they make, the grand part they play, all through the vast spaces spanned by the heavenly revelations ; from the mountains of Horeb and Sinai, in Arabia Petraea, where, in thunders and lightnings, came down the everlasting law ; and Ebal and Gerizim, 60 THE MOUNTAINS. between whose opposite peaks, out of the mouths of millions of Hebrews, rang to and fro alternate blessings and cursings for those who should keep or break the commandments ; and Moriah, where the temple was built ; and Carmel and Gilboa and Gilead and Hermon and Lebanon, and many beside, conse- crated with some special interest of manifestation from above or worship of the Almighty ; and Zion, which gave a name to the holy city and to the Chris- tian church, down to the mount which Christ made his pulpit for the sublimest of sermons, still the supreme and never to be obsolete guide of mankind. "What but the unearthly sinlessness, the divine and aspiring nature, of Him who came to redeem and exalt our race, made him so fondly seek, so almost tend to, the mountains of Judea, leaving the low val- leys and dead levels of the world behind, and wiping the dust from his sandals on the soaring summits in whose welcome solijude he could, undisturbed, com- mune with God? Ii was a mountain where he preached ; it was a mountain where he was trans- figured ; it was a mountain where he was crucified ; it was a mountain from which he ascended, when he had eaten the passover with his disciples, and in- stituted the ordinance of the supper, and sung his last hymn on earth, as though then he could breathe only the upper air, into whose rarer sanctity he was so soon to be translated. He went into the Mount of Olives ; and Olivet and Tabor and Calva- ry, with Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Micah, the hills them- selves, with the seers that celebrate them, call upon THE MOUNTAINS. 61 us from afar, if not with our feet, yet with our heart and imagination, to go up into the mountain of the Lord. Who can think of the Saviour's own spirit but as at an unearthly elevation? It would be an absurd proposition, for very laugh- ter, to affirm the need of literally ascending a moun- tain to be spiritually-minded. The coarse and impi- ous man might stand on the altitudes of the globe, and be coarse and impious still ; though an oath, or jest, or indecent action, everywhere out of place, there jars upon one with especial harshness, as if it were the desecration of a temple. It were super- fluous to add that a man may abide in the plain, and yet do lofty deeds all his life long ; though the mountains will probably come into his mind and do something, as natural emblems and helps, for which God planted them, to prompt his magnanimity. But laborious muscular toil, or the flight of a balloon, is not the only way in which a human creature can avail himself of this outward furtherance to rise. In the bare knowledge every one has of the exist- ence of the mountains, which it has pleased God for more than a physical purpose to root in the ground and lift to the skies, in recalling the opportunity almost every one may have at times in his life to rest on some of their glorious heads, in the fancy, at least, and reflective understanding, of these emi- nences of strength, in which the earth itself, in ten thousand places, seems going up into the heavens with adoration, as if it too, though dumb and though senseless, must fain pay homage to its Ma- THE MOUNT AI1S S. ker, every rational being may find aid to his devo- tions, and keep the mountains in view, in his mind's eye, enough to appreciate the language of Holy Writ, to sympathize with Noah upon Ararat, and Abraham in his sacrifice at Jehovah-Jireh, and Moses upon Pisgah, looking towards Canaan, and David and Jesus upon the hill-tops round about Jerusalem, in which the spirit of praise in the Old Testament finds an emblem of the providence with which the Lord is for ever round about his people. When David himself wrote his immortal odes, to stir his own countrymen, and to be versified for our praise, he was not actually on the mountains, but in his palace-study, thinking of them with the ecstasy of religious emotion which they supplied. In these marked gradations of the soil from beneath upward, so naturally raising our looks and turning them to the celestial regions ; in the ridge that commonly, wherever we look, makes the horizon; in swells of land, that are never, except from the prairies and deserts, far away, God has, of set purpose, provided a gracious assistance to our thoughts, and furnished a ladder on which they may mount and lose them- selves in contemplation of his invisible glory ; and this is the first reason and great final cause of his " setting fast the mountains." We abide too much below. Many seem scarce ever deigning to look into the sky. Our eyes are directed downward, like Mammon's, in the poet's picture, gazing at the golden pavement of the hea- venly floor. We are too intent on the cares of earthly THE MOUNTAINS. 63 business and sublunary gain, peering round to see what we can pick up of profit or gather of sensual delight, too seldom and too faintly glancing above to search after the unfading riches. It would be well if the preacher, instead of dwelling so much in the mazes of metaphysical theology, would oftener call upon the mountains to stand in his stead, and sum- mon the hills to second his exhortation, that their everlasting strength may back up his weakness, and their superior invitations prevail to lead his flock over their sides after the great Shepherd. If the mountains will come at the adjuration, and, for such an office, marshal themselves, they will serve again an end as blessed as when, at the joyful going-out of Israel from the bondage of Egypt, the Psalmist tells us, " The mountains skipped like rams, and the little hills like lambs." There are, truly, various ways of quickening the sentiment of reverence in our bosoms ; but perhaps, for most persons, the principal stimulus in the ex- ternal universe may be derived from those mighty uprisen masses which at so many points break the smoothness of our planet, and, after the sea that drowns most of its surface, stamp it with its most characteristic traits, indeed are the signal of com- motions in the land more tremendous than ever shook the watery deep, and have tossed the soil into mon- strous billows, stiffening in their shape ; so that, even among the lesser heights and furrows of the globe, to one gazing from a central station, the appearance of the ground, far as the eye can reach, is of the 64 THE MOUNTAINS. most terrific 01 stormy seas. But more solemn still and awe-inspiring is the disclosure to one who, in such a country as Switzerland, containing some of the most remarkable elevations in the world, selects for his ascent some mountain which will afford a convenient post for observation. With every step, as he rises, his prospect widens, heightens, and deepens ; the valleys open more and more their curving sides and their hollow immensity ; the hills heave up more and more their broad backs, and unveil their horrid fronts, seamed with frightful chasms. Here furious torrents dash through cavern- ous glooms ; there threatening rocks impend on the sides of ancient channels, or lodge in the bottom of long dried-up beds. The sheep, that were specks of white, upon the declivity, in your vision, when you started, at length, as you turn on some winding of your path, are beheld far below. Only the goats, at a cautious remoteness, continue to be your fellow- travellers, clambering with you on the same plane of elevation, or the chamois bound still above. And lo ! now, as yet you persevere, a spectacle strange and sudden, which, when I saw it, smote me with one of the most singular and never-to-be-forgotten thrills of exultation, that can be felt even from the majestic works of God. White fingers of snow, afar, one after another, slowly thrust themselves into the sky as I advanced ; the fine extremities of distant moun- tains, of the Bernese Alps on one side, or the range of Mont Blanc on the other, more and more of the slender tapering lines revealing themselves in spot- THE MOUNTAINS. 65 less branches of purity, pointing skyward, as though the hills themselves were holding up their hands in everlasting homage to the Lord of heaven and earth which they united. Ay, let us lift up our eyes to the hills, for they will lift us into the heavens. Let us tread on them, for they are steps into the infinite glory. Well might the conscious soul join in wor- ship of the Power which, with ease incomprehensi- ble, had fixed every base, and measured each girth of the gigantic peaks, and rounded to its apex every unblemished pillar, bright with eternal frost, that sparkles, but never melts, in the dazzling sun. Glan- cing back through memory's light, every cone seems to turn, mystically, to a silver candlestick, answering, with mighty enlargement, to the golden ones Solo- mon made for the house of the Lord. The mere geographer or political economist, gaz- ing at our Sierra Nevada, or at the multitudinous Alpine ranks, to which a whole country seems given up, might pass over the scene with a slighting sen- tence upon its barrenness and unfitness for tillage, or even ask, What is such a territory for ? and to what purpose was it made ? But, to a devout discernment, the rugged, fruitless landscape, with its uninhabitable precipices and enormous gashes, will appear rich with those harvests of revering sentiment that root themselves and flourish there, to which the most precious and abundant products of luxuriant meadows and fertile vales are as inferior in value as the perishable body is inferior to the undying soul. Let, then, no such doubt or question of their utility 66 THE MOUNTAINS. intrude impiously into the counsels of the Most High. If the fortresses built upon the sides of mountains have converted them to one of their worldly uses, the convents for prayer and pilgrimage, and protection to the spent and wandering traveller, have been the discovery of a nobler use ; and I could not help feeling that the family party I met journey- ing, with prayers audible on the lips of parents, and repeated by the children, miles up towards a p\ire and cool fountain, were in a frame fitter to the situa- tion than any seekers of the same grandeur for mere novelty and pleasure. Ah ! the fairest of the wild- flowers that grow in the horrid ravines are the feel- ings of veneration and confidence towards the Author of the world. And it is a satisfaction to notice that most men in mountains own a dignity suited to the higher order of their affections, human or divine, and consecrate them as the retreats of freedom no less than as shrines of prayer. So, with a worthy patriotic zeal, we call the loftiest of our New Eng- land summits Mount Washington, and entitle the surrounding heights with the . names of his great compeers. Indeed, it is not in the absolute external magnitude of the mountain that its real glory most consists, but in the displays of power and mercy from the Deity, or the exercises of the revering soul, of which it may have been made the theatre. The crest of Sinai, on the geometric scale, sinks under the line of many a mountain chain. Olivet is scarcely more than a considerable hill, and Calvary but a gentle undulation; but, in our wonder and THE MOUNTAINS. 67 love, do they not overtop Chimborazo and Himalaya, with all the other summits of the earth ? But, beyond these general reflections, must be considered more especially the place which the mountains occupy on our sphere. After the sea, which is hardly so much a feature as it is a rival of the globe, a sort of watery, opposed to the earthy, pole of the planet, the mountains are cer- tainly the most striking portion of the planet. They are the most unaltered part of the world; or they alter, but as they rose, from wasting floods or central fires. The rule of art they alone resist. Here and there, a very small mountain or hill may be tun- nelled, or some frowning gorge magnificently neck- laced with a pathway, whose steps and turns we may count afar like beads ; or the bowels of huge summits may be laid open to reach some of those minerals which have loved to trust these elevations for the chambers of their riches, or to pierce them with their veins ; but the great upheaved masses of earth remain substantially from age to age the same. This may be one source of the pleasure we take in visiting them, that we come at last to fresh, rude, sincere nature. They have not been run into any human mould, varnished, smoothed, or trimmed ; and we gaze on their forms with a feeling akin to that with which we regard the wild beast, whose body is gaunt with the fare of the desert, and whose mane is unshorn. From cultivated, sleek, and glossy life, we go with irresistible impulse into gloomy and savage scenes ; while, for this craving to escape an 68 THE MOUNTAINS. ' artificial existence, and be refreshed with barbarous and original force, the Creator has made large pro- vision. Look at Such a country as Switzerland ! It seems to be the only place, in the midst of human civilization, not encroached upon, and submerged in the tide of human activity. Well nigh it holds its own. Against the inroads of the universal con- queror, it stands out unsubdued, one teaching of humility to him who is made lord over the works of God's hands. The railway, winding like a ser- pent through the sand and into crevices of the rock, stops short everywhere at a respectful distance from this material majesty. The carriage, rising higher and penetrating deeper, at length refuses to proceed. The horse and the mule advance with their burden, or a litter for the weak is borne in hands ; but many a peak and cave can be reached only by the solitary human foot, which, after the wing of the bird, is, in the world, the most superior traveller. He who looks at a raised map, accurately representing the altitudes and depressions of this singular country, and can then make a solar microscope of his imagination properly to magnify it, may understand the compass of gran- deur embraced in what horizontally would be a small territory. The Scotchman, disputing with his Eng- lish friend upon the endless theme of the, rival merits of their respective countries, being at last asked if he would not own so much as this, that England was geographically a bigger country than Scotland, replied, that he doubted it, if the hills were all rolled out! The scenes of Swiss beauty and THE MOUNTAINS. 69 sublimity, covering thus, as they do, a really vast, though folded and wrinkled, surface, seem inex- haustible. The traveller's guide-books for this region, like descriptive catalogues of pictures, blaze with an actual confusion of splendor. The whole vocabulary of picture squeness is used up and consumed. The talkative and serviceable guide adds his homelier, perhaps juster and more expressive, diction. Your own eyesight then comes to make all the speech and literature of the subject utterly vain and forgotten, and to give you in the recollection no feeling but of shame in any thing you may yourself be able to report. One or another peculiar situation, pass or peak, range of heights or vales, possesses the fancy of one or another pilgrim, and conquers him, as a mistress her lover, to itself; and he maintains, as if it were a personal matter, like the espoused quarrel of a friend, that there is nothing beside to compare with that ; till, like the stars in their courses, according to the sublime declaration of the prophet, the mountains fight for their favorites with one another. Rivalries so splendid, each one with claims so enormous, who shall settle and compose ? What a hint they give of those treasures of beauty among his works it has pleased the wealthy Father to scatter, for every one of his children to own as much as he can appreciate ! I can attempt to transfer from the catalogue of memory only those pictures which I owe to my own affinities, and to my being in the way of the original masterpieces. Already, in speaking more generally 70 THE MOUNTAINS. of the beauty of the world, I have given some sketches. What I offer further on a topic so co- pious, is with the more special design of translating, if I may so speak, the mountains into their language and meaning. I undertake this with trembling diffidence. Keverently I enter into the company of these magnates of matter, these makers of winds and storms, and climates and streams, these de- fenders of their own brave inhabitants, who have often enlisted their rocks and heights into the lines of their soldiery, as they resisted invasions of their country by a foreign foe. How little, of all I dimly conceive, I expect to be able to impart ! how little of it, perhaps, I even saw and understood ! He who supposes he is fond of lofty scenery, while he him- self is low in his thoughts, labors under a fatal mistake. Meanness in imagination and conduct has no harmony with sublimity even in material things. The glories of nature contradict, and hide from the degradations of the soul, as the innocent birds fly away from anger and noise. A man of grovelling tendencies, however * acute in intellect, will comprehend only the coarser passages of Shak- speare; and it is only a gross and superficial satisfaction which the self*indulgent lover of plea- sure can find in the creation of God. Nay, even of his poor -sensuous delight such a one will soon weary, and find all the charms of nature insufficient to arouse him. Mountain and river, field and wood, will pall upon the intellectual taste of a man whose soul is ruled by base desires. He may have the THE MOUNTAINS. 71 whole world for his appetite ; but he will eat his own heart. In a range of observation from Ben Lomond, in Scotland, to the Carpathian Hills, it is difficult to select among many significant views. In memory, the hills arrange themselves as a glorious stairway, leading up the earth's chambers to heaven, which one would gladly have the company of friends in re- mounting. The first decided step is at Heidelberg. How shall I describe the welcome which, weary from a long journey on a warm, sunny afternoon, we received from this mountain -nook ? What soft arms it stretched toward us ! How all the circling heights seemed to unite in their invitation to us : " Here lie down and repose ! Lo ! we have shut out the turbu- lent and restless world, and the Lord has appointed this nest of our bosom for your protection and re- freshment for new toils. Come to take the blessing, and give the thanks ! " Even like the rose of Sharon and the lily of the valley in the Song of Solomon, they said, " Our bed is green : the beams of our house are cedar, and our rafters of fir." And truly did we rest our souls, while our eyes were never weary of moving up and down the charming slopes of the surrounding upland. The town, the university, the castle of Heidelberg, I leave. They are too familiar in the pages of guide- books and in travellers' descriptions for me to sketch them, even did my purpose here allow me to speak of any thing but ascending the highest elevation of the Konigstuhl, or King's Seat. In 2 THE MOUNTAINS. company with a brave and never-fatigued member of our party, I went to the top of the hill and tower for a view of the delicious valleys of the Khine and Neckar, of the profiles of neighboring mountains, and the grim edges of far-off forests ; while in the foreground rolled shining trains of cars, whose motion, so observed from above, adds I know not what charm of humanity, or progress in knowledge and^ comfort, to set off the wildest traits of nature. The next step, horizontally long, as from a landing- place, is vertically short, to a hill called Kolobrats, in the vicinity of the sprightly Tyrolese village of Ischl, which, dwarfed, as all buildings of man are, amid the grand features of the world, seems like a puny creature that has crept for refuge into a crevice of the wall. On the brow of a hill, near to the one we ascended, a half-witted girl had offered us berries, which, for charity, we bought. As she noticed we did not at once consume them, she said, very patheti- cally, " Will you not eat ? " as though she feared we had purchased them for her sake rather than for our own. Her remaining with me so much, as the spirit of the rude scene, a sort of incarnation of the moun- tain, has made my pencil glance for this one touch of her likeness. I should not dwell on the ascent of Kolobrats but for the interest and meaning of one incident. On our way up, we noticed, scattered thinly, at wide spaces apart, amid the greenness of the remote mountains, and even quite low upon their sides, various light-colored patches or projections, THE MOUNTAINS. 73 the nature of which became the subject of debate. We agreed that they looked like snow ; but it hardly seemed possible that snow should exist, in July, in such situations. So one and another concluded that the appearances must be masses of granite or the shine of huge heaps of quartz. The youngest of our party, from the first of this quite -protracted controversy, stoutly maintained, against much mer- ciless ridicule, that it verily was snow, however self-satisfied any one might be that the frost-king could not thrust the signals of his dominion so steadily into the richest growth and among the most smiling sunbeams of nature. The lofty summit, which we at length reached, made a revelation like some of St. John's. It showed indeed the correct- ness of the child's apprehensions, in a spectacle of glistening ice and snow, from the front-guard of the south-eastern Alps, in some respects finer than any similar sight among thousands afterwards attained. That pile of unquestionable virgin purity, descend- ed from heaven, in the vast, clear glimmer of its crown, showed tints unlike any thing else ever before beheld. It had something of the peculiar lustrous light that appears in the cleavage of crystals. At times it showed itself as a huge opal in the varying light and shade. What can it be? I asked my- self. Does mere frozen water play such tricks, or can it reach to such far-piercing and delicately- changing splendor ? What piece of the chalcedony or chrysoprase has fallen down to earth out of the foundations of the walls of the celestial city ? Yes, 7 I 74 THE MOUNTAINS. the child was right ! It was a spotless congelation, extending its tokens and tributes down even towards the green and sunny plains. Forth afterwards I fared in my journey to see glaciers, magnificent and immense, cold, white pinnacles, and domes of ever- lasting winter's sway, whole mountains given up to frost as much as are the poles of the earth : as those poles they seemed to be, set upright in the air. But I saw nothing that took my soul with a sweeter wonder, or left in it a more lasting image, than this first sight of the unblemished meeting of heaven and earth. We had battled stoutly about its reality. So we dispute about the reality of things in the spiritual world. One gives the same object a hard name, which another calls by a soft one. What is purity or generosity to one, may appear like selfish- ness or corruption to the perhaps evil eye of another. Even among deep calculators, fine reasoners, ex- perienced and most confident wiseacres, all that is fair and glorious is called in question. Meanwhile comes along a child, with his keen senses and un- sophisticated discernment, and^ points out to us the very doors of heaven. The next step upon the mountain-ladder was to the top of the Patscherkofel, near Innsbruck, a town whose natural beauty is unsurpassed in all Germany, save perhaps by that of Salzburg, being hid away among heights, now tender with moss, and now awful with crag and precipice. Like monsters, that might come and look in upon one's sleep in the wilderness, so the encircling hills intrude their forms and sha- THE MOUNTAINS. 75 dows as your eye looks from the window of your lodging ; for a great and sharp elevation of land makes what is considerably distant look appallingly near. The view from the Patscherkofel is, in its peculiar attractions, unrivalled ; commanding, as it does, to a distance at which the eyesight gradually fails, and the magnifying glass must be used for an aid, several enormous valleys, with their rocks and streams and glaciers. In these huge ledges, I could not help thinking that the solid framework of the world, so beautifully invested, was laid bare, and that we traced, as it were, the bony processes of the creation. If, according to the antique theology, the fashioning of the globe was intrusted to some infe- rior deity or demon, verily we saw where the earth- spirit wrought lustily in the grooves and insertions of his work. Commonly the view of a mountain is finer than the view from it ; and to make it a post of observation is to lose sight of itself. But the dis- closure of these measureless hollows, scooped by the almighty Maker for the channels of his rivers to water the globe, while it drew down the eye, at the same time exalted the soul. I had before wondered at the valley-views near Mount Washington; they were but as the miniature of these. At a point about two-thirds of the way to the summit of the moun- tain is the most clear and delightful of springs, called Heiligenwasser, or Holy Water, resorted to as a Catholic shrine, a draught of which one of any religion might accompany with grateful and adoring thoughts of the Great Spirit who pours out 76 THE MOUNTAINS. his purity alike in material symbols and channels of grace. To this valley- view, not violating the method of showing the mountains and what pertains to them, let me add the prospect of that immense plain which stretches on from Martigny towards the Simplon, and is traversed by the Rhone. I went up a seldom ascended mountain to obtain this outlook, seldom ascended, I take for granted ; for, with some practice as a cragsman in earlier years, it was with great diffi- culty, and no trifling danger of slipping and rolling down the almost perpendicular steep, that I pushed my foot into the ground, to hold as by a claw, and wound up my way. My compensation was to see, laid out in regular proportions, one of the cham- bers of God's house, having room within its pillars and upon its spacious floor for a thousand cities. But, after many wearisome ascents, one is satisfied with gazing from mountains while still eager to gaze at them, and fill the imagination with the various sublimity of their shapes near in sight. This gives the chief interest to the passes, of which there are about fifty principal ones in Switzerland alone. They not only let the traveller through from town to town, and kingdom to kingdom ; but, beyond all other vantage-grounds, they introduce him to the glory of the mountains they divide on their way. Through some of them I must ask my readers to be my fellow-pilgrims. I take first the Great St. Bernard ; not only for its fame, but because so much less than in some others THE MOUNTAINS. 77 as, for example, the Stelvio has the wildness of nature been relieved by the magnificent helps of art. But in this, as in the other passes, one is struck with the thought that God never builds up in the world an insuperable wall, but provides everywhere for his creatures an exit, some way of escape. As the Notch of our own White Hills is said to be the only available passage for long distances either way, and seems to be a road laid out on purpose by the Creator, so, everywhere, the terrible ramparts of matter have something like a ladder of ropes thrown over them, or a channel worn through. But the exact direction and the particular steps of safety are not at once or easily found. Indeed, what are the very associations that immediately cluster about that name, the Great St. Bernard, but of danger and un- told agony for countless exposed or perishing way- farers ? Let not the reflection appear untimely ; but one can scarce help being reminded of the proud pretensions of those who imagine they can make their way through the certainly not less intricate spiritual world of thought and human life unaided and alone. To a superficial fancy, indeed, easy seems the material as well as spiritual career. Wide and deep from the valley of the Rhone opens the solemn door of the pass as for an army to march along. Brooks and flowers cheer the onward course ; but brown, bleak wastes succeed, over whose swell- ing reaches no surveyor's chain has been stretched, and in which the solitary man is speedily bewildered ; while the mid-summer snow, which farther along 7* 78 THE MOUNTAINS. crunches under the traveller's foot, in winter drops itself down on every side, and spreads its fathomless thickness abroad, one endless snare and sepulchre. Can we get along better through our doubts and sorrows and sins, than through these snows and woods and precipices ? So asks and thinks and sighs the pilgrim, as, hour after hour, he troops along. Thank God for guides, guides through the deserts of nature and of our own minds, especially for the great Guide of all ! But, while feeling in such cir- cumstances, what every analogy shows, the insuffi- cient light for either world of nature and individual reason, one feels also in these dreary and terrific scenes, as nowhere else, the distinction of mind, and its superiority to matter. Over this sharp edge, down that grim pitfall, in yonder foaming tide, how soon my life might be lost ! Yet more than crag or cave or torrent, which in a moment could take that life, yea, infinitely more than the thoughtless and insensible mountain that seeks to rest its inaccessible head in the skies, is the perception, the will, the love, in my slender bosom. It is an amazing journey ; but the sign of human life, of a moral and religious nature, in the Monk's Hospice, at the top of the pass, exceeds all the material glory around and below. Our going through the Pass of the Stelvio, in Tyrol, an account of which belongs properly to another connection, showed us a range of snowy mountain-crowns, perhaps as fine as any that opens upon the traveller's road in Switzerland, and espe- cially disclosed one phenomenon I saw nowhere else, THE MOUNTAINS. 79 certainly, in such perfection, a blowing, for long spaces of time, of the white, powdery snow about the topmost points, in the exact shape of those little whirlwinds of dust we sometimes see in the street, only that the spotless purity of the particles and the amazing distance made these lofty eddyings sub- lime. The Pass of the Spliigen, in the Alps, stands alone in the ghastly grandeur of the Via Mala, or Evil Way, where, betwixt opposing precipices, in some places nearly a third of a mile in height, and often only a few yards apart, extending through a space of more than four miles, the most wonderful engineering has built a road along gulfs, which it might be thought possible to span with nothing larger than a thread in the mouth of a carrier-dove. If I may compare with it another scene, the enor- mous wall, beside which, near Ragatz, one approaches the celebrated Pfeffer Baths, looks ; in remembrance, as if it might be one of these jagged masses in the cleft of the Spliigen civilized and reduced. Hardly can there be elsewhere in the world a walk of more tremendous interest, more dwarfing in his own eyes the physical man, than that through these four miles, with its eyries, beyond the goat's clambering, far overhead, and the scarce seen Rhine, condensed between the descending rocks, and, as it were, turned edgewise to the eye, to tinkle far below. Surely we can, at length, pass anywhere, out of whatsoever difficulty, if we have been able to pass here. We can execute the most ideal plans for 80 THE MOUNTAINS. human progress and welfare, after being let through these horrid crags. Such lesson might not a re- former learn from the Pass of the Spliigen? The sword of the Lord, that has cloven the mountain, may cleave the oppositions of the heart. Going through the passes one's self, with all the helps of modern engineering, fills the mind with wonder how Hannibal and Napoleon made their unassisted way. Wherefore were they not discouraged by these end- less upheavings of the ground, one reached only to reveal another, till it seems as if there really is no top, but the steps go on for ever into the sky ? Ah ! these men carried the top in their mind, and ap- peared scarce dependent on the consideration, whether there were any top in nature or not; as the Genoese prophet of this New World kept bravely on, though his crew questioned if the ocean indeed had another side. In a pilgrim's recollection, the line from Lungern to Lauterbrunnen, running through woods, down steeps, and over hills, seems altogether one magnifi- cent pass. The unsurpassed vale of Meyringen, fringed with the alternate green of trees and white of waterfalls ; Grindelwald, with its huge circlet of mountains and its shining ornaments of glaciers, especially the glacier of Rosenlaui, purest of all its fel- lows, opening its dripping, inner rooms, that sparkle with beryl and ruby tints ; the Scheideck, Faulhorn, Wengern Alp, Bernese Alps, how much is there here, not for lame description, but for thrilling sight ! Let me speak only of the descent to Lauterbrunnen, THE MOUNTAINS. 81 which means clear springs, or only springs. Nowhere else more suddenly than there is one let down off a sublime mountain into a fearful defile. It would seem, too, as if the mountain, while dismissing its travellers, were pouring out with them all the floods and circulations of its mighty heart. Snowy as the upper drifts they come from, these liquid glaciers are colored as though they verily were the solid ones, which are their neighbors, and into which the wintry cold partly converts them, in motion. On they rush, like an everlasting manifold baptism, as if they bore on their streams the very purity of Nature's soul, and would cleanse every stain from her visible body. From the Staubbach, about the sixth of a mile in height, and looking as if it were spun from top to bottom of the finest wool, to every thread of moisture that waves in the wind, and adds its little tone to a grand concord, which the fine ear of spirits may gather up, the watery strings and bands keep up and down, keep to and fro, their incessant motion ; and dull of inward apprehension must he be who does not bring away in his heart ideas of refreshment, holiness, and harmony, for a lasting pleasure and good, when the rills are no longer heard or seen. But, alas ! we must hurry off from this matchless unison of the waters. We left Lauterbrunnen, also, with other sounds than the music of rivulets and cascades lingering in our ears. On the Wengern Alp the Jungfrau had sent the thunder of its slid- ing avalanches choruses in a tremendous oratorio THE MOUNTAINS. into our very hearts. There were finer echoes too, in which nature and art shared, from the blowing of long, wooden horns, in chosen spots, against the sides of the mountains. The sweetness of that melody, in which the breath of man was the plec- trum, and the far-off frightful lines and seams of eternal rock the harpstrings, can be no more than hinted to any by whom it has not been heard. What strange softness mixed with what metallic brilliance ! What notes from unearthly distance brought so distinct and near ! What even roughest and most unmusical blast from below returned out of heaven smooth as the dewy air, like God's mercy coming back for the sins of man. Ah ! Heaven changes to melody the sharpest voice of earthly creatures. What peal of defiance, shout of passion, keen report, or blasting curse, can quite drown, or for ever prevent, the gentle pleadings of the divine voice ? I will not, at present, attempt the description of any more of the unnumbered situations of highland splendor, which months of constant motion brought to view. Some are here purposely omitted, because I have occasion to employ them for the illustration of other points of discourse. Ah ! far off there, the mountains, great, good-humored giants, seem laugh- ing at the portraitures I have presumed to give in using mountainous words so vainly to present mountainous things. Yet, when we think of it, why should we expect to be able to bring about more than a cold, faint, and very distant acquaintance THE MOUNTAINS. 83 of the mountains with those by whom they were never seen ? How reveal nature's so various archi- tecture of hills a dome here, a spire or steeple there to a mere ignorant fancy ? How show the Mer de Glace, as it heaves its white and green billows between the Montanvert and those stone lances which the earth holds in rest, and with which she pierces the skies, till, as in her hold they lean a little from their sharp elevation, they almost threaten to overtop and bear down upon Mont Blanc himself? Or how paint the glacier's look, as from the Flegere we see it rushing into the vale beneath, like a river into a bay, widening at its mouth, groaning with a frequent dull sound of its agitated icy waves as they descend, not unlike the distant wash and booming of the ocean itself? What drawing can we give of the centre-piece of all this grandeur, which, as one of the poets says, was crowned monarch of the moun- tains long ago ? Lo ! there, with his spotless covering, which he never takes from his head, he stands and defies you, telling you to carry off his likeness if you can in any shape but the airy and invisible one of your own memory. Magnificent mockery ! Challenge sublime of earth and sky ! Like princes round their sovereign, the other hoary summits gather, as with silent oaths, to repeat his speechless word, and stand by their master. The majestic cabinet in eternal session unveil their faces, and lift their hoary fronts to those who draw nigh their circle. But no Oriental king ever held himself in greater seclusion, or ever vouchsafed more dim 84 THE MOUNTAINS. and inadequate notions of his personal glory, than do they to those remote from their dwelling. The mountains indeed, that they may show their dignity and communicate their favors, require to be ap- proached with great painstaking and peculiar re- spect. The difference for the beholder of mountains, however, does not arise merely from the difficulty of receiving their forms without sight purely into the imagination, but also from the preparation of mind occasioned by the traveller's own long and laborious search after their grandeur. He pays, in his own ex- posure and toil and patience, the price of admission to their incomparable theatre. He gains gradually the mood to appreciate and enjoy them ; and his mind expands to their breadth, and grows up to their ex- altation. A man in his easy-chair, reading a book or looking at a print, can but partially conceive their character. He treads in the edge of their imaginary shadow, instead of scaling their real height. Yet is it well worth the while to catch even hints and reflections of their wondrous substance which God made and upreared to be seen and remembered and related among men. The plains, all save a few barren deserts of sand, have yielded to the possession of human art. The hills, as in the old Scriptures they are called, are, indeed, everlasting. When we have left them, they cannot be forgotten or removed from our thought. As we still feel in our nerves the motion of the sea after we have planted our feet on the firm land, so THE MOUNTAINS. 85 the crests and hollows of the solid globe continue to make themselves felt in our mind. Away vastly they stretch in their earthy storm, their fixed fluc- tuation, their surge of primeval rock into the skies. Once seen, ever after remaining a new and glorious furniture of the mind, in their immense spread on the floor of the world wondrously somehow, with no loss of size, transferred to the chambers of the imagination, they stand there, a mute, material warning against all moral narrowness and bigotry. Liberty and law, magnanimity and humility, inflexi- ble sincerity and inexhaustible bounty, are their lessons. Purity ever descending from the heavens, in their flowing robes or frozen garb, is their per- petual example and admonition. And he that climbeth up their side, resolutely keeping the rough and devious yet ascending way, his prospect widen- ing with every step as he goes on, till at the natural column's head, held up so mightily and so high, he trembles as between two worlds, will be reminded of his immortality. In fine, a frequent thought among the splendors of mountain scenery was that innate love of equality among men which is in the heart of the world, as of God. Nature suffers no pride, and abolishes all pretension. What pre-eminence, amid these glories, can be boasted by my travelling duke ? He has nothing to himself but his velvet seat or emblazoned carriage. " Why envy yonder earl, by whose estate I pass ? He cannot see farther into this magnificence, or enjoy it more, than you can, 8 86 THE MOUNTAINS. unless he have a more poetic eye or a devouter heart. Verily, in some places of beauty and gran- deur, where the conventional distinctions among men are most boldly protruded, they are most utterly abashed. Nature allows nothing there to be prominent, to excite admiration, or to hold the atten- tion of an earnest soul, but herself. Her nobilities and royal claims will outlast those of all beside, save only genius and virtue. THE RIVERS. Rivers, what means your ceaseless tide ? Why do ye hold us to your side ? What is the melancholy spell Ye take from nature's living well To draw us even till we shrink, With tread unsure, upon your brink ? Ye are ourselves winding along ; In cadence swift you sing our song ; For so our lives for ever run, No sooner come than they are gone. THE RIVERS. ALL literature, nominally sacred or profane, is proof that no object in nature so irresistibly suggests moral meanings as a stream. He who muses at all, muses on the bank of a river. Especially the rivers of the Old World, lined as they are with historic associa- tions, with the remains of past grandeur, so strangely mocked by the enterprise of a new civilization, move the traveller to ponder the fate of men and empires. Some of the noblest of these rivers sweep through such wide circles, have their source in so many branches, or their issue in so many mouths, and make in their serpentine length so many turns, as they wander among mountains and bound kingdoms, or cut them in sunder, that one, traversing Europe somewhat thoroughly, will, at great distances, come upon the brink of the same current, and find himself speculating on its political importance, or searching into its deeper correspondence with his mind. Cer- tainly he must glide on the surface more than the straws and the bubbles do, who considers it merely 8* 90 THE KIVERS. in the way of irrigation, as carrying on, with sky and sea, the circuit of the waters, or furnishing a link in the commerce of the globe. The charm which Goethe and other poets have attributed to the sea, or the mermaids in it, to draw the gazer into its tide, tugs at the heart-strings still more at the borders of the river, which would bear us off with itself to a common destiny. So, but that reason held me back from the perilous bidding of a mysterious instinct, would I fain have plunged into the tide of the River Inn, coursing on through its magnificent mountain-girdled valley ; or of the Elbe, where the hills of Saxony see themselves in its liquid glass ; or of the Moldau, as it divides the romantic city of Prague, rushing over the dust of many that have struggled in its waters, beneath that most captivating half-ruin of a temple that crowns one of its upland slopes. But no one spot exercised this spell so strongly as the gorge of the Salza, near Golling, among vast mountains, which gather round the infant stream to form a tremendous basin, so deep that its descent seems to let, one into the very bowels of the earth. Of .all pits, it appears the most huge and fearful. As one gazes round from the bottom, he seems to be looking at an amphithea- tre that might have been used by those awful giants, who are fabled to have stepped from hill to hill, and left the print of their tread or of their sitting upon the solid rock. As from a cup, whose edge is a mile high, runs out the Salza ; but, in the course of ages, it has so worn away at the foundations of its bed, THE RIVERS. 91 that huge precipices and whole hills, covered with earth and trees, have fallen sheer down to form dizzy bridges above its channel, and swell the hollow mur- mur of its flow. Near by is a ledgy pass, which a few Tyrolese made good against the hosts of their French and Bavarian foes, and which has had its repeated wetting of blood in the conflicts for free- dom. The whole space is like the inverted, airy shape of a mountain, or the mould in which a mountain might be run ; and, from its singularity, it leaves an impression on the mind beyond that of the cloud-capped summits themselves. But the rivers, which were our most frequent companions, and for which we came to feel, at last, the sort of affection one has for fellow-travellers, were the Rhine, the Rhone, and the Danube. The Rhine and Rhone, diverging widely in their course, till the former empties into the North Sea, and the latter into the Mediterranean, though so estranged in their careers and the ends of their existence, are almost playmates among the Swiss heights in their childhood. From a cavern of ice, more than a mile above the level of the sea, at the foot of a vast glacier, issues the Rhone, that is to fall into mild midland waters ; and a few miles eastward springs out one of the branches of the Rhine ; while the Mounts Furca and St. Gothard seem to gaze grimly at each other, as they stand guard respectively over their children's cradles. Perhaps the most interesting part of the Rhone is its connection with the Lake of Geneva, and the most famous single locality upon 92 THE RIVERS. the Ehine the Falls of Schaffhausen, where, includ- ing the rapids, the river descends a hundred feet. Looking from the side of the river, farthest from the principal fall, one who has seen Niagara, or even Montmorency, will be disappointed at the spectacle. A near approach, however, to the cataract, in the very act of its boiling plunge, will not fail to thrill the frame of body and soul with that peculiar mix- ture of amazement and delight so welcome to the lovers of strong sensations. As the course of the Ehine will furnish me else- where with an illustration of a particular topic, I shall only add here, in the way of continuous de- scription, an account of a less frequent experience of American travellers; namely, a voyage up the Danube. Up, I say ; for, at Vienna, we were already near enough to the seat of war without going farther down ; and, besides, the glorious scenery of the stream was above. The Rhine and the Danube have sometimes been regarded as rivals in beauty or grandeur, each with its own friends who prefer it to the other. Having, under favorable circumstances, formed intimate acquaintance with both, I am con- strained to yield the palm of glory to the Danube. The romance of the robber-castles those fossil remains of human life, more significant than any which the geologist digs from under ground gives its strange attraction equally to either. In richness of cultivation, and the multitude of fine harmonies or contrasts of art with nature, the Rhine is certainly superior ; but, in the impressiveness of its tide, and THE RIVERS. 93 the sublimity of its shores, the tributary of the Black Sea no less certainly transcends its German brother. Would I could convey a just idea of our ascent and descent of that portion of the Danube which lies between Passau and Linz ! Let the reader conceive the diverse charms of still mountains and flowing waters combined in one picture. The hills, indeed, at some former epoch, seem to have met to- gether and disputed the passage. But the river they would repel found means to overcome their opposi- tion and force its way. Yet there they continue to stand, at once witnesses of their own stout resistance and monuments of its complete victory. Indeed, as a general thing, the fluid parts of nature seem to have a strength and permanency beyond the solid. Earth and granite do not endure and hold their own like water. Hill-tops and rocky ramparts and ancient forests waste away ; but the neighboring stream remains the same, witness and agent of the destruction of what looked so much more formidable than itself. There is a power in motion beyond any mere dead weight ; a fact suggesting the query, whether it is not equally true of human nature, that its flowing elements, its sentiments and affections, are more enduring than all the fixtures of its opi- nions and dogmatic creeds. I must not, however, for such similitudes of spe- culation, neglect the actual features of the Danube's glorious tide. Within a space of a few miles, the river seeks every quarter of the horizon, boxing, as mariners say, the compass, and making a very 94 THE RIVERS. jagged sort of polygon, or series of bending lines, to get along. There is a peculiar charm in thus going between the lofty summits ; not by laboring on, as on your journey you may recently have been doing, with weary foot, over every steep and flinty obstruction which shoots from the ground or has rolled from the heights ; but advancing by a motion of your vessel, smooth as any pleasant dream. Curve after curve, the point of view is shifted, new elevations come, with sudden astonishment, into sight, as the river, like a guide through its own magnificence, indicates each minute afresh the direc- tion to take ; till, as the bow of the boat pushes unsteadily to and fro, you know not which to ad- mire most, the devious track, or the marvellous arrangement by which nature has contrived to keep up her enchantment and your excitement so long. I remember 'no other instance where the attention was so firmly held, the interest of the mind so per- petually stung with ever-recurring wonders, while we thus won reach after reach of the mighty cur- rent, like a troop gaining parallel after parallel of a fortified place. Rapid and whirlpool, which we had left behind, were forgotten, as we pierced farther into this amazing defile at once of land and water. And as, on returning, our steamer shot with more than double velocity, like an arrow, between these bold headlands, that intruded their beauty and terror so near, we could scarce believe, when waked from our r every by the landing at Linz, that we had reached our destination, and that, in or out of dreamland, THE RIVERS. 95 what we saw was not some other town. Many hard and grand mountain-passes did we go through on our journey: this was a river-pass of easy access and luxurious sublimity. The stream, like some brave conqueror, had fought its way through the most formidable opposition, so that the weakest thing might quietly follow after. Thus, after fierce and long struggles of war, come the hush, the smoothness, the calm progress of peace. Those that were adversaries even gently visit, ennoble, and enrich each other, as the mountains and the tide, once at strife, now give and take richness in fine courtesy of lofty exchange, and are mutually glorified. I must now be pardoned, if the rivers, all together, with that strange influence already referred to, and which, at the very thought of them, I always feel, bear me off from these particular sketches into some wider meditations. The children, immediate descendants 'of the mountains, they are intimately connected with the whole frame and motion of the material- world. Nature wears them as her silver girdles, bands that reach to the sea and the sun. With the eternal deep for their beginning and end, light and heat for messengers, employing the winds for carriers, clouds for mediators, and having their pa- rentage in the hills, whose own distinct attraction, separate from the general gravitation of the earth, gathers the mists into their almost perpetual embrace, the rivers are the vital fluid of the earth, and their channels the arteries of its essential circulations. 96 THE RIVERS. But, to the thoughtful and imaginative eye, the ma- terial importance of the river is swallowed up in its moral significance. Let the reader bear with some sober sentences with which I try to trace it, and dis- close the river in the bed of its deepest idea. Our human life has been compared to a dream, a tale, a vapor, a shadow, a flower, but to nothing so truly as to a river. So we instinctively rank as the greatest and truly most important river on the globe, not that which bears on its bosom the greatest ships, or waters the widest territory, or is lined with the most delicious scenery, but that which is laden with the richest freight of instruction to human beings. The Jordan is a little stream, physically hardly fit to be one of the tributary rills of the Amazon. But which of the two streams has done most for the wel- fare of mankind ? Which, for present thought and future association, could be best spared from human memory and the face of the earth ? Whose judg- ment on such a question would be most valuable, that of geographers, politicians, and financiers ; or of poets, mystics, and believing souls ? Such queries may, at least, justify this turn of my theme, to de- tect a resemblance for human life. As the scale of rivers on the globe marks them of different length and depth and breadth, so vary, indeed, in magnitude and importance, the diverse careers of men,; but they all rise from the smallest beginnings, and they all end in the ocean of eternity. In many an eddy the tide seems to hesitate, and even turn back, or, in quiet nooks, to rest embayed, THE RIVERS. 97 undisturbed, and still, as if it were to be here for ever ; but tide and eddy and peaceful-looking surface together are floating on without delay, to empty into the everlasting sea. So, with all our thoughts and reflections, and tranquil satisfactions, and backward- looking memories, we glide to the eternal doom. By house and city and field and hill and castle-wall, rush the Rhine and Elbe and Danube. So the onward course of our existence leaves behind scene after scene, interest after interest, of our advancing career, childhood with its sports, youth with its opportunities, manhood with its struggles for gain and success, till it plunges, lost in the gulf that whelms all, and we are seen and heard here no more. But on the brink of the watery stream our reflec- tion is, that it matters not how long or short the river of our particular life ; whether, like many a rill, it reaches quickly, with the brief term of in- fancy, the mighty flood ; or whether, like some Missouri or Amazon, that cuts the breadth of the earth, it has the most enduring worldly date ; but that the great question is of the purity or pollution of the stream. In such a position we must feel, too, that, if it be polluted, it is because it has become so ; that, when it sprang fresh from the fountain of being, it was pure. The river may become stained and filthy in its course ; but it was transparent and clear in its commencement. Ten thousand springs have I seen ; but never one that was not pellucid and bright where it burst from its creative bed. Ten 98 THE RIVERS. thousand glittering falls of water, silver threads, and gushing torrents, over the mountain precipices, have I beheld ; but none that did not seem to be God's own holy water, with which he sprinkles the habitation of his children. So, musing beside the streams, we feel that never, from its mysterious depths, did the life of the soul begin in the babe, save with unspotted innocency ; and never did it run and leap with the first childish gayety and affection, but in uncorrupted candor and perfect beauty. In a world of evil, and of depraving influence, grant us alike this consolation and rebuke. Once the rain from heaven, and the driven snow, which on the far sunlit tops sink and melt to supply yonder springs, were not more unblemished than our instincts and faculties instilled from the spirit of their Author. Truly, the beauty of the world is the river which is like its fountain in all its way. What matchless splendor and unmixed delight from the translucent brooks that keep themselves clean throughout their channels ! Who has not fondly surveyed them glancing downwards from their upland homes, tak- ing no shadow from shapes of ill into their bosoms, sometimes in rivers broad and deep, maintaining their immaculateness, and bearing the business and plea- sure and travel of the world on their fair, unspotted breasts ? But, alas ! how often is it otherwise ! Verily, our soul is like water ; nothing more pure, nothing more corruptible. The river cgjanot choose its own course. It is a mechanical instrument, sub- missive to the laws of matter and the necessities of THE RIVERS. 99 its use. In its corruption it has no reproach ; in its crystal floor, no particle of excellence, no praise, no moral quality. Sometimes it would seem, that, in our own separate path, we might move securely, nor ever be unclean, our imagination, untouched with low desires, like the shining mirror of the wave that is ruffled by no storm, and turbid with no speck of dust. But some bad companionship is admitted to dash this clearness, and spoil this reflection of a heavenly hope. So not seldom is it with the river- stream. The Rhone, flowing from the beautiful Lake of Geneva, for awhile maintains the glory and the pride of its stainless waters, with their slightly bluish tinge finely throwing back the enchanting colors of the sky. But at length the furious and muddy torrent of the Arve breaks in upon it at one side. Long the Rhone, as if it had a feeling like a live and spiritual creature, resists the intruder, and refuses to mix with it ; and the line of separation between the foul and limpid water is for a consider- able distance preceptibly marked. But the Arve finally prevails ; and the Rhone, its integrity once lost, does not regain its purity till it reaches and is swallowed up in the foaming, everlasting sea. The right or the wrong is the great thing in hu- man life. It is not, however, the whole of our existence. Life has its happiness, or its misery too, intimately, indeed, connected with, yet not always completely dependent on, our own behavior. And, with some, the trials and hinderances they have encountered draw the principal trait in the general 100 THE RIVERS. picture, and weigh so heavily on their minds as to make themselves almost question the goodness of God. But these trials and hinderances are needful to form our character. This, too, is another thought suggested by the pilgrim's position, which he would have his imaginative reader take with him on the brink of the stream. For how is it with the river? It does not have a perfectly smooth time. As a little infant-fountain, it makes its way through obstacles to the light of day ; and no sooner does it flow over at the surface of the ground, than it meets with inter- ruptions still, a stone here in its path, an unevenness there, tossing it rudely and awkwardly, as it cannot help itself, from side to side. But, so thrown about, what follows but that it is obliged to make progress and dig its own channel, when otherwise, having no opposition, it would have spread with easy sloth into a shallow pool, from which it must have been evaporated and lost, and not been a river at all ? It turns its obstacles into its banks ; it hollows out of its hinderances its deep bed ; it fashions from every thing, that confronts and pushes it back, its own greatness and dignity as a stream, till you see it rolling like Niagara between mighty opposing precipices of stone, that once joined together to block and dispute the passage, but were driven to be the very glory of that which they strove to repulse. In the Alpine gorges I have seen a little rivulet, whose unwearied perseverance has cut hundreds of feet down through the solid rock to finish the cleft, marking the landscape for a hundred miles, by which THE RIVERS. 101 the everlasting hills, with their bald heads gazing at each other, were parted to let the traveller through. So, verily, the only way for the life of a moral crea- ture is to dig its own channel. But it was not meant that the river of life, even when, after whatever struggles and accomplishments, it has won its deep and regular channel, should flow on with endless peace in this world. It were as foolish to expect it as to look for a river on the globe that should run without a break or ripple on its surface, or any issue of its body into the deep. What blessed motion in the river of life, as it flows in our affections of family and kindred! I have witnessed that perhaps most charming of all spec- tacles of human felicity, where, with the meeting courses of manly and womanly love, was formed the tide of domestic union and concord; and, like some pageant of pictured glory, I have witnessed the vanishing of that spectacle away. In the sanc- tuary, with the confirming words of religion, I have fixed that seal which ranks as a privilege among many mournful duties. From two connected hearts, the harmonious currents of mutual gladness min- gling ran. The great congregation sympathetic waited by, as on the brink of some beautiful stream, at whose imagery they were gazing entranced. Go forth, wedded pair, with the benediction through your career ! and forth, like the stream, they go. Un- resting time rolls on, till, for the funeral rites, we are called to the very spot, in the temple, at the altar, where last we stood for the marriage-festival. There 9* 102 THE RIVERS. is the congregation as before; there are the ordi- nances of the same religion, the prayers of the same faith ; but where the bride appeared, her coffin ! The fresh circular wreath of flowers lying there upon the coffin-lid, has it fallen from her head ? Ah ! as they fade on the coffin, so withers under- neath, into dust and ashes, the fairer flower of humani- ty. The tide of domestic comfort and joy, where that fairer flower grew and blossomed into its best fra- grance and beauty, like rivers you may have seen, lost in the sands of the desert, has disappeared, sunk out of sight. But thanks for the word of revelation, that it shall rise and burst forth again in a grander channel ! Thanks, beloved disciple of Jesus, for the language with which thou wast in- spired to tell of what, with uplifted vision, thou sawest in heaven, even " a pure river of water of life " ! I make no apology for the moral strain into which, by the streams, I am borne. The thoughts and associations irresistibly awakened by the rivers, are part of the rivers themselves, and no more out of place, in the description of them, than is an ac- count of the color of their water, of the growths reflected in their bosom, or the depth and length of their stream. The rivers are but passages, indeed, in that great volume of nature, which we are in this age just learning, with more than a merely intellec- tual glance, even with a spiritual eye, to peruse, and which is unfolding upon its pages many a truth that it requires no man's peculiarly professional THE RIVERS. 103 instinct to recognize. It is a reading age ; we search for truth in books ; but do we not overlook many lessons which we might better learn from natural objects ? What reading, verily, there is in other volumes, and from other types, than those of the press ! The man of science runs his sections labo- riously down to cut the strata of the earth, that he may arrange their hidden order in representative colors for the information of our eye. Is there not something, flowing full in sight over all these strata, which, though in appearance superficial, is as deep in meaning as the rocky basis, or the fiery core of the globe ? Bear into our hearts, ye rivers, all the messages with which your Maker put you in trust ; make our thoughts, in clearness and onward motion, like your grand unceasing tide ; for, verily, as I looked upon you, leaping from your I(jfty sources, I derived the best image, that all nature can suggest, of a truly great soul's purpose and motion ; simple and direct, but sublime, both in the origin and end, even as your tide goes forth, with unambitious plainness, in the light of day, but goes from the mountains to the sea. The heavenly beginning, alike for life and the river, insures the final rest, the eternal peace. THE LAKES. Shining deep among the hills, Winds its breath, its food the rills ; Sinking for its obscure birth Into springs of nether earth, While its basin's rocky rim Towers till the sight grows dim ; Rivalling the upper sky With its sevenfold purity ; Mocking every pitchy cloud, As it takes its deathly shroud ; Mirror of each shape and shade, Sullen soon where peace just played ; Image of angelic soul, Evil prophet's wrathful scroll ; Winning now our happy stay, Warning with the storm's array ; Acting still the moody part, Throwing back the observer's heart ; Cunning lake, in holy wiles, Plays with truth, to good beguiles. THE LAKES. IN those happy spots of nature where land and water, above and below, combine their charms, it is hard to tell whether the stony upland height, or the liquid deep beneath, most lures the sight. I believe it was Goethe who first said that lakes are the eyes of the landscape ; and, if there be reason for such a figure, it is not strange such features in the countenance of the world should fix our regard. Certainly they add to that countenance the same sort of brightness and animation which the organs of vision give to the human face ; and as our glance, perusing the living traits of a man, is never satisfied till it reaches his eye, so on the earth we seek after water, and are not quite content till our attention, long vagrant, rests in peace upon it. But I cannot help claiming a yet deeper significance for the lake, and regarding it as an image of that human heart, of which the human eye is but the expression and avenue. Certainly I do not mean to push such a comparison into any elaborateness, or to shape it in 108 THE LAKES. any theory ; but as an exhibitor is careful to let in the light in the best direction from above upon his picture, so I may suggest a general principle to add interest to my little portrait-gallery, or to explain any interest it may attract. The race of travellers seems to have agreed upon Switzerland as the chosen spot, beyond all others, most delightful to a visitor, " the summer-house " of the world. Without questioning that Switzerland has charms, in their kind unrivalled, if not peculiar to itself, one may well deny that it is, in all respects, superior, and be disposed to affirm, in some particu- lars, the exceeding beauty of the more remote and less frequently explored country of the Tyrol. One, who has even partially examined the striking points in both regions, may seriously doubt which, on the whole, whether for pleasure or instruction, he would prefer. The mountains of Switzerland, considered alone, would carry off the palm. The sublime Alps, in general, lower their crests and narrow their shoulders as they slope off north-east and south-east from Piedmont and Savoy, through the Austrian dominions ; though ever and anon they rise again, so abruptly that it seems as if they would fain atone for their somewhat lesser altitude by their more direct ascent into the heavens. Such a dome as that of the Rhaetian giant, called the Or tier Spitze, with the everlasting hoar frosting its brow, almost chal- lenges supremacy ; but the surveyor's glass and measure must put him down by a whole head lower than those material Anaks that peer over against him THE LAKES. 109 from the western quarter of the horizon. But what the mountains thus lose, the lakes gain. It is impos- sible to unite all advantages of scenery in one single place ; and the principle of compensation, that runs through human life, extends its fatal line through nature also. There are no mountains in the Tyrol to equal Mont Blanc, Monte Rosa, or the Jungfrau; but there are no lakes in Switzerland, Piedmont, or Savoy, to equal Konigsee, Traunsee, and Achensee, either in the exquisite grace of all these, or in the hilly grandeur which the first of them has gathered about its borders. Nay, even in England and Scot- land where the lakes and hills alike are compara- tively on a scale so reduced, and seem to assume an air of respectability and moderation, as though aware of the cultivation around them, and desirous to be in harmony with lawful customs and a civi- lized life I caught special effects, which there is nothing precisely to match in the Lake of Geneva, or at the foot of Eigi. So is beauty, like the sundered body of Osiris in the fable, scattered all through the creation. One of the most peculiar effects of lake-scenery we experienced in England. Passing by Rydal Water, a little sheet near the house of the poet Wordsworth, we were indeed thrown into a sort of trance by a sight which we knew not whether to re- gard as an outward reality, or a sudden revealing of the splendid imagination and the glorious spiritual calm of the translated bard himself. Softly-swelling hills crowned the farther border of the lake, which 10 110 THE LAKES. strangely and inexplicably, at their base, appeared to meet other corresponding hills, to the eye just as solid and distinct, and so closely joined to the former ones as to make a single mass, lifting one head into the sky above, dropping another into the sky below, till the earth-surrounding heaven seemed for once to be revealed in full circle, spite of the solid platform of the ground. For a considerable time, actually bewildered, I strove to comprehend the meaning of the spectacle, knowing well it must be some magni- ficent illusion, one of those innocent tricks of light and shade of which nature plays so many; but in vain. It could not be told what was substance, and what was reflection. With the keenest look, none could see the line at which the water met the land. So smooth was the surface, so absolutely unruffled lay the mirror under that mild air, in that soft after- noon light, so green and blossoming was that beauti- ful under as well as upper world, that the real objects and their shadows could not be viewed apart, or in any way distinguished into truth on the one side, or deception on the other. Was the unsubstantial thing I saw below, delusion ? Ah ! was not the thing I saw above, so firm in its earthy shape and granite bulk, a delusion, too, compared with the eternal reality of those yet higher, spiritual objects of the other world, revealed to our love and faith ? When we dream, our dream is as real to us as our life is when we are awake. The mountain shall stand for the consciousness of broad day, and the reflection for the dream of the night. Both are THE LAKES. Ill dreams here below, in that they will soon be over. But, I must say, this new realizing of the story of Narcissus seeing himself in the fountain, struck me as peculiarly appropriate to the place where one's mind is full of the great poet passed away, whose soul was just such a mirror as his favorite mere, who lived a life of symbol and fancy, who showed all things in the magic glass of spiritual discernment, to whom nothing was only what it seemed, but who has gone to experience the unseen reality he wor- shipped, and, through so many hiding-places and with such faculty of keen apprehension, sought to find. I shall carry in mind the spot of his residence as the emblem of his spirit, lover as he was of na- ture, that so gratefully enshrines him, but more ear- nest lover and servant of God. The peace he saw so clear on earth, he sees fairer and deeper in heaven. Earlier in time, though farther from home, it was our privilege to behold those wonders of Tyrolese lake-scenery, to which the finest Cumberland lakes, Windermere or Derwentwater, or the Scottish lochs, Lomond and Katrine, are, in themselves considered, insignificant. Never can I forget the way from Linz to Ischl over the Traunsee. A ride upon a tram- road, a kind of horse-railway, brought us, through the mist and rain of a gloomy morning, to the brink of this exquisite basin, this felicity of Nature, in which she seems at once to enjoy herself, and to be bent on making her children happy. That for us, too, her purpose might not fail, the clouds broke away ; the shower ceased. It had only come to 112 THE LAKES. cleanse the earth and air, and make all around more fair and lovely than even by light alone it can be made. Into the pellucid water glides our little boat. As I gazed, I felt almost unsafe, suspended at some dizzy height ; for it was as if only the thinnest, finest layer of gossamer fabric were stretched there for a horizontal veil or floor, and on both sides the unfathomable abyss. On smoothly darts our secure vessel. I look over her side into the infinite chasm. What keeps her from falling down ? On what mys- terious support does she ride between these rival skies ? How, through this hollow sphere, holds she her level way ? Is she a fairy bark ? and are we spirits transported now towards some sphere of the blessed ? From this mood I was diverted a little, and my mind saved from losing itself in pure ecstasy, by observing the huge forms of the inverted hills, running downward as far as upward, in their erect- ness, they climbed. What refinement of pleasure was there in remarking the minuteness, as well as vastness, of the copy ! Ah ! no copyist of the old masters can render his original upon the canvas as faithfully in every line and hue, or with expression so perfect and speaking, as it pleases God here to translate his own works in the engravings of this marvellous page. He, too, writes his name in water ; and, if it fades with the ruffling wind, it fades but to return again with spell more sweetly binding than if it had not vanished at all. How we admired the submarine curving lines, the diverse shades, each angle flashing back the light, each vapor-shrouded THE LAKES. 113 point jutting from the mighty mass, the shreds of woolly cloud floating underneath, and the winds blowing gently round the spectral mountain's brow as truly as about the other mountain on high ! How the double glory divided our regard, till we drew towards the shore from which we were to roll in wheels again by a road hedged in on one side by verdant woods, and on the other by amber streams, that, with their clear, delicious color, told us whence the lake derived its crystal character to make it like " one entire and perfect chrysolite " ! Of the town of Ischl, elsewhere referred to, which nestles in a circle of mountains, brooding shaggy around it, like lions about their young, it would be a digression here to speak. In the light of thought, lake joins with lake, however sundered by wide spaces on the globe, till the beautiful sheets of water become all one chain, throughout whose ex- tent a twofold meaning ever suggests and repeats itself. "With the sheet of glassy water, we become reflective. The look with which we pierce its un- fathomed calm seems directed into our own soul. Truth lies in a well, saith the proverb. If the proverb arose from the dusky but vivid glimmer which the surface of a deep well sends back to the beholder leaning over its curbstone, those profounder chasms, seas or tarns, filled by rains and streams, which, among very lofty hills, seem like huge wells dug by the hand of nature, may be regarded as more striking images and monitions of spiritual reality. Their mighty enclosures of highland hide 10* 114 THE LAKES. them away, as the heart is hidden from sight of all but those who closely approach it ; while from the lake, too, as from the heart of nature, proceed those circulating streams of refreshment and growth, by which the solid body of the earth is renewed in strength, and clothed with beauty. But, following no farther the line of analogies, leaving my readers to suggest to themselves those correspondences which we perhaps always consider more or less fanciful when they are offered from another mind, I should count it disloyalty, flagrant ingratitude for my own enjoyment, if 1 did not attempt at least to describe some of my direct im- pressions, especially of Konigsee or the King's Lake. King indeed it shows itself among all the inland bodies of water which it has been my fortune to survey. The best approach to it is from Salzburg, which, with its commanding situation, its towering walls, the crown of its enormous castle, its rich cultivation, and the magnificent prospects from its neighboring heights of glorious far-off mountains, has secured to itself an almost unanimous suffrage as the most beautiful town in Germany. My pre- sent concern, however, is with its splendid neighbor, lying close under the little village of Berchtesgaden, but stretching and winding lustrous many miles away in the vast cleft which the Creator, loving beauty, has made as a vessel to hold it. To convey a just image of the lake itself, I shall be obliged to give also such poor word-drawing as I can of its immense mountain-frame, which shoots THE LAKES. 115 up point after point, with the graceful curving of its sublime architecture, to altitudes of from one to nearly two miles above the level of the sea. A little bark, quietly rowed by men and maidens, takes you, reach after reach, along the branches and liquid limbs which this sovereign in his kind stretches out into every angle and cove. The grand hills, one after another, salute you as you pass by ; but they seem only subsidiary to, and in fact part of, the lake of which they are the setting, as a circle of gold or a rim of garnets with the diamond of the first water within. The huge proportions of the solid peaks, which are repeated beneath, the ele- vation amazing you, and the depression still more, in their reversal look as if they had been dropped, nature's own lines, to gauge the watery depth. But they seem to drop into measureless space, by their vain length suggesting, not equality, but con- trast, with the infinity they poorly mock ; just as large extents of time are, in our conception, added together to hint the eternity they can never reach. The more of the finite we put together, the farther off we are from the infinite we would approach, of which yet, in this very offset, we find some such dream as alone we are capable of; and so these material visions passed imperceptibly over into vi- sions of the soul. I was truly in a great closet of prayer, so retired and still was the shadowy space within those tremendous walls. But a shout or pistol-shot from our helmsman very practically breaks up the soft, ecstatic revery ; as the little 116 THE LAKES. noise that would be momentarily dispersed in the air above an open plain, rolls swelling through the hollows of the unmeasured amphitheatre, and returns as from the cloud comes ominous thunder. On we glide, mile after mile, to the very extre- mity of this enchantment, to land on the farther border, and walk till we come to the Obersee, or Oversea, a smaller sheet, lying there all alone, like a child separated from its parent. This most tender and exquisite thing, bright and graceful as a silver dish carved by the artist's cunning for a prince's table, is placed amid wild and savage scenery. The clear gentleness and the rocky rudeness mutually heighten and set forth each other. Never before had I seen an image so fine of a noble heart calm and unmoved amid all the terrors and threats and confusions of the world. It was a place fit for a hero's rest, a believer's contemplation, or a martyr's solace. But, throughout the marvellous space that belongs to Konigsee, it seems to be the settled purpose of nature to set traits soft and lovely over against the stern and awful, as they are set in the alternate agitations and composures of the human breast. Returning by a different line across the principal lake, we disembark at a spot where the mountains, as by common consent withdrawing on either side, leave the richest of green and grassy meadows gradually sloping to the water's edge. As the soft verdure closes round our feet, we lift our eyes, and see the chamois, like dark specks mixed confusedly THE LAKES. 117 in sunlight, scattered in the patches of snow that whiten the sides of the distant mountains ; those actually in the snow, of course, being alone visible so far to the eye. From this verdure an hour's walk carries us to the Chapelle de Glace, or Ice Chapel ; not a building of human hands, such as the Russian empress reared out of frozen blocks from the Neva, but a spotless architecture of nature's own contriving. It is simply a mass of ice and snow at the foot of a mountain, as it were a cold challenge thrown from it to the ground, and never, in the hottest sun of August, melting away, or, if it dissolves beneath into the running stream, ever, as a glacier, supplied anew from above, and, like a steady, though ever-shifting, column of smoke from a chimney, not changing its own apparent shape and look. But whence sup- plied ? The terrific peak that runs directly over it, like a splinter of the globe, sharp into the sky, is not clad in snow. Scarce a grain, it would seem, could stay upon its keen edges without being blown off, and lost in the winds. There it stands, as the earth's own spire, actually piercing the heavens, leaving behind all towers of man's construction as at its very base, and suffering no touch of any hand, or accretion of foreign substance, to mar or alter at all its hues or proportions. Strange spectacle it was to see the bare summit, brown as it would have been in the tropics, in the temperature of its so greatly aggravated cold, refusing the snowdrift, and casting it down into such humility at its base, where 118 THE LAKES. it lay quiet from an origin wholly mysterious and unknown. Quaintly that snowdrift reminded one of the ancient widow's cruse of oil, subject to ceaseless draughts, but never failing. The Ice Chapel has an atmosphere of its own ; so that, as tve drew near it, the guide gave a signal to put on additional garments, for protection against sudden chills. The entire scene, while we stood on the chapel-floor, made on the mind one of those indelible stamps which single themselves out into prominence from the multitude of one's impressions, and are preserved for ever. Far below ran the rivu- lets into the majestic lake upon which we had sailed. Right above, the mountain pierced the sky. It was the first we had closely seen which aspired to belong to the highest class of mountains ; and, by its pecu- liarity, it left an impression, which no image that came after, even from the Silver Horn or the Jung- frau, Monte Rosa, or Mont Blanc itself, could efface, or much exceed. No : the solemn domes of the sub- limest Alps shall not obscure from the sight, or wipe from the recollection, that steeple* of stone, nearly two miles high, on whose marble-like pediment we stood and wondered so long. To a contemplative eye, the massive and broad-based mountain, which seems to have been heaved up, in one of its swells after another, by successive throes of the central power, is grander than any of the Aiguille Mountains, so called from the needle-like sharpness of their ta- pering points, as a man with balanced powers excels one with a single prominent faculty. But, THE LAKES. 119 when the Aiguille pierces the sky, and you can draw so near to run your eye up its mighty length, there is a sudden thrill of astonishing delight, which can from no other object in nature be received. But neither the marvel nor the genial instruction of the spot was yet over. Scarcely more than a minute's walk from the Ice Chapel brought us to a bed of wild-flowers, the most delicate, profuse, and various we had anywhere in the world seen assembled to- gether. We were quite unable to number their mani- fold kinds, or enough admire their slender beauty, or come to an end of our delight in their sensitive life, so vigorous and sweet to every sense while they hung upon the stalk ; so wan, wilted, scentless, and dimmed in their colors, when they were plucked away. They were the graces of the terrible moun- tain ; they were the ornaments of everlasting frost. So out of the religious heart bloom the finest graces of meekness, gentleness, kindness, and forgiveness : they bloom and flourish on the living stem of Chris- tian principle, spite of all, however near, that is cold and harsh and forbidding in human life. With a farewell, like the lingering one to a friend, we de- scended, till we came to the long, red fringes of delicious strawberries lining the path, which had lured us up the ascent, and now cheated us out of some of our weariness as we went down. The wind freshened and the rain began to fall as our clear-eyed peasant maidens and simple-minded men rowed us back ; the mountains, that still towered overhead, no longer returned their gigantic features from be- 120 THE LAKES. low ; and so, in a mist of nature, and with many mazy thoughts wandering in our mutual looks, we took our leave of Konigsee. As an illustration of the purely delicious in water- scenery, without the rude or grand, no lake, perhaps, stands in such fine contrast with Konigsee as Como. The waves of the Alps, running into Italy, and suc- cessively lowering their tops, seem to have paused around some natural hollow, which they might deepen with their sides, and fill from the beakers of their white and foaming crests. Nothing could take the eye more sweetly than these softly rounded hills, finely swelling up, yet not too high to let vegetation creep greenly over their tops ; while, with every slope into the valleys, or terraced wall upon their sides, the growth varies, the maize and mulberry, the vine, olive, and chestnut, in diverse charms, vy- ing with each other before the always pleased, but never startled, beholder. What is the secret of that so strong and continuous spell here fixed upon the heart ? Does the spectacle irresistibly suggest a thought of that better state, whose hope is hid within the breast of man ? Is it a type and material pro- phecy of that supernaturally predicted heavenly con- dition whereinto shall enter nothing that defileth or disturbeth ? And does the voyager through this smooth basin, adorned with fruits and flowers, enjoy a foretaste of the blessed rest of the upper heaven amid the manifold productions of the tree of life ? But such are not the only thoughts suggested by lake-scenery. If any one would realize to the full THE LAKES. what opposition can exist between natural objects of the same generic order, let him go from Como, across the huge Alpine barrier, to Lake Lucerne, perhaps the finest in Switzerland, though it cannot reach up to the glory of the Tyrolese Konigsee. In the elements, how- ever, of a wild and savage interest, it is certainly un- surpassed. The jagged character of the land about it gives birth to a fury of winds, at the same time blowing from opposite quarters out of its different indentations, as though the whole neighboring region were a manufactory of every description of storm, exposing the boatman to peculiar and sudden danger. One cannot help feeling that he has seen the proto- type or counterpart of this fitful and impetuous body of water in some strong and restless nature given up to the perpetual control of ever-shifting passions. Indeed, a symbolic meaning of this kind has attached itself to one feature of the lake, which makes such sport of thermometer and barometer, and holds itself alone the jealous and fitful measure of heat and air in scorn of the inventions of man. I refer to a height called Mount Pilate, on which the local superstition seems to be concentrated. Accord- ing to an ancient tradition, the ruler of Judea, ex- iled by the Roman emperor, wandered ^.rnong the mountains, ever pursued by a guilty conscience, till he put an end to his intolerable existence by plung- ing into a lake on the top of the elevation, ever after distinguished by his name. The particulars of the legend have passed from mouth to mouth, and from book to book. I allude to them on account of THE LAKES. an illustration in my own experience of the power of such a superstition, once fixed on the mind. Gaz- ing, with the story in my memory, was it at all fancy, or altogether fact, that presented the mountain in the exact shape which a remorseful soul ought to assume ? Certainly, in its deep, ragged lines, there was a haggard and twisted look, as if something had wound or wrenched it out of its regular form. It was like a mass of iron, taken red-hot from the furnace, and violently wrought till its lines and seams are all mixed together. Whatever may be true of Pilate, the morally weak, if not guilty, governor, I can never cease to carry this, his earthly namesake, in my imagination as the natural language of self- upbraiding ; even as the golden-plumaged bird that lights, while I am writing, in a tree, under whose shadow once dwelt a noble man, becomes, by some irresistible law of association, the natural language of his spirit. There could scarcely be a greater contrast between different specimens of the same general kind of scenery than one feels in attempting to bring to- gether in his thoughts Lucerne and Konigsee on the one hand, and the trans-Alpine Orta and Maggiore on the other. It is the contrast of terror, clad in beauty, with loveliness robed in delicacy and grace. Mountains are near by on the Italian side ; but they are smoothed and tamed by the hand of culture. Awful peaks rise in the distance, but only to height- en the charms of the romantic seclusion from which they are beheld. Upon Lake Maggiore, in the Bor- THE LAKES. romean Islands, a kind of miracle of taste has been wrought to arrest the steps of every pilgrim. From a soil, itself created and renewed by human labor upon the barren rocks, has been made to bloom the Flora of the tropics. The orange and citron, the sugar-cane and coffee-plant, the myrtle and pome- granate, the aloe and cactus and camphor-tree, with a multitude of other exotics, welcomed us from the snows of the Great St. Bernard, and stood up, fear- less, bold, and flourishing, within sight of the per- petual ice through which Bonaparte cut a path for the descent of his cannon. I cannot leave this subject of lakes without vin- dicating my claim for them of an intellectual and moral interest, by the power of attraction they seem always to have had for men of genius. Why re- peat, in this connection, what every scholar is familiar with, in respect to the Lake of Geneva ? Why speak of Rousseau, who has enshrined its imagery, so suited to a sentimental idealist, in his works ; or of Gibbon, who finished his famous History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Em- pire upon its borders ; or of Byron, whose muse gathered her chief inspiration of the nature of a tender love from its groves and bays ; or of Voltaire and Calvin, conflicting names indeed, the first of whom declared it to be his own lake, and to have precedence of all others ; and the last of whom, though he was too suspicious of all earthly fascina- tions to let any of its beauty steal into the severity of his style, may yet have felt some refreshment THE LAKES. from it fall like dew on his inwardly heated and sternly determined soul? He who rolls down the long, smooth, zigzag road to Vevay, with Lake Leman, as it is otherwise called, shining up to him through all the cultured way, and the monarch of mountains, whose white cap is sometimes, from a distance of sixty miles, reflected in its waters, will gain an appetite for feasting on some of the richest associations of literary life. Moreover, what lover of English poetry needs be told of the outward immortality conferred upon Cumberland and Westmoreland by the works of those who, by way of eminence, are called the lake poets ? or what traveller of sensibility but will have his pleasure in that exquisite region enhanced by recalling the names of Wordsworth and Coleridge and Southey ? The very captain of the tiny steamer upon Loch Katrine, and the stage-driver from the Trosachs, are at once reciters of the verse, and orators of the fame, of that wonder of modern let- ters, who may well be called Scott, as his genius has spread over the whole land that he seems named after, as well as born from, and has done not a little to make bards of all his countrymen, a name pre- dominating for delight, as does that of Knox for duty. How many beautiful lakes of our own land only wait the consecration of genius to become as famous as any in the Old World ! There may be lakes in Tyrol and Switzerland, which, in particular respects, exceed the charms of any in the western world. THE LAKES. But there are other respects in which nothing can exceed what lies close to our own door ; though we are so apt, as one said to me, to consider a thing fine merely because it is foreign. For example, in that wedding of the land with the water, in which one is perpetually approaching and retreating from the other, and each transforms itself into a thousand figures for an endless dance of grace and beauty, till a countless multitude of shapes are arranged into perfect ease and freedom, of almost musical motion, nothing can be beheld to surpass, if to match, our Winnipiseogee. There are many different dialects on the earth; but there is only one language in heaven. Mean- time, in the parallels we can trace between such features as I have mentioned and the human heart, may we not even now escape from our confusion of tongues, and Babel shouts of passion, into some an- ticipation of that common language ? Is there not for us some speech in the lake ? If the river is the offspring of the mountain, the lake is the creation of visible or subterraneous fountains and streams ; and so, if the former symbolizes the vital circulation of the human frame, the latter may be a type of the human heart. The elements in their general sweep, the air and wind and rain, may represent the force of circumstances, the influences of society, and public opinion ; the liquid reservoirs of nature are a type of the secret breast. As the river is the shadow of human life, so all the lakes qf the globe, distinct accumulations of living water, sometimes linked ll* THE LAKES. together in long, beautiful chains, sometimes separate and solitary, furnish the best emblem of the heart of man, the vital centre of the moral world, now lonely, now united in sweetest fellowship with the hearts of his kind. The calm lake, which has drawn into itself no- thing but purity from all the dust and disturbance of the world ; which from its limpid wave gives back nothing but refreshment to man and beast ; which reflects the forms of things around and above it with unerring truth and beauty, from the slender twig to the huge summits of its mountain-girdled shores and the eternal sky, not one false line or unjust proportion in its mirror, more than in the abiding realities it portrays ; the lake, whose bosom is as deep as its sources in the hills are lofty, and which keeps that bosom still unruffled, though mighty rivers issue from it through the world : what likeness, in every point so perfect, of the holiness and beneficence, the truth and equity, the trust in God on high and benignant- power over the world beneath, of a rightly composed and well-regulated heart! Gra- cious likeness it is ! Alas ! and can the same heart, which is capable of such winning -charms and gra- cious workings, be so driven and tossed with fierce and uncontrollable desires, as to resemble the lake only in the madness of its waters, foaming under the resistless gale ; no longer imaging any part of the sacred vault of heaven at all ; no longer supply- ing the needs, or giving furtherance to the creatures, of earth, its own composure lost, and threatening THE LAKES. only peril and ruin to all who tempt its rage ? Cer- tainly, upon these marvellous pieces of nature's painting he must look with a very superficial eye who does not see in them his own moods returned. He can have only partially traced their reflections who has not followed them back into his own soul. He can have from them but a poor and perishable satisfaction, to whom they do not read solemn les- sons respecting the right internal ordering of his desires. He alone is truly blessed, to the agitations of whose bosom the Master of human passions, as of the stormy waves, has said, " Peace, be still ! " THE SEA. Beauty, terror of the world; Glorious and gloomy thing ; Charms and threats together hurled In the compass of thy ring : Keen exultings on thy shore Answering anguish through thy deeps ; Pleased one listening to thy roar, Which another minding weeps : Infant's breathing, not so light As thy ripple on the sand ; Thunders, bearing no such fright As the breakers on thy strand : Measurer of old earth's time, Scorning history's little date ; Reckoning aeons in thy chime, Hint of everlasting state; Robber, spoiling all below, Yet who tenfold back dost send ; Shall we call thee deadly foe ? No, our rough but generous friend ! THE SEA. THE sea is so obvious in its grandeur, that it would seem every one's mind might at once take it in, and that no description could do more than impoverish its own impression. Yet of this sublimest object in the terrestrial universe, this greatest indeed of material things, with which we are made capable of coming into so close contact, which stirs the soul with wonder and terror, or to raptures of joy, as nothing else can, dwellers on the land have often inadequate and incorrect ideas. One, who has been born and always lived on the sea-shore, has, in fact, hardly yet seen the sea ; of its simplest attributes he has but a faint idea. Ac- curately learning all its mathematical dimensions cannot alone enable us to conceive it. The child who gazes at an artificial globe, and observes how wide is the watery waste compared with the earthy continents, may have only a mechanical picture, not the reality, in his thought. Figures of hundreds or thousands, through the calculating intellect, always convey a vague notion, compared with the vivid THE SEA. idea lodged by experience in the imagination. We must be upon and cross over the sea, vividly to appre- hend its character. Thus only can we feel first its extent. When we have watched, day after day and night after night, the wake of the swiftest steam- ship, and seen the smitten waters boil and phospho- resce at being cut so abruptly ; and the week passes away while still all around spreads the same fatal ring, as though it held you to its own centre, and your seeming motion were absolute rest, you no longer wonder at the first navigators for whispering with one another in fear whether they should ever get over it, and you begin to understand what is meant by the broad ocean and the middle deep. At last, you perceive that the sea is the great mate- rial fact in the world, and the land the exception ; with all its continents, only an island in that sur- rounding ocean, a little shifting in whose level would overwhelm and drown again the whole. The dwellers on that island, who fancy their abode an endless territory, and imagine that going to sea is only a subsidiary circumstance, may, to the sailor tossing between the poles, look rather like prisoners of hope, tenants at will under the mighty, encroach- ing deep. Then the landsman has a faint sense of the solitude of the sea. He is apt to suppose the sea, on the contrary, as a quite sociable place. So many ships, entering and clearing every harbor all over the world, must make a great community and scene of frequent converse upon the rolling billows. For THE SEA. 133 awhile, coming into or going out of the great ports, vessels constitute to the imaginative eye a beautiful white-winged company ; and those who live at such ports, and see them come and go, saluting each other on their way, may have fine surmises of their friendly intercourse and majestic courtesies throughout their whole career. But, farther off upon the great cir- cles of the liquid mass, the millions of barks are to each other well-nigh lost. Sometimes a ship may be spoken ; a letter may pass ; or a crew be saved from protracted peril and imminent destruction. Occa- sionally the course is shifted, lest one navigator should dangerously cross the track of another. But, for the most part, vessels are hermits in a desert, as separate from each other as anchorites on their pillars or in their caves. The gloomy pall, that often hangs over the sea, hides them sometimes from each other's approach when in immediate vicinity ; and one is overridden by another, or, like the ill-fated Arctic, stabbed to death beyond all reach of succor. Nevertheless, the sea is another name for solitude ; and, if you desire to feel alone, go down upon it, and from your berth at midnight rise, and pace the deck, with no companion, till the wash of the waves has sung its monotonous tune into your ear, and the universal wilderness above and below has filled your eye, and your swaying thought keeps time with the rocking together of your wooden house and mortal tenement from side to side, and there will come moments of ecstasy when you will think there is none in the world alive but yourself and God. The 12 134 THE SEA. vast ocean is a closet, that may be as private as was ever built in the corner of a dwelling ; a holy of holies, as awful and unmolested as that in the old Jewish temple ; a seclusion for the heart, which the depth of woods, or the sands of Sahara, could not exceed. Poets and orators talk of whitening the sea with our commerce, and furrowing it with our keels. But the canvas of nations on the tremendous waste is less than the lightest streak of a cirrus cloud on the edge of the summer sky ; and, could the traces of every sailor on the huge plain be pre- served, instead of immediately vanishing, they would appear but as the first lines of the plough on a new- found coast. In the sublime imagery of Job, God can make the deep boil as a pot of ointment ; but to speak of man as vexing or disturbing it with his puny activity, is to put the effect for the cause. Intellectually, he is lord of the sea, as of the land ; but, in the physical fact, he acts less than he is acted upon, and all his workmanship is borne with a lightness unfelt on the tide. But of this power, too, of the sea, the landsman has a feeble understanding. It gives us some sign of its terrific power as it bursts upon the shore, or drives the helpless mariner with its rejecting fury, or greets us with the ominous sound of its distant roar; but its thunder dies away, and its fiercest assaults are driven back from the earth. We must ourselves be subject to its control to realize its might. Go for once, and thoroughly tempt it. From its endless rise and plunge, you implore some respite. THE SEA. 135 Deaf as the adder is the unrelenting surge. Nature hears no prayers : and here is Nature in her wildest, most untamable form. You are thankful to believe that above the inexorable nature is One that hears ; as your sighs and groans and supplications seem to break and pass like the breath that makes them, or bubbles of common air that swell and vanish with their shining moisture, as each instant comes and goes. The winds, not for you, but of their own caprice, may lull and keep the peace awhile ; yet covertly they conspire to break their bonds, and raise the tempest. Even, however, in their hush, the sea has a vital heaving of its own, which goes on without them all the same. It seems like some mysterious giant, bound to carry human creatures on their way, but scorning its servile task, and shaking them rudely and wilfully on its shoulders as they are borne. A bridge, truly arched, is said, from actual pressure, to gain in strength of resistance. But what words can describe the sea's disdain of every weight launched. upon its bosom? It tosses and gores, it plays with and wears out, it pierces and rends to atoms, whatever it will. Well armed must the warrior go to battle with its storms : it will find every weak spot or hole in his armor. If one link in the coat of mail be ill-woven, there will the thrust be sure to be first directed, and the strain to come. The builder of houses upon the land may possibly slight his work, and escape without detection. Not so he whose architecture is for the sea, which seizes, even to the smallest bolt or pin, the whole frame of 136 THE SEA. whatever is put to its unceremonious test, makes all tremble in its instantaneous grasp, and whatever is not thorough in material or construction begin to give way. There is no impunity for neglect here. For what is loose and unguarded, there is no enemy beside so sleepless in vigilance, so resistless in attack. Like a swordsman, so aware of his superiority that he plays with his antagonist, so the monstrous ocean sometimes toys with those that tempt its wrath. To give amusing instances, I have seen it take a vertical pile of plates, and, in a moment, with their shining figures, tessellate for square yards the cabin floor. The solid urn, that had been resting firm as the mast, I have known it overset with a lurch as unforeseen as the stealthy spring of a wild beast. It was pleased, on occasion of my crossing it, to show its favorite trick of sending aboard, for an arrest, one of its crested and plumed officers suddenly to collar the most experienced sailors, and hurry them the length of their floor. Once, at deep midnight, it enacted a novelty of somewhat savage merriment, in sweeping a heavy iron cable, that lay dinting its rusty coils into the planks, with terrific rumble athwart the forward deck, so as to rouse the sleepers below as at a signal of the crash of doom. But the real earnest of its strength I cannot pretend to por- tray. Though I saw it hoary with rage, surpassing all the armaments of battle ever built, should they discharge their thunder together ; though I peered from its borders into the storm with which, upon the THE SEA. 137 rough Scottish beach, it wrecked, and then wantonly turned completely over and over, a noble vessel; though I saw clearly and often that man's only defence against its brute force when aroused is in the most adroit submission, and that any sheer con- tention would be like helpless infancy set against omnipotence, all my witnessing but constrains me to leave the measure of its energy to that imagina- tion which all estimates of bulk, or strict lines of the balance, rather hinder than assist. But, once more, the landsman sees only part of the sea's beauty, to leave out which would be to omit half the portrait. Yet it is, in great part, a terrible kind of beauty. Its monstrous look softens, and its motion grows caressing, as it runs into the inlets of the shore. Most graciously it courts the humanity on its borders with invitations to its broad and cool mansions, and coaxes it out upon its open floor, to treat it, alas ! too often with savage inhospi- tality; and yet, sometimes, after fierce storms, that have roughly handled the sailor on either of its sides, it will smile, as in my own experience, with halcyon days dropped down betwixt the watery poles to tempt one out upon the deck, where he will swing as gently as the hang-bird in its nest, or seek refuge from the warm sunshine in the shadow of the mast. Beauty, in general, seems to lurk chiefly in the lines where diverse or opposite elements meet together, as with the sky and earth at the horizon, or the land and sea upon the beach. Yet are there peculiar charms only to be caught far out at sea. The huge 12* 138 THE SEA. cup, turned from above upon the liquid ball below, with their fine assorting of mutual colors, blue and gray, as sometimes in smooth embrace meet these mighty curves ; the golden disk of the sun, rising, a solitary show of unrivalled sublimity, from behind the one convex into the other concave ; or of the moon, with her splendid silver pillar cast in section athwart the dusky waves ; the infinite grace with which the ocean makes a ship bow to its power, the mysterious witchery of which particular spell never wears out or tires the meditative mind, all these things make vastness of scale and grandeur of movement fall into the idea and feeling of beauty. Then there are, at sea, particular spectacles, of entrancing interest ; one, at least, of which I must take leave to describe. I refer to our encounter with a large company of icebergs. Perhaps no other sight in the world makes an impression more unique and profound. Being in a steamship, we could, in the daytime, without peril, draw near to them, and get good views, at greater and less distances, of their motion and bulk. There they lay, floating along- in fellowship, the strangest sort of host, of all things living or inanimate, in the world. Like the migra- tory birds, they were seeking a warmer'clime, not, however, to refresh, but lose, their existence. Bits of the pole they had broken off from their parent source, with the cold instinct of death at their heart that they must hurry on to waste away ; and, as each day they missed something of their icy frame, and THE SEA. 139 turned uneasily with their shifting weight to and fro in the waters, they were themselves so many pro- phecies, that whatever is frosty and forbidding in the creation must melt in the mildness of equatorial airs, and the tropic floods of eternal friendship and love. Meantime, they themselves made a pretty sharp winter around us ; though, so great was the curiosi- ty to survey them, we willingly, at the early dawn, breasted the boisterous and cutting wind to gaze long at their solemn troop ; and one sea-sick invalid of our party was lifted in arms from her couch to gaze through a round window, in the side of the ship, at these new monuments of power and tokens of purity. Of all shapes and sizes, they silently swam upon their way. The Lord loves variety in all things, the crystals of the mine, the flowers of the field, the mountains of the earth, and also in what be- forehand we might think only monotonous, these cones and domes and spires and pyramids or shall they not be called chains of icy hills ? upon the sea. So the eye was drawn to examine, with ever-new surprise and delight, this manifold architecture, Egyptian, Grecian, and Roman, by turns. In the great draught of water required for their enormous and solid bulk, they are not thrown about among the billows as the largest ships are, but seem to sail on in sublime and stoic disregard, or with but at least faint respect, for wind and storm. One tremendous mass heaved its bulk not far from us, and, as it swept along, seemed a temple of God upon the deep. Its foundation sank low where, beneath the superficial 140 THE SEA. action of the fiercest waves, it could rest, without rocking, upon waters quiet as the solid granite of the land. Its tower shot up like an aspiration to the sky. Full in front of the rising sun, it swept on- ward, its steeple blazing as never upon the earth blazed marble in the light of day ; and whatever use it did its part to serve in the great economies of nature, it, at least, answered well for any thoughtful observer the purpose of worship in the ministry of the soul. Slowly southward it moved and faded by degrees away, bearing some holy thought in its shrine of material sanctity, and taking its place in memory for ever though its temporary and fugi- tive being is long since dissolved among Bethels of prayer. But, for the fond length of this description, I must atone by abstaining from further reference to the particular captivations of that beauty of the sea, which is as broad and deep as the sea itself ; which is sent forth from its surface in clouds, and makes the glories of the sky its own in reflections from be- neath ; which is full of innumerable changes, and yet ever remains essentially the same. The interest to us of the sea, as of all material objects, lies not merely in its physical characteristics, brought to the cognizance of the senses or the measurement of the understanding, but in its rela- tions which we may detect with our thoughts and feelings. Man is made to be a believing creature ; and, if he believes in any thing, he must believe in that doctrine of correspondences between the worlds THE SEA. 141 of matter and spirit which. Swedenborg was so fond of illustrating ; though perhaps Swedenborg did not discover all these correspondences, or in every case seize the true and real. But there are two kinds of people in the world, the literal or prosaic, and the spiritual. The one will judge of a thing simply as it appears ; the other will have a second sight, and add a second meaning. Ask the one, for example, what the sea is, and you will get for answer, " It is a great body of water, salt water, very deep, and covering more than two-thirds of the surface of the globe." But, by the other, this liquid mass this piece of geography with its mathematical dimensions is regarded as, beyond the uses and economies of this terrestrial planet, an instrument of education. It is possible I may fail of the sympathies of either of these classes in the doctrine I have to propound respecting the import of the sea. Frankly I own that I must speak somewhat ill of it. I have some grave charges to bring against it ; and find broad implications of a very bad sense and intention in its huge mass, rolling with such disrespectful sound and forward motion. Let who will make a grain of allowance for the disgust of a sea-sick voyager ; but, looking back now very calmly, I must present the sea as an enemy, the great adverse power. In the old Psalms it is pictured as opposed to God himself, who overcomes it. The Creator is also described as setting bounds to it at the first : " Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further ; and here shall thy proud THE SEA. waves be stayed." The sea is proud, then, and of an encroaching disposition. Yes, and it is angry too. It rages and roars in the record of Holy "Writ, as well as in our own hearing. It is a restless creature, moreover, and never has any peace ; and the wicked are compared to it, in its trouble casting up mire and dirt. It does not seem to be a Christian thing, but a heathen rather. The land is tamed and cultivated, and, even in its rudest climes, made smiling, flowery, and fruitful ; but who shall tame or tether, till or alter, the sea ? It remains in its original, everlasting wildness and raving. Standing alone, it would, I think, hardly teach a man to be any thing better than a Manichean, or believer in rival gods. If there be aught in the divine providence painfully trying and inscrutable, we say, after the sentence of ancient piety, " His way is in the sea." When all flesh had become corrupt in the sight of Heaven, there came for punishment a deluge ; or the sea was made universal. So far, indeed, does the Bible go, in its relative disesteem and disparagement of the sea, as to say that, in the next world, we are going to have no more of it. In John's vision of the heavenly coun- try, " there was no more sea." And though, in this world, it is the abode of a large part of the human family, it seems an unnatural dwelling. Man, even here, seems properly to be a land animal ; and, as he ventures on the sea, a peculiar sickness commonly seizes upon him, as though to warn him he is invad- ing an alien, unfriendly element, from whose hostile threatenings and hazards of ruin he is repelled by THE SEA. 143 incomparable and indescribable preliminary horrors. Truly, the sea is man's adverse power; though, by a principle in his nature, superior to the disgust of his body or the fear of his soul, man is called to struggle with it, to tempt all its jeopardies, to " take arms against a sea of troubles " till he turns his foe into his benefactor, and from the magazines of wrath extorts incalculable treasure. The sea, indeed, in the earlier ages of the human race, seemed something altogether against them. It hemmed them in with the strait limits of its shores ; with its combined swell and noise, it menaced and affrighted and pressed them back. In the rude vessels, which alone they were at first able to con- struct, they crept timidly, in fair weather, along the coasts ; or, if they ventured farther out, were per- haps overtaken by the tempest, and, with loss of life and property, cast away. Yet they did not give up the contest ; they did not succumb to the fury of this terrible monster, and, cowering timidly away from the borders of its huge den, own themselves beaten, the for-ever-helpless sport of its wrath and vanquished subjects of its sway. They persevered in launching upon its unstable, treacherous, irre- sistibly heaving bosom. They studied diligently what kind of structure would most securely swim amid its liquid lapse, and best enable them, in its darker moods, to grapple with the rising surge, till the experiment and toil of many centuries resulted in that crown and glory of all architecture, a perfect ship, every line of which, from the curving hull to 144 THE SEA. the tapering masts, the winds and waters taught the carpenter to shape and hew, that the almost living creature, floating strongly on the surface or bowing gracefully before the blast, might cut undaunted the breadth of the ocean, and make the very gale that howled upon her the means of her furtherance to her port. Ay, more : when thus, after all such painstaking and unwearied courage, and out of all severity and stress of the elements, was fashioned this accomplished material messenger, that, in her going to and fro, she might make endless multipli- cation of the wealth of mankind ; explore and populate barbarous countries ; build up a thousand shining cities on the harbors which are the outlets and inlets of this commerce of the globe ; transport arts, letters, and religion, to savage climes ; and unveil a new world, which the blue, boundless main had long jealously hidden in its breast, so that, under God, we might, for our country and existence in a land of liberty, be indebted to a ship. This is the weapon which has fought with > all the fury of the sea, and fetched tack immeasurable spoils of vic- tory. What, then, is the sea, which is at our very> doors, but that on whose brink our civilization is built ; out of which our forefathers, worn-out sailors, escaped to the snow and sand ; from whose assaults and foaming, our life, our riches, *our prosperity, our institutions of freedom, worship, and education, and our very humanity, have been w'ashed to the firm ground ? And the sea, which has required so much THE SEA. 145 courage to cope with itself, has it not taught man to be courageous under every kind of trial on the ocean of life ? It has taught us, that, if we yield to fear and foreboding on the voyage of our existence, we are like the sailor who should lie cowardly and darkly down in the bottom of his boat, and let her drift towards the rocks before the breeze ; or, at the first stroke of the wind or lowering of the sky, hasten back spiritless and afraid to his corner, and, with all his means and opportunities, bring nothing to pass. It has taught us, on the roughest tide of affairs, to steer calmly and bravely on through the wild commotion. The worst way a ship can behave in a gale of wind is, in the technical term of the nautical dictionary, to broach to and lose the com- mand of her rudder ; for, so placed, she is at once roughly tossed about, torn asunder, and soon sinks in the awful hollow, which is called the trough of the sea. Our self-prostration under disappointment is that dreadful hollow, that fatal trough of the sea. It sucks up how many ! God from on high, by his billows, calls on us, beneath whatever pressure of temptation or pain, to rise and stand at the helm. Beside only sin, he hates nothing as he does despair. If the pilot surrender, all is gone. What port at all can be reached ? Among all the occupations of men, there is per- haps no figure that speaks with so unmistakable emphasis of hard endeavor as the sailor. He has fought with the elements. The uneasy motion of the deep has rolled him from side to side. Many a dis- 13 146 THE SEA. mal night has gloomed down upon his sleepless eyes. Many a hurricane has fiercely blown, to bronze the hue and groove the lines in his hardened cheeks. He seems, like his vessel, as you look upon him, to be the very creation of the winds and waves, by them made hardy, and equal to all demands in his body ; as, by his own exposure and endurance, he is made sympathetic and generous too in soul. No better or readier subject for kindness and Christian care, for the salvation of the gospel and the kingdom of God, than he. Let us rejoice in all we have done for him, and be ever willing to do more ; for who has done more than he and his tribe, in all time, for the welfare of humanity, conscripts as they have been to fight our battle with the hostile sea, and bring home the spoils for our wealth, comfort, and luxury ? While missionaries go to savage re- gions, leave not him a pagan in this pagan territory of the sea ; but render back into his soul your grati- tude for his contributions to your earthly estate. But we are sailors too, bound to take from him example. Does he never fold his hands and shut his eyes in dejection, when thick mists gather around him ; nor lie patiently locked up even in the prison of polar frost ; nor flee when the icebergs in terrible glory sweep round him, or maelstroms open their yawning chasms beneath; nor retire at the menace of the clouds ; nor put about for white, ominous crests in the distance; nor suffer himself to be daunted by the whirlwinds of the tropics, or give up his reckoning for the gulf-stream, and all the THE SEA. 147 currents of the watery waste ; and, because he does not, therefore fulfils his ends, makes the world opulent with incalculable gains, and converts that which, swollen with arrogant passions, looking haughty and revengeful, seemed the enemy of God and man, into the most effectual friend and swiftest promoter of the race ? And shall navigators over this great deep of human life, towards the everlast- ing refuge, permit themselves to be stopped amid mists of doubt ; or have their heart frozen in them by the world's coldness and ingratitude ; or proceed without any plan, when no vessel, among all the millions that float, ever did so ; or postpone all progress to a calm day, when it is only the dis- tressing wind they tremble at, that can carry them on with most speed ? No : unfurl the sail, ply the oar ; and as the seaman, when all his spars and shrouds are rent away, will rig what he calls a jury- mast, and by that little help, availing himself of the breezes of heaven, still take vessel and cargo safe to their destination ; so, when the broad canvas of success in life is rent in pieces, there is still some resource. Vessels sometimes circle the whole globe before, according to the owners' large plan, they can settle the voyage. So let us be content to go. This is the language that old Ocean breathes from all his billows, and out of all his caves. Verily, as at midnight, in the driving vapor and the rocking surge, I have long paced the noble vessel's deck, and over her side, while she pitched to and fro in the middle of the Atlantic, strained my eye into the 148 THE SEA. baffling dark, and heard the heavy thump, thump, of the unrelenting sea upon her timbers, and yet marked her steady, ceaseless ongoing against the monstrous and fathomless weight, that impeded and stood against her little bulk, an image has entered my thought of the brave, heaven-trusting soul across this mysterious flood of being, making her grander way. To a now distinguished man, as he began his career, it was said, " You must not lose heart if you do not succeed at first." " Oh, sir," was the reply, " he that loses heart, loses every thing ! " But this theme must not be closed without my saying further, that it is not the boldness of the navigator which is alone to be considered, but the purpose with which, in his bark of life, he sails this tide of time. What is the object of our voyage ? Is it our own enjoyment or amusement ? Then ours, after all, is but a pleasure-boat, with a merry look, a handsome show, rendering trifling service indeed to God or man. Is it our own selfish gain and accumulation, by sharp dealing at others' expense? Then, much worse, we are but priva- teers, however assured our bearing, bent merely on plunder. He is not the only pirate who boards the weaker vessel to rob and slay on the high seas, but whoever is willing to prosper cruelly out of the woes and privations of his fellow-men ; land-pirate, we say, in no empty phrase. Those are not the only false colors which are hoisted by the slaver, or the bloody invader ; but every hypocrite, in this great voyage of human existence, sails under the same. THE SEA. 149 Do you in truth and candor accost whom you meet ? You are the honest merchantman, helping the bene- ficial communication and good understanding of all the different members of the human family. Do you spend freely for others of your substance and means, imparting more than you receive, and run- ning to the succor of those in need ? You are like the ship, in time of famine, despatched to the relief of those ready to perish. Like some national ves- sels, there are those on this ocean of time who seem to exist for the sake of delivering such as are in jeopardy ; and, alas ! f like armed and quarrelsome cruisers, there are jealous and malignant persons, who do not seem satisfied till they have attacked somebody, and given a fellow-creature pain. What- ever be our danger or distress on the flood, though like Jonah and David we have sometimes to look up to God and cry, " All thy waves and thy billows are gone over me," yet may we all, in the sublime words of the Psalmist, find " the Lord on high mightier for us than the noise of many waters ; yea, than the mighty waves of the sea." As I desire my readers, beyond the accidental direction of a journey, to trace, if they can, some intellectual method and progress in my themes, I beg leave to observe, that these essays upon the mountains, the rivers, the lakes, and the sea, are to 13* 150 BEAUTY OF THE WORLD. be regarded as particular illustrations of one general topic, the beauty of the world. What chiefly amazes the explorer, is the immense sum of that beauty. If any thing can be learned of the disposi- tion of the Creator from his doings, infinite lover of beauty he must be. What comforting persuasions, too, of the feeling, towards his living creatures, in one who is the source of material loveliness without measure or end ! No hint can I give of the multi- tude of things, entrancing me on my way, which are necessarily omitte'd in my report. I should have liked to set forth the charms, p unspeakably rich, of the Tete Noire, that took us away from Chamouni ; of our ascent, half by starlight, half by sunlight, up the splendid Val d'Aosta ; of the ride, in a strong rain, to Dalaas, over a road heaped and gullied with slides of mud and rock, while torrents were spin- ning down the mountain sides, and turbulent streams sweeping across our very track, and troops of men struggling with nature to keep the way in passable repair ; and, as our carriage rocked a little fearfully, we looked up and saw the huge clefts smoking as though they were enormous guns, just fired, in the range of whose dread artillery we still stood ; of many a -chasm, where we gazed down and beheld the watery glimmer so low, we must fain think the heart of nature not fiery, but moist ; even of the sight of hills and streams near Stirling ; or of the scores of transpicuous rivulets, up and down which we passed, because they knew the easiest descents from the hills, and therefore took all the paths and BEAUTY OF THE WORLD. 151 vehicles and men along with them after their prac- tical counsel as to the most available line in which to proceed. But these, and a thousand things besides, must be left in those octavos of the brain, never to be repre- sented in ink and paper, but holding, for the delight of a lifetime, bright and unfading pictures, which after all the trouble of getting them engraved on those inner tablets is over make the recollection of travel almost more pleasant than travelling it- self. In all this overflowing wealth of divine grandeur, one thing a pilgrim of any sensibility can scarcely fail to note, namely, the evident care of the great Author that we should not be overwhelmed with the exhibitions of his creative strength, by strewing everywhere amongst them the tokens of an enchant- ing sweetness and grace. Even amid the most ter- rible displays of his might, he seems ever taking pains to hide the power, whose full revealing would crush our souls into utter despondency and fear. He defends us from his sterner attributes with his softer, as a parent swings his infant so tenderly in his sinewy arms. He interposes, with the flowers, the grass, the moss, the dews of heaven, and the trickling rivulets, between us and the frightful, overhanging rocks. I have said that beauty is everywhere, disclosed in its grand total at every point of the creation ; but I would not underrate the special attractions of particular spots because they are made so much the 152 BEAUTY OF THE WORLD. subject of exclusive boasting and notorious exagge- ration. One cannot help feeling that the marked features of the globe were made to be seen, and even from great distances visited ; and that the select traits by which one object is discriminated from another, of the same kind, are often well worthy of our study. It is only when some single place is de- scribed as though it were the only gate to the king- dom of heaven, and the fortunate creature, who has surveyed it, clearly considers himself better and hap- pier, and more in the way of salvation, than others who have not had his opportunities to be so blessed, or when one foolishly esteems it the great event of his life to have gone to some remote region of ter- restrial space, though neither Athens nor Jerusalem appears to have altered his character a whit, that we are disposed to remind him of first principles, and assert the equality of all innocent souls, and the supremacy of simple pleasures and moral aims. An open imagination will be stored with magnificent furniture from a less circuit than sailing round the world. He, who never forsook his native fields, may, with a fine ear, detect as much sweetness in the song of the reapers as he would in the " Yogel " among Swiss mountains, or the " Yo, heave ho " of the sailors hoisting their canvas at sea. Often the very thing that transports one abroad was essentially present with him from his childhood, and would have transported him at home, had he given it any heed. It is wine that enlivens or intoxicates ; not necessarily the wine of France or Germany, but the BEAUTY OF THE WORLD. 153 juice of the vine that grows on our western hills may be used or abused just as well. So I must venture to repeat the sentiment, that every genuine quality or influence for the soul is at each man's command, and everywhere within reach. A winter- view of the cold, blue rim of the sea, from the sum- mit of my own town, thrilled my heart as much as the environing waste of limitless waters, though possibly I owed part of the delicious shock to a recent crossing of that waste, which completed for me the galvanic chain. The hills of New Hamp- shire, white, from head to foot, in January, were as spotless as the Dent d' Argent, the Monch, the Shreckhorn or Wetterhorn ; and, to the imagination, a mile or two, more or less, in height, did not make all, or the most important part of, the difference. They who are inclined to use their privileges will learn that the great Maker has been more impartial in the manifestation of his wonders than they may have supposed. " Also he hath set the world in their heart ; " and, as they turn inward, they will find it occupying the mysterious inner rooms of their being with fair forms and shows sublime for evermore. Our enjoyment or improvement from the scenes of nature, wherever we may be, depends not merely on the object seen, but very greatly, too, on the mood with which we see it. A soul dulled by familiarity, asleep in custom, or that never had its spiritual faculties waked, may be in the presence of the most enchanting or tremendous phenomena of the universe, yet remain unmoved to any pleasurable 154 BEAUTY OF THE WORLD. interest, or possibly affected only with weariness or disgust. But, where the appetite is keen, there is no table for feasting like that spread by Nature. Moreover, we partake of her bounty freely, without constraint or compunction. Sitting at the loaded board of a man who has invited us to his party, un- less his courtesy is the very noblest, we experience some uneasiness and deduction from our content. "We feel ashamed of so much cost and labor for us. But, amid the most plentiful provision of nature, we are unabashed, God can furnish it all so easily ! His and ours is the willing mind. I take no trouble to excuse myself for such sug- gestions at the close of one great division of my work. The world serves but a low purpose when it has only given gravitation to our feet, and a garden Tor our hunger. We miss its best employment, until it becomes to us also the ladder of the patri- arch, and we see angels ascending and descending. It is a poor, earthy world, exiled from the glorious fellowship of the celestial spheres, unless it connect itself with the Invisible in our minds, as it does with systems, the eye never saw, over our heads. SUPERIORITY OF ART TO NATURE. In ecstasy the human creature stands Before the world built wondrous by God's hands ; The while God's spirit, through the creature's will, Buildeth another world more wondrous still. Art is man's nature, ere the earth he trod : Man's nature is transcendent art of God. SUPERIORITY OF ART TO NATURE. THE whole intent of the present essay may move only to doubt and surprise. To most persons, probably no proposition could be a more decided paradox than that of the superiority of art to nature. Nay, not a few may consider the statement impious. " What man has added to the world, is finer than the world itself ! " they may exclaim. " The thought is blas- phemy." But why blasphemy? What is added is added by the soul, is it not? And what is the soul, but the most admirable part of God's own creation ? How, then, does it contradict the spirit of reverence, if it please him to make the soul his tool of further results nobler than the rudeness of the rocks and the clods of the valley ? Besides, it is among the Creator's first recorded commands to his children, to subdue the earth, a direction im- plying some excess or departure in nature which he would have them overrule. In substance he says to them, "I have made the world for you; but I have made it in the rough, and left it for you to 14 158 SUPERIORITY OF ART TO NATURE. finish. I have but hewn out the model, and left it for you to polish. I did not wish to give it to you unimprovable, but so that your own faculties would be unfolded in your labors to perfect it." Of course it is not meant that art is above nature in every respect. It is inferior in mechanical extent, as in exact proportions and exquisite coloring ; but it may be superior in its expression of intelligence and moral meaning. In saying this, I include now in nature only the material world. Art can make nothing so vast and splendid as the sun ; she can- not tinge her work with a hue so lovely as the rosy red that blushes at dawn through the eastern sky ; but she can put into her productions a spirituality and intellectual purpose contained in no mere terres- trial elements. Art cannot imitate that life and motion in nature which make pictures ever fresh and changing through thousand shapes and hues ; but she can seize and arrest the postures of her finest grace, presenting, not common, but beautiful, nature, and at the same time indicate designs, affections, achievements of humanity, which are the rarest glories of history and the world. When once a natural scene was praised as finer than any landscape could be in picture, a painter replied, in substance, " No : the canvas may be more precious than the clay." There would be no end to a quotation of instances exemplifying this doctrine. When Miriam is painted in triumph dancing to her timbrel, and the Red Sea angry in the distance ; or, to turn to another point an illustration of Ruskin's, when the SUPERIORITY OF ART TO NATURE. 159 building of Carthage is represented to the imagina- tion by some little boys sailing their boats of shingle ; or when the rays of the sun are gathered round the benign face of Jesus, there is not only an effect which neither land nor ocean nor the orb of day, alone or all together, can equal, but a purpose and situation for the higher intellect and the heart, which no ordinary arranging of natural elements in the outward universe suggests ; for the simple reason, that, perfect as it may be, it is in a different and lower plane of comparison. When Nature, indeed, attempts a beautiful thing, she succeeds, while the artist is apt to fail ; but the triumphs of art are the most glorious things visible in this lower scene. They are nature extended, nature ripened and consummated, nature in bloom, not the gross body of nature, but nature's more delicate members, refined senses, and rational organs. God has made the crude world first with his hands ; but this secondary world of art the flower of the first, if I may say so he has made with his spirit, by the inspirations of genius in the breasts of his children. The glory of both the worlds belongs to him. Every thing fair or good is traceable to one source alone, in the infinite beauty and holiness of his mind. It is, therefore, no insult, but a tribute, to him, to set human art above material nature. But it has not been the common idea. .So far from thinking that God gave the world to man rag- ged and precipitous, that his hands of flesh might make it soft and habitable, we have been taught that 160 SUPERIORITY OF ART TO NATURE. this very ragged and precipitous character of the earth is owing to man's sins ; that the crags and ravines, yea, also, whatever is monstrous or malicious in the brute creation, as serpents and tigers, are the injuries inflicted on the world by human depravity, man, fallen man, having touched the originally fair and spotless frame of things only to mar and pollute and inflame it. Fearful have been man's sins, and sad in the world their consequences. But to refute a doctrine of the results of human agency so sweeping, we need not summon science into the field. We need only remember that the primeval command to populate the world, in order that it might be replenished and subdued, was given, not after, but before, the fall ; nay, the serpent, that tempted Eve, and was thought to be the most malig- nant of beasts, preceded the transgression, and, of course, could not have been the consequence of it. No more were the gulfs and caverns and rifts and mountain-peaks, into which superstitious creed- makers, in verse or prose, have fancied that the world shuddered at the first iniquity; no more so because God gave the earth at the outset as some- thing to be subdued, and therefore gave it, not like a cultivated garden or an ivory ball, but wild and rank and broken. The earth injured by the fingers of man ? Nay : it has been mended and glorified. What, without those fingers, would the earth have been ? A scene of tangled overgrowth of enormous weeds, of stony desolation, of forests falling useless into their own SUPERIORITY OF ART TO NATURE. 161 decay, of a vegetation mixing its vain excess with confused rottenness, and savage creatures roaming through the prodigal waste, and turning all into a den, a lair, and a sty. What is it with those fingers, little instruments, yet busily at work from the foundation of things ? It is a cleared territory. It is a cultivated field. It is an adorned abode of a knowing and aspiring, though imperfect and faulty, race, a race, that, in comparison with its capacities of virtue and happiness, in comparison with its final destiny of more spiritual being and heavenly pro- gress, may indeed be described as wandering and lost, but yet a race, which, with all the wickedness of its offspring and all the weakness of its abortions, has ennobled the sphere it dwells in, almost beyond its own knowledge or imagination. Belonging to no sect in religion, I must, as a pilgrim, hold this to be the theology of travel. By the angel that first saw it come reeking and rocky, or inwardly swelling and flaming, from primeval chaos, the earth now, in its improvement so immense, could scarce be recog- nized. Depravity has, indeed, often blighted that improvement, and kept it back. The idle and faithless and unprofitable of its members, numerous as they may have been, have dropped by the way into their graves, little noticed. The sons of mischief, who have sought out diabolic inventions, have gained for their doings and monuments a foothold relatively small to the space which the children of worth and genius, as the servants of God, have beautified with constructions of utility, and exhibitions of splendor, 14* SUPERIORITY OF ART TO NATURE. and seeds of all wholesome and nourishing growth, for the blessing and honor of their kind. This was God's design from the beginning. And no man shall convince me that the Maker himself has wholly failed of his purpose in man's creation, that he is quite disappointed in the race of his children, and finds, after all, in the humanity he took pains to fashion and inspire, only a grand mistake, his sen- tence recorded in Holy Writ only falsified. No : sinners and rebels have abounded ; but the whole moral world has not wheeled out of its orbit. While, however, the facts will not bear out those who would teach that the human race, as a whole, has abused and spoiled the world, neither will they second the sentiment of that other class of transcen- dental philosophers and nature-worshippers, who think man's additions to the world have been slight and puny, overlaying and obscuring too, as far as they go, rather than illustrating and exalting, the original grace and grandeur of the globe. Their philosophy does not seem to be philosophy, any more than their rivals' religion seems to be religion. The additions of man to nature insignificant ! The roads into which he has cut hill and desert; the bridges with which he has spanned rivers and vales ; the keels with which he has furrowed lakes and seas ; the grains and fruitage with which he has made slopes and meadows green and flowery to the ends of the earth ; the houses for habitation, halls for justice, temples of worship, with which he has crowned bank and shore ; the cities that shine far SUPERIORITY OF ART TO NATURE. 163 by night as by day; a million interior chambers decorated with pencil and chisel, and ten million wheels and bands, weights and edges, moving and pressing, sundering and joining, to fashion the uten- sils of comfort and furtherance, with a roll that never stops, and a hum that dies not out of the air, all insignificant and poor, compared to the simple, plain face of material nature with which the process began ! Instead of hiding from sight, with our negligence and folly, behind the monstrous back of what we consider the necessarily sinful stock from which we sprang, is it not far better to be kindled by whatever example of industry has been presented by mankind ? But let us consider the testimony. One of the first and chief enterprises of men has been to make paths by which they could communicate and deal with one another; and this making of paths, has it harmed the world, which it has changed from an uneven mass of hinderances and obstructions into a succession of level floors, running by gentle ascents and declinations through easy portals into almost endless apartments, converting the vast wilderness into a magnificent dwelling ? Let me refer to, perhaps, the grandest of these passages on the globe, that of the Stelvio, being the highest practicable carriage-road in Europe, run- ning over the Tyrolese Alps at a point nearly two miles above the level of the sea. The scene which it traverses might, one would think, well take off all attention from any work of human hands. Enough 164 SUPERIORITY OF ART TO NATURE. to amaze and delight are even the entry and bare approach through deep gorges and along rocky beds, furrowed with often raging torrents, their sides ploughed with descending avalanches, across whose recent stony deposits, perhaps at the moment of your passing laced with mountain cascades, horse and vehicle must be carefully supported and led. Gazing up, you see the lofty ramparts of nature wreathed in pale or in lurid vapor, as though parks of a celestial ordnance had been opened in the recent storm ; and hostile signals still displayed, as from a fort against a coming foe. In some places the track has been swept away ; but the inhabitants have rushed forth with peaceful weapons of husbandry to shape a new line, or throw over the current a safer bridge. Looking down into the river that dashes far below, you may observe its banks guarded with fortifications of floating timber or solid walls, to keep these inland waves from ravaging some adjoining nook of cultivation or more distant field. But, for- ward, you behold the path, like a living creature, climbing undaunted still, scaling the steep, or, where the rise is too sudden, traversing from side to side, as a vessel tacks to make headway against the wind, till, as it steadily gains upon the monstrous bulk of the upheaved earth, the sharp peaks and oval sum- mits of the upper air, white as Purity's own form, begin to peer down upon your vision. But, right up, in the face of unmelting frosts and eternal snows, glides your road so smoothly, that your pace is with- out a break or jar. And now, your eye, reaching SUPERIORITY OF ART TO NATURE. 165 on, catches sight of its farther, higher progress on the main, central elevation you are to surmount. It shines zigzag afar, like the teeth of an enormous saw, that, from underneath, has cleft the hills. It hangs still farther beyond for miles up and down the awful brow, thinned by distance, as though a spider's web were spun from point to point to glimmer in the beams of heaven, or the everlasting rocks were sharpened to a cimeter's edge along the front of every beetling precipice with which the countenance of the giant of the range is seamed. But forth you fare, and find the airy thread continually becoming your convenient path. Terraced on foundations swelling at the base to resist the sap of the ele- ments, and the crush of falling matter from above ; roofed in some places where the slides are wont sud- denly to come, that the mighty weight of ice and earth may shoot, possibly over the very head of the passenger, into the tremendous vale below ; boring its way through the stubborn rock, out of whose fis- sures the stalactites drip ; winding by the feet of glaciers and beside banks of midsummer snow ; standing a moment on the top to command the glorious view ; and then plunging, the traveller with it, in the same absolute security, down the awful transalpine gullies, from whose bottom he looks back in astonishment to see where he has descended without terror, his wonder not ceasing till, by the bright streams and clear skies and soft verdure, and perhaps rare fruits, of Italy, he is taken into an embrace as mild as the elemental 166 SUPERIORITY OF ART TO NATURE. grasp before has threatened to be severe and dread- ful. Nature or art, which is the superior ? They are here brought face to face into direct comparison. Infinite indeed is the beauty, terrible the splendor, of the natural scene. Walking alone, away from my companions, in that silence of solitary nature so impressive when undisturbed by the sound of voices or the rattle of wheels ; mounting angle after angle, and sitting on the ragged stones or hanging on the sharp declivities ; I made my temple in the immense chamber, with columns of primeval granite, from whose snowy capitals, in a carving with which no marble could vie, shone down upon my fancy the very holiness of God. But, great as was the natural- scene, the work of art, girdling the mountain-chain, was an unspeakable enhancing of its charms. The tide of human life, pouring through from kingdom to kingdom, was grander than the waterfalls, foaming from the spot- less snows through the dark ravines. What was built by man was finer than the earth it was built upon ; for it was, even according to Holy Writ, the earth replenished and subdued ; and I felt that the eye of God rested with more pleasure on the finished work than on the first roughness, because approving his children for their obedience to the original command ; nay, yet more let me say, be- cause glad in himself to see his own instrument and tool of the human soul, with all its keen faculties and strong forces, in his handling accomplishing the SUPERIORITY OF ART TO NATURE. 167 ends for which it was by him fashioned and designed, and, for the perfection of its doings, only wanting, in its rest from its labors, as God rested at the begin- ning, to give him all the glory. And man only the architect of ruin in this world, his greatness seen, as it has been said, in the ruin he makes ? Man, by his sin, the destroyer of the earth, breaking it into precipices and gulfs ? Nay, man is the mender of the world, repairing it from the pre- cipices and gulfs into which, by the Creator, it has been broken, for the very purpose of calling forth his creature's abilities and virtues to restore and complete it. Speaking simply in illustration of a point which I might set forth in many pictures, let me briefly refer to a pass of a character quite differ- ent from the Stelvio, that of the Finstermiinz. It is a frightful hollow, running down as near to the gate of hell as its glittering summits rise on either hand towards the door of heaven. The ebony and ivory gates of the heathen poets are equally in sight. Our road passed midway between the broad curve above, and the profound sweep below. Like insects, we clung to the wall, while we gazed at once into the depth of heaven and the bowels of the earth. If the upward passes are sublime, such a comparatively downward one is tremendous. In the gulf, round which the mountains tower, the huge masses and enormous features of matter are brought more fear- fully near than they can be in any other situation. You feel as within the walls of a huge natural build- ing in which the beams are the strata of the earth; 168 SUPERIORITY OF ART TO NATURE. or, rather, the space you occupy resembles the hold of a ship, a little less regular, indeed, than that seen from the mountain at the Notch of the White Hills, yet cut with a stroke far grander. But, from all its savage magnificence, one spectacle succeeded in tak- ing off my eye. It was that of a troop of laborers, who, betwixt us and the heights overhead, were turning the overhanging bluffs into a new causeway that should divide the pit and the celestial peak. How delicately its beautiful arches were springing over every sharp descent, while the refuse rocks and gravel were rolling from the hands and tools of the workmen down the steep ! The fine leaps of those bridges, spanning streams and gulfs, were not like the leapings of the mountain-goat, now here and now away, but wrought into permanent stone, that the traveller might neither leap nor stumble. We were among the last who should traverse the Finster- miinz by the harder, though wilder, path below ; but we were only a handful of the millions of pilgrims who, in the long courses of ages, shall have their astonishment there diverted from the .dreadful gashes of nature to the graceful victories of art. I have given but one or two pictures out of a score in my memory no less striking. Had I space, I should not fear to proceed in this parallel of art with nature throughout, and show, with illustration after illustration, that the cultured field is more beautiful than the primitive plain ; the builded and finely proportioned house, than the timber or the tree ; the vineyards, than the hills along the banks SUPERIORITY OF ART TO NATURE. 169 of the Rhine or the Danube ; the tower and castle, than the vantage-ground on which they are reared ; the mine, channelling through the mountain's core, and opening the secret treasures of nature to sparkle in the light of the explorer's lamp, than its lofty and fruitless, though sunlit, top; the mechanical con- trivance, than the wood or ore ; the electric wire, that runs, a sudden publisher, amid soaring Alpine crags, than the huge needles of rock by which it is surrounded, or the stray lightning that shivers their points, all these achievements of man, as we call them, being but, by man's employment and subordi- nate agency, the matured workmanship and fulfilled glory of God. Yes, this was most startling and admirable, in the lonely wayfaring along dim heights, to see the faithful telegraph stretch through galleries of rock by my side ; or, having clambered with fear after a prospect near the top of some well-nigh inac- cessible and seldom-ascended mountain, to observe the thin but fertile soil in every crevice, defended with walls for the grape to grow purple in the southern sun, in a long stairway of gardens even to the plains ; or, when winning some post of observa- tion, whose frost-bitten height would endure no cul- ture, in some watchman's little shed to be dazzled with gems wrung from the mountain's heart or shaggy flank, and wrought to throw back the light of heaven purer than could its far-reaching head. Ah ! even in trifles the art of man is more curious and astounding than that nature which is but the block he cuts. No : it is not the world that most 15 170 SUPERIORITY OF ART TO NATURE. amazes or delights ; but what this tender-skinned creature, this slightly-figured inhabitant, with his animal form and his immortal spirit, has done to it, to replenish and subdue it. I am necessarily confined to a mere poverty of most briefly described instances. But take, if you will, the ocean itself, as one of the confessedly sub- limest wonders of the creation. When one considers its width and depth, its billowy motion under the winds into the clouds, its incalculable duration, in ages that no arithmetic can cqmpute, rocking from side to side, to submerge, now one continent, and now another, or thrusting up volcanic islands as can- dles out of its profound abyss to flame along its level floor, it becomes a phenomenon of entrancing in- terest. And when, setting sail from the shore, one tempts for himself its heavy swell or swift-rising crest, and learns by experience that in the most balmy season nobody knows what it will do, how speedily and terribly its features may change, he must fain choose it, in his adorations, as one of the most expressive embodiments and .emblems of Al- mighty Power. But what is this little floating work of art, moving across the ocean's breadth, with even stroke, like a swimmer's, casting aside the irregular dash of the waves, with interior revolution propel- ling its own weight, independent of calm or gal^e, heedless of night or day ? What is it ? A house, not built on a rock, but on the treacherous water, that slips every moment from beneath ; a school of science, with almost numberless discoveries in daily SUPERIORITY OF ART TO NATURE. 171 practice ; an inn, not as yonder in the splendid city's square, but in a wilderness of waves, so vast that all the ten million sails by which it is specked could be at once upon it placed out of each other's sight ; a domestic society of families, meeting in the humane courtesy of all nations from the ends of the earth ; a governmental polity, wherein law and order hold with freedom even balance ; a board of bounty, to which sea and land, field and garden, tropic and temperate climes, yield supplies ; and, lastly, a church of God, through whose windows, on holy- day, ah ! I well remember it, gushes out the sound of sacred anthems to soften the screaming winds, and catch the listening ear with grandeur beyond the elemental roar. Ah ! the child wonders at every thing before he wonders at the greatest of marvels in himself; and the sailor may think his ship an inconsiderable thing amid the surrounding fury of the tempest. But the reflecting mind will have its attention more spell-bound with that small mote, rising and sinking in the surge, than with the enormous waste which it so surely circles. In this great ocean is an island. Before the reign of human art began, it was a worthless tract, fought for by savage tribes, that roamed over its damp and unproductive soil. Into what, by art, has that nature been transformed ? If I call it a jewel of the earth, the splendor of whose gloss transcends the value of the original stone ; if I call it a jar, charged with fearful thunders to shake the bulk of the globe ; if I call it a house, many-mansioned, with lines arch- 172 SUPERIORITY OF ART TO NATURE. ing over hill and vale, to shelter and feed increasing myriads of men ; if I call it a machine, lifting from under its own foundations material and fuel for work, with which it fashions almost every thing needed for the comfort and furtherance of a civil- ized race ; if I call it a garden, in which scarce a weed or barren spot is suffered to exist ; if I call it a harbor for ships, a court of law, a temple of religion ; if I call it the first cradle in which our own infancy was somewhat rudely, though not to us disadvantageously, rocked : and then allow you to make what exceptions in it of wrong and misery you will to the general description, in which of these types would you recognize the ENoland, our mother England, that has, by the astonishing vir- tue of human art, taken the place of that rock- bound, storm-smitten, savagely possessed desert of old? Yes, art is superior to, or an advance upon, nature. There are arts of mischief, I know ; but they are only as the pick-lock of the thief, the stamp of the forger, the blade of the murderer, ^ inferior excep- tions to the measureless blessing of the arts of peace. Glory to God, who requires man to replenish the earth and subdue it ! Private villany cannot match the wide beneficence of man's use and application of nature's laws, to transfigure Nature herself. Even the passionate conflicts of warring nations, present- ing still so horrible a spectacle of proud and poli- tic but unmeasured bloodshed, must subside before the march of growing industry, as conflicts in the SUPERIORITY OF ART TO NATURE. 173 elements are said to become more rare with the clear- ing up and cultivation of the ground ; till the sword shall be left to serve but as the emblem of justice and instrument of occasional vengeance, and the fort everywhere become, what in many places it already is, a sleeping guard, whom no inroads arouse. After all, it is but the lesser workings of art to which I have, as yet, referred. Its nobler service is yet to be described. But though mechanical achievements, the lowest grade of the efforts of art, have here occupied us, even they suffice to establish my proposition. And these achievements, already wondrous as they are, so far from being concluded, are but begun. When the cable, to hold the tele- graphic wire, on that remarkable steppe, about two miles below the surface of the water, shall run across the ocean, and the two hemispheres shall be bound together by a flash of lightning in a moment of time, and reports of all the doings of civilized man shall flow in a current as regular as the revolution of the globe, and fifty thousand times as fast, we may admit it to be a phenomenon more marvellous than mountains or rivers or lakes or seas. If, in fine, there be any one to style this account of the superiority of human art to material nature a piece of self-glorifying and dangerous praise of man- kind, I reply, first, that there is in it no absolute credit to man at all, but only to Him who ordained it, and gave the means and powers for it, and whose mere agent man is in carrying it on ; nay, whose prediction, from the foundation of the world, man 15* 174 SUPERIORITY OF ART TO NATURE. \ but brings to pass in every step of it. I reply, next, that the achievements of humanity, so far from being an honor, are only a reproach to any of its past or present members, who, by reason of sloth, have failed to increase, or by malignity of wickedness have only reduced, them. And I reply, lastly, that, the greater this glory which I have celebrated, the more notorious and overwhelming the shame of every individual who has not brightened it into new lustre, in some way of his art and duty, by contribu- ting his particular share to the improvement of the world. The hopeless feeling with which one undertakes to describe Nature, or reads his own description, is only aggravated in regard to any account he may give of the trophies of Art. He finds he cannot tell what is in her first chamber and on her lowest shelf. How I am afflicted by the poverty of what I have said, as, at the moment of tracing these characters, there rush back upon me at first in a splendid con- fusion, in the halls of fancy, which I have no time to analyze, and which it would take folios to record the contents of a hundred museums, displaying those victories over matter, so much nobler than of man over his brother man ! I try to single out, as within the range of my present aim, the meanest de- partment in this register of spiritual conquests ; and I am at once overwhelmed with a multitude of shin- ing objects that come upon the mind, as upon the conspiring woman came the soldiers' shields in the Roman story. Such an accumulation, for instance, SUPERIORITY OF ART TO NATURE. 175 as that in the Green Vault, of the Saxon princes in Dresden, which probably exceeds every similar one in the world, would reward the virtuoso's years of study, and can be only slightly comprehended, far less explained to others, by the passing visitor. He can afford but a glance of his eye for the diamond and onyx and pearl and opal, of untold value, set in a workmanship of cunning, never perhaps to be equalled again. As he passes through the glittering succession of chambers, with inward amazement he exclaims, How the treasures of Nature have been rifled and magnified! How her elements have been refined and raised to new powers! Or how she herself, at the bidding of man and the moving of his finger, has sent the representatives of her finest materials, the very glory and flower of her con- stituency, from all the widths of her domain, and depths of her bosom, to please the sight and instruct the heart of her proudest tenant ! Transparent crys- tals and gems, white and red and yellow and blue, as it were a solid rainbow from the rocky mines ; iron and steel and stone, as though they not only danced after some Apollo's harp, but exalted them- selves into nobler shapes, and divided themselves into figures of grace, as the music of thought fell on their dull ears ; ivory and every precious wood, carved into such proportions and expressions, as if their final cause had not been to play any part in animal or vegetable life, but to be channels for com- municating intelligence and feeling between crea- tures of a spiritual and immortal being ; the precious 176 SUPERIORITY OF ART TO NATURE. metals, with imagination's forgery transformed into a currency of grace and beauty, more precious to the heart, more enriching the soul, than all the cir- culations of trade ; the housings and accoutrements, lances and spears, of war, so finely fashioned and richly adorned, as if, after all, they had not been meant for the bloody ends of actual battle, but to be the instruments of delight rather than destruction, and to blaze for admiration instead of being crusted with gore ; and nobler things than all these, flowing into the higher circles of art, which I have not yet, in my narrative, presumed to enter, in crucifixes in bronze, and paintings of sacred story in enamel, this hint, in a scanty enumeration of cold sentences, may barely suggest the wealth of such a collec- tion. Shall I go from Dresden to Munich, and draw out, in poor words, the lustrous array of specimens made by royal patronage, till the genius of classic and that of romantic schools and eras seem in close embrace together ; and one, wandering, as in a trance, through chamber after chamber, and building after building, finds himself questioning whether he has not, in praising former exhibitions, misplaced the wonder of the world, and really discovered it for the first time now ; the capacity of the mind is so limited, or its attention so exhaustible, that one set of objects crowds out another, and even the faculty of judg- ment is, for the time, lost ? Or shall we, to see how gorgeously art can dispose the means furnished by nature, stand in Paris among the Gobelin tapestries, SUPERIORITY OF ART TO NATURE. 177 and marvel at landscapes and social scenes, in silk, from the loom, as fresh, and lively as ever dropped from the pencil ? Or shall we peruse the painted porcelains at Sevres, where the old masters are copied so accurately., for the delectation of princes, that, if they were to come back from the dead, they could hardly decide which was their own work, that dim with age upon the canvas, or that so brightly flashing from the burnt clay ? But questions or statements on this subject are alike vain. One cannot travel far in this sphere of art without feeling that it verily is another creation added to the first; put forth by human faculties, within and around the gross material planet, to rival its finer parts and products ; provided for by the inspiration of the Almighty, and so redounding altogether to his glory, while he intends by it to educate his intellectual creature, and lift him up to himself. TESTIMONY OF ART TO RELIGION. Art, how thy finer glories rise Beyond all scope of space or size ! Creation to thy finger bends, To cunning mastery condescends. Yet thou obeisance too dost own, Taking from hand unseen thy crown ; Reigning in light, with noiseless word A shining witness of the Lord. TESTIMONY OF ART TO RELIGION. I HAVE already adduced illustrations of the power of art to bring the ends of the earth together with roads ; to turn the sea from a gulf of separation into a bond of union with ships ; to convert the rank or barren soil into wholesome fertility with culture ; and to promote social intercourse, multiply riches, and add to every kind of comfort with numberless inventions.. But, in the nobler service of religion, art seems to feel herself peculiarly interested and honored, breathes a loftier inspiration, bends to her task with a purer zeal, and produces her most endur- ing masterpieces. She scatters her other manifold achievements as a prince strewing gifts among the needy children of men ; but she tenders her sacred labors with a bowed and worshipping head to the decoration of Zion, and the acceptance of the Lord. She leads mankind to that shrine of their Maker which she has beautified for their blessed captivity. In that deliberation or argument which a man holds with himself, whether he will be religious or not, he 16 TESTIMONY OF ART TO RELIGION. * must meet this plea, not only of human instincts or wants, and of holy books or Scriptures, but also of the most constraining and magnificent accomplish- ments of art. If I may be pardoned the appearance of egotism in such a piece of autobiography, I would say, that, having spent the substance of my studious life as a reader and a thinker, a different mode of mental occupation lately presented this plea of art with especial force. During my long journey, I closed all the volumes of human learning, every printed page of genius, in logic or poetry or eloquence, save only to peruse my morning or evening chapter in the Bible. Intense active engagements and per- petual motion required me also to let slip the mul- tifarious threads which my busy thoughts had for many years been spinning to their various likely conclusions. My whole weaving establishment of speculation was closed. No new patterns of schemes or theories for the whole season were introduced. Nothing issued from that purely internal source, from which both a very active brain sends out its fancies, and the spider draws its web. Nor did I care to have any thing to do with the intellectual spinning and weaving of other people. Books, from having been for many years my longing and delight, when I could be excused from other toils to drink in their instruction and refreshment, came to look , unattractive, almost repulsive, to my mind. Shak- speare and Milton themselves lay unheeded, their spell, for the time, broken ; and when, towards the TESTIMONY OF ART TO RELIGION. 183 end of this period, I opened, in a brother-student's library, the leaves of the journals stating the fresh facts and recent reflections with which the minds of men were occupied, the eyes, so long disused from published matter, were dazed, and quivered ; the head refused to follow the train of phrases and sentences, and turned in disgust away. Yet, during all this time, may I presume to declare, I had been a reader and thinker nevertheless ? I had read objects, and not words. I had read the solid things around me, and not descriptions in verse and prose. I had been perusing the substantial memorials, stamped on the face of nature, of human action, aspiration, or suffer- ing, and not the second-hand story, or the tenth- repeated commemoration thereof, by compilers of the pen. From this method of reading the big volume of the world, whose covers are continents, whose binding is the chain of hills and seas, whose clauses are ancient buildings, and its alphabet gold and silver and brass and stone, I have come to affirm that the great and glorious passages in that volume are of religion; that the letters, which art has stamped for the Divinity in this huge folio of the earth, are the most shining and enduring letters in its compass. The monuments of religious faith are the noblest of all monuments reared by the hand of man. It is not with any obsolete import, but only increased emphasis, that one may repeat David's old exulting invitation, to walk about Zion, and go round about her. Ah ! one could walk about that Zion of the holy city of Jerusalem which he intended, and 184 TESTIMONY OF ART TO RELIGION. go round about her bulwarks and towers and palaces, in a brief day's journey. But what feet shall obey the royal poet's injunction now, when the Zion that we mean is no single town, with its soaring temple and fortified wall, and no collection even of Jewish tribes into a province of the haughty empress of the world ; but when its defences and decorations have stretched beyond measure and number ; when its inhabitants are the foremost communities, its ram- parts the chief kingdoms, and its shrines the archi- tectural glories of the globe ? The builder of Zion is Art. Valuable, and now well-nigh indispensable, are the other contributions of art to the furtherance and the finest civilization of mankind. But her splendid indorsement of re- ligion is the most conspicuous specimen of her handwriting ; and, while it is to earthly creatures a precious confirmation of the rights of her elder sis- ter, it is, moreover, the most lasting token of her own fame. Why should it not be so ? If so much cun- ning device and masterly execution can go into a path, a mill, a tool, a vessel, matters of pure outward utility, why should not that worship of the Most High, which is the transcendent emotion of the hu- man heart, lift its standards with an exceeding lustre and eminence proportioned to its own superiority? If the lower efforts and comparatively mean exhibi- tions of this strange and marvellous faculty of art be not useless and vain ; if to some real purpose, for man's welfare, wheels and bands have been adjusted, channels dug, and lines of communication run, and TESTIMONY OF ART TO RELIGION. 185 there be a valuable consideration of personal and social benefit returned for this outlay of effort and means, shall it be nothing but a failure, a waste, and a defeat, when Art takes a higher flight, and throws herself into her grander endeavors, to build and adorn shrines of homage to the living God ? Shall the sacrifices brought by the spirit of beauty be a despised and worthless offering, while those of earthly economy are acceptable, and counted for great gain ? No, calculating, critical, sceptical, or close- handed man ! The toil and money expended for the house and altar of God are not utterly lost and cast away on unproductive enterprise or an empty super- stition. The alabaster box that held the precious oint- ment, wrought by cunning Hebrew artificer as it might have been, was never so beautiful as when it was broken on the feet of Jesus ; and both art and religion, the two deepest energies of the human soul, conspire to defend the temple and the gold of the temple which they have together reared and wrought, as a befitting gift in token of man's fealty to the Author of his days. So let me continue my illustrations with some image of those cathedrals which make a principal at- traction of Europe. I shall not minutely describe any particular edifice ; but try, in a single resem- blance, if I can, to give an idea of the whole class. One of the surprises and delights abroad, to an ignorant or inexperienced traveller from the interior of our country, where the landscape is spotted with the white little meeting-houses of a Protestant and 16* 186 TESTIMONY OF ART TO RELIGION. doctrinally divided population, must be some vast and ancient sanctuary, in solitary dignity, soaring from the centre of a town to the skies. Perhaps he learns, to the confounding of all his sharp calcula- tions at home, that a whole marble quarry has, by some rich nobleman, been bequeathed for its con- struction, and there stands, as in the Duomo at Milan, transformed into a huge, many-sided crystal, polished with manifold cuttings against the light of the sun. Elsewhere he may see the tall structure rising in stone, of a ruddy tinge, as though the cold, hard material blushed its graceful and delicate tribute to the Most High. Again the gray, primeval granite towers from the lowest bed of the earth, the very heart of the globe ascending and refining its rude and rocky awkwardness into airy alcoves and columns, to signify its adoration. As you walk inside, you see the ample space garnished with pillars, the con- gregated shafts of a single one of which, looking like a sheaf of grain to the sight, may occupy as much room as sometimes, among us, does an entire hall of assembly. Mounting to the roof, you marvel at a carving of ornament, so extensive and multitu- dinous as to include more labor than the saw and hammer, in a new country, have done in rearing an entire village. The eye, lifting its glance higher up the turrets, or passing out along the projections from the eaves, notes thousands of statues, so it is liter- ally at Milan, hanging forth their finished sculp- ture in mid-heaven, over the sides and summits of one edifice which art has presented to religion, and religion to God. TESTIMONY OF ART TO RELIGION. 187 Look, with such imagination as these poor words may be able to awaken, at some masterpiece of this pious architecture. You will perceive intuitively that there is, in certain magnitudes and relations of parts, an intrinsic charm; and it is by the perfect and faultless form of what you are gazing at that your attention is first won and entranced. That spire, shooting with its various openings and succes- sive diminutions far into the sky, through all its curves, in all its angles, and along the whole of its fine taper, has certainly the very gradations of a heavenly harmony, a harmony which all the arts aspire after, expressed, now in tones, now in colors, and now in forms, but ever the same heavenly harmony ; and the soul reaches the temple's top, as it were but to leap or fly into the upper habi- tation, leaving the body behind. That swelling dome in its shape rivals even the blue sky above it. Is it not the lofty arch itself, painted small by the sun, itself in tjiese days a painter, that at once reveals both ? Those uncounted pinnacles, each with its wavy surface and line straight up, are as so many flames of fire fixed in and feeding upon the atmo- sphere which they penetrate with an unquenchable ardor from the human breast. What a picture, that will not let you go, but holds you with its immense glitter, enchants by its play of light and shade with the rolling sun and level earth, these three to- gether, from morning to night, draws you to point after point for a new observation, sends you off for a view more complete, and then pulls you back for one 188 TESTIMONY OF ART TO RELIGION. more distinct, till your body is tired out with the very fascination of your soul ! Not in a day or a year is such a work accom- plished ; but age after age the grand cathedral, uncompleted, is yet carried on, as though the heart of the world labored with it for ever. It grows from its roots in the faith of mankind. A tree longer in blooming than even the celebrated century plant in the garden, it opens into leaf after leaf its un- fading flower. In the long process of its perfection, it links together generations, and perhaps diverse peoples, and monarchs that have tended it, till it takes on itself the character of an offering to its Creator from the human race. The workman, that now walks with his mallet or graver on its sublime eaves, but follows upon the work of predecessors whose bones are long since resolved into the mould of their mother-earth; and upon his strokes will come the hands of others, at this task of time, after his bones shall have likewise crumbled. Ygu pace over the steps, that are firm as the very ground, to every part of this princely crown of all buildings, which stretches with twofold direction, back into the past, and forth into the future, and you seem to be meeting, as on a common platform, with the sons and daughters of men, whose flowing lives mingle to make the tide of history. You feel that you are taking the adoring anthem from the lips of some, and sounding it on to the lips of others ; or, standing, as you grow still with meditation, you appear to be leaning on the staff of the Almighty, by the vene- TESTIMONY OF ART TO RELIGION. 189 rable banner of God that floats in the breezes of eternity. As from some point, like the tower at Strasburg, well-nigh level with the top of the grand pyramid in Egypt, your perpendicular gaze reaches the street, well indeed might you believe yourself removed from the stirring and tumultuous scenes of life, whose insect shapes glide in ghostly phantasms below, but the roar of whose ceaseless business can- not attain to your ear. Yet the great cathedral evidently belongs to this world, as well as to the world of spirits, to span and bridge over the inter- val, to earthly-minded men so impassable, between the two. It is the offspring of the human mind, and the nature of things ; it is the fineness and ex- tract of nature, the beautiful essence of this fair and orderly world, as though the great trunk of the globe had necessarily unfolded into blossom; for, as you look, you are persuaded that the conception of it was inevitable, the first germination a thing of course, in the revering heart and fertile genius of man; and that, the moment it was conceived, the execution was unavoidable no less, the result follow- ing upon the thought by a law, let me repeat not profanely, as when God said at the creation, "Let there be light, and there was light." But the worshipper in this wondrous ark for the soul looks upon the superficial structure as but the shell and container of realities infinitely more dear. Within are the altar and holy place and blessed host and divine service, with song and prayer and sacrifice. Within are the chapels inscribed, by pa- 190 TESTIMONY OF ART TO RELIGION. tient art, with the marvellous and benign incidents of the Christian faith. Within are the niches filled with the vivid sculptures and delineations of holy men and martyrs, from the apostles down, and the Captain of their salvation at the head of all. Within, along the aisles, by the low basement, or in sacred crypts underneath, sometimes more spacious than our upper sanctuaries, are the tombs of kings and heroes and saints. Within, the walls are hung with paintings representing whatever is most grand and touching in Christian annals, crowned by the birth and crucifixion and resurrection of the Lord. If one did not know the facts, it might appear like practising on his credulity to tell him, that churches, not alone in the great cities of the continent, but in the lesser towns, display an expenditure in canvas and statuary exceeding the bestowments upon most of the costlier temples in the capitals of our land. The spirit of religion is, indeed, not to be measured by the size and splendor of cathedrals ; but by many things beside, more important. But we cannot help regarding such a holy place as the hand of art brings, for one of the best of its doings, to the em- brace of piety, among the striking proofs that man was made to pay his devotions, through the chief of his accomplishments, to the first Builder of the world. If the other triumphs of art, for our con- venience or luxury, have in them an intent and profit, these most of all. With no senseless de- sign has the temple been made to soar above the warehouse, making the summit of the city, adorned TESTIMONY OF ART TO RELIGION. 191 with beauty beyond the mill and factory, consecrated with insignia more precious than those in the courts and offices of human law, and lined with aisles, in marble and costly wood, more richly wrought than the porches of houses and the paths of the hills. It is a true symbol that should rouse the sentiment to which it refers ; for if the blood thrills, and the nerves tingle, in admiration of what man has done on earth for his own improvement, shall not a signi- ficance be acknowledged in what he has done to show forth a direct loyalty to God ? Yea, there is meaning in this too. The spire does not point to a region towards which we may not travel. The dome does not emulate a heaven in which we may not dwell. The swelling roof, as it rings back the chanted hymn from its indescribably rich tracery of stone, beside whose long stability the life of man passes like a shadow, is itself but the dim figure and little reflection of a ceiling that echoes loftier anthems in everlasting duration. But I must proceed, though with some hesitancy and sense of unfitness, to make my perhaps rude copy of some of the testimonies to religion more finely recorded by the painter's pencil. The glories of religious architecture, which from the hand of genius have marked and figured the earth, are strik- ing proofs of the soul's faith. But perhaps we find witnesses more persuasive in an outward compass vastly inferior. Sometimes a picture, occupying but a few feet of canvas, being, mechanically considered, a mere colored surface, is charged with a power ex- 198 TESTIMONY OF ART TO RELIGION. celling that of the most massive constructions, out- shining all tha widest grandeurs of human wealth and enterprise, and overflowing with an influence which surmounting belfry and steeple cannot convey to the soul. If any one ask whether this be all which the chief of the fine arts has to say, simply to tell us what good and excellent things are Chris- tian faith, love, and piety, I must answer, of course, that though this is not the only object or exercise or wonderful accomplishment of art, yet that moral beauty is its great inspiration. Instead of attempting, however, to elucidate this from any abstract account of the subjects chosen for the brush, let me try to introduce my readers into a continental gallery. The halls to which we are ac- customed afford, indeed, but little idea of the ample spaces, in magnificent structures, devoted in Europe to the reception and preservation of the treasures bestowed century after century by the hand of genius. It might consume an hour to compass the exterior of one of these edifices in your walk ; and the strength of a day would scarce suffice barely to pace along the walls and through all the windings of the interior, granting the hasty glance of a moment at each picture, perhaps wholly overlooking count- less etchings, engravings, pieces of statuary, mould- ings and carvings in gold, silver, and ivory, the modellings of towns and ships, the memorials of national history, or relics of great personages, con- tained in the same vast building, the study of which would furnish occupation for years. For the picto- TESTIMONY OF ART TO RELIGION. 193 rial exhibition alone, you must glide quickly over the waxed floor, and let your eye run along the painted surface which has been traced by a thousand cunning fingers, and gloriously stained as with the life-blood of a thousand hearts. You are but one of a great multitude of gazers, who from all parts of the world, like pilgrims to a shrine, have flocked to such a splendid temple of art, open like a sanctuary, the glories of art, like those of nature, being, abroad, com- monly free to all beholders without money and with- out price ; though no calculator could easily estimate the immense cost of what is thus so freely displayed. Accumulations of ages, contributions of nations, gra- tuities of kings and princes, offerings by a more than royal power to outlive many dynasties, with additions of modern treasure to ancient stores, these col- lections of generations, to whose long march our national existence is like infancy to threescore and ten, are all placed in order as for an everlasting show, which revolutions and governmental changes respect, though blood runs through the streets ; while the river of life, of which you make but a drop, flows on through the suite of spacious rooms, as in one of its permanent channels, and quiets its waves, and cleanses its current with the beauty, as it flows. Well indeed is it when the character of purity is given to the enjoyment of a people ; well when the seekers of pleasure can be won to such delights ; well when we shall have them in our country to offer. But what are the, figures that thus rapid and ghost- 17 194 TESTIMONY OF ART TO RELIGION. like pass by you as you move, or from which, you select here and there one to contemplate with espe- cial regard ? Truly, they are very various. They are not all serious themes, not all texts for a sermon, not all celebrations of love and prayer and virtue, and whatever is best and holiest in the human heart. They are, of course, representations of human life and action, in every great direction in which the human soul goes forth. So be it ! Religion is not the only interest of man. It would be partial and false to say so. There are other things in the world deserving attention beside even the sublimities of spiritual affection and worship. They are legiti- mately in the world, as God meant they should be ; and therefore legitimately represented in art. But it is worthy of note, that the purely base and wicked things in the world, which God abhors, are seldom or never chosen by art for its topics. They are as unfit to be reproduced as they are ever to exist. Art, therefore, in her plans and labors, is essentially pure and lofty. One can hardly be in her palaces without a feeling of sanctity. As you survey the masterpieces, arranged in her apartments for the as- tonishment, delight, and instruction of mankind, though you will often see the evil and the good in conflict, you will rarely find any thing merely cor- rupt or offensive in its effects. Looking at good pictures is, accordingly, an informing and elevating study for the soul. Study, I call it ; for, delightful as is the spectacle, that it truly exercises the mind and soul is evident to any one who will observe that by nothing is he sooner fatigued. TESTIMONY OF ART TO RELIGION. 195 As everybody is more or less conversant with pictures, scarce a room we enter being so mean as not to have something more than the bare work of the saw and the hammer, some engraving at least suspended, as all read a little in the great volume of art, let us be glad that they read a refined and wholesome language. The picture-language, which, in rude and savage periods, is used before this won- derful instrument of arbitrary characters has been well formed, consisting of coarse drawings of the several objects and positions to be indicated, may be considered as reaching its perfection in the magnificence of form and coloring that constitutes the very wainscot, and crowds up into the ceiling of these marvellous courts, through which you are tak- ing your journey. Truly, the picture-language has, in some respects, the advantage over that constructed into books out of the grammar of conventional signs, especially a moral advantage ; for, while many of the volumes from the press are essentially filthy, clean as they may look to the eye, and many of its diurnal sheets are false in fact, plausibly as their story may be told, Art very seldom is so shameless as to choose pollution for the subject she shall hold forth, and commonly, in her most brilliant hues, tells the truth. In that finer world of art, then, which, like one globe you may have seen curiously wrought under another, has been fashioned within this comparatively coarse, outer world of matter, what are the scenes presented ? In the very heart of a great metropolis, 196 TESTIMONY OF ART TO RELIGION. escaped from the roar of the pavement and the dust of the street, treading in this charmed circle of the halls of art, you shall, perhaps, suddenly light upon some sweet landscape, with the green grass and purling brooks and waving trees and sunlit hills, found, as it were, in a moment's search, without any long excursion, as though the citizen had his holy revenge for being shut up and excluded from the sight of nature amid tiers of brick and stone, in this present of a speaking likeness of Nature herself, made lively by touches of imagination out of the finest recollections of the artist, and clothed with a charm beyond the ordinary situations that could be commanded on the face of the earth itself. What a device and discovery of enjoyment and improve- ment ! The rain may pour, the snow may fall, or the tempest blow without ; but, within, you are en- tranced with visions of light, serenity, and verdure, that bring back pleasant spots in your actual pilgrim- age, remind you of other days, or transport you, as by the waving of a wand, to the place where you were born. The din and drive of human traffic and toil go on a few rods from where you stand ; but your soul is surrounded and absorbed, as in a mirror, by the fair and peaceful works of God, which, unlike human inventors and makers, he has forbidden no- body to copy. You take one step, and this magic theatre of art, in which you are, reveals, beside the attractions of the material globe, the figures of ani- mated life, it may be the kine feeding over the meadow, the sheep in the pasture, the birds in the trees and the air. TESTIMONY OF ART TO RELIGION. 197 One motion more, and the noble form of humanity is disclosed, with its blessed boon of life from the great Creator. Children play before some rustic cot- tage ; peasants partake of good cheer at their well- spread board ; household friends converse or sing in the lighted chamber ; men and maidens, in harm- less glee, dance to the sound of the pipe on some level lawn ; the grass falls before the mower's ring- ing scythe, or the reapers bind, with bustling sound, the yellow sheaves ; the mill bestrides the rushing stream, and you almost hear the whir of its wheels mingle with the dash of the broken tide ; the vessel hoists her broad sails, though no actual wharf or port is near by, or plunges amid the angry billows of the middle deep, so artful in depicting are these superficial and motionless colors, or furls her wings to sleep in the shelter of some still lagoon. Another turn : the buildings and natural appear- ances of other climes are unveiled, and, in fancy, at once you are among them, the wigwams of the Indian, the altars of sacrifice in Mexico, the snow- houses of arctic regions, the cane huts of tropic islands, the gondolas gliding on Venetian canals, and tower and palace shining forth from the level squares ; till, in this wizard carriage of art, moving your own feet but a very little, you travel, as though a strange velocipede bore you, round the world. But, in a moment, you may stop, and see others moving ; for, at the lifting of your eye, the strange panorama unfolds new shapes, homes of love left, seats of industry forsaken, quiet fields trembling at 17* 198 TESTIMONY OF ART TO RELIGION. the tread of approaching hosts, and the clear sky blackened with the thunder-storm of battle. But, thank God ! tempests, however big and fierce, cannot rage for ever, nor the heart of man, more than the heavens, be perpetually convulsed. So Peace ad- vances on the terrible dark, and silences discords with her voice; while the heroes, that fought for their country, their kindred, or their faith, come in triumph, with crowns and plaudits, at which the very air seems to shine and shake around you, for their courageous deeds. But what portraits are these which Art unques- tionable mistress of all this multifarious arrangement and pompous ceremony of human life has taken pains to put above the rest, to set as diamonds at the top of her riches, and wear for her chosen ornament and pride ? They are wrought from her loftiest inspiration, and with her most patient handling, as though she would embody in them an idea and effort corresponding to their intrinsic worth and superiority. "What are they ? They are the images of religion ; they are the New Testament turned into colors, and become again a more gloriously illuminated manu- script than, in old time, it ever was before. Not an incident, from beginning to end, of the marvel- lous narrative, that can be made picturesque, is omitted from the designs of the palette. Among all the versions so famous of the Bible into different tongues of the nations, is this translation into the one universal language of mankind. Particularly the career of Jesus Christ is thus represented in TESTIMONY OF ART TO RELIGION. 199 hues and forms that speak with moving eloquence to every soul. Whether you can understand French and German and Italian, or not, you can understand this sublime speech of the canvas in France and Italy and Germany ; and no jargon or confusion of vocal sounds beneath can at all drown its accents or mar its meaning. Art becomes another, yea, a fifth, evangelist before you, proclaiming with her mute but mighty trumpet, like that she paints in the mouth of angels, the eternal lessons of truth and duty. Other matters have been but her practice and preparation, her first note and prelude to this music of her heart, which she plays with all her fervor and utmost skill. " Songs without words " is the title given to some of the musical compositions of a great master. And here are discourses and conversations and parables, the holiest ever uttered, without words or accents. The New Testament not inspired, when it has such over-measure of inspiration in it as to inspire afresh to the noblest achievements of art ! What value and variety of instruction ! The publi- can leaves his table to look after a nobler revenue ; and the fishers their nets, to be fishers of men ; the disciples gather to their Master's feet, beneath whose lips the air is calm as noontide ; the good Samaritan addresses you in his act of mercy by the wayside, and you do not weary of his short and pathetic dis- course ; the prodigal returns to his father's arms, and you almost hear upon the strings for we listen to pictures as well as look at them the tune that gives the time to those flying feet ; the wise virgins 00 TESTIMONY OF ART TO RELIGION. bear aloft their steady-flaming lamps, and the dim, expiring wicks of the foolish ones drop and die out upon the floor ; and every character, good or bad, holds forth example or warning in hues glorious or gloomy, from this second gospel, into which the little wonder-working pencil, wielded by human fingers, has converted the first. What is Art, then, and what would she say ? Is that your query ? For what is she here, and what is her mission in the world ? Verily, Art is nothing less than a preacher, the most penetrating and convincing in all the company of those that preach, their welcome sister ; and her sermon of religion, for the inward ear of a countless multitude, is to declare it, not the only thing, but yet supreme of all the interests and pursuits of man. Other things she patronizes and condescends to favor : this she chooses for her distinction and crown, the privilege and end of her being. She would seem to have assembled all the decent do- ings of men in her reflecting glass, -for the sake of maintaining the breathing love and truth of heaven at their head. As the commencing proportions of the structure are reared but for the grand concluding capital that glitters in the air, and as the procession exists for the leadership of the king, so she sum- mons all lesser things and lower dignitaries together for the sake of a comparison, to affirm of the soul's pious, absolute devotion to the Almighty, this is "the chiefest among ten thousand, altogether lovely." So the one figure most beautiful and sublime in TESTIMONY OF ART TO RELIGION. 201 art, is the one figure most beautiful and sublime in human life on the face of the earth, beyond the ancient front of Jove or the bright brow of Apollo, the figure of Jesus Christ. In every situa- tion, a babe in his mother's arms, a boy in the temple among the doctors, healing the sick, raising the dead, or himself rising, transfigured, crucified, glorified ; his life, his passion, his ascension, every thing about him is seized by Art for her best en- deavors, and often finest success. So I felt, especially before one delineation of the holy mother and her child Jesus, which makes the pride and glory of the German city of Dresden, and, like the other great pictures in their several places, is set there so that it cannot be removed, if I should not rather say, it is the honor of Europe and the world. The spectator feels, at first, a little curious and puzzled to account for its effects ; for this astonishing picture does not seem to have been elaborated with the patient pencil that has wrought so unwearied upon many other famous subjects, but rather to have been thrown off*, almost as though it had been in water-colors, by an inspiration of divine genius, in a sudden jubilee of its solemn exercise, . with a motion of the hand, at the last height and acme of its attainment. The theme of the Saviour of the world, a babe on his parent's bosom, is of interest not to be surpassed. The dim shine of a cloud of angels flows from behind a curtain into the room, which is equally open to earth or heaven. All heaven indeed, through the artist's wondrous TESTIMONY OF ART TO RELIGION. hinting of innumerable eager faces, seems crowding there to see. " These things the angels desire to look into." All earth waits dumbly expectant and mys- teriously attentive below. The mother is discovered standing upon the globe with her offspring in her arms. The pope, anticipated impersonation of the highest human authority, bends his knees with the half-bald, half-hoary head, sending from his lowly posture only an upward, revering glance, while he lays his mitre on the ground, and, as well he may, there lets it lie. A saint stands at the other side, looking down with the humility of a heavenly coun- tenance, yet evidently taking in, with admiring con- templation, the import of the whole scene. Little cherubs from below return their silent, loving gaze to the vision that drops downcast from above. But it is remarkable that the least and youngest figure in this company regard it from what side you will is at the head, and in command of the whole. The graybeard of ecclesiastic might, at whose wav- ing thrones were to shake and kingdoms be re- arranged, is annihilated before that soft, childish face. The sanctified and mature spirit, that had flown in- calculable distances from its upper seat, wears the veil of modesty, and bends into the stoop of wor- ship, before that earthly life just begun. The angels that sang with the morning stars together over the foundations of the world, flock and crowd, as to a sight unequalled even by their old experience, in the ante-chamber, about the door, of their rightful Sovereign, shaped as infancy that cannot yet walk ; TESTIMONY OF ART TO RELIGION. 03 while the winged seraphs, of age apparently little su- perior to itself, that have descended from the sky, fall yet farther down beneath the floor, and cling by their beautiful arms to the edge, as, with their sight, they seek from afar their clay-clad companion, yet some- how Lord. The mother herself, that bore what she holds upon her breast, has a countenance, in which strange submissiveness mingles with paternal care, and tenderness runs into forethought of future days. The child, as though in him a thousand lines con* verged, is the centre and unity of the piece ; yet without ceasing at all to be a child, in the utmost extent that simplicity and innocence can reach. But, at the same time, there is in his look a majesty pecu- liar and unrivalled, which seems to justify and re- quire all this angelic and terrestial deference. In those delicate orbs, shall I ever forget them ? turned full out upon the world, and gentle and un- pretending, too, as eyeballs sheathed in flesh ever were or could be, there is, in what manner I know not, by what art or inspiration painted I surely can- not tell, a supremacy of control which principalities above or below might well fear to disobey, as though that were the final authority of the universe. Never before by any like production had I been quite abashed and overcome. I could except to, and study and compare, other pictures : this passed my understanding. Long did I inspect, and often did I go back to re-examine, this mystery, which so foiled my criticism, and constrained my wonder, and con- vinced me, as nothing visible beside had ever done, 04 TESTIMONY OF ART TO RELIGION. that, if no picture is to be worshipped, something is to be worshipped ; that is to be worshipped which such a picture indicates or portrays. But the problem was too much for my solving. I can only say, it mixed for me the transport of wonder with the ecstasy of delight ; it affected me like the sign of miracle ; it was the supernatural put into color and form ; for certainly no one, who received the suggestion of those features, the sense of those meek, subduing eyes, could doubt any longer, if he had ever once doubted, of there being a God, a heaven, and, both before and beyond the sepulchre, an immortal life. No one, who caught that supernal expression of the whole countenance, could believe it was made of matter, born of mortality, had its first beginning in the cra- dle, or could be laid away in the grave, but rather that it was of a quite dateless and everlasting tenure. I would be free even to declare, that, in the light which played between those lips and lids, was Christianity itself, Christianity in miniature for the smallness of the space I might incline to express it, but that I should query in what larger presentment I had ever beheld Christianity so great. Mont Blanc may fall out of the memory, and the Pass of the Stelvio fade away ; but the argument for religion, argument I call it, which was offered to my mind in the great Madonna of Raphael, cannot fail. It will be understood that I have singled this out from a multitude of pictures, presenting this one subject, of the childhood of Jesus, which seems to have been with painters a favorite theme. I have no TESTIMONY OF ART TO RELIGION. 05 space to describe others, not even the celebrated notte, or night, of Correggio, which, in the same gallery, hangs near by ; or any of the sitting Ma- donnas so commonly engraved. To give the frank judgment, perhaps, of my ignorance, no other paint- ing of the same scene possessed me in the same way. I could see that all the rest were paintings : I well- nigh forgot that this was not reality. I could talk of the rest in measured sentences ; but of this only in exclamations, or in ejaculations and sighs heard but in heaven. There is, in every mode of human accomplishment, a great, an infinite, difference be- tween that which fully expresses your idea and answers to your yearning, and that which falls, however slightly, short of it. This difference I repeatedly felt in pictures, and in none more than in those portraying the image of Jesus Christ. As I have tried to put into words some faint copy of the beginning of his course, as delineated in one of the Madonnas of Raphael, let me attempt likewise to transfer the general effect of its close, as drawn in the Descent from the Cross, the masterpiece of Rubens, which, more even than the noble cathedral in which it hangs, gives a heavenly honor to the city of Antwerp. In strong contrast, indeed, does the latter picture stand with the former, which, in the opinion of some, it rivals in merit. The first of the pictures looks forward, the last looks back ; one is prophecy, the other history ; one happy innocence, the other hard experience; one the flushing spring-time, and the 18 06 TESTIMONY OF ART TO RELIGION. other the melancholy fall. Is this rude hill-side, with these implements of cruelty that have now done their work, the last scene of what began in apartments of love and joy, with such signals from above and below of hope and success ? Is this life- less form, sinking here in gory shame, the same that we saw borne aloft on the supreme earthly throne of a mother's bosom, only grown from childhood to manhood ? Are these the sinews of that softness ? Where, oh where, is that solemn jubilee of promise and power, foretold of yore as ending the long track of Hebrew prophetic light, for meeting heaven and earth to see ? What gloom is this which has gathered over the splendors of the scene, and what ignominy clouds its transcending majesty ? Whither have the angels fled, they that bent their eager faces to the vision of lovely innocence embodying divine authority ? And, for the symbols of strength and unparalleled triumph that graced the advent of the incarnate spirit of God, is it possible that the painter can now not even hint the presence of any celestial aid, but only be allowed to celebrate the victory complete of earthly foes, and point to the dim withdrawal, with exulted shout, into the back- ground, of engines of torture and emblems of dis- grace? What change in the human accessories in the foreground ! Instead of a parent holding with reverence what, but for the sacred claims of flesh and blood, she counts herself scarce worthy to touch ; instead of the man of supreme power, with bowing head and bending knee, casting down his titles of com- TESTIMONY OF ART TO RELIGION. 07 mand to the ground ; instead of these, compassionate looks fastened on the same yet how altered ! ob- ject once of admiration and lowly pride ; and pitiful arms outstretched to loosen a dead corpse from the wounding spikes, and let it gently slide to the earth; these palms that wrought miracles, these feet that walked the sea, themselves carried as a dead weight ; while, with tears and sobs and wring- ing hands, woman's friendship, purest of earthly things, and then proving itself so, waits below to see done the pious office it doubts if nature's force will enable itself in such grievous anguish to perform. Oh sad abandonment and extreme reverse ! Not strange is it that the aspect of such a picture should fix even to illusion the sympathies of the beholder ; so that one who had visited it, being after a while desired by his companion to depart, replied, as in a dream, " Stop till they get him down ! " Not, however, the living shapes, but the inani- mate figure, of Jesus, as in the first painting, is still the centre and attraction of the piece. Impotent itself, it is omnipotent over your sympathies. Help- lessly swaying from side to side it seems, as you look on the rough, bloody tree ; yet it lifts, and unawares gradually draws up, your own arms, which you cannot keep still, as if they would fain support it. The white linen sheet, which tender respect is spreading underneath, makes, with the deadly pale corse it is receiving, the light of the picture ; all else becoming visible from this sepulchral tint of agony that finishes in death. Yet, after all, it is 208 TESTIMONY OF ART TO RELIGION. not suffering, or the last mortal sleep, that princi- pally engages your attention. Spite of the cold, pallid sweat, with which lingering torment has at length given place to dissolution, the main expres- sion of the countenance is not of agony or death. It is not because these are feebly portrayed. Never, indeed, was agony or death touched with such mas- terly force. Ah ! what a tale of struggle and exhaus- tion, of strength utterly gone, and spirits fainting away, so that the nerves will twinge, and the chill shudder run through your own shrinking frame, as you look ! Nevertheless, in the features is signifi- cance stronger than agony, and deeper than death itself. Yes, you see it ! you see it ! The final quiver on those lips was not of pain, but prayer. The last breath, distending those thin nostrils, was not despair, but resignation. In that delicate mouth, that almost feminine cheek, was no prevailing sen- sation of reluctance or disgust, but welcome for the doom ; and the dropping of that head was not from overmastering weakness, but towards a Father's bosom ; while out of the glazing eyes, through well- nigh sealed lids, falls and falls a light as of the set- ting sun of existence, telling it shall rise in glory out of this dread eclipse. He cannot, must not, expire for ever so. In the soul, a spirit from God, as we look, seems to declare it. A gospel of nature in the heart responds to the gospel of grace, that he must not expire for ever so. A true and conscious prophet in man's bosom repeats the prediction which the great Prophet of earth and heaven gave of his resurrection. BEAUTY OF THE WORLD. 209 Ah ! precious burden ! precious for you who have climbed the fatal tree to bear the spent body to its rest ! You are upholding that which shall uphold you. In the hours of your weakness and decline, when thick on your brow shall be the damps that prefigure those of the tomb, when heavy on your soul shall lie the sin which Christ came by his spirit of love and self-sacrifice to rebuke and take away, the dying of the Lord, at which you ministered, yea, rather his life, his spiritual, unquenched, unquench- able life, in death and out of it, shall be the token to you of mercy from God and immortality. Mother of the Son of God, at the foot of his cross, dry your tears ; for this dishonor of your spotless child shall but prove his perfect glory. Penitent Mary, who knowest not now, for all thy life, what to do for him that did so much for thee, thine eyes shall see another sight near to Calvary. Erring son or daughter of the frail one from whom we are de- scended all, if thou beholdest in a woman the source of our sin, behold, too, in the offspring of a woman, the means of our salvation ! There are worshippers of nature, and worshippers of art. There are those who seem to regard the creation as corrupted by all mixture with it of man's activity ; and there are those who, in a wild, uncul- tured scene, of however a delicate and romantic 18*" 210 BEAUTY OP THE WORLD. beauty, soon feel desolate and lonely, and must resort to some busy motion of their own will, that they may be content, even if it be no more than playing a game or using a knife. There are those who are at home amid the career of the elements, of the winds and streams and tides ; and there are those who, like Samuel Johnson, love better to be in continual neighborhood with the tide of human life, that runs, with its everlasting roar and mighty stimulus, through the streets of cities. Some are so superstitiously fond of the rude universe, that it is an unpardonable offence to their eye if the hand of art has altered in the least its features, to smooth the knoll, or, with gate or dam, to swell the waterfall ; and some think the designs of the Maker in his works can not only be perceived, but even assisted, carried out and fulfilled, by his children ; nay, that he left on purpose something of this for them to do. But a religious soul must count all worship of either art or nature a false worship, and all resting in art or nature as stopping mid-way on the ladder from earth to heaven. Accordingly, it will exult with perfect satisfaction, and enjoy the ecstasy of divine peace, only in those scenes or achievements through which shines bright and pure the glory of God. And if this be most conspicuously manifest in a picture, if a piece of canvas, that might hang inside a cottage, or a scene, such as a great genius, unknown, visiting a convent, painted for a monk on a napkin, express the eternal splendor better than any material feature of . the world, such a soul BEAUTY OF THE WORLD. 211 will not hesitate to prefer and set it above the sun and the sea and all the sparkling host of heaven. Mere magnitude is not the great container of power or condition of effect. There are galleries in Europe which are more to me than its mountains, and which I believe the first Parent, fondly surveying the labors of his inspired and adoring offspring, prizes as more to his external honor than the Pyrenees or the Alps. Let us thank him for the testimony of art to religion, to himself; let us see, in the lines and hues its hand has. drawn and laid, only the first sketches of subjects that shall occupy the attention of another existence ; let us esteem every attempt of genius as failing of its true aim, unless it lead us now, beyond delight and admira- tion, to a nobler life. THE ENDURING KINGDOM. Through haughty realms that low and wasted lie, Through royal ranks that march in haste to die, An empire, with no touch of earthly fate, Grows on to boundless reach and endless date. No gilded throne its lowly founder rears ; No sword or sceptre stretches for our fears ; His purple robe, the crimson on his head, Tells of no hearts he bruised, no blood he shed : Glories of his insignia kings affright, And crowns are turned to relics at his sight. THE ENDURING KINGDOM. WE all have a general idea of what a kingdom is, that it is a certain regular authority of will or law built up on the face of the earth, including a par- ticular space and population, and enduring through a greater or lesser period of time. This general idea will break itself into distinct and vivid meanings to the mind of a traveller, as, leaving his own home, he visits successively the different nations that oc- cupy the globe. The peculiar symbol chosen in one or another of them to designate its power, the lion or eagle or double-headed eagle, wi:h a score of devices beside, will salute you from a flag on the ship or the fort ; or it will be stamped in a seal, or em- blazoned on a document, or glisten in a picture, or shine from a coat of arms. The civil power will, at every frontier and in many interior towns, inquire into your right to pass from one country to another ; and, if you have not an orderly passport, with the latest authority, from the last office in some, perhaps, little village, to travel, it will turn you back from the 16 THE ENDURING KINGDOM. boundary line, though that may be a snowy moun- tain-top which it has cost a day's labor to climb. Then the officers of the customs will make you aware of the new control, to which at any point you have become subject, by searching for whatever they suspect you to carry unlawfully, in the shape of goods, over the borders of the state you may be entering; till, from port to port, on river or sea, from boundary to boundary, and from city to city, of great empires or petty principalities, you will per- haps, in a long journey, have to encounter fifty ex- aminations, and get a realizing sense of what a kingdom is as you pass through its metropolitan fortified gate, or cross and re-cross its provincial line. A new language or peculiar dialect will in- form you of the same thing in a more intellectual way. Characteristic customs, local legislation, spe- cial privileges of particular persons, a diverse cast of features in the people, or some special shade on the countenance of the despotic or constitutional sway, will be additional remarks of verification. But, if you go deeper than the surface, you will see that every one of these kingdoms has the mark of time upon it. It is older or younger, begun at a specified era in the history of man, and is doomed to fall, or have its reigning family displaced, by another dynasty, at some point probably not far off in the future, successful revolutions going on even in the most passive and unenterprising races, such as the Indian and Chinese. It is needless to speak of the houses that have, with bloody hands, expelled THE ENDURING KINGDOM. 17 each other by turns all through Europe. In France, one may carry a half-dozen governments in his pocket, in the different coins of the empire or re- public, as it may chance to have been, the image and superscription on the pieces of money being by no means all of one Csesar or tribe of Caesars ; but liberty, equality, and fraternity, contending with Bourbons and Bonapartes in your purse, in the jingle of gold that has succeeded to the clash of deadly swords and guns. The same thing may be seen in the contradictory monuments, especially in Paris, that most beauti- ful and brilliant city in the world, which, it has been said, is France, monuments reared, not far from each other, to the heroes and mobs and princes that have alternately had their hour upon the stage. For all that is apparently requisite to the name and superficial show of glory is that one shall have played some part, it does not much matter what, in the great national theatre, to conquer the people, or conquer for them ; to be brave at home, or success- ful abroad ; even to build, or procure to be built, an arch or portal; to set up an Egyptian column, or pull down a Bastille ; to construct a glorious palace, or, in a riot, turn the cannon against its doors. The duration of kingdoms ! It is only necessary to in- spect the map of the continent, as it has been drawn and colored age after age, to see how short-lived have been its royalties and reigns ; how their re- spective limits have wavered to and fro, or been confounded together, making at last a perfect laby- 19 - THE ENDURING KINGDOM. rinth ; how their ancient marks have been obliterated, their whole regions ruthlessly partitioned, their very names changed, or the stock of emperors and nobles, that counted on perpetuity, cut off and driven out for ever. Go down into the crypts of the churches, in Westminster Abbey, in St. Denis, or at Vienna, at Basle, Milan, and every great town and historic centre, and, by the dim, struggling light of day, or under the sexton's flaring taper, try to read the in- scriptions, or make out the regal insignia in marble or bronze, of those once splendid in place and do- minion ; or walk through the long-deserted palaces, whose rooms are now kept by showmen for gainful curiosities, which were no mere curiosities once ; survey the portraits of faces, whose frown was once destruction, but which are now so forgotten, that no decision is possible of the authenticity of the painter's delineations ; look at the beds where they slept, the ceilings where their diadems and heraldic honors are still sculptured, the tables where they abdicated, the doorways through which they fled, or the secret passages where they fell under the assas- sin's knife ; stand by the spot of execution in the open square where they poured out their life a sa- crifice to their foes ; or pause and wonder, as I did in the prison chapel of Marie Antoinette, in the dun- geons where may still be seen the little gloomy oratories of their prayer, and the rude crucifixes they adored with almost their expiring breath ; and then, if it be your question how long it is the fate of human glory and empire to last, acknowledge it is THE ENDURING KINGDOM. 219 but a short story that is to be told of the kingship and nobility of this world, a tale like that a hundred times related, scarce more briefly in Holy Writ than often in earthly annals : " So Ahab slept with his fathers ; and Ahaziah, his son, reigned in his stead." All this, however, only renders more striking the presumption, in regard to any particular kingdom, that it will endure for ever. It has not seldom hap- pened to some brave and politic adventurer to esta- blish or usurp a kingdom, which he could leave to his children after he had occupied it for the little while a man may have to live. But there is one kingdom not abandoned to other hands, but in which its Founder reigns personally, with no decease. So it was predicted he should ; and it is, at least, an interesting question how this bold challenge has been maintained. It certainly was not maintained in any magnificent seeming of political power. Jesus Christ never ascended any throne, never wielded any visible sceptre, never led forth any army with ban- ners ; and, as he had a mortal body, he died as other mortals do. What, then, is the nature, or where is the evidence, of his endless reign ? Feeling incom- petent adequately to describe the influence or to exhaust the argument, I can only touch on the sub- stantial proofs, open to the observation of a pilgrim through many climes, of this unparalleled sway, running over the demarcations of earthly powers, gaining a foothold at once within the separate limits of angry rivals, transcending the chronology of all THE ENDURING KINGDOM. their noisy competitions, still warm and alive when their hates and loves came to be equally cold in the tomb, and without a signal yet discernible of termi- nation or decline. If any one will query whether this spread and hold of authority from an invisible Being is properly to be called a kingdom or reign, I will ask, in reply, Wherein does kingship consist, but in the giving of orders which are received and obeyed, whether the king be seen or not, as in the East he seldom was, reserving himself in state, and in the modern West often is not, though every carriage stops in the street, and every moving thing gives token of obeisance, when he or any one of his family passes along ? No : this alters not the case. The absence of the king may make his power more wonderful, but not less real. In many empires you may be permitted to visit the old regalia, now guarded in towers, and per- haps, for security of their immense value, both pecuniary and symbolic, kept under iron cages, which have passed from head to head, not without stains of blood. No such symbols, indeed, did Je- sus wear or transmit. Among the other pretended relics of him, no regalia are shown. His was no crown but the thorny one, no purple but the mock purple, no scarlet but his own blood, no emblems but cross and cord and reed and nails. But whose orders have been circulated and respected like his ? What king has commanded so many subjects, and been in command so long ? Of whom else, since THE ENDURING KINGDOM. 221 the world began, could it be said, without instanta- neous laughter and ridicule, that he should reign for ever ? The outward insignia though they be of gold and diamond and sapphire and pearl ; though countless multitudes of visitors crowd to gaze at them ; and though their cost, in some cases, mounts to millions are but the cold blaze and mere para- phernalia, perhaps the cast-off clothes, the corpse- like remains, of royalty. The royalty itself is in the control exercised over men's minds, over their thoughts and purposes, their affections and actions ; and, to make out our point, suffice it to observe, that this, in the will and precepts of Jesus Christ, is wider, deeper, and longer than from any man that ever breathed. I saw in Warwick, an interior town in England, a stone church, that seemed, as I approached it, to be part and parcel of the primeval granite of the globe, which there pushed forth into a huge bole for its natural foundation. The walls seemed to have chosen for themselves this firm basis, running down to the very centre, so smoothly did they spring and rise out of their bed, as though tier had laid itself on tier, even as the strata below grew and magnified themselves from the pressure of the fundamental fires. The tower ascended and hung out its beauty in the air, as if it were the blossom of this solid crystalline root ; and the whole structure, as I re- turned to gaze upon it again and again, moved me, as itself a signal, none too strong, of the deep-laid and durable religion, the righteous and everlasting 19* 222 THE ENDURING KINGDOM. princedom of Christ, which was proclaimed from the belfry, and preached and sung beneath its echoing roof. There can be no extravagance in illustrations of the durableness of Christ's kingdom. In the old Italian city of Aosta, in which the signs of modern industry are strangely mixed with the yet stand- ing tokens of former flourishing, I beheld a half- destroyed arch and a broken amphitheatre, said to have been erected before Christianity was known. One of these might have been built for the amuse- ment of the Romans in the intervals when that war- like people were tired of battle; and the other pur- ported to have been raised by Augustus himself, to commemorate his victory over the Salassi, a bar- barous tribe. But they were both crumbling away. The inscriptions, though cut deep by the chisel, seconding the triumphs of the sword, were fading so as to be scarcely in part legible. Benches and pillars and capitals and corner-stones were gone. Recent edifices pressed intrusively around, as if to crowd, as they very nearly had done, the ancient and venera- ble structures out of existence. "What a spectacle and record of the ephemeral character of human accomplishments! Of that first splendor, beneath which armies, flushed with success and reeking with gore, their brazen shields casting back the sun and their flaunting ensigns aloft dallying with the air, undoubting of new triumphs, rolled on their way, of it all, only a fragment, a cipher, was left. Of that pleasure which crowds had gathered to the play THE ENDURING KINGDOM. to share, where the stirring game may have been performed, the trial of strength or speed decided, or scenes from real life in theatric pomp enacted, while Music lent her strains, that were only by the more . vehement shouts of applause or cheers to new efforts interrupted, nothing at all could be any longer seen or heard. These constructions, the honor and praise of some famous unremembered architect, their ruins now held together for a little while longer by dint of props and plaster, that I and a few others still might see them, kept for show and pride, ah ! melancholy ostentation of the pride of man ! they were put up before the time of Christ. But how his time has lasted green and fresh beyond the date of their power or feeblest relation to the interests and pursuits of mankind ! They are obsolete but for the inquisitiveness of the antiquary and the lessons and quotations of the historian. Augustus is but a name, and the savage horde he expelled but a dim tradition, hanging, like gossamer or a thread caught upon a branch above a pit, over the gulf of oblivion. But the life of Christ, the go- vernment which the old prophet said should be upon his shoulders, feeds on the centuries that waste all things beside, waxes with the ages, and requires space without bound, and lapse without end, to accommodate its vast proportions and develop its immeasurable fruits. While Roman arch and theatre go down, and have no successors, the neigh- boring shrines are still vocal with prayers and THE ENDURING KINGDOM. sounding with anthems ; whatever in their material and perishable elements gives way being at once restored out of the worshipper's undecaying faith and love, in promise of temple set on the site of temple till the end of all things under the sun. The endless duration of Christ's kingdom ! Let me, to illustrate it, overleap the broad flood of years, from imperial Rome to the multitude of European kingdoms that have taken her place. As I came within a short sail of the scene of that strife now involving the mightiest nations of the globe, and in many a town heard the tramp of soldiers through the streets or beneath my windows; or saw the artillery rattle over the road eastward ; or passed by the camp, whose men and ammunition might be summoned to the conflict, the origin of this astonishing strife disclosed in itself but a new tes- timony, if not to the best and highest spirit, yet to the enduring nature of that kingdom which Christ established on the earth. For what is the question but one between the Eoman Catholic and Greek Christians in Jerusalem, as to the particular privi- lege, among other claims, of entering through the chief a door of the church built over the Holy Sepulchre of Christ, and who should possess the key of that door ? Is there such fire in his ashes ? Can his bones, after eighteen hundred years, so move the minds of men ? If the temper of the meek and lowly Jesus had fully possessed the rival Greek and Latin churches, no such contest, indeed, could have begun. But it is the yet rude and passionate human THE ENDURING KINGDOM. mind on which alone Christ has to work ; and the depth to which the dispute has penetrated into the sensitive and half-sanctified natures of men, dimly groping on their way to become followers of that Jesus who will finally deliver them from the inordi- nate strength of the passions they are now indulging and making themselves slaves of in his name, this profound stir, which, though at first belligerent, is better than stupid apathy and slavish subjugation to tyranny, shows the grasp which the Son of God lays, or is just beginning, with imperfect action, to lay, on the human soul. It shows that his kingdom is not ceasing, but just advancing its standards. If men will fight, as, alas ! about something they yet will, it is best for them at least to have some high motive ; and potent indeed must be the principle of that debate which, as it unfolds, is seen to involve the rights of the several communities, both of ignorant and of civilized man ; which points, we may trust, to the settlement of justice for that whole continent, whose greatest nations and chief professors of Chris- tianity English, Russian, French it calls into the field for combat ; while the Mahometan, though most immediately concerned, his very existence as a people depending on the issue, is, after a little tem- porary excitement, now the most idle and inefficient party in the case ; for what cares he, the dull infidel, in his heart, about Christ or the Holy Sepulchre at all ? Christ said he came to bring a sword on the earth ; and, verily, the sword which he came to bring is again unsheathed. For though the war, THE ENDURING KINGDOM. as conducted by governments and despotic leaders, may be a war of simple policy, arising from no prevailing inspiration of right among kings and statesmen on any side ; though the great powers of Europe appear all of them, out of their way and off their own ground, to have gone impertinently where they had no business, into that remote Crimea, to contend about their balance of power, as they call it, as private persons who have quarrels to adjust retire to some thick wood or lonely spot to fight their deadly duel ; yet there is, to light up the horrors of the battle-field, some providential sense of right in the masses of people and soldiery ; and, in the present condition of the world and human nature, it must be confessed there seems to be a terrible necessity in the struggle, a sort of doom to that bloody baptism, from which we may hope the nations will come out purer for their sufferings, and with equity for all parties rescued from the clutch of brutal force. God, of his mercy, grant this atone- ment for so much woe ! Meantime, as the whole strife is but the application of a fearful test to ascertain what, in the premises, the prerogatives and duties of Christians are, it is plain in this fierce demonstration also that the kingdom of Christ, his domination, so far from being outworn, is, through many rough obstacles in the depravity of the human soul, just planting its roots ; and, when the storm that cleanses is over, through the clouds of war may fall a light in which the millions of our race can find their way to his sepulchre without a key THE ENDURING KINGDOM. 221 of iron, or the claim of any exclusive ownership to a heap of doubtful stones. Yes, the sword too, among other witnesses, I claim for his witness. He did not make the sword he brought. Its material was in the nature of man. It was forged in the heats of the human bosom. But when, as great questions of public morals touch the international conscience, it leaps from its scab- bard, we can only pray that it may be so divinely guided and humanly wielded as to hew out a way to that righteousness and peace through the world in which the kingdom of Christ shall have its stability, true and perpetual. As, however, I have spoken thus much of the manner in which it is involved in the tumults of earthly kingdoms, I must add, that, though the kingdom of God, in the Lord's own words, may be taken by violence, and the violent take it by force, it has no violence in itself. To illustrate this, let me describe, from recollections of what I have seen,, the contrast of Christ, as a king, with perhaps the most successful worldly despot whose name history has preserved. I suppose Napoleon Bonaparte pre- sents the greatest instance, not of creative genius, though that too in him was wonderful, but of strictly personal power, power of an overmastering will, ever known. I forget not that Alexander over- ran the world; or that Caesar, later, ruled the mistress of the world. But the world, in the time of Caesar and Alexander, was an easier thing to overrun and rule than in the time of Napoleon ; and THE ENDURING KINGDOM. I must consider it at least an unsurpassed example of military prowess, strength of will, and intellectual resource for action, when the Corsican held the modern states of European civilization so widely subject to his control ; when the old empire of Caesar himself fell before his scarce bearded youth, and the distant Asia, where Alexander, the Mace- donian, trod and vanquished, shook at the tread of his diminutive figure; when England, more than any other nation inheritor of Greek and Roman supre- macy, feared him as she never feared aught beside ; and this Western world, from aged men to children, wondered and whispered, as tlie earthquake-wave of his might struck on our shore, what he would do even here. But what was his kingdom, of which, in this connection, I make a merely representative use, in its duration what was it, compared with that of Christ ? I will say nothing of Waterloo or St. Helena, to insult his memory or .aggravate the contrast ; I will repeat no profane words instituting a likeness be- tween these two personages, such as I heard from the mouth of an Englishman, in a picture-gallery in England, as we together gazed at Napoleon's por- trait ; I will not quote even Napoleon's own oft-cited words, owning the vast inferiority of his kingdom to Christ's. I will only set over against each other, very slightly sketched, the pictures of their respec- tive kingdoms as I beheld them standing in their signals now, selecting the best that can be found for the military hero in the case. Of Napoleon I must say, that no man like him has THE ENDURING KINGDOM. left the print of his foot throughout the Old World. The fields of his battles are the great fields ; the bridges he desperately crossed amid smoke and fire, as bullets flew by and banners were rent over him, are the most famous bridges ; the Alpine passes he traversed or engineered as roads for his troops are in fame, so far as I know in all nature, the marked passes ; the towns he entered or slept but a night in, distinguished, to this day, for his presence and momentary passing ; the inscriptions to his honor still held forth, grandly memorable and inviolate, from the column on the banks of the Seine, where he wished his ashes to repose, made from the molten cannon he captured, to the stone tablet in the Monks' Hospice of the Great St. Ber- nard ; the rooms where he dictated submission to magistrates, in every carving and hanging kept as they were, to be displayed for a fee to the traveller ; the tree in one of the Borromean Islands on whose bark he wrote with his knife the Italian word, Bat- taglia, oh, how he wrote that word deep and wide over the world with his sword ! likewise guarded for exhibition ; the sword and hat and coat and very boots he wore in one or another engagement, ar- rayed in ostentatious order ; the pictures of his bat- tles lining the walls of many a magnificent gallery ; the engraved scenes in his life, to his death-bed, suspended within the chambers of mean houses as well as aristocratic palaces, even in the countries he subdued and disgraced ; a tomb, undoubtedly among tombs the most splendid and costly in all the world, 20 30 THE ENDURING KINGDOM. occupying the nave of the church where the totter- ing remnants of his once-unequalled army abide and worship. And what shall I say more ? Amid images of golden bees, betokening empire, the mark N. upon the shining relics, in the Louvre, of his reign, to which N. has been added the numeral I., to signify Napoleon the First, at the instigation of the present pallid-looking emperor, who would thus pass for Napoleon the Third, and who has perhaps furnished the most striking of all proofs of his great relative's sway, by being able to creep, in his shadow, to his throne. But all this imperial blazonry, this pompous and particular commemoration, is of something past, of a man departed, of an empire gone, of a dominion once indeed advancing, but pressed back and re- duced, from all its advances, into its original bounds; of a ruler, as I heard from French and Belgic lips, less loved, by hosts even in his own land, than hated; and, if by some lauded, by many despised, or regarded as scarce himself human, rather a meteor, a dispensation of Providence, a needed whip for ancient abuses and follies, a scourge of God. Shall I now presume to go on with the compari- son or contrast, and say how different, how unspeak- ably exalted, from this, the other picture of the kingdom of Christ ? for whom there was no defeat in his darkest hour, no Fontainebleau of abdication, no far-off lonely spot of exile ; who was never banished, though church and state of his time, banded together, strove to banish him ; who THE ENDURING KINGDOM. still lives and reigns, with never-retreating, ever- widening empire, in the breasts of men; whose meek soldiers are truly, what Napoleon pretended were his, invincible ; who has amazed and overcome, not a few territories and towns for a while, but is stretching the blessed captivity of his spiritual free- dom through every latitude and zone ; who has built a thousand temples for every fort or arsenal of the vulgar conqueror ; and who is continually writ- ing his innumerable titles, not on brass or marble or cloth of gold, that shall break and crumble and fade, but on the fleshly tables of the human heart. Witness the cross, once the brand of shame, but now planted in love at the springs and along the steeps, the rugged places of the sojourner's way, by its frequency indicating his direction, as though it were a guideboard over earth as well as to heaven. Witness the images everywhere, in painting and sculpture, of his life and death. Witness the poor woman I saw, one of others countless, touching her fingers to the image of the babe, and then fervently, with devotion unquestionably sincere, carrying them to her lips. Witness those parents and children, making one of a myriad of families, I observed going up the mountain, whose affectionate prayers in their alternate, manly, womanly, with boyish and girlish, eloquence fell audibly, a sort of heavenly murmur in the sunny day, on my ear as I went by. Witness ten thousand proofs, to which I cannot now even allude, that the kingdom of Christ is strength- ening ; while Napoleon's, though but yesterday it 232 THE ENDURING KINGDOM. rose, is well-nigh sunk to-day. Were I seeking the emblem of an enduring force, I should not select the bronze figure of the emperor, with his glass eying the fortunes of the battle ; but another work of art, by a modern hand, yet destined .to a lasting fame, called the Light of the World, in which Jesus is represented at dusk, in his hand a lantern, whose beams fall upon his features, and light up his soft ruddy hair and delicate countenance, and make fruit and flower glow on the soil near his feet, as, while the darkness gathers and night hovers all around out of the sky, with wistful face of infinite tenderness, he proceeds to knock, with the other hand, at a cottage door. May we hear him at our gate ? For the dwelling and the portal, which the painter intended, where are they but within ? Christ's, among all other earthly empires, the enduring kingdom ! Most affecting is it to see the fresh trophies of his supreme rank among men rising out of spots where wreck is laid on wreck of human power ; where Roman generals threw down towers from tremendous heights, to have their own dominion, in turn, thrown down ; where the boun- daries of modern principalities have wavered to and fro like shadows cast by the sun upon battle- fields ; where diverse races of men, and customs of civilization, and ideas of law and government, and orders of society, and modes of literature, have pre- vailed for their several periods ; but the rule of the one Redeemer, however imperfectly as yet subduing the stubborn nature of man, has never been dis- THE ENDURING KINGDOM. 233 placed. Still, with the right and the sense of right divided betwixt them, the nations muster for war and meet in bloody strife. One only umpire, for thrones and peoples, can pronounce the just decree. As I passed through the great courses of travel where Germany and Italy look over at each other, and saw on every hand the signs of what had moved along there in former generations, I fell into silent ejaculations in my spirit. How many armies have marched upon these heights and amid these vales ! How many proud captains have here triumphed, and civil rulers set up their sway ! How ancient and modern conquerors are, in the token of their succes- sive predominance, by these bands of territory strangely linked together! Yet how dimmed and hardly traceable are their memorials now ! But what monuments are these, new as well as old, ever re- stored and brightened into fresh lustre, reared to sig- nify the honor and love of the population, and lining for hundreds of miles the traveller's way ? What are these paintings and sculptures of crucifixes and every form of sacrifice and submission ? They are of Him who governs men more by his sufferings than have all the heroes by their mighty deeds. 20* THE CHUECH. The ties of blood and race and speech, A common nature's kindly reach, The human reason, conscience, hert, All from their firmest holdings part, lie, who his offspring never leaves, A bond from his own spirit weaves. THE CHUKCH. THE church is a very delicate theme on which to give, however fairly, even impressions, or the result of a traveller's observations. Yet every religious person will at once own the impossibility of omit- ting this subject from a list, pretending to any com- pleteness, of the facts and ideas in the world, and must be willing to have each surveyor of ecclesias- tical institutions, on the broad scale of nations, speak his honest and impartial word. Unconscious of a wish to plead for or against any section or denomi- nation of the great Christian body, though perfectly willing to have my testimony weighed with reference to my own general training and position, I am sure I shall not transcend the limits of a generous reader's charity, or violate with partisan aim the rules of the great republic of letters, if I throw in my frank statement with those of a thousand reporters beside. Every truly earnest man pardons another's earnest- ness. The religious traveller, when first he gazes on the marvellous constructions, the glorious pomps, and 238 THE CHURCH. glittering processions of ecclesiastical power in Europe, may for a moment indulge a feeling, not only of admiration, but of envy, at the sight. He may be disposed to exclaim, " Oh ! if we could have at home such brilliant and captivating presentations as these of the sacred things of faith and piety ; if there could be such noble buildings for the praise of God, and such costly works of art in commemora- tion of Jesus, and so many impressive ordinances and affecting celebrations to mark the notable events of the Christian year or the venerable traditions of past time ; and if such grave intoning of ancient liturgies, and such enchanting strains of music as issue from the mouths of those picked and trained singers and these white-vested choristers of boys, could be heard in our assemblies, what an excel- lent and perfect accomplishing we should have of the homage we would offer to the Most High ! " But a little experience of what goes on under this so imposing exterior will soon disabuse the sober mind of its fond and superficial fancy ; for, after one has surveyed all these outside preparations for effect, and he begins earnestly to seek for the meaning and the heart that shall be proportionate to and worthy of the mighty and promising apparatus, alas ! he dis- covers that the outward richness does not certify any equal inward wealth and inspiration, perhaps not so much as he has known embodied in the meanest ritual and cheapest edifice ; and wonder at the super- ficial spectacle is succeeded by disappointment at the poor utmost it contains. As one takes up a shell THE CHU11CH. 239 from the shore, gorgeous and shining with all the colors of the rainbow, but finds that the living crea- ture which made and first had it for an abode is long since dead or departed; so one is sometimes forced to feel, under the vast, cunningly wrought, and magically painted temple-roof, that this is but the shell, once perhaps well occupied when genius came from God to inspire the builder's soul, but now, under all the fine appearance of religion, with the life almost or quite gone out of it. Then he recurs with unspeakable satisfaction to his spiritual conception of the church, which the Head of the church has himself given ; of human beings any- where, under any extraneous circumstances, adorned or simple, humble or high, united in the name and held by the holy magnetism of the presence of Christ. So, from all the glories of architecture and vestments and melodious voices and viols, his soul goes back to the undecorated meeting-house, where, like the early disciples with burning heart, he first knew his Lord was with him ; or to the lowly vestry in which, by the grace of God, he was originally touched. I was at the Catholic worship in Dresden. It seemed more like the embrace of Rome with the world than like the simplicity of filial and fraternal adoration for which I yearned on that bright sab- bath morning. The drums and horns and strings of the opera, that had been amusing the people through the week, had marched into the temple to conduct the divine praise, and, with the loud swell and long 40 THE CHURCH. roll of their harmony, whose ambitious though ex- quisite tuning I still seem to hear, to make the most prominent part of the service. Handsomely carved and nicely curtained boxes in the sides of the walls, high above the general assembly in which I mixed as in a common crowd, showed the heads of members of the royal family, put into that ostenta- tious privacy and vain superiority in an act of venera- tion for Him, high and lofty indeed, before whom all earthly distinctions fade as the morning clouds, and are level in the dust ; while it seemed to me that the majestically dressed and artistically moving offi- cials should rather, like Barnabas and Paul at Lystra, have rent their clothes, and run in among the people that were impiously sacrificing to them something at least of their human dignity, and should have cried out, " We also are men of like passions with you." Alas ! in that region sabbath-day is a play-day without, in the streets, and seems almost like a play- day within, in the sanctuary. I went to the famous shrine of Westminster Ab- bey with a multitude to praise God and keep holy time. In the very grandeur of the fane seemed to be worship. On those noble pillars, vast sheaves of stone, the religious affections climbed up to heaven. In the graceful curves of the groined ceiling, the fascinated imagination slid to and fro for a while, till it was fastened as by a spell, caught in a sacred net of the associations of all beauty. The prayers be- gan with the pure, decorous language of that form, ever the same, save for its manifold little variations THE CHURCH. 41 in one or another connection and latitude, which has been made so familiar to the ear of Christendom. Very pleasant was the reverent sound. But is it an over-critical may it not be a truly devotional spirit that asks, Is this endless repetition of a few formulas all that is meant by prayer, the public ac- knowledgment of the being and mercies of Almighty God ? Is this mechanical manner, this monotonous speech, into which such stiffly prescribed supplication often almost unavoidably sinks, all that is possible in these momentous addresses of human creatures to Heaven ? Can there be no more adaptedness to oc- casions, and to the actual relations of life ? no more personal ardor and sincerity, consistent with the out- pouring or attempted excitement of general emotion ? and never a spontaneous burst, instead of this dull recitation ? Oh ! believe it not ! Believe it not, you who may yourselves be inclined to such captivating formalism ! The bosoms of men may break out to- gether, as well as burn in solitude, with thanksgiving and veneration to the Power that made us ; and to shut up all the emotions belonging to him in a prayer-book, is as great an affront, though unin- tended, as it would be to read off the expressions of our affection to one another only from written lines or a printed page. Husbands and wives, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, will it do between you ? Neither will it between us all and Heaven. I pause to say, Let not any turn in disgust from the ardor of these expressions. I know the intended benefits of a liturgy. I know it is not a regulated 21 THE CHURCH. service that is alone liable to monotony. I know that gifts vary ; and that, in the poverty of a minister's spirit or the slowness of his lips, the printed words are a succor so great as to render it really doubtful, whether, taking the clergy together, some degree of habitual form be not expedient. I understand the promise, that lies in a response, of bringing the con- gregation, as well as the priest, into concerted frame of spiritual action. I can see that men in general have attained to such poor heights of devotion, and are such beginners in the heavenly life, that it is a question whether they must not be confined yet longer to an exact ritual, as to a sort of alphabet of worship. I well perceive, too, how those who offi- ciate, by having the aspirations of the assembly in their hand and under their eye, are spared the ex- haustion of strength which comes from extreme expenditure of feeling. But who, for any or all of these reasons, will maintain that the ecclesiastical custom is the ideal of adoration ? Criticism of the rigid Catholic forms on the one side may indeed also be met with criticism of the dividing Protestant dogmas on the other. Between a union in modes and words tending to become lifeless, and the inde- pendence of thought and action that may exclude a common spirit, some may deem it hard to choose. Considering the double problem, how the churchman shall secure freshness of intellect and soul, and how the dissenter may harmonize the separate activities of a host of minds, let us at least be thankful, that, while most of the world is still tied up in arbitrary THE CHURCH. 243 regulations, there is among us an open field for pre- scription and freedom to try their opposite methods, and compare their respective drawbacks and advan- tages. But I must not forget what remains of my de- scription. The preacher rises. Now, I thought, in this liberty, at last, of utterance, the spirit may soar as on eagle-wings to a pitch adequate to the unsur- passed attractions of the place. Ah ! those very attractions prevent it. We may well be content with the plainness of our gathering and proceeding in the congregational order, from the reflection that, more than any priestly magnificence, it gives room for those persuasive and receptive openings of the human breast, in the appeals and responses of simple duty and truth, which are hindered by the rigid methods of outward show, yet are loftier and dearer in the eye of Heaven than any exterior dis- play, though of St. Peter's or Solomon's. Only that which we rely upon in any matter can stand us in much stead ; and they who, in religion, have con- fidence in the flesh, in any outward thing, certainly can never be made perfect in the spirit. Leaning upon a staff is inconsistent with running or flying towards heaven. So I considered, as I looked around at the charms of art and external edifica- tion that stole away my regard from the mortal exhorter's feeble homily, and said in myself, "What eloquence, less than that of Demosthenes, could fill this loaded air, and make itself heard among these voices, from the tombs, all around, of dead poets 44 THE CHURCH. and heroes and saints ? What personal power could supersede this proud antiquity with present energy, and subdue this material sublimity and historic opu- lence into the mere subordinate service and humble following of the pulpit-signal from that little stature in the preacher's strain ? He was altogether neutral- ized ; so weakened by surrounding shows and super- incumbent ordinances, it seemed almost better that he should hush. I must own the sin, if sin it were ; but I could not help studying the beauteous stains upon the glass, and following the fine traceries of the windows, and, over the ladders of art and grace there everywhere set before me, getting into the kingdom my own abstracted and wandering way, instead of being able to mount with the somewhat slow and heavy ascent of the actual performance ; and my strong and decisive conclusion was, Oh! let me be satisfied with whatever hearing of the word is my privilege in assemblies without great exhibi- tion or any means of pretence, more than with all this color and noise and march and heraldry of religion. I certainly will not reproach as un- generous, or at all of a niggardly, illiberal hand, the Providence which has confined me and my friends and kinsfolk and countrymen to such com- parative bareness in the modes of religious service. The constraining of the soul to love and righteous- ness by the earnest pleading of the human voice is worth more than all the church formularies and archi- tectural magnificence by which, through some fataHaw of compensation, it is so commonly hindered and dis- THE CHURCH. 45 placed. I count not my forefathers faultless ; I will not take up their quarrel against the bishops, who may be the needful ministers of Heaven to great masses of mankind ; I will even confess, that, grimly bent on reaching to the very soul of things, they stripped life too bare, and gave us sometimes an Egyptian skeleton, instead of beauty and truth; but, knowing that more often they woke the powers of the world to come in the human soul, seeing from what burdens of moral death and material superstition they escaped and beforehand delivered us, I will glory in their line, nor be willing to ex- change the Puritan heritage for all legacies of cost and splendor in the most imposing structures and elaborate institutions of the world. If the cus- tomary question be put to the returning traveller, what change or modification his sojourn has made in his notions respecting religion, the reply he must at present be indulged in is, that he comes home no sceptic, no Roman Catholic, no English Churchman, yet more deeply than ever convinced that Christiani- ty evangelical, historical, spiritual Christianity is the hope of the world ; and more than ever com- forted with the simplicity of that administration of Christianity in which he was brought up, and to which he is still accustomed. No charm of cathe- dral spires in the sky above, or of cathedral services beneath, has seduced his heart, or can, in the least, rob from him his old first loyalty to the independent worship which he was born in and counts it his delight to serve. 21* 246 THE CHURCH. In one of the most venerable minsters of Eng- land, that in the town of York, I attended, in good weather, on a week-day service. The clergy and the choir made about half the assembly, the mere handful of which looked strangely in the cor- ner of a building, founded for the worship of a thou- sand years ago, that could have held almost the whole city's population. Noble, indeed, is that building. Its massive walls and high square towers, hoary with years, its arches and monuments within, affect the soul like everlasting anthems in marble and prayers without ceasing in the rock. But, when the accommodation was compared with the attendance, the huge, hollow chambers looked like a lake whose waters have been dried up to their lowest bed. En- chanting sight, even the empty structure ! But is it more than the life of humanity dedicated to God? Does it approach, in honor, to what the missionary to the Chippewa Indians beheld, three acres of prairie-land, without a house or a tree, covered with a congregation of fifteen thousand, to listen to his preaching of the word of God*? No : this is the interior and essence, that the exterior and accident, of the church. In the minster, the songs echoed sweetly through the aisles, and rang down distinct from the curving granite top ; while the notes of the organ, at every stop or interval, died away most me- lodiously, as though some metallic harpsichord were swept by unseen upper fingers in the air. But I would rather have heard the hallelujahs, like the voice of many waters, from the myriad bosoms of THE CHURCH. 847 the savage red men, aboriginals of the soil, on the western plain, returning, not from any stone temple- top, but from the sky where God dwells. Let not this attempt to define and magnify what is vital in the church of Christ, in distinction from what is superinduced and unessential, imply, however, any uncharitable doubt that the purposes of religion are, in every sect and portion of the church, largely accomplished. What is essential in the church must, of course, have, and it will put on, some clothing. It will be variously clad in one place or another. Only let those who are called Christians, in every place, beware of taking the clothing for the thing clothed, or of imposing their particular garment of Christianity as the only fit one upon others. Let them remember, too, that, as with the human body, the more clothing required to be put on, the lower is proved to be its life ; so, the more the church is dressed, the less, in actual de- monstration, is the vitality of the spirit. An exces- sively official and formalistic operation of the church may, in some respects, be adapted to a low condition of mankind, of those learning their letters in reli- gion ; but, in the name of God and Christ, the mo- ment they are susceptible of it, let them have a higher teaching and ministration. Otherwise, at length, as the Bible is true, " the letter killeth ; " the form will begin to extinguish the soul. In fine, as so much has been said of the moving efficacy of forms, especially in the Romish church, in foreign countries, let one bear witness that nothing in those 248 THE CHUKCH. forms made any remote approximation in power or persuasiveness to the sermons and supplications, in the same countries, whose sincere accents fell on his ears in the Protestant communion. Yet if we are at all to trust to forms, more than to the spirit, then I hesitate not to say, Let us go to Rome at once. In the Romish service there is often, at least, a warmth and earnestness, to which that of every other formal church, in England or America, seems affected and cold. One can but admire the deep policy and mas- terly working on the human mind of the papal sys- tem, every sense of whosoever, in the stream that is perpetually flowing in and flowing out, enters any of its tabernacles taken possession of : the eye, with paintings, statues, alcoves, altars, columns, and cos- tume ; the ear, with entrancing sounds of tongues and pipes and chords ; the smell, with fragrance from dexterously swung and adroitly caught, rising and descending, censers ; the touch, with holy water, in the ever-renewed emblem and motion of the cross ; and whatever is weak, dependent, confiding, in the human heart, at once seized by an ancient authority, held forth in manifold symbols, and a professed ever- lasting infallibility, now declared from the dogmatic creed, and now stalking, in the shape of ornamented, almost military, officers, through the submissive, adoring throng. But you cannot help asking, How would Jesus Christ look in such a scene ? Quite at home, think you ? How would he, the simple, fa- miliar, loving, and holy, like the strange mixture of superstition and despotism with humility and love ? THE CHURCH. 49 Where would he prefer to stay ? Amid this pomp of praise, this aristocracy of rank and caste in reli- gion ? or where even two ^or three in his name, in simple devoutness and modesty of mutual regard, were met together ? I can only say, Kead the whole New Testament, and answer. The traveller, be his prepossessions what they may, sees well that the tooth of time is eating fear- fully into the structures of the ancient church, and that other destructive influences are gnawing at the ideas those structures were reared to represent. Gazing at the massive doors, enclosing the rotting remnants of those which Ambrose shut in the face of Theodosius, he reflects that the strength by which they were shut has withered away with themselves ; and that, to beard arbitrary political power, no Am- brose will return. Some noble walls and towers are ascending; others are sinking, or maintained at a cost which renders it doubtful if a period be not at hand when men will be no longer able or willing, with the enormous contributions required, even to keep in repair what the former generations built. Sadly, in York and Oxford, and many another monument of antiquity, the carved stone moulders down; and though one or another broken shaft or- crumbling pinnacle may be replaced, yet the feeling cannot be avoided, that the whole outward, solemn edification of the past there tends to obsoleteness and decay. A momentary regret comes over the mind, as one contrasts this decline with the rise, in the present age, of industry and commerce, setting 250 THE CHURCH. up their marble and granite structures, the polished smoothness or clean and sparkling fracture of whose solid blocks seems to promise everlasting duration. But he will not grieve inconsolably who thinks he sees the soul of man in these days, with humane and pious thoughts, more than ever before, itself made the temple of God ; nor will any true lover of God or man consider a literal canon or rubric or order of service the essential thing, if the living hearts of a congregation, beating together, shall form our Book of Prayer. But, while men are in all things so much under the influence of the senses, the Romish, or something akin to the Romish, re- ligion must prevail. The understanding makes dis- tinctions, and separates ; creed begets creed, and opinions war against the opinions of which they are the offspring : but a solemn form, having ever the same shape and quality to the senses, is a medium and common language, through which each worship- per can express his own individual thought and feel- ing ; while all, from the most feeble-minded and illiterate to the most intellectual and refined, are in it bound together. To cure children or adults of leanings to Romanism, it might seem enough to send them to Rome. Alas ! not so. All the shock to the soul, from her deceits and superstitions, cannot suffice to countervail the attractions of her own showy, scarlet person. The sensuous bias, once al- lowed to operate, is found to be fatal. There is no resource against it but in the law of reason and of a holy love. SOCIETY. The spirit drives me from the throng : Dear is my thought ; it holds me long. The spirit draws me back again : Dearer I find my fellow-men. With lonely strength, with social love, The perfect plan of life is wove ; From one in all, and all in one, A heavenly model is begun ; And every child of God makes part Of that great whole, the human heart. SOCIETY. A GREAT ship's company, of which I once made a poor unit, has often very vividly returned to my imagination, as a figure more or less accurately re- presenting the whole mass of actual society. One man of genius on board, for the sake of economy, was in the steerage; wealth and rank elbowed wealth and rank in the cabin ; certain rude qualities, predominating over all the refinements of feeling and character, were in bold, if not sometimes inso- lent, command of all; while any thing great and splendid in virtue, by only an occasional flash in conversation or decisive stroke in practical emergen- cies, showed the hiding-place, where, awaiting a time of need, like lightning in the cloud, it for the most part quietly lay. Great exigencies show men their places, produce spiritual as well as political revolu- tions, and anticipate the sentences of the judgment- day. Yet there is a grand equality, as well as distinction, in what we call society. Human society arises by virtue of the different gifts and conditions it has pleased the Creator to 22 254 SOCIETY. allot to different individuals, all having the same fundamental constitution. These differences are not meant to divide men in their feelings, but rather for the very purpose of uniting them, to unite them more closely than perfect equals in faculty and situation ever could be. Though one may be poor, and another rich ; one celebrated, and another undis- tinguished ; one learned, and another ignorant ; one at the bottom of the social scale, and another at the top, the wealth or honor, knowledge or rank, is no reason for pride, and honest inferiority of position or possession no occasion for abjectness ; but these divinely ordained diversities of life, like the concord of diverse notes on a musical instrument, should make the actual harmony of mankind. Let me illustrate this noble Christian doctrine through seve- ral points connected with pictures of my own expe- rience. First, there is the very obvious dissuasive from pride in those affections which may adorn and dig- nify the lowliest estate. Two scenes in one of the cities of Great Britain occurred in my sight almost simultaneously, as if designed *to show this. One scene was humble, the other royal. Let the humble one come first. It was a parting between some emigrants and those of their kindred and friends who were to stay at home. I counted it a piece of good fortune, that, seeing often the arrival of the emigrant here, I could thus witness his departure there. The place was a railway station. Such as were taking their leave were already seated in the SOCIETY. 55 cars. In the raw wind and wet, their nearest rela- tives waited without. The two companies being thus cut off from each other, wistful faces, weeping eyes, and waved adieus still bound them together. Where was the necessity of the separation ? Some promising, bright-lettered advertisement, such as I had myself read, pasted up on the corners of the streets, had attracted their regard. Some big and famous ship, with a rich name, the " Golden Sun," or some other poetry of fortune, painted under the horn of plenty on her stern, was to set sail for Australia the next week ; and, at a cheap rate, those out of employment at home, or toiling under some hard landlord, could be transported to mines of wealth on the other side of the globe. Yet, now they have made up their mind to go, their dear old native land clings to them closer than they had ever thought ; and they find the process painful, of drawing out their roots from the spots where they have lived, if not flourished, so long. The train waits long, the damp breeze blows, the clouds threaten ; still the remnants of the broken households linger round the windows and doors, through which, to and fro, eager hands are stretched, and confused glances fly. As I gazed on the band, I knew that one of them was a father, the next a mother, a third a sister or brother ; for nature is eloquent to tell such things, without any special inquiry or information beside. When human beings live in the affections belonging to the relations they mutually sustain, we need not search the family 256 SOCIETY. record or town register to ascertain what the rela- tions are. We shall know very well whether you are husband or wife, son or daughter, lover or faithfully betrothed, by your conduct describing you ; that is, we shall know if you are such more than in name. So I knew, and seemed to see the bonds that ran there, invisible to eyes of flesh, from bosom to bosom. The signal of starting is given. One and another from the crowd leap forward for a farewell grasp or last earthly salutation ; the young earnestly tearful, aged men and women, who cannot quite bear the sight, turning their heads 'away. A quarter of a mile glides the train on the rails, and unexpectedly stops; whereupon the for- saken ones rush forward again to speak other final words, or look other speechless looks, for which the few minutes 5 delay gives further opportunity. Back a little way, the locomotive pushes its long burden ; back goes the social throng, as though it were a living attachment to the dead vehicles. Thus to and fro repeatedly, the almost mingling feet and wheels passed together, every pause filled with affection- ate tokens, till, in the warmth and contagion of this sustained emotion, I felt almost I was one of the kinsmen, and had a brother's right to give and take greeting and blessing with the rest. So the ties of kindred take hold of those of humanity. As I remarked the contrast between the dumb, unsympathizing mechanism of iron and wood, rolling hither and thither, and the vital interest of the per- sons assembled, I re-asserted in my heart the dignity SOCIETY. 257 of human nature, above all material things, in the affections that may kindle its humblest forms. Ay, such affections will not be quenched by the rains and snows that shall beat on those emigrant heads, nor be blown away by the tempestuous gales of the middle sea, nor be frozen in the black frosts of the southern cape, but yearn back all the more for dis- tance and hardship and privation, and peradventure save from sin, with the fond memories of that declining, gray-headed parentage, and pure, fair- haired sisterhood, which those departing sons and brothers left behind ; or shall touch them with sad consolations, as possibly they sit disappointed over the fruitless dusty heaps where they dig, their golden visions, like broken bubbles, scattered into gloomy emptiness ; or, in their success and fortunate thriving, shall draw them, as the immigrant Irish on these shores, in noble loyalty to their own hearts' best promptings, in the year of famine, were drawn, with charity, exceeding even that of missionary societies, to send of their gain to the needy in their unforgotten homes. The other scene, which makes part of my present exemplification, was one that, very shortly after, I went to witness on the opposite side of the same city, in Scotland. It was the passage through her northern borders of the queen of the realm, as I need not say, a shining spectacle, which a multitude of tens of thousands gathered, partly to make as they beheld ; while, so far as I know, of the emi- grants' parting I was the solitary interested outside 22* 258 SOCIETY. spectator. In pomp of appearance, indeed, this lat- ter scene was far distinguished from the first. By a worshipper of names and a respecter of titles, the former might be wholly despised, as unworthy to be referred to in the same connection. Yet I could not see that the muster of the town from every lane and by-way, the thunder of cannon, the long lines of glittering soldiery, with the masses of citizens on either side for the living walls between which the regal and princely carriages might pass forth, gave to the grand display a real glory beyond that of the honest sentiments of love that rudely graced the emigrants' unpretending farewell. Ah! the real glory, if in this world of shows and shadows we will speak of reality, in either case, was that of human affection. It lay in whatever there existed of sincere and disinterested devotion to others' hap- piness and the true interests of mankind. No throng of admiring observers, indeed, would expect the emigrant troop, awaiting them from one stopping- place to another ; no magnificent reception anywhere would be given them ; no marshals would herald their way, or court journal recount their progress ; they could never have such a place of Highland- sport and recreation as their queen was returning from ; but, with emigrants or queens, the eye of God looks only at the degrees of inward purity and charity that sanctify and inflame the breast. Loyalty to a just ruler, to the civil law he executes, to the symbol of righteous authority he is, may be a beautiful thing ; I am glad in any land to behold it ; but it is no more SOCIETY. 59 beautiful than loyalty to those original ties of human nature, running through our hearts, which began be- fore dynasties, and shall outlive the mention of ter- restrial empires. Take, then, for my first delineation, the emigrant. I have often been asked if I saw the queen. I am tempted to say that I saw, not only the honored and beloved queen, but the poor creature to whom her sore-taxed territory no longer gave food or foot-hold ; and who, therefore, sundering every familiar link of acquaintance or nativity, must go forth a voyager to south-eastern or south-western climes, or come to do for us the work our children disdain. Therefore I have drawn this portrait of the emigrant, because, in his almost innumerable host, on his long voyaging or journey, he is a phenomenon quite as remarkable in the modern world as the stationary, presiding power of a nation ; and, in the actual influence he exerts on the destinies of the world, may, in his per- son, furnish proof, that, be a man or a woman' what he or she may in station or official function, there is no ground for one to be puffed up against another in his outwardly inferior place or work. One uni- form heart is under the costume of emigrant or em- peror ; only, as I saw the coming out of that heart in the emigrant's trial more than through the imperial smile, in which I repeatedly had my little share, I shall remember him longest and with most concern, whether as beheld in the outset of his course, or afterwards represented again before me in a man re- turning from that fifth continent of the world in the 60 SOCIETY. Oriental seas, with the distressful story of his ice- covered bark tossing long near the frigid zone. As the question, What shall be done with the emigrants coming almost by thousands every day ? so agitates just now our politics, let it not be deemed unseason- able to cast this friendly picture of him on the angry and tempestuous tide. But another dissuasive from being puffed up, on account of any social difference we may suppose in our favor, may be found in the dignity of labor, which, like disinterested love, is alike honorable, through all its modes, in every class or person. Therefore let me add to the likeness of the emi- grant one of the laborer. I will take what might ap- pear the least and meanest example, from a visit in Lower Germany to a mine of salt, which, in its dark, subterranean recesses, has been wrought, cen- tury after century, since the time of the Romans. As I compared the toilers in those dim caves with the travellers for pleasure, party after party of whom explored them for curiosity, I could not put the humble toilers at any disadvantage in my respect. A diversity, indeed, was there in the occupation or fate of the two classes. The travellers enjoyed the op- portunity to amuse themselves everywhere through the world, going from country to city, and ocean- shores to Alpine-peaks. The toilers were confined to a circuit, narrow indeed, many of them under the rocky ribs of a mountain, in which was the mineral it was their business to extract, and were lighted to their task, not by the lamp of the glorious sun, but SOCIETY. 261 by a wretched, smoking wick of oil. The entrance to the dusky chambers of their industry was by a path cut through the very side of the hill, with scarce more than room for one to move comfortably, but advancing straight forward into the bowels of the earth, furlong after furlong, till the novice, inex- perienced in such things, might begin to shudder as if actually entombed, never to come forth. The variously colored crystals gleamed through the dark, as the flame of the guide's torch flared abroad, the particles of every hue imparting, from the finger that bore them to the tongue, that saline quality, es- sential to human and animal health, which God has so wonderfully treasured up among the very clods of the land as well as in the waves of the sea, so that even in such interior territories it may not be out of reach. Steep descent after descent carries us into abyss after abyss of this strange internal workshop, till we come at length to a lake of brine, in the midnight of the cavern appearing of immeasurable extent, only partially illuminated by a circle of candles on its invisible shores, and, more than aught ever seen beside, affecting me like the revelation of another state of being, perhaps that under- world by heathen poets described, which modern theologians still talk of; for there, verily, stood the ferryman in his boat, as if his office were to convey disembodied souls across the flood to their doom. But we were going back to the world we had left ; for, from the farther side, by another long avenue, similar to the one by which we approached, we SOCIETY. travelled towards the light of day, which, at the vast distance, looked like nothing but a sparkling star, gradually enlarging till it opens, as we emerge, into a flood of lustre. Reflecting on this one of a thousand like scenes in the retrospect of so peculiar a journey, my emo- tion was of respect to the dignity of labor. It was not particularly that an endless troop of wayfarers should deign to investigate those lower regions, and pay the customary fee for their curious privilege ; it was not that the imperial owners and monopolists of this secret wealth should from time to time exa- mine their singular estate, or that monuments of solid salt should be erected and carved inside there with sculptured names and dates, like marble shafts in courts and temples on the surface of the earth, in memory of their princely coming and condescension. It was the nobility of labor, untitled and unknown, save for its effects on the common good. Ah! I think sober men are sometimes disposed to give up, and be ashamed of, their titles, when they see how poor and empty they often are, compared with the substantial heraldry of toil, not figured on parch- ment, but in the actual tools it handles, yet more promotive of the great cause of human progress and welfare than all the weapons ever wielded in war. Yes, labor, I say. In all labor, says the Old Bible, there is profit ; more profit, indeed, than in any in- dolence or conventional display or service of fashion. Six hundred years and more of its honorable descent were there set before me on the spot, from the time SOCIETY. 63 that the masters of Italy and the world pierced the soil to gather riches with their spades, instead of wresting them from others with their spears. Dy- nasty after dynasty had, in the surrounding territory, risen and gone down ; one conqueror had driven out another, to be himself next driven out ; the clash of arms and the issue of blood had been often heard and seen in that Austrian neighborhood ; but the sons of industry, generation after generation, had quietly succeeded each other, children taking up the instru- ments that had dropped from dead parents' hands, with scarce an interruption to these peaceful strug- gles, digging away floor and roof of their internal abode, and washing out the wealth of the globe with streams, fresh as they flowed in, to be fully saturated at their mouth, ah ! more beautiful than the streams of gore that had redly furrowed the outside ; showing the dignity of labor, and all laborers, with head or heart or hands, united by it. I use the single instance in my description, that I may illustrate the praiseworthiness always in this world of useful exertion. Nor be it pronounced an exaggeration of the happiness that is attainable by .the mass of mankind, as much as by the favorites of fortune, if I testify to a cheerfulness in the faces of those workmen, under such seemingly untoward cir- cumstances, in the shadows of that endless night or perpetual eclipse, the shining of the sun amazing them as much as its occultation does us ; a cheer- fulness which not a few of my fellow-passengers, through all the splendors of nature and art, might 64 SOCIETY. well have envied. Neither let it be called a too radical view of the varieties, higher and lower, of the human lot, if I profess to discern no outward honor so great as pertains to those who, in one way or another, are fulfilling the almighty Creator's pri- meval order to subdue the earth, and have dominion, not of inheritance or form, but of talent and strength, over it. Another dissuasive from social pride among any members of the social body, I seemed to myself to see in the contributions which all the active and use- ful members of that body bring to the common civi- lization of mankind. I need offer here no argument but the very aspect of a great city. Take the great- est in the world, London. Greatest, I call it ; for, if any Chinese town exceeds it in population, none can equal it in importance. Every other city, that I saw, it transcended in solidity, in majesty, in unpre- tending, almost sleepy, power, active as it was, in the ' evidence of wealth and the prospect of endurance. "Wonderful product of humanity ! marvellous flower on the tree of life ! Millions of people, about as many as in all New England, providentially met together in one mass and motion ; endless lines of building ; measureless flow of the tide of existence, whose banks your feet, however untired, cannot out- pace ; no nation or province on the face of the globe, from Hindostan to Oregon, by its own offspring, in this vast assembly, unrepresented ; more strangers every day in the streets than natives in most of our cities ; no article of commerce in the whole sphere SOCIETY. 65 that may not more surely be purchased there than in the spot of its manufacture or growth ; no specimen or modification of human nature that does not in the huge fabric find a place ; nothing so low in the earth but there it may be seen at the foot of the ladder, and nothing so high but there it consti- tutes the top. Yet this spectacle of numberless and enormous diversities is the very spectacle most urgently enforcing the argument of mutual and common respect ; for how marvellously composed, how subtly intermingled, how variously derived from every quarter, right and left, above and below, are the materials and elements of this civil prosperi- ty ! Has any king prescribed, or conqueror intro- duced, or caste created it all ? Who graded the street, along which the lordly carriage so smoothly runs ? Who hewed and laid the level pavement, clear in all weather for myriads of the gay population so leisurely to walk ? Who smoothed and planted and fenced the parks, whose blooming beauty is shared by crests and coronets with childhood's play and with mean attire ? Who reared the prince- ly structures, around which liveried servants, solemn sentinels, and martial bands, parade ? Who cement- ed the walls and vaults, within which treasure is here guarded, and there crime ? Who brought this inestimable sum and changeful richness of goods, for that comfort and luxury, from every longitude and clime, fur from arctic, spice from tropic, coasts ? Who dived for the pearl, polished the diamond, wove the silk, crushed the grape, smelted the ore, sifted 23 266 SOCIETY. the gold, sowed and reaped the grain, and shaped metal and wool, fruit or plant, for enjoyment or use ? No king did it ; no conqueror did it ; no caste in society did it. Who did it ? Nobody in particu- lar. Mankind, human nature, did it ; every one who toils did it ; God himself, through his crea- tures, did it. Truly, many things, to work out a vast accomplishment, have been done here. Who shall cast up their figures, and assign their several portions ? Before this immensity of achievement, under this combination of glory, what royal preten- sion shall not sink, what private claim of nobleness shall not be abashed ? Imagination flags, and enu- meration gives up her count of such figures. Who, with gift more cunning than throned patronage could bestow, or ancient houses could inherit, or wealthy banks, with their hundred millions sterling, could multiply, lined the walls of those interior chambers with the splendors of painting, and made their corners lustrous with images of marble, as though genius meant that rank and order and wealth, even in their own possession and home, on their couch and at their table, should do it reverence? Ah ! that smoke, from numberless roofs, of London's atmosphere, rising for ever to meet the mist of the sky and to overhang the concentrated glory of the world, shadows forth something more conspicuous than kingly succession, or purse-proud ease, or aris- tocratic assumption. That hum from this mighty heart, going forth every hour, at noon and midnight, over a hundred roads, to mingle with the murmur SOCIETY. 267 of the all-encompassing sea, speaks of something finer than costly living, or courteous visiting, or vain adorning ; though these may think themselves the finest things that exist. It is the equal worth of every honest and religious offering, from lofty seats or low ones, to that general weal, which subsists not in few terms, but upon a thousand conditions, the immense structure of civilized life being hung to swing so safe and easy on countless little cords. Even the slave on his master's plantation whom we may be too nice in our sensibilities to think we could ever approach or take the hand of, or whose condition some self-condemning tyrant over his own servants abroad or miserable scorner of mankind may make our well-deserved republican reproach might say, with a voice reaching from Charleston to Boston, and from Boston to London, " Lo, from my dark-stained hands, the stuff of your white clothing, the seasoning of your food, the flavor of your drink, the pleasure of your freedom ! I, unpaid, have been among the builders of your so fine social pros- perity ! God grant me the justice in which man is so tardy ! " Nowhere so much as in a great city does society, in all its worse and all its better elements, come to a head. Abroad in its streets, one feels as in an ocean of humanity, swept about by those tides of life which are stronger than gulf-streams. As he listens, he distinguishes, amid the general roar of this sea, the separate dash of a thousand particular sounds, coming from wheels, human cries, and clattering hoofs, now 68 SOCIETY. growing fainter, and again more distinct. A shout of passion, a call of alarm, an entreaty of affection, mingle together. The soldier orders you back from a gateway, the driver warns you from his carriage- path, and the workman's sentinel from the eaves of a building under repair. Traders and beggars hang on your steps, and beseech your regard. Heavy ar- tillery at the walls speaks, as the voice and mighty throat of the whole population, to announce great public events. A wandering minstrel touches his harp softly in the back-yard of your dwelling. Meantime, black death, the cholera, rages dreadfully around ; while toil and play and feast and song go on, and keep it strange company. Such was my voyage through the great deep of gay, sad Paris ! Who, but He that ordained, can solve the mystery of this social being? COUNTRY. 23* Dear soil ! whose growth is mingled in my blood, To thee unebbing sets my feeling's flood ; Deep through most secret chambers of my mind Engravings of thy lightest traits I find. The tints so fast on Egypt's walls shall fade ; But not the surer colors thou hast laid. As body joins in one with soul, no bound Between thee and my yearning breast is found. So let the precious early influence last Till Memory's self be something in the past. COUNTRY. ONE of the sentiments which travelling must touch is that of patriotism. He who cares little about any thing else abroad will be eager to compare other countries with his own ; and, however foreign cli- mates affect his health, his love of native land will rise or fall in the thermometer of his heart. It must be confessed, that, whether with those who rove or stay at home, patriotism, formerly with the fathers and founders of the state a feeling so in- tense, is now a very variable element, subject to many weather-changes and modifications ; so that no query to the returning pilgrim is more common than his opinion of the merits of foreign nations in rela- tion to the United States. Upon such a query will probably at once arise in the pilgrim's mind a two- fold remembrance. If, before he started, he has been warmly interested in the many questions so fiercely debated among us, which make our politics and society such a torrid atmosphere, he will re- member the cool sense of relief from domestic discussions in. other climes at first so grateful. But COUNTRY. he will remember, too, how speedily his interest in those same discussions returned, and how he felt there were in all the world no questions beside so dear to him, or so important to humanity. But travellers and citizens alike are sometimes recreant to their country. The patriotic principle is lost or violated in divers ways among different classes. With some it appears to be driven out by their philanthropy or idea of philanthropic duty. Men of severe and reformatory conscience are apt to see very sharply the evil near home, in their neighbors or the civil state they are subjects of, and the institutions under which they live ; and, if the kindly affections in them are less active than the conscience, they will overlook the good in their own community or nation : whereupon may follow disgust - at their birthplace and political companionships ; then denunciation of the whole course and adminis- tration of affairs, whosoever may be at their head ; with cries even for disunion, insurrection, or bloody resistance to law, and preposterous over-praise of other peoples on the earth, to sharpen still further the contempt of one's own. Such persons, receiving the flatteries of society in foreign parts, instead of feeling a proper tenderness for the reputation of their own mother-country, and covering her shame, so far as they honestly may, by holding forth what there is also of purity and glory about her, may be tempted rather unfilially to descant upon her sins and miseries, and side with her maligners and foes. Then there are those whose patriotism dies out, if COUNTRY. 73 indeed it were ever born in them, because they really do not like the free republican spirit of our government. They look back after their own, or their ancestors' origin, across the sea. They are childishly dazzled yet by the splendors of despot- ism, and pleased with the pride of an old aristocracy. They are untimely tories so long after the date. A noble lover of freedom, both in politics and reli- gion, to a disdainful son of America said, " Speak well, my child, of the country that gives you your bread ! " Ay, we might add, speak well of the coun- try where you were born, or had your breeding ; where the first elements of knowledge have been instilled into you, and the earliest ideas of duty impressed from the holiest laws of Heaven : where the privileges of liberty have been enjoyed by you, even if, in your unworthy bosom, its aspirations were never kindled ; where your fathers' ashes rest till the resurrection, and your own and your children's must soon repose. Let us all speak well of it. Those who cannot had really better emigrate, and go where they can live content. Once more : the vulgar partisan ; slave of the caucus and cabal ; tool and devotee of cunning, selfish policy ; worshipper, though in hypocrisy, of men, with still greater meanness, and less ex- cuse, sacrifices patriotism, all genuine love of country, though he boast it ever so loudly, to party- spirit. Now, if a man ask suddenly why he should love his country, I do not know that any reply should at 274 COUNTRY. first be made, but that it is his country. That is reason enough. Love of country is, in our consti- tution, one of the primary, divinely ordained senti- ments, springing up in every generous bosom, like the love of kindred, the love of friends, the love of God. I do not find it necessary to ascertain whether my country be the greatest and most excel- lent country the sun ever saw before I can con- clude to love it. I should love it better, more loftily, if it were more excellent ; but I should love it, so God help me ! whether, compared with others, it were excellent or not. Quaintly Charles Lamb says, " It matters not to tell me how many mothers in the world there are better than mine : she is my mother ; that suffices for me." So our country is our mother. We are made of her dust yonder by God, who is our Father. We are but unnatural- children when she is not dear to us. As we love our friends in spite of their faults, not, as some say, for their faults, so with our native land. We should never, indeed, join in the impious exclamation, " Our country, right or wrong ; " we should never love or defend the wrong in our coun- try, but honor and laud only the right. Yet let us remember, that, by the law of mutual influence in the members of the same commonwealth, as of the same family, we share alike in her dignity and dis- grace ; and, while happy in the one, strive, not bitterly, but affectionately, to rid her, as ourselves, of the other. But is there no reason, beyond natural instinct, COUNTRY. 275 why we should intelligently love our own American country ? Yes : in one word, we should love her for what, as a new and youthful country, she has in so short time accomplished for the welfare of mankind. Persons, who from other climes have sought a home on these shores, in a phrase no more proverbial than it is correct, speak of their former residence as the old country. In this we may find the key-note of our subject. Nothing, perhaps, so much strikes a traveller in Great Britain, and over the w^hole Euro- pean continent, as how old every thing looks ; that is, how long the experiment of human progress and perfectibility has been going on. Our country is the youngest of the great mother-lands of the globe. Newly married is she to the civilization of the race. But, for what she has achieved for the general bene- fit, which land of them all Assyria, Egypt, Persia, Greece, Rome, or any modern stock is more worthy the attachment of its offspring ? I admit a balance of advantages and disadvantages between the newness of a country and its oldness ; for to claim every thing for ourselves is but ridiculous absurdity ; and those compatriots of ours, who sometimes make such a pretence, are like the Scotch citizen I met with on my journey, who, though an educated man, was so prejudiced, I could not convince him that certain masterpieces of genius in painting, which I had seen in continental galleries, were superior to some obscure pictures by a British artist ; or like the Hol- lander, who, when I eulogized the many fine pro- ductions of the Dutch pencil, replied, " Yes : we 76 COUNTRY. have had all the great artists, except a few Italians." Ah ! we may be, as is charged, a vain race this side the water ; but, after all, not the only vain race on the earth. Young as we are, let us admit we may, in many things, be surpassed by some of the nations on this aged globe. It is difficult, however, for one, native here and never abroad, to realize how old the world is, every thing about him is so fresh, and significant of progress and recent enterprise. In other lands he is carried back, travelling on the line of time as well as space, till even the ancient names of the Scripture chronology have a more vivid meaning as he traces for himself branch after branch of the hu- man, genealogical tree. Gazing long at monuments, dim epitaphs, 'half-effaced inscriptions, moss-grown walls, and ruined towers, the features are revealed of the longevity of mankind ; and he feels, as never here, that he is walking over the ashes of buried generations. The " earth sounds hollow to his tread." That Eastern side of the globe appears a vast sepulchre ; while the Western, in relation to it, is an immense cradle. In many places, accordingly, decrepitude, beyond any sign of flourishing, is in the whole figure of that foreign existence. Often decay is the prevailing aspect of the scene ; not decay in the fields and forests, but of institutions and em- pires, to which Nature herself looks young. Then, to the eye of imagination glancing hitherward, this region of the setting sun in heaven seems, in vision, the region of the rising sun of humanity, as if it COUNTRY. 77 were reserved by God so long, that in due time, when the advance of his children there should stop or be retarded or clogged, it might be here the theatre of a new experiment ; for, when God tries experiments, he takes the whole world for his room, to carry forward still further the interests of his earthly family ; to increase their outward fortunes ; and, above all, promote the great principles of free- dom and religion. The Old World, indeed, like an old man who has steadily through life been pursuing his business, is rich in many respects in which the New World is poor ; for, when we came, we left our property behind us ! Verily, it has a history which, to ours, is like an endless vista of crowded centuries to the short nursery-tale of a growing boy. In truth, by none of the soaring and sublime proportions of the ma- terial world, which the traveller commonly talks of, was my spirit so thrilled as when standing in some of the public halls of England, France, and Ger- many, amid the visible reminiscences of the past, and letting the fancy with the sight run over the long record of glory and shame, whose numberless tokens were, in expressive registers of substantial relics, all around displayed, signals of deeds of daring and courageous defence mixed with proofs of conquest and plunder ; rows of kings, sculptured or painted, through which the sceptre of authority had passed, dropping successively from the dead hand to the living one, while imperial souls, with plebeian, went to the just account ; heavy suits of armor, per- 24 278 COUNTRY. forated or dinted with blade or ball, as their wearers, now ashes, bore them into the deadly fray ; the linen shirts through which heroes, battling for the truth, as they saw it, had been pierced, with the blood- stain still on the white cloth, perhaps the robe of some woman, nerved by inspirations caught from heaven to maintain her country's cause, and purely laying down her body among the vulgar heap of the slain ; or, like Joan of Arc, leaving in embers, at the foot of the stake, the limbs that had moved only in the service of God and her native land ; with manifold, more than I can enumerate, trophies of success, pictures of struggle, gains of humanity on cruel, arbitrary power, reaching back age after age into almost fabulous seons of antiquity, and spread- ing a table to which the whole nation could come and feast on the proud recollections of the past. History represented in, and narrated by, art : from these two great geniuses comes, in general, the grand impression received in the Old World ; while it is rather the brilliance of present achievement and of ardent hope which characterizes our new population. There it is beauty standing sentinel over action, or reverence embalming performance ; here it is strength and zeal still working out their imperfect aims, and somewhat roughly and rashly chasing after what is yet to be celebrated in the annals of many years to come. There it is a frequently outworn, here a vir- gin, soil. There the very children seem old when they are born, with the heritage of centuries in their manners and looks ; here the old are often young, COUNTRY. 79 with eager hands and speculative faces, as if they had still somehow to make their fortunes before they die. There a city seems to have grown up taller and taller, till it is hoary with time, and stooping a little towards the ground : to the returning traveller, the town here seems cut off at the top, or lately sprouting from the earth. But that we should have done so much so quickly for the subduing of the earth, and for the liberty and happiness of its inhabi- tants, is, I repeat, the one comprehensive title of our country to love and renown. Yet even pious affection will not be blind to those drawbacks upon our repute which fanaticism may magnify. It is kind to a nation, as to an individual, to point out its defects for its own good ; and our defects border upon our virtues. This is truly the New World, and that the Old ; and, correspondently in the analogy, this is the fast country, and others are relatively slow. It is a singular illustration of the speed of our settlement, that virtually one language is spoken all over our vast territory ; while, from ancient roots, several distinct dialects still prevail within the narrow space of Great Britain alone, the English tongue having come, strangely enough, to be better spoken here than in England itself. But there are dangers and sins incident to youth and swiftness. In how many things are we too fast ! and our fastness is our iniquity and disgrace. Our reckless and perilous locomotion in this country, bad enough in itself, is but an emblem of our un- righteous haste in things of more concern than a 80 COUNTRY. journey. One traverses the deep, and rolls in every kind of vehicle over many lands, down hills terrifi- cally steep, through gorges that, to the approach, look impenetrably narrow, and along edges of preci- pitous hills or unfathomed gulfs ; or he sails in a hundred boats over rivers and lakes in perfect safety to himself and the tens of thousands of all his com- panions ; and then he comes home to find, in the first newspaper he takes up, accounts of railroad ac- cidents, steamboat explosions, runaway horses, and overturned carriages, with the long list of accidents, severely painful or awfully fatal ; till it seems to him, that, with all the dark plots abounding in de- spotic countries, there is one many-jointed, overt, and shameless conspiracy against human life, which is peculiar to his own. As this external haste among us is a representative fact, indicative of all our jeopardy, it may not be even morally useless to remark the literal fact, that, beside the double-guard upon his axle, which the foreign driver uses, of brake and chain, often, more- over, when you are coming to but a gentle descent, an iron shoe, like that actually employed to lock the wheel, is distinctly painted upon a firm and high post by the roadside, visible from some distance, for a peculiar caution against rapidity there. In how many places might such a shoe, to lock the wheel, well be drawn and hung up, not only on our high- ways of travel, but elsewhere too along the whole scope and course of our activity ! Might it not pro- perly be set up before the young man, liberally ex- COUNTRY. 281 pending his means and health in pleasure, excess of wine and revelry, burning out, as with a double flame, the candle of his bodily vigor, which God gave to be purely and prudently consumed ? Might it not fitly be elevated at the door of the speculative tradesman, launching forth all over the land beyond his basis of capital, and giving reins to his credit upon others and his interest at banks as far as he can drive it, till he and all his fellows are brought up by some crash and overturn, such as that from which multitudinous confused hosts, that might be painted like Pharaoh's army emerging from the Red Sea, have but lately been striving to extricate their bruised or broken wheels ? Might it not pro- perly be observed by the many stewards and trustees, who, led into temptation by being carelessly watched and miserably unchecked, pervert to their own gain or luxury the funds they hold for others, and as- tound the community with defalcations, for which they are not alone, though so terribly, to blame ? Might it not even be kept in sight by the extrava- gant woman or spendthrift girl, who, in silk and velvet and ornaments of jewels and gold, must clothe herself beforehand in her husband's or father's possible gains, or so invest the acquired property that might be devoted to a nobler end ? Might it not beneficially be raised in full view of our whole po- pulation, accused as money-loving, but though there be a class of misers wasteful far more ? If in a forward land, where the young are often dis- respectful and the wisdom of age unhonored, any 24* COUNTRY. could thus be led in the course of modesty and dis- cretion, I should not regard as useless the journey that gave me one illustration so far-fetched from the mountains whose rivers empty into Oriental seas. Nay, might not some of the philanthropists and reli- gionists themselves, in their moral impatience to exe- cute immediately their plans, imitating the general foolish hurry of their countrymen, remember the homely imported symbol ? But yet, can their coun- trymen, hasty in so many other ways, blame them for taking example and trying to be a little hasty in the noble way of doing good ? Ah ! is it not a sig- nificant fact, that the driver in our country, instead of holding back his wheel on the inclined plane, races down one hill for a purchase to win, easier and quicker, as he hopes, if not overset on the way, the top of the other? So we rush in trade, expense, enterprises of mines and roads and mills, in our am- bition, conquest, physical aggrandizement ; but, alas ! it was never, in the history of the world, with any such boyish rush that intellectual or moral greatness, which is alone dear in the eye of Heaven, was reached. For the present, must it not be admitted, that, if we excel in quickness and invention, we pay dear for this excellence, by falling short in thorough- ness and security ? In the French capital, if there be so much as a little staging for workmen raised on the wall of a house, officers are stationed to warn off every passer-by ; and all along the continental rail- ways stand men, with colored staves in their hands, to signify whether the onward passage is safe. How COUNTRY. 883 much collision and destruction here would such an expedient have prevented ! Those colored staves, indeed, indicate a whole plan of regulations, car- ried out there, which, among us, might be thought superfluous. If many cars or coaches are forth, running with imprudent velocity on uncertainly cleared ways, there will, according to the doctrine of chances, be a large ratio of interferences and over- throws. Equally so it is in companies and expedi- tions of finance and business. Referring to these and similar things, as I talked with an American revisiting his home after a foreign residence of some years, I said, " Such is the price for the invaluable boon of our freedom ! " " Ah ! " replied the emigrant from America to Europe, "there is more freedom here than for some of us is quite convenient ! I prefer, for my part, to live in the despotic country ! " Spite of the sad abatement, thank God, it is the dis- position of very few of our people to agree in this sentiment ; and liberty pervading, representative liberty is so the peculiar, romantic glory of our land over all beside, that millions in other territories, with desire unspeakable and " groanings that cannot be uttered," long to participate it. " Whither go you from hence ? " asked of me a bent, gray -headed Austrian keeper of the inn-door, near the borders of Bavaria. " To America," I replied. " I en-vy you!" thus, in his broken speech, emphasizing the English word, was the brief, decisive rejoin- der. Ah ! if liberty were the universal lot here in our fair domain, if we had worth and moral power 84 COUNTRY. enough for that, the tribute could be accepted in a joy dashed with no compunction. But I should not be an honest reporter, if I did not declare that everywhere throughout Europe our American sla- very is regarded as our inconsistency and blot. Nevertheless, with our miserable and depressing slavery, I must as honestly affirm, I see not how an impartial observer of the world can behold our country's stand on the scale of character as, on the whole, below that of any other. The essence, the sin, of slaveholding itself, is in one man's using another as his instrument, the tool of his pleasure ; a thing, and not a person; an article of merchandise, instead of an inalienable property. It is a melan- choly truth, that, of this very same using, in Eng- land, in France, in Austria, and Russia, there is as much, to say the least, as here. Only it is our spe- cial shame, as we must confess ; because it is the vio- lation of our standard, and a virtual recanting of all the principles and professions of freedom that lie at the basis of our government. The best that can be said for our spiritual health in the matter, is, that we are all, in one way or another, so sore about it ! "What," said to me, with coaxing good-nature, a British fellow-traveller, " what do you think now of your slavery ? " " Think of it ? " I answered. " I think it is our reproach and transgression, the great evil of our land, the disease of our body politic. The body politic has diseases like the body physical. This is ours ; a very bad one ; there could scarce be a worse. And let me tell you, that we Americans COUNTRY. 85 do not resent your reproachful referring to the dis- eases of our body politic, save when you forget that your body politic has diseases too." He was silent ; I was silent : we both had cause. Would we might all be silent, if so we would repent ! We talk much of our great country. It can never be the extent and extension of our soil, but only the goodness and generosity of the people, that can make the country truly great. One saintly soul, whom we call Son of God, walked, eighteen centuries since, over the coasts of Judea; and it is called the Holy Land to this day. The land was no holier than any other, west or east. He was holy that passed over it, and perfumed it with his sanc- tity. And only when this land, far and near, is trod- den by his faithful disciples, can its glory exceed that of the elder nations of the earth, and patriot- ism the warmest be a sentiment at which justice can take no offence, nor humanity have any shame ; for it will be identical with themselves. If, in fine, reviewing the whole matter with a good citizen's conscience, one should desire to see the dangerous tendencies of his own American coun- try, their most vivid recapitulation might be made under a figure suggested by the thought, which has marked the whole line of our comparison, of our national youth. That figure is not seldom, in these days, presented in the cant phrase of Young Ameri- ca, which, though spoken in a light and laughing way, has a sober meaning, demanding our best re- flections. 86 COUNTRY. The artist has tried to express with his pencil what is signified by Young America ; drawing the portrait of a boy, not without some pretensions to beauty, bright, vigorous, and promising in his ap- pearance, but with such pride and self-will in his compressed lips, such presumption in his wide-open, staring eyes, such forwardness in his whole aspect, vanity in his dress, and such a hint or likelihood of impertinence in what he is about to say or do ; for, though the hands are not given, you cannot finish the figure in your imagination without fancying them rudely clinched ; that you gaze at the delinea- tion with a very qualified and dubious pleasure. Truly, we should have occasion, all of us, young or old, for lamentation, if such were the universal character of the youth of our country ; for well some one has said, " If you would know the public opinion and action of the next age, inquire into the prevailing thoughts and tendencies of the young men of the present." Excellent and hopeful traits has Young America. But we should, for our wholesome admonition, seek what, involved in the meaning and very sound, as the ear catches it, of this phrase, is not well or praiseworthy in the prevailing temper of the whole social and political body of which we are part. There is a spirit of the times and of the country, which we are to welcome, follow, and profit by, where it is right ; and guard against, so far as it is injurious and wrong. The land we live in has my love and praise beyond any other land under the .COUNTRY. 287 sun ; but will the spirit of patriotism forgive me if I say that the artist's figure of Young America does not wholly misrepresent the American people ? "Young America ! " Verily we are young, as com- pared with many countries, Old England, France, Spain, Italy. Many a man among us is older than the nation as a distinct community. Less than four- score is not very aged for a nation, when, in other regions, the same species of arbitrary rule measures . a space of thousands of years. But we have, in our juniority, certainly attained to an enormous growth. We present, on the mighty scale of a people and a continent, the phenomenon sometimes witnessed in the gigantic and amazing size of an individual in his early manhood. If we inquire, then, into the character and port of this power, so monstrous in the morning and spring-time of its life, must we not confess that, to some extent, it is boyish ? I am sorry this should be such a term of reproach, and sorry to use and apply it ; but does not the wilful, wanton, jealous, intrusive, disrespectful, and quarrelsome temper of an undisciplined and inexperienced youth dash and adulterate somewhat our finer elements of public justice, generosity, and dignity? Is there no juve- nility, none of the hasty, defying, unmannerly, and intemperate tone, which makes the least pleasing characteristic to which the early period of life is liable, evident in our civil documents, legislative proceedings, and in one state or another, under one administration or another in our govermental 288 COUNTRY. policy ? Are we a truly manly nation ? Look, any one who will, and see the indiscreetness, to say the least, sometimes of our functionaries, acting with our trust, commission, and authority ! See the dis- graceful personalities on our floors of debate through almost every capitol, from the chief one down, as though vulgar boys were calling each other names ! See abusive words, turning, on occasion, into angry blows ! See how, like a combative stripling, with his fists prepared for action in the street, we are, in one or another itching member of our great corpora- tion, ready for a general fight; and have had to invent a barbarous word as a name for those who, but for the law's restraint, would, at any moment, rush forth to invade the territories, in coveting which we violate one of the everlasting command- ments of God ! See within our own borders all law, human and divine, recently trampled down by brutal force, in defence of the disgraceful institution of slavery against the peaceful and legitimate exten- sion of freedom ! See, on the other hand, the heady and passionate quality, like a sour ferment or a humor in the blood, such as youth is subject to, in our very benevolence ! See the crudeness and ludi- crous mimicry of lordly ways, as though awkward clowns were playing at gentility, not yet excluded from what is called our best society ! See the facts of Christianity ridiculed by a blasphemous scepti- cism, as superficial in its philosophy as was ever a profane lad with a thoughtless oath on his lips ! See liberty itself interpreted as the right to do what we COUNTRY. 89 please, that seems to be our definition of liberty, though it be to make war, spy into our fellow- citizens' dwellings, or enslave our fellow-creatures' bodies and souls ! See whatever, current among us, betokens the faulty pattern and the erring side of the genius of Young America ! Young America has his trophies and achieve- ments ; but they are qualified with grievous abate- ments and great wants. He outsails his rival England in his yacht America ; but sometimes he goes to the bottom or the shore in his huge steamer ; while his rival sails safely on, and carries a hundred thousand souls unharmed across the sea. The character of a whole nation, is it not repre- sented in the smallest things, even in a ship ? Young America trades and makes a great deal of money ; but he is so fast and ambitious in making it, that the whole rolling mass and splendid carriage of his enterprise has been repeatedly overset with tre- mendous crash of common ruin ; and how many of us are there, who have not learned that Young America, in his hurry no doubt, uses a slyness and sharpness of bargain, which, to a true and sober vision, is not very distinguishable from dishonesty and deceit ! The boy, negotiating with his fellow, sometimes cheats in tops and marbles ; and Young America has default, false play, and repudiation in his blood. Young America builds ; he is a great architect ; but I cannot say that his houses do not oftener tum- ble down than houses do in other nations, though other nations usually build higher than he does, 25 290 COUNTRY. if we will believe they do any thing better and stronger than we do. Young America makes his own way ; carves out, as we say, his own fortune ; but he lives high, and be- yond his means, and uses a magnificence of dress, ornament, and furniture, which he cannot well sup- port, and which often drives him to failure and the auction-block. Young America abjures, in theory, all aristocracy ; but, in his expenses and self-indul- gences, he not seldom imitates aristocrats, and even goes beyond their example, shamefully to his own harm, bettering their instruction. The peer, de- scended from a score of kings, may be heard re- marking that he cannot afford to do this or that ; but you never hear Young America make any such ad- mission. He would be mortified to have it thought he could not afford any thing. Yet Young America, pardon me, shade of my country, my reluctant censure ! with all his vanity and show ; with all his crowding among the strong, and all his shouldering of the weak ; with all his sins against inferior races, as the African and Indian, -T and all his avarice of new possessions, Young America is a generous giver, an earnest learner, an ardent worshipper too, ^ such a giver, such a learner, such a worshipper, as nowhere else upon the globe can be found ; and, in the beauty of these characteristics, promising to be great and good as never nation yet was beneath the sun. Would to God that his good points might be strengthened, and his bad or doubtful ones reduced ! For Young COUNTRY. 291 America must be Old America by and by ; and the dishonored, dreary, miserable old age of the sinner belongs to nations in this world as well as to indi- viduals. For ourselves and our children, for our commu- nity and our country, far as our strength may go, let us adopt and extend his virtues ; let us lament and extinguish his vices. To the utmost of our in- fluence, let us lead him to that true religion, of Christ in the divine gospel, which can alone cure every iniquity and confirm every elevated principle. Let this be the purpose of every man, father, elder, guardian, among us. Let it be the purpose, if pos- sible more cordial still, of perhaps every more in- fluential woman, mother, sister, daughter, of our ruder sex. The portrait of Young America is sketched, not unwittingly, as a masculine shape. Let the gentler, more affectionate, and, what I have always found, more religious part of our humanity, that must share the character and fortunes of the whole, pour, of its naturally higher purity, more gracious modesty and ardent devotion, to refine, exalt, and save save for the world, for human weal this our so mingled, endangered, and most momentous American life. MANKIND. 25* Nature, with thy beauty rare ! human nature ! form more fair Than earth or sun, than sea or sky, Yet blasted with depravity. Thanks for some purer blossoms yet, Upon thy boughs in glory set, Intrinsic grace and worth to prove ; For genius thanks, and thanks for love, Which flower from thy rugged stem Brighter than sovereign's diadem ; And prophesy, with final fruit, Comely to make thy darkest root. MANKIND. EVERY traveller, I believe, is expected, as a matter of course, to have the lowest opinion of human nature. Certainly no theological theory of the depravity of mankind has ever come up to the prac- tical contempt which a certain class of worldly-wise experts in observation entertain for mankind. The scorner of his race is admitted to testify and tell all the stories of base and wicked doings which he has gathered on his way ; but, if a man bear different witness, it is at once by many presumed that he has been imposed upon. Only a short-sighted and cre- dulous person, it is intimated, can render a favorable judgment, in this inquest, upon his fellow-creatures. Especially if it happen to be a member of a parti- cular religious profession who renders a merciful verdict, the cry is at once raised, " What does he know about human nature ? He does not even sus- pect what is going on in the world, and is ignorant as a child of things occurring every day in the street before his eyes. People appear only in their Sun- day-dress to him : how should he see the thoughts 96 MANKIND. and conduct that make their ordinary wear ? He walks in a complete mist and delusion : to speak vulgarly, dust is thrown in his eyes, and anybody can deceive him." But a man who has journeyed unprofessionally, in many lands, with all classes, in all vehicles, in the highest with nobles, and with laborers and peasants in the lowest, for, in aristocratic regions, there are three or four grades at your service, among deck passengers and cabin ones, himself, without courier or servant, doing with agents and publicans all the business and necessary talk of a travelling party; walking with those that walked, and riding with those that rode; dealing with deep-voiced, sincere Britons ; plausible and polite French ; coarser-man- nered but warmer-hearted Germans ; and supple Italians, so long schooled to cunning by a double ecclesiastic and political tyranny : such a man may have some right to be introduced upon the stand. He may claim to know something about his fellow- creatures in their dispositions and transactions ; in their worldly conduct ; and their week-day clothing, be it of velvet or serge. " Well," exclaims my cold sceptic or shrewd mis- anthropist, "what can he bring but the traveller's proverbial testimony about the tricks he has been the victim of, overcharges in the bill ; circumven- tions by money-changers and financiers ; deceptions as to routes and distances and objects of interest ; of having had to go from admiration of the glories of the world to scold the impositions of the driver ; of MANKIND. 97 being cheated in the terms of the bargain ; misled as to the beauties of the way ; disappointed in the times of arrival ; and, in short, involved in a universal con- spiracy against his solitary enjoyment and advan- tage?" Now, I am not going to pretend there is but one side in this matter, or no color at all for such exag- geration. There is much in the eye, as well as in the thing, to affect the judgment. I have known travellers abroad who took just this dark view, always passed a harsh sentence, or suspected a fraud- ulent plan, and disputed the honesty of that very landlord or conductor with whom other persons, in the same circumstances, were quite content. But I must say in regard to such, that, though an indi- vidual complainer may speak from a noble sensi- tiveness to the moral tone and quality of human life, yet I think I have noticed that the censorious in general had not themselves the best of tempers or the most generous minds, and so were not compe- tent to a fair and comprehensive decision. " I have not," it was remarked to one, " found the total corrup- tion yet." " You will, if you go far enough," was the earnest and bitter reply. " You will not carry that article long without losing it," said a man, referring to something exposed to be stolen ; as though the thief were always near by, as certainly he is often not very far off. But I did carry it round to the other side of the world. Doubtless there are many wrong and mean trans- actions which the traveller has to endure ; and, alas ! 98 MANKIND. he is sometimes himself more afflicted by an error in his bill than by one in his life. But he may safely engage to remember far more of kindly ar- rangements and equitable affairs. Indeed, I find my first argument in a phrase in our familiar speech, whose meaning I first fully learned from converse with the world. We say, a common humanity, if nothing else, might induce one to avoid certain actions or perform others. Such phrases always savor of truth and reality. There is such a thing as a common humanity ; that is, a spirit, a mode of behavior, among men in general, not sublime indeed, but in- teresting and worthy. It is a virtue, confessedly such ; and, for my part, more than any thing else I saw this virtue of common humanity. Threading my lonely path through the masses of great cities, how numberless the civil remarks made to me ; friendly replies given ; perfect strangers, who in Lon- don and Paris, at Antwerp and Rotterdam, and in many places, that went out of their way to guide me, or drew careful descriptions of the course I was to take, aiding me without reward ; or when the thanks I returned was the only pay they would have accepted ! My reader would become impatient if I were to detail the disinterested advice I received from chance companions, in long conversations, as to the best methods of living or places of abiding in distant regions, scenes in nature to visit, works of art to examine ; when my counsellors might never see me again, and had no motive but this common humanity to prompt them. There is no pleasant MANKIND. 299 varnish^ no boasted refinement, worth so much as this. Indeed, the general good-humor of intercourse among those accidentally thrown together ; mutually helpful services freely rendered ; pleasant words ; affectionate, religious salutations heard along road and river ; unaffected cordialities of kinsfolk and friends, pointing back to happy homes, did not, to me, prove man the brute or demon which by bigots and sceptics who are more akin to each other than we may fancy he has been called. There are certainly great differences of behavior, arising from diverse constitutions, both intellectual and moral, in men as you meet them. Nothing is grosser than the doctrine which puts human nature indiscriminately into one piece, and clothes it in uni- form, when there are as many natures as creatures. But, from those who had but slender endowments and moved with awkward deportment, I have received such generous furtherance and patient instruction as would fain oblige the heart to glow, and the face blush with humble gratitude. I cannot, therefore, join the decriers of human nature in their sweeping censures, whether they be worldlings or theologians. I would rather, from my experience, echo that grandly ringing line of Peter, who also was some- thing of a traveller in his day, "Honor all men." Ah! Peter himself did not begin with that feeling, but with Jewish scorn ; and the line which he wrote in his Epistle arose, I doubt not, from his own re- corded experience, wherein, upon his full-blown disdain of other nations, men in general, he saw the 300 MANKIND. great sheet let down from heaven to earth, contain- ing all manner of four-footed beasts, wild beasts, creeping things, and fowls of the air, for him to eat, teaching him the folly of his previous Hebrew pre- judices about the Gentiles, that is, all the rest of the world, and admonishing him never after to esteem any man, of any nation, common or unclean, a correspondence which, let me say in passing, is another of the many internal evidences of Chris- tianity. Ah! there is no dainty air, no grace of fashion, no conventional propriety, no horror of vul- garity, so precious as this common humanity. But, in addition, there is a reason for honoring all men in the greatness of individual characters, pro- duced by this tree of humanity, on which we, with the millions of our fellow-beings, grow. That mighty tree, like some trees in the vegetable kingdom, truly does not come into complete bearing at once. Only a multitude of leaves, slight and cheap expressions of its vitality, may for a while appear ; but at length, at intervals it may be of ages, appear its splendid flowering and its glorious fruit of moral grace and goodness, here and there, on a few of its branches. God did not cut it down because of this slow and late blossoming, and at first scanty ripen- ing ; but, as with the fig-tree in the parable, he tended and cherished it the more; till at last the holy and divine product, once so rarely seen upon it, which it was yet intended and planted to bring forth, unfolded oftener and more abundantly on its boughs. Though the tree is yet backward in many MANKIND. 301 a part hereafter to be covered with this spiritual glory, we live in the day of its finer flourishing ; and I should be thankless and recreant if I did not testify, that my most delightful recollections of the foreign excursion which carried me to clamber so far among its foliage sometimes finding fruit, sometimes not are of extraordinary specimens of human excellence I was permitted to behold. They are of noble men, who cheered the pilgrim when away from his friends, conferred favors upon him he had no power to return, and brought him under ob- ligations they would not suffer him to cancel, yet which were lightened of all disagreeable weight by its being evident they would bring anybody and everybody under the same. What else meant those monuments of their generosity which I saw, in so many asylums and hospitals, on my way ? I did not rejoice in them especially for what they did for me, but for what they were in themselves ; in fact, I did not give them personally the entire credit even of their own worth. After all, did they not grow on the tree ? They were samples of the stock from which they sprouted. The farmer does not take green or decaying fruit, or a withered or smutty kernel, for a sample of his orchard or his wheat. They boasted not, and I boast them not ; because they bore not the root, but the root them. The blood of Adam, through all the myriad streams of humanity, was in their veins. The whole tree was essential to their pre-eminence. The coarse trunk, the knotty limbs, the swell and rising of ages, lifted 26 MANKIND. them so high, and nursed the buds that were to open into the shape of their beautiful and nourishing souls. Only thank God for exemplifying, in all such instances, the capacities of mankind, for inspir- ing us with hope of seeing them multiplied without end, for kindling us with desire ourselves to reach up to their blessed maturity of manhood and woman- hood, and for moving us thus to honor all men who are vitally connected with these particular manifesta- tions. Honor the nature which, in every man, has the germ of such goodness. But human nature, from her Author, puts on another crown of honor in the genius which some of her offspring have displayed. I need not say a word to celebrate the incomparable claim of that peculiar gift we call genius. Every one who can read a book ; who can be charmed with the bright visions of poetry ; who, like Paul when he was caught up into the third heaven, can be transported into other worlds by the magic of invention, or thrilled in any way with the imagination of beauty or the eloquence of words, will acknowledge for it his debt. But whence the genius we admire, and which our bosoms so dilate with ? It is, we say, an inspiration of God ; but it is derived to the favored mortal, whom it kindles, through the common facul- ties of human nature, only in him refined and heightened. The man of genius is no exclusive creature, a being of another order, as is some- times supposed. He is but the child of the race; he is the flower of the family. The richest blood MANKIND. 303 of Adam, flowing from every quarter, where, like wine in store from the choicest vintages, it has been most exalted, has mingled a thousand mazy cur- rents, of diverse qualities of value, in the veins of the chosen one ; as if the great Father meant in him to show to what the powers of his human children are equal, in discovering the treasures of his creation, and unveiling the attributes of his mind. But this genius is made out of the stuff we are all made of, only carried up into greater force and purity. It is the porcelain of our common clay. Like John the Baptist's robe of camel's hair, we wear the cheap and shaggy coat, whose finer threads compose its in- calculable cost. Be not discouraged by the transcen- dent abilities of the man of splendid intellect. He is but your brother ; and what he is you may some- time become; yea, far exceed. Teacher of youth! gladly toil to wake up and patiently train the ener- gies of your pupil's mind : there is that within him which will hereafter and finally outstrip Homer and Milton. Real philanthropist ! be not so scornful with any, but honor in all men the capacities which, for the moment, so brilliantly culminate in some. Such the thoughts with which, in memory, I still hover over the spots I visited, consecrated by the death of those whose names and writings made their birthplaces and abodes illustrious, and whose genius liveth evermore. "We fancy there must be some ex- ceeding attraction, some unrivalled splendor, in the native soil and local habitation of such persons ; but they lived on the common earth, as well as shared the 304 MANKIND. common nature of men. When I trod the grounds of that great instructor and pure-hearted amuser of the world, and, in a world of so much sadness, it is something even innocently to amuse, of Walter Scott I mean, the rumor of a tale ascribed to whom affects us more than the authentic work of another man, wondering, I asked myself, " Is this the outward origin of those matchless tales, of the lyric and historic pen, which have so bound young and old in their benignant spell, soothed so much care, whiled away so many hours else of weariness and pain, and turned the fancy of millions into a stage, whereon such a host of characters, before unknown, have marched and con- versed together, as it were alive, in their own form and costume ? Are these, that I see, the actual hills he celebrated ? and those yonder the woods and brooks ? and what I sailed over yesterday the lochs ? What explanation do they vouchsafe of the mystery of his mind, so populous with all incidents repre- senting all types of human disposition ? " The river Tweed flows muddy in the hollow behind his house, but can tell me nothing. " Eildon's triple-height " soars there into the sky, but shows not among all its rills the channel of his inspiration. Farther away rise the summits, whereon some of his heroes halted in their march ; but they shrink into insignificance as you gaze at them, so much more figure do they make in the mirror of his imagination than actually on the earthy globe. Nor can all the famous curio- sities guns and spears and figured stones, rem- MANKIND. 305 nants of barbarian and classic glory .that hang about the walls of his dwelling, which is now a shrine, solve this problem of intellectual mastery. I stood delighted, yet disappointed and sad. It was the satisfaction of funeral respect. Only one touch- ing ray of light falls graciously from the staircase which he constructed from his study to his chamber, so that he might rise to his work and retire from it, and, late or early, light or quench his own fire, with- out disturbing the family by passing through any other room. All that can be said is, " Oh ! he is our man, our representative, one of the elder-born in our household ; and we can love and admire him because we are his kindred." So with that prodigy, more amazing, whom we call Shakspeare, well regarded in any treatment of that human nature, of which he, of all men, was al- most alone ordained preacher and priest, priest of man, not priest of God. The house he saw the light in still stands ; the neighboring church holds his dust ; the Avon flows by softly as ever ; but none like him is born there where countless pilgrims scratch, as if for preservation, the names that melt like bubbles into the sea of his immortality. There is no resurrection under the sun of the poet from his tomb. Nobody beholds the stream, or gazes on the sky, or greets the rising day, as he beheld and gazed and greeted. But we can all sympathize in his mood and appreciate his wisdom, and inwardly feel that his supremacy is, nevertheless, but the expansion of our nature 26* 306 MANKIND. Oh! this genius is not a plant from the ground, but a bestowment of God in the noblest blossoming of the human soul. When we honor it, we honor all men whose several traits, through the long line of existence, have contributed to its ultimate inesti- mable production. It is customary with many to trace back their relations far as they can, and map them out upon a genealogical table. If we were likewise to follow the pedigree of genius, we might find it running into the widest variety of sources, out of which it sucks its life and nutriment, from the laborer in the field, and the watcher in his obser- vatory ; from sailors over the deep, and mountaineers upon the crags ; from prisoners in dungeons, and kings on their thrones ; from peaceful shepherds, and soldiers under arms ; from beggars and benefactors, strange kinsfolk associated, to be all, as they may well, ancestry of one person ; yet from all these might we see the actual currents gushing which mix in its circulations. It is genius, because it is the as- sembling and raising into more intense and potent action of the manifold original elements of human nature, elements scattered remotely or coming out singly here and there, but elements gathered for once, and flaming together for the renown of man- kind in the glory of God. There is respect for the delegate, but for his constituency greater. I honor the man, the chief; but I honor all men more. He is borne on their shoulders. But, in fine, there is something loftier in this world than genius itself; and that is martyrdom, self- MANKIND. 307 sacrifice unto death, for human welfare. This also I adduce for the honor of human nature. I admit the deep shames and terrible iniquities by which that nature has been discredited and abused; but why are they black but because there is an honorable nature beneath them ? Yet some may exclaim, " Martyrdom a glorious thing for mankind ! Why, then, is it that the martyr cannot live ? "Wherefore has he expired in agony, but that his fellow-men were set in malignant, unappeasable wickedness against him ? " Ah ! that is because at the time, as the great Martyr said, " they know not what they do." Afterwards they adopt him, whom they hated and slew, into their highest honor and love. Yes, not a martyr was ever lost. The heart of man re- claims all the holy suffering confessors of God, and, by its reclamation and admiring affection, demon- strates its own capacity for self-sacrifice. I stopped upon the bridge at Prague, over the river Moldau, where, we are told, a Romish priest, nearly five centuries ago, was plunged into the stream, by order of the Bohemian king, because he refused to divulge what had been confided to him by the queen under the seal of confession. To the loving eyes that looked after him, flames appeared to flicker above the place in the water where his body lay ; and upon the parapet are stamped five stars, en- closing a cross, in imitation of those flames, and sug- gestive of eternal glories for the ascending spirit. The memory of the poor priest, faithful to his vow, could not perish. His soul was taken out of its 308 MANKIND. humility of station, to be, more than three centuries after, sainted and canonized. The recovered body, once clad in sackcloth, was incased in a gorgeous shrine, and placed in the cathedral; while simple John Nepomuk, who cared not so much for his flesh as for his vow, became, in all Catholic countries, the patron of bridges ; he who could not keep himself from being thrown over one in utter shame and mor- tal agony ! No : the humble martyr was not wholly cast away ; he did not drop out of the respect of his kind. No king threatens him now ; but many a royal head bows at the place of his execution, and travellers from all the world reverently pause to gaze at the spot where the willing victim sank ; while the- rapid current, as it rolls and sweeps one's imagina- tion along its tide to the sea, seems to be bearing his fame upon its bosom for ever and ever. So Borromeo is persecuted to death by the accusa- tions of foes and the attacks of government. But, at Arona, his face, in a colossal statue of bronze, from a height of more than a hundred feet, shines, year after year, to unnumbered beholders, an image of all sweetness and lowliness, for that is the im- pression, in the air. But why, in the noble army of martyrs, go further ? Does the fate of the great Martyr himself, and Author of our salvation, show, to the honor of human nature, no earthly recogni- tion and human appreciation of his unapproached purity ? One sign, of a legion, let me select, in transcribing a pencilled line from a picture of the crucifixion in a museum in the Netherlands. On MANKIND. 309 a rock, which the artist has painted beneath the bloody tree, his brush has left these words : " That the ashes of his father might rest lightly, Vandyke rolled this stone to the foot of the cross." I say nothing of the particular doctrinal faith here implied : I only ask, if, to the honor of human nature, all might not show, for live or buried parents, as much feeling of filial piety blended with devotion to the Saviour of the world. To that great interrogatory about mankind, which we search into our hearts "and travel through the world to answer, such, then, is one poor pilgrim's hint of a reply. How many and various are the answers to , this interrogatory, he is well aware. "What is humanity ? It is a depraved nature ; it is an undeveloped germ ; it is a material clod ; it is a poor form of clay, capable of being illuminated by immortal splendor ; it is a cradle of all-heavenly affections ; it is a hiding-place, in which it is won- derful to see what ugly demons can lie down. Such are some of the contradictory decisions made by theologians and philosophers and practical men. The human creature is a great paradox, is high and low, good and bad, to observers from different points of view, at one time. Every thing virtuous or sinful is true of him. It is thought that those who have close and large converse with human beings must agree in the same opinion, and that an ill one, of their race. The romance of idealists and the enthusiasm of children, about human nature, are supposed to be necessarily scattered to the winds 310 MANKIND. while the pilgrim passes on his way. As, not sel- dom, the imagination one has had of a famous city or scene in nature is utterly dispersed by the first sight of the object ; so, it is believed, by travel will be broken up every high or favorable theory of our poor humanity. Human nature, it must be con- fessed, does not commonly appear to rise much in a hotel or a steamboat. When it is hunting after its convenience, satisfying its animal wants, or engaged in transactions of mere trade, it cannot be seen in the most favorable light. But all the bad lights in which it may be surveyed cannot wholly distort or obscure that glory of its capacities and better aspi- rations, which ever struggles with the gloom of its meaner propensities, its deceitful windings, and selfish plans. The tribe of little observers, like that of gloomy theorists, may denounce mankind; but the true cosmopolite will be no sceptic about the soul, or hater of his race. For one, I thank God that experience of travel, wide conversation, and forced dealing in finance, have only confirmed my thoughts, while they make my testimony in order. I thank God that I have not lost my good opinion of my fellow-creatures by mixing with them ; but found them, with all their faults and follies, only becoming dearer to my heart. Let me, however, own the strong color of reason- ableness in a darker view. When the actual facts of human life are compared with the ideal of a poet's imagination, the demand of a spiritualist's conscience, or the longing of a Christian's hope, how low and MANKIND. 3.11 wretched indeed human nature looks ! It is only when our existence is regarded as a process and pro- gression, both whose beginning and end are out of sight, and we can believe in an advance already im- mense, and tending to immensity inconceivable, that our heart is reassured. According as one looks at his nature in its present and positive shape, or in its promise, will his view be graver or more cheerful ; nor is there a single part or feature of our complex being, which, considered in one or the other of these ways, might not be made alternately a ground of encouragement, or an argument for despair. May I therefore be permitted, in conclusion, to select from the broad field of my observation one more practical test ? It relates to a theme dear to all true manhood, and without which no treatment of this general subject can be at all complete : I mean the condition of woman. It will be within the memory of every intelligent person, that He, who must by all be considered as the greatest being ever clothed in flesh, moved his disciples even to marvel, because they found him talking with a woman ; this being, as we learn, one of the six things that would render a member of the then prevailing school of philosophers impure. What an improved state of thinking and practice since that time, among men simple and vulgar, as well as wise, this one statement proves ! But yet, how far we are from that perfect relation of the sexes which we desire, let one of the great movements of our own .day plainly signify. How far from it we are, even in strong and enlight- 312 MANKIND. ened nations, I can indeed myself bear witness. In this particular line of improvement, the very country namely, our own where is most complaint of woman's disabilities and degradation, certainly leads the world in efforts for her elevation and improve- ment. How well I still remember the painful shock I received from the first incident that decidedly fastened my attention in the streets of the great city of London ! The driver came to the door of the crowded omnibus, in which I was sitting, to ask if any one would exchange his seat and go to the top, to admit a woman. The gentlemen all shook their heads ; and one indignantly cried out, " No : not for the queen ! " The individual who left his place to let in the weary creature perhaps owed purely to his Americanism the trifling kindness which he alone, of all the company, was willing to show ; if indeed he were not, as he fancied at the time, for his supposed simplicity, the object of some little con- tempt. It would of course violate justice, as much as logic, to argue from single circumstances to gene- ral conclusions. There is doubtless great honor for woman in what we call, with a figure drawn from woman's own glory, our motherland ; and perhaps such a fact as I have mentioned might be paralleled among ourselves ; but I do not think the coolness of the refusal, the scornful pride of the exclusion, the tone of voice, or look of the countenance, could by any of our citizens possibly have been equalled. Our common feeling towards woman would prevent it. On the continent we saw women engaged, as MANKIND. 313 though it were their familiar work, in offices that, in the Western world, would fall to them nowhere but on the outskirts of civilization, or under the tyranni- cal rule of some one who is less a man than a barba- rian or a brute. As we passed along through South- ern Germany, we observed females, of reverend as well as youthful years, not only employed in the hardest labor of the fields, but at work with an agricultural fork upon the heap of ordure ; and once actually tackled into the cart, to draw it as would a beast. Nothing, certainly, like this Aus- trian cruelty did we see in Great Britain; although I confess to feeling a strange mixture in my mind of sadness and amusement, as, on the river Ouse, I noticed a woman, with all the calm and knowing look of the most experienced mariner, steering a little sloop of merchandise down the tide. It is sometimes, by the professed advocates of wo- man's rights, said that a woman may do all that a man may ; but, to him who sees what men do in this world, this is a two-edged maxim. Thanks to God and the tenderness of the human heart that woman in our day is commonly excused from doing many things that are thought to become a man ; that she is not called to fight, or walk on the midnight patrol, or mingle in the angry conflicts of the bar and the caucus ; but is kept " secretly in a pavilion from the strife of tongues," and from all the corrupt en- counters of the open world. For a principle, let us rather say that woman may do all she can do, without ceasing to be a woman, in that peculiar glory of her 27 314 MANKIND. distinct nature, of all grace and loveliness, with which the Maker has clothed her, not for time only, but for immortality. I will maintain, he is not a true man who has never seen the very flower, to his eyes, of humanity in the shape of a woman, and who does not believe that flower will for ever, in heavenly regions, bloom with a special beauty not belonging to the other harmoniously related, manly nature ; whether, by special, outward revelations, such a truth be hinted at in the different celestial orders of seraphim and cherubim, or not. To every traveller, at home or abroad, one thing is clear, that we have got men enough already. We do not want any more, a greater proportion, of them on earth. We do not want any of our sisters to un- sex themselves, and come over to our rude ranks ; for we love them better and more purely than we do ourselves or one another. Let them do every thing that is possible, without ceasing to realize the true type of womanhood. Let them teach and train the young ; sing inspired songs, as so many of them vanquish almost all men in doing ; be eloquent, if they can be so and not fall into our hard patterns of eloquence ; minister to the sorrowful, and heal the sick ; even, as in the elder lands, wear crowns and sit on thrones, where the honor of a nation shields them, and keeps their womanhood untouched from whatever is coarse in popular criticism or personal assault; and, in a thousand ways, exert that in- fluence which is worth more than all our power. But everybody who has taken many steps in this MANKIND. 315 world will say, Let them be women still ! For those of them who scorn the least leaning on the arm of manhood, and assert their absolute independence, have evidently broken somehow the divine model after which they were fashioned, or are men in dis- guise, with all the real properties of a man wrapped up under their soft skin, and therefore possibly have a right to act as the men they essentially are. She certainly is no true woman for whom every man may not find it in his heart to have a certain gra- cious and holy and honorable love ; she is not a woman who returns no love, and asks no protec- tion. But, as a traveller and observer, I crave pardon for so many words on a topic which cannot be opened without leading to the expression of opinions as well as the record of facts. I only add, that, leaving men out of the case, what I have seen and known of wo- man, far and near on the earth, is enough to give eternal brightness to my thought of human nature, and to make me espouse the cause of that nature amid all its offences, and defend it in its darkest hour. For, in fine, under all its forms, with all its iniqui- ties, in my survey, reaching through many countries and climes, it has never yet appeared without some grace and redeeming quality. Even in this poor world of ours, I have never been able to see sin as the great fact, evil as the centre, or misery as the law. What is bad in the human passions on this lower theatre of time is, indeed, always rife, and rages often fearfully. Still it is but an exception, 316 MANKIND. tremendous and overwhelming exception though it be. He must be pitied, as narrow-minded and not aware of the full love and mercy of God, to whom human existence is only a blight, a mischief, and a curse. The good predominates ; and I declare it the more earnestly, because I think it for the glory of God and the welfare of mankind that it should be seen to predominate. HISTORY. 27* How restless fleet away the years ! How blind the fugitives to tears ! We send our cries along their track : Their echo is, " We come not back : Gaze not at us with longing sight ; Behold what droppeth in our flight, Riches that mock all plundering power, Robes that outlast the festive hour." HISTORY. IF to the host of travellers the question were put, " What is the object of your journey ? " there would be, from different individuals, how many distinct re- plies ! Leaving out health and pleasure, and confin- ing the interrogation to simply intellectual aims, the answers would still be quite various. Some wish to survey the features of the planet, and some to see the world in the other way of observing the actual pursuits, customs, amusements, and business of men. Those, in whom what may be called the ima- ginative senses are much exercised, desire especially to study the works of ancient and modern art. It would be an answer indicating as honorable and lofty a view as any other, if one should say he was tra- velling to read the history of his race. " The pro- per study of mankind is man." But here, too, one pilgrim would still be distinguished from another, according as he should seem to himself to be perus- ing the lines of progress or of one great degeneracy. The saying, with many almost proverbial, that his- tory is but a relation of crimes and miseries, if HISTORY. its extravagance have any color of truth, holds only of some of the volumes of written history ; of the story of the world as told by the pen, which seems to have singled out for its emphasis not the good and blessed and quiet course of human affairs, but disturbances of peace and order, noisy and sur- prising things, plots and invasions, insurrections and revolutions ; as we know and remember that the crime of one unworthy man may fill a larger space than the simple annals of a people. I shall refer to another than the literary chronicle. Let us take the earth it- self for the volume of its own history, as, like some curious machines, a self-registering instrument, and we shall peruse a different, better-proportioned, and brighter tale ; for the reflection that is most frequent, and strikes irresistibly deepest, in the mind of a surveyor of the globe on a broad scale, is of the immense improvement of it through all the as- certainable epochs of its duration. The surface and soil and whole character of the world through wide regions are the work of man. If human reporters were silent of its progress, the very stones would cry out. To take, for a moment, an illustration so superficial : What has been done with them ? At first lying rude and ragged on the ground, or only rending the bosom of the world with their sharp points, as they were left by the creative finger, op- pressing the natural productiveness of the soil, or piercing, with barren majesty, the empty air, how they have been transformed into every shape of value, of gross utility and of spiritual benefit ! From the HISTORY. time that Jacob set up his rocky pillow for a me- morial in the wilderness of Haran, and called the place Bethel, a word that should go to the end of time ; and that Joshua chose twelve stones from the river Jordan to celebrate the preserving mercies of Heaven ; and Elijah, out of the same hard and apparently useless fragments, broken" from the foun- dations and corners of the earth, built an altar in the name of the Lord ; from those times, and from periods who can know how much earlier, these fruitless scales and waste pieces of the world, by the art and feeling of man, have been converted, not only into structures of convenience and shelter, but into the expression and nurture of the noblest pur- poses and the divinest emotions. "The stones of Venice " a great author may well call his account of the glories of the old architecture. Beautiful, indeed, the language thus spoken from the heart of man, not alone in edifices still standing, but in the ruins that bear witness of a former age. As, in a spot inhabited by many successive genera- tions, you walk within the enclosure of some disused and long-deserted abbey, passing through the grassy, roofless aisles, among worn images of faith and piety, whose voice, musical above, has been long stilled below, you exclaim, " These men were wor- shippers, these men were lovers of good, so long ago!" All now may be bleak and bare, uncovered to the winds, swept by the tempest. But the sculp- tured cross, in which the rough granite is made to declare self-sacrifice; the broken pillars, between HISTORY. which, lips, now ashes, preached the word of God ; the finely carved font, in whose drops once young and old were baptized into the church of Christ, but through whose seams and fractures now the green moss tenderly creeps ; the niches of saints above, and all around the sepulchres of the just ; the in- scriptions, raised in bronze or cut on the very marble floor you tread beneath your feet, to the honor of those who have done bravely or suffered meekly in the cause of truth; with window and ceiling over- head wrought into emblems, of sacred characters and scripture incidents, which Nature is busily covering with her growth, as though she would heal the wounds of Time, and fill up the gashes of the elements, and fain hold together a little longer the crumbling shafts with her graceful bandages, all these are relics of what the former race has done. They make before our eyes the shrine of pilgrimage for crowd after crowd of the present generation ; they stir the heart with a glow of holy joy, in the conviction that the nature of man, whose root we grew from and whose moisture is in our limbs, is not utterly depraved, his doings not wholly bad, his history not merely of evil ; they show that we are not the people with whom wisdom was born, and so entitled to be censors of our fellow-men ; but that what the race has performed most earnestly, and yet admires most fervently, is something relating to duty, to devotion, to a spirit disinterested and heroic even unto death. The same feeling goes to the same conclusion as HISTORY. 323 you stand in the burial-ground, which is the end of all, and a large chapter in this unwritten, monu- mental history of the world. Than the graveyard, there is, indeed, no more striking exposition of the common nature and temper of mankind. Examin- ing that record, through a score of ages on the broad front of the world, as made by Jew and Christian, by Protestant and Romanist and Heathen, all the foolish, personal quarrels of men, all their dogmatic and ecclesiastic strifes, appear to you but to rage on the distant outside of life, while the solemnities of human affection and trust in the Most High are identical in the deep recesses of the human breast. We may well rejoice that this sequestered territory, in which we all have an interest, has its sublime entry, its pathetic and encouraging passage, in that substantial book of human conduct, that only quite trustworthy narrative, the globe itself. The account of the graveyard, as it runs through every clime, would be a most edifying history. Selected ordinarily in a spot of the greatest natural beauty ; planted often with those ever-green trees which it would seem God himself first set in pity, to sym- bolize the longest date, and largest, unwithering promise of human hope ; not gloomy, but cheering, to the soul look its resting-places for the dead, marked with columns which maintain their form, and in some measure their position, though declining under the roll of many centuries. Yet they are adorned with fresh wreaths, which, in foreign parts, it is touching to see laid, not alone on the tombs of friends and 324 HISTORY. kinsfolk, but also of genius and virtue, many years ago translated to their glory and reward, as though the simple, common heart of man took genius and virtue themselves for its natural relations. The con- trast is very impressive between these white or ver- dant offerings of yesterday, and the gray slabs, the leaning obelisks, and half-effaced epitaphs, which, in their oldness, tell of the death long since of those who wrote and reared them, as well as of those for whom they were written and reared. As I walked through them in many countries, I felt that the graveyards of the world are part of its true and significant annals. Nor are they like many volumes of history on the shelf, never opened. Millions of the living turn from the beaten and dusty tracks of travel to pass through these quiet vistas of the dead ; they pause to spell out the lines on the tablets, of courage and patience, of loyalty to country and kindred, of innocence and fidelity, as though they knew and felt these to be the most precious of all things ; they shed gracious tears on the sod, while their thoughts are borne up to heaven. Yes : God's acre, as in the German tongue the field of the ceme- tery is called, is testimony that man, as a species, is not utterly base. He does not cast out his brother when he is dead ; he does not hurry him, indecently, unlamented, into the dust; he does not leave him without at least a signal to announce the measure of his term, and indicate the place of his repose ; he tenderly cares for the body, the inferior and com- paratively worthless and merely perishable part, after HISTORY. 325 he knows the immortal soul, with all its wealth of power and affection, has flown. I know not what great names and flourishing celebrities of the passing hour affected me like the sepulchral inscriptions of saints and heroes, founders of nations and extenders of the kingdom of ideas, whose bodies under my feet slept so still and low. As I roamed through Fere la Chaise, the ghosts of dead sages and soldiers were everywhere rising and gathering thickly around. The shrieks of the vic- tims of revolutionary violence had apparently but just been stilled ; and the ground seemed to rock with every social and political surge by which, for long ages, the nation had been swept. History was there present, telling, not the tedious and well-nigh inter- minable tale of the pen, but some of the sublimest and most touching periods of man's vast career. The heart could not keep from burning, or the feet from trembling, as from grave after grave, while I passed along, came forth, ever and anon, some shadow of the actors in great crises of the world's affairs for a silent greeting with my spirit. A kind of resurrection was taking place all around me. The dust and ashes were moved to let some mysterious, vital influence into my bosom. Who can doubt of a real and final resurrection ? So at Frankfort and Prague, and in many of the older spots of the world, where Mother Earth has first brought forth and then reclaimed her share in the frame of man, my thoughts were even more pro- foundly gtirred to see different nations and races, 28 HISTORY. from east and west and north and south, lying in the ground together ; as I trusted their spirits, ac- cording to the word of Jesus, were in the kingdom of God. On the earth, at least, the warring tribes and strangers from afar were mingled in peace. In- dian and German, American and Roman, Frank and Russian, the Saxon and the Celt, had made their bed together. May this rest in death prove no false image of men's final tranquillity of life here below, as well as in the celestial land ! I know not what attraction, but one that I share with my race, drew me everywhere, in England and France, in Germany and Italy, into the burial- ground, whither all the sons of men must fol- low their fathers, and held me so to study human nature in its last, earthly remains ; lingering long to decipher the quaint, wiry, glittering decorations of the Catholic, or the graver emblems of the dissent- ing, faith. I only know it was no dark sentence in this history of mankind on which my eyes there fell ; but one suggesting more cheerful and consoling lessons than I gathered from scenes of the finest animation, out of the din of the market and the haste of the street, from the tables of feasting and all the halls of music and pleasure, which, I know not how, when away from home, were the melan- choly things ; while what are commonly counted sober, if not saddening, scenes exerted over me a delightful attraction. Ah ! my experience was true to a frequent mood of the universal human heart, to which sport and amusement may not seldom become HISTORY. 387 melancholy, and serious meditation incomparably sweet. The bright and cheerful spaces tenanted by the followers of Jesus, the dim and narrow corners where the Hebrew ashes are piled thickly, sown among the interfering tombs for immortality, won or bound me as with a spell ; and both gave me a ten- der feeling to my kind. As you may see the character of the inmates of a house which you enter, or for the first time begin to occupy, by the traces they have left of themselves on their dwelling ; so, judging of man, not of par- ticular individual men, but of the race, in this way, by the stamp he has made. on his terrestrial abode, reading the history, not which literary authors, but his own little, wonder-working fingers, have written, he is not to be set down as a creature for ever erring, completely abandoned and lost. Unworthy, guilty men enough there have been for our warning in the great career of time ; yet, thank God, for it is im- portant to our fundamental faith, essential morality, and needful encouragement, thank God that man himself, in his whole nature and tendency, is not proved false and delinquent, but of a temper gene- rously endeavoring and grandly aspiring. So, cling- ing to the earth itself as text or commentary, I must affirm that it teaches a doctrine of respect for the being our Maker has bestowed. If we respect not the being, how can we respect the Maker that has bestowed it ? That, indeed, man does respect the nature God has given him, might be proved by many of the very inscriptions on the tombs to which I 328 HISTORY. have referred. To show the hope and aspiration of the human heart, I will repeat one of these which I saw on a gravestone in the city of Edinburgh, and which wrote itself on my memory. It is the senti- ment of a parent bereft of the mortal presence of a little child : " This tender bud, so fresh and fair, Called hence by early doom, Just came to show how sweet a flower In paradise would bloom." But particular illustrations of our point would be without end. The earth, the old earth, under the treatment and handling of its inhabitants, is it that of which we speak ? Why, it could now scarce be known for the same by one who saw it in its first estate, so changed as it is from a mass of the refuse of waves and storms, from a coarse and reeking lump of clod and ledge, from a heap of rank growth and rotten decay, into endless increase of order and fertility. I take witnesses that cannot lie, or be rejected, or in any way ruled out. With the stones themselves, that testify of improvement, of something right and worthy in the faculties and desires of the human mind, also joins in accord the meanest part of the creation, the very dust of the valley, by what it has, under man's culture, been made to produce, in flower and fruit, for the appetite of his body and the imagination of his soul. Proofs do you ask ? You cannot turn towards the shrub that blooms beside HISTORY. you at the window in your chamber, saluting your senses with its beauty and fragrance ; you cannot sit to partake of nourishing food at your daily board ; certainly you cannot walk through the gardens of the world, without observing, in a living history, the demonstration of what man, by God's help, has done to repair and better the sphere of his mortal occupa- tion. I know the fairest blossoms and the richest grains of the meadow and hillside are called the productions of Nature ; but they are not the mere productions of Nature. They would never have been brought forth through her wild, untutored force. Thorns and thistles, sour and bitter food, would she of herself have offered. It is the mixture of the human genius and will with her germs that has be- gotten this splendid beauty and delicious nutriment which we ourselves admire and flourish with. The clearing of the wood for the cultivation of the soil is said to soften the very climate of a country, and bring in all the material and moral consequences of that softening. And it is the care and intelligence of man that have chosen the best situations for the seed ; that have tempered and mixed, for the perfec- tion of particular products, the qualities of the soil ; yea, that have summoned out of earth and air and sea the very elements needed to foster the tender shoot, fending other elements off, and keeping them away, till, under God, he has made the very land- scape his creation, and stretched the garden of Eden, which was once but a little Oriental, Asiatic spot, as a belt round the earth, and a garment of beauty 28* 830 HISTORY. far toward the poles. Yes, man is the improver of the world ; and man, in his own deeds, the compiler of his own history. One of a thousand illustrations of this occurred to me as I rode through the fine and most ancient Brenner Pass of the south-eastern Alps. Our path advanced in the midst of the original savageness of the world. The mountain-peaks stood sternly ; the ravines in their sides yawned grimly ; the tracks of former avalanches opened, desolate and ominous, as other materials for the fearful slide balanced and toppled on high. Far below, the torrents dashed fiercely, as it would seem they had done since the beginning of the creation. Only a chain of half- ruined castles, dating from the middle ages, hung along the declivities, where they had taken the place of the towers which the Roman general, Drusus, had cast down from the tremendous tops. With such associations accumulating only to add to the awful and unalterable grandeur, at length, almost suddenly as if we had been lowered into a pit, we were let down the terrific brow of the hills, out of the Alpine clime, with its bareness, its stony ruggedness, or stinted growth, directly among what but the figs and lemons, olives and pome- granates and mulberries, in their fenced and trellised beauty, a fine specimen indeed of human handi- work ! Every one of these might, indeed, have some- where taken root and germinated, and run into a half- ripening, half-corrupting luxuriance, without human care. Yet to what did they owe their fulness and ma- HISTORY. 331 turity and rich assemblage, turning that rough gorge and mountain pit else a frightful hollow of coarse vegetation and poisonous decay into a picture and paradise, as it were, set sheer off and floated far away from some region of fairyland? They owed it to nothing save the pruning and tending hand of man. With every gathering of the forces and concentra- tion of earthly agencies at the command of intellect and skill, which alone are in command in this world, to yield ever-new forms of riches and plenty ; this too is, no less than bloody narratives of sieges and slaughters, part of the history of the world. I wish to conceal no page in this big volume, which the globe is, of the annals of mankind. I see in it other signatures than altogether fair and pleasant ones ; I mark well the lines which publish, in the actual features of the planet, the contentions of war, as well as the happy and kindly and thou- sand-fold exceeding victories of peace. In some maps of the world, every spot, which has been the theatre of any signal conflict in the bloody arbitra- ment of battle, is marked with the engraving of a red flag. Truly, these little flags are planted thick over the geographical territory of modern Europe ; and the traveller sees still tokens as frequent on the soil, that, while strife still rages in some places, it is only hushed into doubtful and uneasy slumber in others. He cannot overlook the low and grisly- looking fort, for which, as for cathedral and cross and holy shrine, the earth has been constrained to 332 HISTORY. yield the substance from her bones. There it stands, on some eminent, artfully selected spot of vantage. Its hundred hard, uncomely corners, looking as if every one of them might inflict a wound if you approached, represent well the fierce, unlovely spirit of strife. From each angle and embrasure you note that the deadly missile can be made to fly ; and each of these stone apertures may become in a mo- ment the cannon's mouth of flame, as, from unseen loopholes, the musket-ball darts, exposing every comer over the brow of the hill many times to the peril of being laid low. Here is this horrible anomaly, that, while wild beasts and birds of prey seldom war against their own kind or pluck out each other's eyes, man is doomed to be slain by his fellow-man. What is the meaning of this clause in our history ? It is, no doubt, that, with finer capacities and aspirations to develop and test our virtue, there are excessive lusts and inclinations to wrong in the human bosom, which must be watched against and repressed. But the dispositions existing these warnings and threatenings against them, in iron and stone, which man himself has with sad necessity contrived, we are not to regard with pain or displeasure. They are not themselves the incendiaries and stirrers of ill-blood, but properly rather officers of the peace. Inevitably appointed, created by man, they are stiff opposers of the commencement of quarrels. They are like reason and conscience, or the strength of will against the passions, in the constitution of the HISTORY. 333 individual mind. Sometimes, indeed, they are tools grasped by the wicked, to carry their malignant pur- poses ; but oftener they are instruments of right and order, for the subduing of crime, or for patriotic defence. The soldier is not, of course, a demon ; and he may conscientiously perform his office, while yet he obeys the Scripture injunction of doing violence to no man by passionate riot or malicious assault; although his office and the degree of its necessity are of course a measure of the hot, insur- gent, inordinate impulses, with the differing ideas and moral judgments, of the human soul. Yet let us do justice even to the soldier, and to human nature in him. Alas! without his uniform there may be iniquities as great as were ever done under it. The peace-man or the citizen, the trader or the toiler, must not lose sight of his own temptations and transgressions in his clamor against warriors. The warm and honest inspiration of duty has been in many a warrior's bosom. In one of the antique religious temples of Scot- land, now wasting away, which I visited, I beheld it engraven on a polished stone, that the heart of Bruce was deposited beneath; and, as I stood there, I asked, "What religious conviction, what Christian sen- timent, would thrust that brave heart from its place, would pluck it from beneath the floor, and throw it away ? Who would forbid a thrill of admiration for the daring and endurance he brought as the sincere offering, for which his nature, fashioned by God, fitted him, to the defence and honor of his native 334 HISTORY. land, and which, mate the gazer on his tomb ex- claim, 6 No : his heart is not here, cold and still, but everywhere where the inspirations of patriotism and disinterested heroism are required ' ? " In the mili- tary museums of England and France and Germany, I walked through the long rows of steel-plated armor worn in old centuries of conflict, and marvelled at the strangely fashioned swords and guns captured from Eastern foes, to be turned against their former owners ; and saw the thick helmets and heavy breastplates, here and there dinted through by the stroke of poniard or lance. I wondered at the giant strength and patience which bore that weight through the terrible fray. In those letters, of shield and mail and spear, I read what we must call the barbaric por- . tion of the world's history more vividly than it could be traced in any reporter's descriptions of con- quest or retreat. I declared to myself, " These, and not granite and marble, are the real monuments of the past." Yet, while I felt these were pictures of deeds to be done away as the better spirit of the gospel shall prevail, I felt, too, that upright and noble comba- tants, not a few, mingled with the cruel and the base ; and that we at this day, who talk so finely of our no- tions of reform, should not have the privileges, civil and religious, which we enjoy, but for the resistance unto blood of the patriot to the traitor, and of the faithful to the vile. Yes, war itself, while it has expressed the baleful principles as well as holy inspirations of the human heart, and been the channel of the grossest iniqui- HISTORY. 335 ties as well as loftiest achievements of time, has not had the effect of preventing, and shall not have force to make me deny or question, the progress of the race. It has often cleansed the world of the sins it manifested, and which took it for their instrument and medium. It cannot entirely blacken the glory of that monumental history of the race which is written on the solid frame of the globe. Nay, in its own relics of former power and terror, it teaches the drawing nigh of a day of milder methods of correction for mankind. In this view, nothing so interests the pilgrim as these ruins of ancient towers and places of military strength, which make the land- scape of Europe picturesque, from the first landing he makes on the English shores to where the Danube rolls its eddying and troubled waters towards the Black Sea. Perhaps, however, one is nowhere more struck with the march of civilization than while examining the military relics within the English domain ; for instance, such a one as the magnificent Castle of Warwick. Both points for a comparison are so near at hand as to make the impression deep. The castle stands grim as ever in its frowning battlements and its points of observation and defence. It overhangs a stream below, which, could it speak, might tell many a tale of awe, as, in old times, it may have whispered mournfully to ears in the neighboring dungeon-vaults, by the base of whose immemorial structure it sweeps. But how opposed is this figure of the castle to every thing else around ! How the 336 HISTORY. grand enchantment of antiquity in it seems almost out of place, and its portentous threat an affront to the soul ! For, behold the green culture, the domes- tic comfort, the social peace, that now creep to the very verge of its precincts ; as though in prophecy that some day these embattled walls shall fall before even the so light assault of the waving grass and grain, and children shall run over the sandy dust of what once kept hosts at bay, and seemed to " threat the skies " ! The mighty armor shown us, how formidable once, how impotent now ! " Pharaoh is sold for balsams," says Sir Thomas Browne ; and the terrible monster, that affrighted and shook whole re- gions, has become a curiosity, for being admitted to see which one pays a fee. Of still more romantic interest to us, on account of the part it has played both in actual life and literature, as well as the touching decay in which lie the halls that held such scenes of festive joy and heart-rending anguish, was Kenilworth. With what pathos, equal- ling beauty, the eternal freshness of nature clothes the ragged stones, rent from the situations in which they once enclosed the privacy of gracious affections or the plots of cruel hate! How the starlings and swallows, as they flew and chattered overhead, motioned to us on their swift wings, as if to hint the speed with which the grandeurs of the world pass away, and told, in their seemingly senseless talk, of the vanity that is in all the noise and uproar of human passions! Truly those mouldering rem- nants of rude decay are a type of waste in the HISTORY. 337 perishing institutions which their massive and sightly order once so formidably represented. Still more deeply did I have the same feeling in the Castle of Landek, in the Tyrol, as I saw it so sunk from its pristine honor, its exterior adorned with heraldic signs of imperial power, but its inward parts dilapidated and desolate, inhabited with dirty, half-clad children and stinging flies, its roof rotting, its moat stagnant and offensive, and its whole appear- ance grand only to the eye looking from afar. So decline the noble things of old, informing us, more sadly than can any poet's line, that " The paths of glory lead but to the grave." As, again, from another castle in Savoy, I gazed into the gloomy mouth of an Alpine gorge, I asked, f ' Where are they who built the ramparts, over whose rough and scattered pieces I have climbed alone ? " The wind suddenly freshened upon me, and the sky darkened, as I put my query. Was some answer intended to my interrogation ? Did the spirits, from their inconceivable abode, breathe back a response, to say, that, for all their well-doing and disinterested heroism, their present state was more blessed ; but, for every evil purpose and cruel deed, their lot in the supernatural sphere was the darker and the worse ? But there is history not only in the castles that pierce the sky. The very ground on which they stand, could the ear be laid close thereto or the eye 29 338 HISTORY. discern it truly, would make revelations which no pen has yet been able to record. Such is the ground of Italy and France and Germany and the whole continent of Europe. But take, for example, the territory of our English forefathers. How it has been actually made, not by nature, but by race after race that has run over it, with alternate weapons of war and implements of industry ! Not only is the subdued and fertile glebe, inherited by the present generation, at once a leaf in the history of mankind and in the volume of the strata of the earth ; but the moral soil out of which grows the character of the existing people is constituted by the bones and ashes of their predecessors. To one coming from the broader lands of the Old World, it seems in- credible that the "White-faced shore, Whose foot spurns back the ocean's roaring tides, And coops from other lands her islanders," should have in its little compass included such achievements. How well I still remember my own somewhat proud amazement, in returning from the wide continental reaches, at the evidences of superior power in that narrow compass of England, as though her insect body had limbs to reacli round the world ! Truly a rich yield of nourishment for mankind has come from her little space. But, after all, we are not astonished at large and splendid products from a small garden which has been plenteously enriched for ages. Behold the blood that has been so lavishly HISTORY. 339 poured out to fertilize the soil within that " water- walled bulwark " ! See tribe after tribe, from distant parts of the earth, laying down their spent bodies in that little space, " hedged in with the main " ! What a mixture of stimulating and productive powers from the valor and genius, the heroism and martyrdom, the barbarian force and the delicate affection, that have consecrated those fields, and prepared them for the growth of all that is best in humanity ! Even England, however, chief of nations as she is, comes far short of the idea of a perfect people. The re- spect she pays to rank and wealth hurts the honor supremely due to intellect and virtue. The shows of things still beguile her from the worship of reality. The noble is more to her than the saint. She looks to this world, not to the better. Her pride exceeds her dignity, her independence is more than her freedom, the external standard she rears for human rights is loftier than her inward humanity, and her formal worship deadens the vital acknowledgment of God ; while the prudential virtues of the past threaten to extinguish the flames of aspiration and the immortal light of genius in her breast. But we shall not be amazed at her actual attainments, or in- clined to over-praise the trophies of the transcendent renown she sets against her manifest defects, when we consider the loamy depth where she grows, and the choice roots of manhood out of which she has sprung. England's practical power for good, in which she has so long led the civilization of the globe, is her best reply to all criticism. To the 340 HISTORY. commander of our steamship, one of the noblest that ever swam the seas, I said that I had been warned against taking passage in his vessel, it being alleged to me that the force of her engines had strained her timbers. " They see her come and go ! " was all he deigned for answer. Might not the same answer be made to every complaint of the nobler mistress of the seas ? Beneficently to the world she holds her way over the floods of time. Nowhere did I feel what a conqueror she has been, in an intel- lectual as well as material way, as I felt it at the meetings of the British Academy of Arts and Sciences, in which earls from ancient seats of power, representing olden deeds of valor, and ad- mirals from their dauntless cruising towards the dim and frosty pole, and geographers from Oriental ex- plorations, and geologists from their travels into the earth as well as round it, and chemists from their laboratories, and experimenters in metallurgy and botany and building and enginery, in short, the professors and practitioners of every branch of hu- man knowledge, vied together in their efforts to advance the information and comfort of mankind. The whole scene, exhibiting the results of thousands of years of toil and study, pictured the nation itself as embodying more of what we mean by history than does now any other on the face of the globe. It is quite in order, in my present essay, to dwell so much on England ; for, more than any other spot, she is history. But where shall we find, in general, the history of the world, save in the monuments and HISTORY. 341 instruments, the buildings and utensils, the arts and cultivation, the inscriptions and sunken pillars, the enterprises and improvements of the past ; in these folios of brass and marble, these letters of stone, this ink of blood, these human periods of graves, these exclamations from crosses and gallows and fu- neral piles ; and the interrogatories that seem, with such melancholy significance, to come to us from the blocks in guarded galleries or open squares, where the guilty or unfortunate have laid down their heads ! Oh ! there are dumb orators, of earth's annals, more eloquent may we not say more true? than any who grace anniversary occasions, or hotly espouse rival interests in book or pamphlet, and perhaps wholly mystify the simple fact about what is so plain and moving on the very face of the world. Admitting any equitable exceptions, the real his- tory of the world is written at large on its own frame, in whatever has been done permanently to improve its condition and better its population. The multitudes of the idle and injurious, among the children of men, have passed away little heeded, mostly leaving but slight mark of themselves ; while the diligent and good have atoned for their sloth, or been able to repair their injuries. Very striking are the sentences in the old Bible, that " the remembrance of the wicked shall perish and be cut off from the earth, and he shall have no name in the street ; but the righteous shall be in everlasting remembrance. He rests from his labors, and his works follow him." It is a question too opportune and momentous to 29* 342 HISTORY. be by any in such circumstances evaded : " To which of these sorts do we belong, to that of the negli- gent and sinful, who die and have no memory that is worth having, or is long kept ; or to that of the moral and industrious, who promote the common welfare, and whose doings are, by the race and heart of man, accepted into the history of the world, like a book into the canon of the Bible ? " If we are of the indolent and faithless, then every work from the foundation of the world, that has multiplied by one jot or tittle the general prosperity, is our reproach. Ay : every wall against the flood, every protection from the weather, every beam hewn and laid in any worthy structure, cries out against us. Every utensil for convenience, devised and made, to be it- self substantial part of man's history; every en- gine, invented and carried through successive steps of excellence, reproves our unprofitableness. Every wheel that turns on land or sea, every pier and mole that withstands the waves, is State's evidence for our condemnation. Every household implement we use, the very clothing that covers, and the food that nou- rishes us, is quick and bitter in its sentence upon a lazy and foolish life. The grass of the field, the kernels of corn, the clusters of the vineyard, are man's witnesses and God's messengers to tell of our miserable deficiency; and homes of comfort and temples of prayer alike bring the announcement of our shortcoming and sin. Not only grand accom- plishments, but lowly ones, for human good, are the sluggard's accusation, and should be the wasteful HISTORY. 343 man's remorse. Every sight of fidelity is the brand of his shame, every sound of industry the smarting blow of his self-upbraiding. But, if we are laboring for the well-being of our fellow-creatures, we have a place in this substantial, monumental history of the world. Our name may not last, engraved on the earth or blown from - the trumpet of fame ; but our work will endure. Somehow, somewhere, it will enter into the history, as long as man himself, in the inconceivable length of his generations, shall live ; and it shall come up again when the heavens are no more. In a chapel, near the city of Edin- burgh, is shown an exquisite pillar, wrought by an apprentice, killed by the mean master that was jea- lous of his success. No eulogy of its maker is in- scribed upon it. It is itself, resting on the earth, visited and read by myriads, his history. The somewhat ambitious title of History, for the sake of brevity given to this piece, I have justified only by some very slight glimpses and hints of that in which history consists. History, as commonly understood, is certainly one of the most valuable and instructive kinds of composition. I shall be con- tent, however, if I may convince any, that, for just and vivid ideas of the fortunes of our race, we must not trust entirely to that literary record, more or less extended and elaborate, which, when we are young, we read with a sort of superstition, as though it were the original voice of the human heart ; but that we should, far as we are able, seek the substantial wit- nesses, and the veritable, though it may be mute, re- 344 HISTORY. lators of the great tale of human action and suffering in this world. To the traveller, in the Old World especially, his- tory becomes more real than it can be on any printed page. It startles one like something suddenly lifted from the dead ; it stands in actual presence before us ; it holds up its handwriting, in characters of age and depth that amaze the dweller in this new region, with his eyes so long used to reading chiefly the bright signatures of hope and prophecies of the future. Every thing to him in yonder hemisphere is historic ; and inanimate objects themselves are the historians. A quaint old town like Nuremberg shall take him farther back than Hallam can on the way to the middle ages. Gibbon and Hume must retire for a time, when England and Italy themselves, with all their cities, speak to us. The walls of the houses, in parts of Germany, written over to the passer's eye with pious inscriptions, are worth a good deal of Mosheim and Gieseler, for ecclesiastical an- nals. Some broken cross, by which once men knelt in their extremity; or shattered baptismal bowl, where they devoted their offspring, with their own bodies, to death for conscience' sake ; the armor that brave soldiers wore through the fray, and, when pierced, lay down to die in, a nobler coffin than now holds their ashes, and grander monument than obelisks of granite or marble ; the bridges where heroes stood, the streams they swam, the cells in which they pined, the ground they wet with their willing blood, that great institutions for posterity HISTORY. 345 might grow there, oh ! such as these things tell us most pathetically the tale of our humanity ; and we feel, while we stand amid such associations, that the very ground under our feet is the flesh of our worthy brethren, and the atmosphere their spirit. As we abide among the touching memorials of the past, a mysterious feeling comes over us of the age of our race, and of its many diverse fortunes. We think of the builders whose bodies rest beneath their building, and whose souls long since rose aloft. If the wind swells, it is their breath upon us. The rain, that begins to fall, is Nature's tribute to their names. Our eyes moisten in sympathy; our answering sobs are not wailings, but thanks- givings ; our grief for the great departed, in the presence of their achievements, is but gladness so exquisite as to partake of pain. DESTINY. Dim fade old pageants from the stage ; Fresh prospects light the coining age : Shows, vain or tragic, yield their place ; Humanity unmasks her face. Knowledge and love, a wedded pair, Haste to reveal their features fair ; And Nature's axle gleaming flies, Fraught with untold realities. DESTINY. I SAT on the ragged wall of a ruined tower on the brow of a mountain boldly overlooking the town of Martigny, near the Swiss borders, and commanding the prospect of an immense valley made by an ellip- tical chain of steep summits. It was eventide on Sunday. I had, in the early day, shared, so far as I could, in the worship in several buildings of the Romish church, and had now sought my lofty soli- tude, in a house " not made with hands," for medi- tation, so dear and consoling to the mind of one absent from home. My thoughts travelled first, in a moment, as, unlike other vehicles, they can travel, to a far-off, familiar sanctuary. I reflected how dif- ferent everywhere on my way the sabbath services from its wonted simplicity, and somewhat sadly missed my privilege. But soon my mind became intently engaged on the scene below ; and this was the point in it that impressed me, namely, that every thing was in motion : the river Rhone rolling far through the interval, while in its winding course it received a tributary torrent from the hills ; the 30 350 DESTINY. summer leaves and buds bursting on the waving boughs of the trees ; the clouds flying through the air, and their shadows over the ground ; the people, from their dwellings and various altars of praise, walking along the banks of the stream ; the sun declining ; the earth turning, motion, motion in all ! " Motion whereto ? " I exclaimed. One thing or person is moving one way, and another in another way ; but whither are they all moving ? It was not the only occasion on which the same query had arisen to my mind. At some steamer's landing or great railway station, by day or by night, waiting amid the boundless buzz and whirl with which the world at the great centres of travel is emptied out and re-absorbed, and looking round for my own particular conveyance, the feeling has often come over me, The world is a very strange world, and the purpose of it hard to comprehend. What is the meaning of all this complex, multitudinous stir ; of these wheels ever revolving, and turning the waters into foam, to carry to and fro companies of persons composed of the natives of every clime, from America to Hindostan ; these trains from afar, announced, as with fiery eyeballs, by the blaze of their coming ; arriving with their huge bulk, and then passing successively, like great ships, into the gloom again beyond ? Amid the swarming myriads, that, by wheels or sails, are crossing each other's track all over the planet, one set of travellers chooses this direction, and a different set chooses that ; but whither is the whole earth-full of them going ? In DESTINY. 351 other words, what is the object in the making of the world ? What is the end of human existence ? We look back and trace our history a little ; let us also look forward and inquire into our destiny. Some, I know, will declare this a senseless inquiry. Some will affirm that we can form no idea of what is to happen ; as I once heard a man soberly say, that it would not surprise him if the next day he should hear that Europe was sunk in the sea, so little did he believe in any possible calculation of the purpose of creation, any tracing of the Creator's plan, or cast- ing of the horoscope of human destiny. But the human heart, by all the religions which have grown out of it or come down to it, has been led to believe in some great object and consummation of life. It is convinced, and it predicts as clearly as ever did any prophet, that as certainly as the rain and snow have an errand, and do not return in barren circuit to heaven, having accomplished nothing, but make the earth fruitful ; so there is for humanity a decree, a word of God to be fulfilled. This word is expressed in his voice to seers, in his inspiration in the mind of all his servants and children, in the course of his Providence, and every indication of his design in the universe. If we can detect any uniform ten- dency in the events of his ordination under the sun, then that is his word ; for it shows to what we are coming, as the accomplishment of the heavenly plan of human life. Advantageously to study this, though not disposed to exaggerate the benefits of mere locomotion, I am DESTINY. constrained to say, that one must leave the shores of a country so new as our own, and survey the marks which generation after generation has left of it- self in older settlements on the globe. As, inside of the earth, diverse species have made, in petrifac- tion, the record of what they were ; so, outside of it, the stamp of former races of men is not so obli- terated but that we can compare it with the work of the present age. No human remains, it is said, are found in the depths of the globe ; but those on its surface are worth more than all the relics in its bowels. Going through a great gallery, one may read the whole history of painting in separate pieces of canvas upon the walls, arranged for that purpose, from the rudest attempts of the earliest times to the finest triumphs of art. Let me try to detect the tide in human affairs, by holding up in contrast dis- tinct pictures from widely-sundered periods in the life of the race. I may do this in describing one of the most famous and happy of all journeys, a voyage up the Rhine. The picture of the actual present in such a voyage is certainly one of the most fair and delightful that mortal eyes can behold, a watery pathway, for much of the distance winding through highlands, so enclosing you as you go on, that the river is turned into a thousand separate lakes, whose chain of smooth mirrors is indeed a grateful exchange for the frowning face of the broad and angry sea. For foun- dations ever quaking beneath, there is before you a bright, endless road over a level floor. It would DESTINY. 353 seem as if a beneficent deity, the good genius of your life, meant for once perfectly to charm you with images of quiet, untroubled beauty, as you glide over the bosom of these inland waters, with flight like that of a bird, between the transparent heaven above and the repeated heaven below, passing from re- flection to reflection of splendor, ever wonderfully tempering your interest and enjoyment with tran- quillity, with nothing to alarm or rouse you from the wondrous dream into which your bodily vision seems to be converted, as you recline and gaze at gentle bend after bend in the current, and slope after swell- ing slope of the shores ; the heights not so lofty as to amaze or excite, but soaring only to vary the landscape, and melt with sweet outlines into the sky ; the rugged robes of ice and snow, which, from the Alps, hang their terrible fringes of glaciers down as with a besom of destruction to sweep the ground, here exchanged for the soft dress of vineyards, with patterns of matchless colors clothing the delicately rounded uplands, or casting a garment of tenderness and grace on what might else approach to naked and precipitous crags ; at points the banks drawing near to each other, and then departing, as if to dis- close their magnificence more completely, or show that the channel of the liquid, scarcely rippling waves was only dug by the great Maker, who re- fined here the movement of his hand, that, for such enchantment, he might let his creatures easily through. Meanwhile, to second the material tranquillity, the 30* 354 DESTINY. representatives of all nations under heaven, in moral concord, civil community, and social harmony, float together in common admiration of this marvellous mixture of stillness and change, this rich painting, in which every curving line and fitting hue meet at once to allure and lull the soul, to open and half shut the eye ; the same tone running through perpetual alteration ; the delicious sunlight alike enriching the prospect and tuning the whole frame to its beholding ; till, in the trance, you may almost grow doubtful of your position, and ask whether you are transported through the panorama, or the panorama, as in the illu- sion of the stage, is advancing by you. Were I, in short, to give the effect in one word, it would be, peace ; peace among these bordering kingdoms, through whose carefully ruled bounds and relations the unruffled river flows ; peace for the soul, in its high, glad contemplations; and, better still, the peace of God that passes understanding, and which, from such even and undisturbed glories of his workmanship, he would seem specially intend- ing to infuse. So, with nice, unerring instinct, the Germans call that stream of theirs Father Rhine, no doubt for the bounty with which he nourishes, and the benignity with which he binds in prevailing tranquillity together, the nations, his children, that stand by his side or cling around his feet. But it has not always been peace and serenity in this scene. Oh, how far otherwise ! The evidence is before you. Lo, all along the hill-sides, between which you glide, lie the bones of a pre-existing DESTINY. 855 monster of war, as it were the fossil remains and huge skeletons of strife and battle, in those ruined ramparts and robber-castles of stone, which continu- ally re-appear, and fix the traveller's curious regard. As the geologist professes to reconstruct enormous primeval creatures from a few remnants of their solid organization ; so, from these ragged heaps and half- destroyed towers, may we imagine re-formed the theatre of deadly struggle, which this same now blessed and mild-looking river Rhine some time in bygone ages was. Ploughed with wrathful pas- sions ; crossed in the desperate haste of plunder, so different from this calm passage; echoing with shouts of onset and screams of woe and bitter groans of death, so different from these tones of conversa- tion varied with music ; stained from many a heart with the blood so different from the juice of these purpling clusters that has mingled with the tide, now so unconscious, and flowed out to the ocean, as the cries of agony were lost in the air ; the siege of those then lofty, but now downcast, places of strength alternating with fearful slaughter in the vale or plain ; and the whole region haunted with stories of suffering and traditions of guilt, with horrible accounts of woe, cruelty, and crime, oh, what a change and shifting of the figures ! Does not this picture of the past, compared with or offset against that of the present, on the very spot of whose glossy brightness so dim and ghastly it lies, disclose a ten- dency, which expresses the will and word of God, and corresponds with the slowly resounding, but 356 DESTINY. clearly heard and certainly to be fulfilled, song of angels, of peace on earth, and good-will to men ? I have given an illustration to paint the fact that might be proved by many details. The same ten- dency will discover itself if you survey the walled towns all over Europe, which are so many almost innumerable strong demonstrations of a pervading proneness to strife and exposure to peril. These vast girdles and thick environments of rock now are, in general, a kind of cast-off clothes. They are to cities what once was the cumbrous brocade, worn like a fortification upon the persons of some of our ancestry, growing more and more useless every day. Behold indeed another change ! The tops of these surrounding belts of rock-masonry, once mounted with cannon, are now calm and romantic promenades for the delectation of peering travellers or the play- ground of children ; the moats and ditches, qnce filled with water to warn or drown assailants, are now empty, dry, and grass-grown ; the drawbridge of the baronial tower is broken, and the portcullis, with its teeth still sharp and portentous overhead, rusts, never to slide again, like an enormous guillo- tine, in the grooves of its socket ; and fragments of shields and helmets, swords and spear-heads, which it would almost seem were once within the grasp or upon 'the body of every one that had got beyond his boyhood, are dug from the soil, to be preserved in museums. All these, and many things beside, show what was once the substance or material of man's business, become but a relic of his youth, or the DESTINY. 357 harmless entertainment of his leisure. I can only hint at a few of the indications of this tendency in the world to peace. The very expression, which has grown into a proverb of freedom in England and America, that every man's house is his castle, has evidently descended from times when every man's house contained the implements of destruc- tion, to be thereby defended, and might at any time have to be made good against actual attack. It is one of the curiosities of the traveller to observe and marvel at so many dwellings whose lower openings are grated, like the doors and windows of prisons, to make an impassable barrier between those without and within. Whereto, then, are we all going in this world ? Remarking, as a moral geologist, the drift of hu- man affairs, as it is notched by centuries on the face of the earth, I answer, "To peace." "What!" many may exclaim, "in the face of existing horrors of war assert a tendency to peace ! " Yes : that is the tendency. It is not yet fully realized, I am quite aware ; but the very fact that war, once the pastime of men, is full of horrors, and now shocks the conscience of mankind, shows the tendency; and it is a great comfort to have war turned from the occupation of men to an occasional outbreak. I am not deceived, and cer- tainly would not deceive, by a mere picture, or by the .varying aspect of the case in the countenance and complexion of strife. I know very well that part of the alteration is in the means and weapons of war- fare ; that the apparatus of destruction was never 358 DESTINY. so perfect or terribly effective as now ; that slaying human beings, like government arid theology, is now a science, whose skill may be an ambiguous exchange for the honest passions of combat ; that the ancients, with all their chariots and elephants and coats of mail for man and beast, had nothing to equal a steamship of war or the long reach of the modern artillery and rifle ; though, even in this respect, I take it as one signal of the wit of man being directed to something better than the achieve- ments of battle, that the finest Oriental tempering of a steel blade is said to be among the lost arts. Among the lost arts let it be ! As regards, too, the fearful conflict going on be- twixt the mightiest powers of Europe, I must say, further, that in the first reluctance for the contest ; in the subsequent and incessant treaties and diplo- matic propositions extended on all sides to transfer, if possible, the debate from the battle-field to the council-chamber, a spectacle never seen in barba- rous times ; in the divided opinions, in the public mind, as -to the necessity of the war on either hand, division on a moral question never existing in a savage clan j in the small degree of moral glory that can accrue to the plainly selfish policy of any or all of the combatants ; whether the strife issue in favor of one contending host or another, and however it affect the spread of barbarian territory, or keep open the ways of trade, to make Egypt the causeway of commerce to the East ; in the difficulty which Chris- tian moralists must feel to find a complete justifica- DESTINY. 359 tion for a single party in the matter ; in the different sentiments, even in the parliamentary debates of by far the noblest nation involved; in unnatural alli- ances and offered mediations ; in good things alike with the posture of bad ones, we see blessed signs at least that the first fair opportunity will be seized, as the moral sense of mankind demands it should, for conciliation. The kingdoms of Europe cannot be so foolish and wicked, so Heaven-defying and contradictory to God's word and man's destiny, as, for a series of years, to pour out their best blood and treasure for mutual annihilation, effecting nothing worthy such terrible cost. As at sea, after the storm is spent, will sometimes come, far along the surface of the deep, a solitary billow, that almost oversets the vessel; so the great tempest of battle on this earth is really in the background, half exhausted on the distant monstrous tide, and this present commo- tion only from one mighty surge, which shall have but few successors. In fact, the business of fighting has been already over-done ; and, spite of temporary convulsions, must slacken. The evident holding back is an augury of cessation, of the world's weari- ness, as it may well be weary, of bloodshed. There will never be three men again like Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon, to the ambition of each of whom, it is calculated, was offered the holocaust of two millions of men, or six millions in all, falling for them and their policies, under the edge of war. The demon of war himself, moreover, already greatly wounded with the very sharpness of his own dagger, 360 DESTINY. will at length commit suicide ; for, when invention shall have improved the instruments of murder to the utmost, they cannot, for mere extermination, be used. Like some individuals in the East, who, in sober reason or with deficient valor, have turned back from the awful jeopardy to which they were sent, nations, with wise discretion or a wholesome fear, will recoil from the barbarous meeting in fire and blood. The duel between man and man, that brutal custom which has fastened itself so deep and wide and long on the human soul, shows symptoms here in our sight of giving way before the combined feelings of right and ridicule. So the truly no less vulgar duel between peoples, save only in defence of country, hearth, and home, when it is right, in the eye of God, in these days more and more ad- judged a folly and immorality, must make room for that tendency, which is the divine will and word of peace. If this be the tendency, the actual word of God, then every quarrelsome person, everybody in this age who provokes dissension, on a great scale or a small one, is gainsaying his Maker, and undertaking the awful and absurd responsibility of setting him- self against the destiny of his kind. The best that can be said for war is, that it may be a needful step in the character and transition in the progress of the race. Being disposed to mete out ample justice to the warrior, who may have in him a noble spirit, as he does the sometimes necessary work of contending against unjust and malignant foes, I must yet DESTINY. 361 maintain, that, in the diversities of excellence, the warrior can never touch the very highest grade. It is not in the nature of his work and struggle that he should. The martyr, who bears witness to the truth, and has nothing to do with carnal weapons but to sink under them as a willing sacrifice to his chosen duty of enlightening and saving the human soul; the saint, who purges his spirit with the constant severities of self-denial, which are more virtuous than any personal exposure, and who lifts himself with solemnities of faith and prayer ; the lover of his kind, who burns with disinterested desire to do good to his fellow-men of every kindred and color and tribe, because his fellow-men they are, and that rela- tionship is grander to him than all beside, these all are above the warrior in the very type of their goodness ; are on the higher rounds, though he may be on the lower ones, of that ladder which rests on earth and reaches up to heaven. I cannot help re- garding it as to the honor of our own Washington that he could never be a mere soldier, in which light he may be criticized, and that we cannot regard him as such now. Thank God for every omen and hope, that the higher type will supersede, and ever more widely assert precedence of, the inferior ! For, not doubting the providential necessity of conflict here below ; not doubting that many implicated in it are more worthy than many others who never lifted their hand, or had courage to strike a blow ; not doubting that there may be in those differences of administra- tions, of which an apostle speaks, a common spirit, - 31 DESTINY. must not so much be granted by all, that we can hardly imagine the most exalted quality, like that of Jesus or John, engaged and exulting in the muster of hosts or the shock of arms ? But, in fine, it is not in a tendency simply to peace on earth, as the word of God and destiny of man, that we are to rejoice ; but because peace is union ; because peace produces the arts of peace, in every shape of industry and commerce. The Jews had no dealings with the Samaritans, inasmuch as between the Jews and the Samaritans was hostility. They could not trade, because they hated. Peace is intercourse, is good understanding, is mutual friend- ship, among the nations of the world. Who shall describe its consequences, in wealth, comfort, and improvement, as opposed to the poverty, distress, and demoralization of war ? There does not seem externally to be so much activity, there is not so much noisy movement, in peace as in war ; but there is an inward and more benign activity. The bruised and wounded body was more active in the fray than it is when lying still upon the couch; but, under the outward stillness, what beneficent operations are going on, the lacerated fibres knit together ; the exhausted nerves rallying their strength ; the blood- vessels refilled with the vital current, propelled to all points ; and every spent organ of life rising, un- seen, with new vigor to build up the frame and pro- long the lease of existence ! So is it with this old, bruised, and wounded world, that has bled so freely and unstanched in battle. Peace for it is union; DESTINY. 363 peace is the parent of concord and strength, in its frame. There is splendid excitement, a showy glory, a grand report, in many of its wars, as history dis- plays them ; but, long torn with them, it yearns for peace. It would fain lie still from fierce and savage encounters ; but its stillness is not stoppage or sloth. The fibres it tenderly puts forth to heal divisions are in all these modes of intercommunication, the praise of which is on every tongue ; in every dusty avenue or iron path ; in every vessel that sails with goods to and fro, bearing thoughts and sympathetic ideas also ; in every loom that, as the shuttle flies to and fro, weaves men's hearts together ; in every stroke of productive labor, creating life and happiness and good-will, with the fruits of the earth or the textures of the workshop ; in every foreign language that is learned and spoken, every tongue that is translated, every traveller among the millions that travel; in every letter by the ocean-post ; in the very concep- tion of a decimal coinage, common to all lands, which could have arisen in no other age, but has a moral and political meaning now ; and in every electric wire, submarine, subterranean, air-drawn, to connect distant territories and ocean-sundered states, like a living nerve reaching from the brain to the heart and hands ; as though, verily, the cold, rocky, earthy globe itself had heart and brain and hands ! Mountains interposed, if there be no other cause, shall " make enemies of nations " never more. But peace, fertile, busy peace, the word of God, the blessing of man, shall bind all the members of hu- 364 DESTINY. manity together for tokens of mutual affection and labors of universal charity. Then the human des- tiny or word of God, whose intent we seek, shall com- pass its perfect fulfilment in religion, the world's worship of the Most High, in the name of Him, who, though he brought a sword, is himself the Prince of Peace. Among arms, said the Roman author, laws are silent. Among arms, we may add, the temples of prayer are voiceless. The fight rages, as we hear, on the sabbath, whose songs cannot rise till its clangor goes down. Then the world's history will run into its destiny. Whether, however, this idea of the course of hu- man affairs be an intellectual vision or but a baseless dream ; nevertheless, to every observant traveller, the great question will be that of the destiny of his race. The myriad objects he has seen on his way may come back only in magnificent confusion to his memory, halls and towers, hills and streams, mixed together, and he may find his thoughts of all these things like a tumultuous and wayward flock, which the driver, seeing one after another of them run hither and thither, finds it hard to keep in any order to- gether ; but, in the steady line and progress of all his other mutually changeful meditations, one reflec- tion will stand forth, touching the destiny of his kind. Many shows and performances, in his route through the world, will successively attract his re- gard and kindle his admiration, or fill his soul with an exquisite, temporary delight ; but they will one by one subside, leaving this single inquiry : " For what DESTINY. 365 were my fellow-creatures made ? and whither am I, with them, going ? " Upon an extensive journey, that will very probably happen, which not seldom with serious persons takes place on the journey of life ; namely, a decay of interest in all particular spec- tacles and displays, however bright and imposing, and a gradual accumulation of concern upon the spiritual realities of our existence. Through our years of childhood and youth, long do we play or struggle with the gay pomps and ever-shifting re- presentations that occupy the stage of life ; but at length the mind, with much sore experience grown sharp-eyed and earnest, wishes to penetrate beneath the appearance. First conquered by, it would fain at last conquer, the world. As, with the siren look and swimming motion of the sea, the nervous system is at the beginning overcome and prostrated, but afterwards by degrees rises to com- mand and preside over the billows' glittering roll ; so the heart, yielding at the outset to earthly sights and seductions, would finally behold and govern them by a law. That there is a law, too, for these other fluctuations of life, all who do not doubt of every thing must believe. That the law is gracious, all must believe who do not deny that Sovereign Mercy reigns. Let any, who will, entitle the law by names different from those that have occurred in my poor language. What all our names and thoughts strive to signify, let us toil and pray that God will fulfil to the good of every one of his creatures. On the entablature of an ancient gateway, lead- 31* 366 DESTINY. ing towards a resting-place for the dead, I read an inscription, in which the soul is sublimely celebrated as superstes corpori caduco, surviving the frail body. The inscription itself was old ; its line in the stone was crumbling away ; but it transferred itself to my mind as fresh as it first fell centuries ago from the graver's chisel. Day after day it re- peated its simple words, and rose up in my recollec- tion thousands of miles from the spot it hallowed with honor for mortal dust, and hope for man's spirit. Unnumbered times since, at home, it has been the mental refrain in those pleasant, voiceless songs of faith, which, in quiet hours, we sing in our own thoughts. At the conclusion of my work, I take a hint from the antique sentence that so pursued me. The traveller passes lightly over the world, convers- ing with its ephemeral things ; and often, in his report of his experience, he passes as lightly over his own thoughts, leaving their main current below, as the bulk of the ocean lies under his vessel's keel. Be- neath the gay and bantering tone of his conversa- tion, or his correspondence through the press, only glimpses may be caught of this unfathomed sea of sober feeling. He may have a boyish shame, that keeps him from telling how often his mind from afar turns homeward, and it may be heavenward too. He laughs over with us the events of his course ; but has he not also mused and prayed as he paced some narrow deck, or gazed into the cloudy sky from the porch-window of some foreign dwelling, or lay in the watches of the night upon his lonely bed, DESTINY. 367 while the storm swept the roof-tree ? Has he not marvelled, as in broad day he rode along with his companions, to find his attention and talk with them occupied, not upon the charms and grandeurs of the way, but about friends and acquaintances living on the distant shore, or dead since he departed, their souls landed, as he trusts, on some upper coast ? Among the other revelations of his journey, how surely he learns that all external things, which seize upon his curiosity, after a while loosen their hold, and a time comes when eloquence can no longer charm, nor beauty win, nor pleasure please ! If sickness or sorrow fall upon him, even fs the grass- hopper shall be a burden; and desire shall fail," unless it be fixed upon something higher than the earth. In this I do not preach a homily, but appeal to the traveller's own sincere consciousness. If he be honest, how freely he will confess that whatever immortal faith and hope he finds to feed on in his familiar abiding-place, supply him with a more satis- fying nourishment than he has derived from all the wonders of the world ! If he disguise not his con- victions, he will own that all the sun includes in its circle is not so much to him as the sense of these few words, Superstes corpori caduco. Travelling upon one of the great railways abroad, as we came to a long, dark tunnel, which, on our entering it, shut out the whole extent of the bright and blooming world, I observed, that, while the light of day was fading and flying off through the windows of the swiftly rolling car, some other light, DESTINY. till then unnoticed, poured forth its rays, till it illumined the whole space which, with our fellow- passengers, we occupied. It was the flame of a lamp, hanging out of sight over our heads, but com- ing into use in time of need. So, in the dark pas- sages of mortal life, where the lustre of worldly prosperity vanishes away, beams of comfort from above, which before we never saw, and perhaps had never believed in, visit our gloom, and cheer us in our desolation. They are the dayspring from on high ; they are the dawn of another morning upon all our nights of earthly darkness ; they are the true and lively harbingers of our human destiny. One thing is plain, that no traveller of sensibi- lity would be happy in the thought of things in the world remaining for ever as they are. Be the pil- grim's philosophy of human nature and human life what it may, his heart must often, on his way, yearn to agree with those who believe in the final and uni- versal triumph of good. At many a point of his journey, as he looks and passes on, he must cry out, in love for man and prayer to God, " It will not always be so. These enslaved races, these oppressed nations, will not lie for ever under their heavy yoke." That unequalled Hungarian band, I heard play their ex- quisite tunes in such magical concord of diverse in- struments, blowing their strong and skilful breath to please their present masters, as the mocked Hebrews sang to their Babylonish lords the songs of Zion, will some time answer to their own heroic leader's longing, and otherwise more gloriously employ their DESTINY. 369 genius and skill. Those poor conscripts, I saw trail- ing towards Eastern battle-fields their gun-carriages and military stores, will be released from their hard and terrible business, the present actors by the stern, kind sergeant of death ; and their posterity by an improved humanity among men, who are not to be so cheap or hateful in one another's eyes ever- lastingly. Those sailors, who are so worn out in toils and watches by night, amid the chilling, misty, and fiercely foaming elements, that, instead of a whole, they have to themselves scarcely more than half a human generation for their lives, must somewhere have compensation, for this waste and suffering, in a lengthened term. Those women, des- tined in their nature to softer duties of inspiring good affections, in some future and better age will not, in their lineal representatives, be seen sweating their almost bloody sweat under the blazing sun which I beheld beat upon them in the far Austrian fields. Surely an era shall come, even on this earth, when those sad-eyed German and Italian children will no longer run for the mile beside the traveller's car- riage, each with the mournful-sounding petition, " I pray you, give me one kreutzer ! " or, " Something, I entreat of you, for the sake of charity ! " request than which nothing could have a form and phrase more touching and beautiful. May I add, that the host of travellers themselves will not for ever make their not unfrequently painful and tedious search after delight ; but there will arise other scenes upon other journeys, where, as the simple savage said, 370 DESTINY. " there will be no more snow " ? Low and wretched as man appears when we contemplate the worse ten- dencies and ghastly facts of life, to one who looked at the primeval earth, given up to enormous vegeta- ble growths or to animal wildness, any anticipation of the state even now of man would have been a reveal- ing of wonderful and incredible glory. How can eye or ear or heart help us to foresee or understand that lot, exalted with a difference still grander than any yet manifest in terrestrial history, which for the immortal creature we hope ! In the refectory of the Church of Santa Maria, at Milan, is Leonardo da Vinci's original picture of the Last Supper. One who is familiar with the engrav- ings of it, so common, and has not been aware of the condition of the painting, is surprised and sorrow- struck to see what a faded ruin it is. But the mar- vellous part, the central figure, still holds much of its pristine grandeur and beauty. Through the dim hues and broken lines of the perishing wall that holds it, the face of the Lord, amid his disciples, gleams out with a lustre of divine benignity, that seems indestructible, and essentially independent of the earthy materials in which it is now so faintly embodied. There is, indeed, in it a peculiar glory, almost wholly spiritual, that is retained in no copy, and appears to be related to the colors and propor- tions of art only as the sun is to the beams that flow from his urn, but from which he himself draws nothing. Gazing, we feel that the Sun of Righteous- ness wanes not with the decay of the material por- DESTINY. 371 trait in which it is represented. It is a heavenly vision fading away ; it is the godlike Man, whose countenance, unheld upon any surface of stone or canvas, and to mortal sight left imperfect, as the artist told his ducal patron it must be, because he could not fully realize its celestial beauty, shines yet with rays unquenchable in the believer's heart. That countenance is the brightest dawn of hope that ever rose upon the human race. It is the announce- ment and promise of a destiny sublimer and more blessed than, in its infirmity of ignorance and sin, the soul of man might have ventured to expect. There is no argument for our futurity, no picture of immortality, upon which that countenance does not throw light. THE GUIDE. THROUGH transatlantic lands, for safer guiding To every spot of covert beauty's hiding, The traveller, after Nature's marvels chasing, Has leaders all his path before him tracing ; And guides unearthly, to the mind appearing, Its course through more than fleshly perils cheering, The pilgrim's doubts in light mysterious solving, Dark questions end he long had been revolving. Thus o'er the sea, as slumbers turned to dreaming, That so mocks real life with vivid seeming, On spectral journeys, e'en in rest advancing, I saw in prospect hills and rivers glancing : When, lo ! a hand I feel my steps arresting, And hear a strange, dumb, ghostly voice, requesting My quick return, the track unfinished leaving ; Whereat my soul, as in a swoon, sank grieving. Wide through the world's eclipse again outreaching, That vision of the night repeats its teaching ; With sense of baffled will vague sorrow feeding, My waking wit to understand exceeding. 32 374 THE GUIDE. Would earth or sky disclose for me a meaning ? Were angel-forms or mortal towards me leaning ? What summons thus subdued me to obeying A shadow in my moving or my staying ? Ah, shadow cast from life remote, retreating ! Ah, cry from kindred heart more slowly beating ! God ! so distantly could I be learning For sight of me its fond and frequent yearning ? Was spirit's ear, so fine, from spirit hearing The whisper of a soft and tender fearing, Lest never more should come, in earth's beholding, What lay so deep within the bosom's folding ? Where'er I went, went still the dream pursuing, My daily thoughts the nightly show reviewing ; While nought I knew, howe'er I strove at knowing, But only as it urged my feet were going. Mystic conductor humbly not refusing, Homeward I blindly sped, no moment losing j For solemn tidings at my door confessing To what I owed affection's farewell blessing. Benignant guide ! with lamp the gloom outshining, And rod so sure my truest aim divining, Gladly all splendors of this world's alluring 1 pay for love's last tones and looks assuring ! Oft, high above our wisdom's comprehending, Come dream-like calls to holy duties tending ; Whose dictate, followed from our inmost feeling, Shall clearly shine in mercy's great revealing. THE ASCENT OF MONT BLANC. BY I. T. TALBOT, M.D. THE ASCENT OF MONT BLANC. MOUNTAIN-CLIMBING has now become so common among laymen, as well as professional rovers, that the wonderful adventures and hair-breadth escapes of the last half-century are almost unheard of to- day ; or, if repeated, are only smiled at as the inex- perience of juveniles, or the weakness of senility. Mountains have either very much decreased in size, or our ideas of their grandeur have undergone a radical change. Why ! Mount Washington, that giant mountain, a few years since was far outside the bounds of civilization ; and the first ascent of it was heralded by all the journals of the country, and would have drawn to the daring individual, who performed the feat, a life-pension from government, were it not that republics are ungrateful. Now it has become a fashionable place of resort for our nature-loving citizens when they wish to avoid the " melting mood ; " and rival hotels at the summit seat their crowds of visitors at sumptuous dinners. The ascent is made with scarce an hour's forethought, and becomes a morning ride or an afternoon ramble. 32* 378 ASCENT OF MONT BLANC. Smaller mountains have sunk into insignificance ; and few would think of going to the top of Wachusett, Monadnock, or Kiarsarge, and reporting that they had ascended a mountain. Mount Vesuvius, that entrance to Hades, or workshop of Vulcan, as one may choose to call it, is the place for sick people to visit when they wish to take a sulphur-bath on a grand scale ; to feel the actual motion of the earth ; to see eggs or potatoes roasted in the ground ; or to get impressions, from the molten rock rolling along at their feet, of coins which are skilfully extracted from their pockets by the ingenious beggars. 'Tis a pleasant way of spending a day. Mont Blanc itself has diminished in magnitude by the constant efforts of the guides " good and faithful." The goat-path has been cleared of some of its rolling stones ; the ladder has climbed to the last point of land, and given its name to the Pierre de 1'Echelle, where it rests from its labors from year to year ; and the stone hovel has been replaced by the Hotel des Grands Mulets. Above this, the "bald, awful head" remains conservative to all hu- man influences, and only yields to the progressive changes of the descending snow, or the mighty, fall- ing avalanches. The names can now be reckoned of nearly half a hundred who have stood upon its sum- mit ; and if the signs of the times be correct, ere the close of the present century, not scores, but thou- sands, will have gazed upon the grandest, most varied, magnificent, and illimitable scene which Nature, in her richest profusion, presents to mortal vision. ASCENT OF MONT BLANC. 379 Physical, like mental elevation, when unattended by fear, does in itself afford an indescribable sensation of pleasure. High up above the dust and grovel- ling passions of the lower earth, one seems to breathe a purer, lighter atmosphere, unpolluted by the sins and miseries of humanity. Never yet have I stood in such a position that I have not felt myself made better by it, more thankful to our Father for the many blessings he has bestowed, the many beauties he has scattered over the earth, and the pre-eminent pleasure we may feel in our power of enjoying them. As my eye has wandered over the beautiful land- scape, wide-spread beneath me, my mind has involun- tarily ascended to find itself nearer the great First Cause. Pleasant is it to see others like myself en- joying mountain-scenery, even in its wildest and strangest phases ; and, since there is at present such a decided upward tendency, each one should do something to improve the path for those next suc- ceeding. It is for this purpose, and perhaps to furnish re- miniscences to those who have already made the trip, or an hour of pleasure to those who have not, and will not, that I transcribe some of the occurrences of the pleasantest excursion of my life, which, though not entirely devoid of danger, presented far less than I had always imagined, and than the popular mind attributes to it. The ascent of Mont Blanc had been a cherished idea with me from early childhood ; the origin of which might perhaps be traced to Saussure's graphic 380 ASCENT OF MONT BLANC. account of his adventures, which I chanced to find in " A Book of Travels and Travellers." The picture accompanying it perhaps added to the impression. It represented a man clinging by his hands to the edge of a terrible precipice, while none of his com- panions seemed to care for him ; and, farther on, two men, at the top of an inaccessible point of ice, were pulling up a third by means of a rope. But how the first ever got there without wings, was a mystery to me. Later, Pococke and Windham's description of Chamouni and the Glaciers came in my way ; and my enthusiasm was not decreased by the brilliant ac- counts of more recent travellers which I read from time to time. An interview with the celebrated Dr. Hamel, whose attempted ascent in 1820 terminated so fatally, gave me much information regarding the trip ; and, notwithstanding the sadness which settled on his brow as he referred to the poor lost guides, I determined to make the ascent at my earliest oppor- tunity. My first view of the " monarch of mountains " was the glorious one which bursts upon the vision from the summit of the Col de Balme. Surrounded by its Aiguilles, placed like sentinels at fixed dis- tances, it rears its head high above all else ; and yet even here it did not seem of such immense magni- tude as one would suppose from its actual height. Still greater was the disappointment when it was seen from the valley of Chamouni. The Dome de Goute, a nearer and much smaller mountain, seems the larger, and is often mistaken by strangers for the ASCENT OF MONT BLANC. 881 crowned monarch of the hills. The Aiguille du Midi, too, from its apparent height and form, looks as though it might be a spire to this mighty dome. Time had passed so rapidly amid the enchanting scenery of the Tyrol, that I was absolutely com- pelled to limit my journeyings in Switzerland to a very few days. There was no time for carefully ob- serving the barometer ; none for a long preparation ; hardly enough for the trip : and, even upon the spot, I felt that I should be obliged to relinquish the project I had for years so earnestly contemplated. Many were the long and lingering looks of disap- pointment and regret which I cast toward the sum- mit ; but all to no purpose. It neither seemed to beckon to me nor nod its head in recognition of me, but remained as stolid and indifferent as though I had never given it a passing thought. The first two days at Chamouni were spent in making the usual trips to the Glaciers, the Cascades du Dard and des Pelerins, the source of the Arveiron, Montanvert, the Mer de Glace, and the strange and beautiful Jardin. It is not a light day's work to go to the Jardin, and return ; yet I wonder that so large a pro- portion of the strong, healthful, nature-loving, sight- seeing visitors of Chamouni should fail to make this trip, so replete with beauty, wildness, and adven- ture. The perpendicular mountain, against which we pressed ourselves and made our way, a hundred feet above the glacier, with scarce three inches foot- ing, dignified by the name of bridge, Le Petit and Le Grand Pont ; the mighty Mer de Glace, with ASCENT OF MONT BLANC. its transfixed waves, from crest to crest of which we went, skipping, Switzer-like, aided by our long batons and the invigorating air which came fresh down the valley ; Le Moulin, with its raging waters of unknown depth ; the Couvercle, covered and partly formed by the immense mass of debris brought down by the glacier ; then the Glacier du Talefre, with its waves bright blue and sparkling ; and, a little farther, the Jardin itself, with its daisies, wild-flowers, and bright-green grass, situated in the midst of a sea of ice, and protected by lofty moun- tains, down whose precipitous sides the ice came tumbling in vast avalanches, but never touching the consecrated spot, all have associations which can- not be forgotten by one who has once seen them. As I lay upon the grass^ contemplating the wild scene around me, the Mer de Glace, with its waves glittering in the sunlight many hundred feet below ; on the right the forked Aiguille des Char- moz, and on the left the Grandes Jorasses ; directly in front the long, unbroken surface of the Glacier du Tacul, which seemed one grand highway up the side of Mont Blanc ; with the mountain itself, seen best from this position, now towering above every thing else, and showing its true grandeur, all these urged me to carry out my original intention. I had no power to resist ; and, turning to my guide, I asked him if he would go with me to the summit on the following day. An emphatic " Oui, monsieur," and eyes sparkling with pleasure at the very thought, settled the matter with him at once. ASCENT OF MONT BLANC. Seeking the other guides, of whom there were some ten or twelve on the Jardin, accompanying a still larger number of Englishmen, I chose the finest- looking of their number for my chief guide, who proved to be the famous David Couttet, noted for his coolness and excellent judgment; and I had no reason to regret my choice. To him I intrusted all the care of choosing the other guides, directing only that they should be of perfectly sober habits ; and four braver, more active, and faithful fellows never trod the mountain-side.* When my determination was made known to the company, they greeted me most cordially ; and dif- ference of nationality interposed no barrier to the interchange of the most friendly feeling. " God save the Queen " and " Hail Columbia " were sung with united voices ; and the mountains echoed back the strains with a peculiar sweetness. They then drank to my health, and success in the undertaking. At rapid speed we hastened back to the village to make preparations for the following day. The lengthened shadows of the Brevent had already co- vered the valley ; and the sunlight was rapidly creep- ing up the side of the mountain, as if to show me the easiest manner of ascent. I had little time for moralizing or admiring. A single night was left for completing our outfit; which consisted of clothing of extra thickness, overcoats, boots fitted with iron * The names of these guides were David Couttet, Alexander Devouassoud, Francois Tournet, and Francois Simond ; either one of whom would have risked his own life to save mine. I must particularly recommend Tournet to any one who wants a cool, active, and daring guide. ASCENT OF MONT BLANC. nails, fur collars, ear-pieces, mittens, green veils, blue spectacles, knapsacks, ropes, ice-axes, Alpen stocks, and all the et cceteras of the journey. The hostess of the Hotel de la Couronne, where I stopped, one of the faithful family of Tairraz, from whom I received many kindnesses during my sojourn, at once put all the culinary department of the establish- ment into active service, and prepared every thing to the entire satisfaction of the party. Government compels every traveller to have no less than four guides ; and each of these, as well as the traveller, must have a porter to accompany him as far as the Grands Mulcts. It requires no small quantity of provisions to supply ten strong, healthy men, violently laboring for two or three days amid the glaciers. The following is a list of the princi- pal edibles packed into the knapsacks : 6 Large Loaves of Bread. 2 Quarters of Roast Veal. 2 Legs of Roast Mutton. 1 Boiled Ham. 3 Boiled Tongues. 1 Large Piece of Roast Beef. 12 Chickens. 2 Turkeys. 5 Lbs. Chocolate. 5 Lbs. Sugar. 4 Lbs. Figs. 4 Lbs. Raisins. 3 Lbs. Dates. 12 Lemons. 4 Bottles Bourdeaux. 10 Bottles Vin Ordinaire. 1 Small Cask of Vin Ordinaire. 1 Bottle Brandy. Besides these, there were numerous other articles, such as the guides thought necessary, convenient, or palatable. The small cask of wine was for the din- ner at the Pierre de 1'Echelle ; and the bottle of brandy was returned unopened. The trip usually occupies three days, and is made by reaching the Grands Mulcts the first, spending the night there, ASCENT OF MONT BLANC. 385 going to the summit and back the second, and re- turning to the village the third day. This is making easy work of it. But, being pressed for time, I re- solved, that, at farthest, it should not occupy more than two days. Still it was necessary to have a good supply of provisions ; and, from the state of the weather, we came near needing it all. There was not much sleep for our party that night ; and the next morning, as we collected together, we found that a cloud had been thrown over our pros- pects, as it had over the tops of the mountains. The weather, which for some weeks had been clear, was now cloudy ; the barometer, which had stood at "fair weather" on the preceding evening, was now at " variable ; " and no shaking of the instrument by the guides would change its position. Light, fleecy clouds floated up and down the mountain-side ; and no breath from us, no wishes or entreaties, moved them. After watching and waiting a long time, the guides, anxious for the ascent, decided that it was clearing off; that the clouds were moving up the mountain, and it would be safe to proceed at once. Packing up as quickly as possible, when such was the word of command, at half-past eight, on the morning of the 5th August, 1854, we commenced the line of march on an expedition whose difficulties I little un- derstood, and whose dangers had been greatly exag- gerated. I confess to some slight misgivings as I placed a package of letters and papers in the hands of my friend, Mr. Beck, of Boston, and, with all the nonchalance possible, told him he must dispose of 33 386 ASCENT OF MONT BLANC. them according to circumstances. All fears vanished as we heard our footsteps on the bridge of the vil- lage, and felt ourselves really on the way. But soon our fears changed to another direction. " 'Tis rain- ing, as I'm alive ! " " Never mind ; 'tis only a shower. We are in for it now : we have started, and must not turn back." So on we go, through woods, over rocks, up, up, up the steep sides of the mountain. When seemingly above all human habi- tation, the tinkling of cow-bells and a shepherd's voice told us that we were not entirely alone. Here we were at the Chalet de la Para, a miserable hut, at which, during the summer season, an old herdsman lives, tending his flock, and spending his time in knitting stockings and making cheese. We stopped to rest ourselves and talk with the old man, who told us that many summers he had passed four or five months here without seeing a single person with whom he could speak. He gave us some nice warm whey to drink, and butter and eggs to take to the Grands Mulets. As he declined accepting money, we offered him a bottle of wine in return ; but even this he refused, saying that in the summer he never drank any thing stronger than the whey which he had in abundance. We gave him our thanks, and in exchange received his a Dieu, and kindest wishes for our success and safe return on the morrow. Our pathway now ran over a rocky and uneven surface, formed by the debris of the Glacier des Bos- sons. The two large glaciers, des Bossons and du Taconnay, extend from Mont Blanc to the valley of ASCENT OF MONT BLANC. 387 Chamouni. Between these is a long ridge of rocks and earth, the accumulation of centuries, which is called Montagne de la Cote. It was by this route that all the earlier ascents were made ; and at its upper extremity still exist the ruins of the old cabin, erected at so much labor and expense for the celebrated Saussure, previous to his ascent in 1787. This route is now abandoned on account of its greater danger and difficulty, and the one to the left of the Glacier des Bossons is adopted in preference. This is over a ridge which extends to, and forms the buttress of, the Aiguille du Midi. Soon after leaving the chalet, we came to the last signs of vegetation ; and here all hands set to work to gather firewood from the dried branches of the stunted firs which grow even here. A little farther on, we came to the Pierre Pontue, a jutting rock, with a very narrow path, overhanging a precipice of a thousand or more feet in depth. Down far, far below, is heard the roar of the mighty waters which the glacier is pressing onward. Now you climb over the sharp rocks, piled on each other, and feel them give way beneath your feet : again, as you creep along the perpendicular side of some huge rock, with scarce an inch of footing, you wonder that your feet remain so firm. But nobody thinks of fear here ; for every one gets safely over. Still a little farther, and we have the Pierre de 1'Echelle, the last point of land. The rain had continued at intervals during the ascent, sometimes in gentle drops or pelting show- 388 ASCENT OF MONT BLANC. ers ; or, as it ceased, the up-lifting clouds displayed through the gracefully curling waves the checkered fields of the valley many thousand feet beneath. Some English friends, who had accompanied me thus far, were enraptured by the beautiful scenery which Nature was thus coquettishly displaying ; and they now, too late, regretted that they had not made pre- parations to accompany me to the summit. Protect- ed somewhat from the severe storm, still raging, by the generous old rock, we dined, and parted with many regrets, I, that I should be alone ; they, that they must lose the still more beautiful sights in advance. From underneath the old rock the trust- worthy ladder was drawn out ; wet knapsacks were adjusted to still wetter backs ; and the firewood was broken up, and put into the most compact manner possible. Soon after leaving the Pierre de 1'Echelle, we came upon the Glacier des Bossons ; when sud- denly the rain changed to hail, and the clouds set- tled about us thick and dark, as if to defeat our pur- pose. Crossing the glacier in every direction are immense crevasses, from five ' to fifty feet in width, with a depth of which we could only judge by the long-continued clinking of the blocks of ice which we dropped into them. We were often obliged to make long detours to avoid these ; and the advan- tages of hob-nailed shoes became apparent as we walked upon the very brink of a crevasse with all the feeling of security we could have had upon the solid land. We were now in the wildest and most beautiful part of the glacier, as I found on my re- ASCENT OF MONT BLANC. 389 turn on the following day. Whoever thinks that in the Mer de Glace he has seen one of Nature's wild- est freaks, can have little conception of this place. Yawning on every side are the immense, unfathoma- ble crevasses, with their deep-blue edges. Above them tower lofty masses, with long, pendent icicles, forming towers, arches, and colonnades, of the purest turkois ; and the rays of the sun, falling upon it, are reflected as by brilliants, until one feels that he is in one of the magic palaces of Oriental story, in- stead of threading his way through the intricacies of an ice-field. But we had no time or inclination for admiration in our upward tour; for there was no sun to light up the magic temples ; and the clouds, heavily laden with the descending hail and snow, so hemmed us in, that the sense of vision was of very little service. Night was fast advancing ; and we had no certainty of our position. If the cloud should thus continue, there was positive certainty of a night-bivouac in the snow. A crevasse was before us, to which there seemed no end ; and the guides ran back and forth to find some means of escape. Just at this moment, the cloud lifted ; and we saw, some hundreds of feet above our heads, the black, pointed rocks of the Grands Mulcts. A shout of joy rose to the lips of all. Our day's task seemed nearly at a close; and, summoning all our energies, we soon found our pathway, and were climbing at full speed up the rugged cliffs. The Grands Mulets seemed placed here, an oasis in a desert of snow and ice, to furnish rest and protection to the wearied traveller. 33* 390 ASCENT OF MONT BLANC. It rises, in two or three peaks and a rugged mass of rocks, so far above the enchaining ice, that it is en- tirely protected from the falling avalanches. Seen from the village of Chamouni, a distance of eighteen or twenty miles, it looks like black spots on the white snow. The march of improvement is plainly discernible here. The stone hovel, which for the last half-cen- tury has formed the only shelter, has now been su- perseded by a comfortable wooden building, some twenty feet long and eight wide, with stone walls on the outside to protect it from the wind, and provided with door, windows, table, benches, stove, and other furniture. How came this here, at a point so many miles distant from, and so many thousand feet above, all human habitation ? is the first question which suggests itself. Three years since, it was built by the combined efforts of the two hundred and forty guides of the valley, who brought upon their backs the necessary material, each guide putting his num- ber in large figures upon his own articles ; so that the inner part looks as though it had formed the basis of some important mathematical calculation. Drenched to the skin, and chilled through by the hail and cold atmosphere, we were glad to find a pile of dry wood in the corner, left there by the last party. Soon it was crackling in flames in the stove, and afforded grateful rays of heat to the surrounding party. Dry clothes were produced; and I was soon in a more comfortable condition. The guides who had any fresh clothing availed themselves of it ; and ASCENT OF MONT BLANC. 391 the poor porters took off one piece after another, and held it to the stove until it was wholly or partially dry. Hats, caps, boots, mittens, overcoats, and all articles of apparel, were disposed of in the most ad- vantageous position possible for drying ; and the guides took especial care that every garment of mine should be perfectly dried for me before we should set out. A warm supper, with hot chocolate, formed no unpalatable dish, and caused our spirits to rise ; and, as the shades of evening fell upon us, the light of two wax candles, set in the mouths of wine-bottles for candlesticks, gave a cheerful aspect to the room. As we all collected around the friendly, warm-hearted stove, our conversation turned upon the prospects for the morrow. On a previous occasion, one of the guides had, on account of the weather, waited here three days before he was able to proceed to the sum- mit. A second had this season waited a week, and then been obliged to return. Another had five several times been disappointed by the bad weather. The heavy hail, falling upon the roof and driving against the door, reminded us what we, too, might expect. Once commenced, I had no disposition to leave the journey unfinished ; and I made arrange- ments, should the storm continue, to have more pro- visions sent up, resolved to remain until it became fair again. Determined to make the best of our po- sition, I encouraged the guides to sing the " Ranz des Vaches," which had a reviving effect ; and for some hours they continued singing the wild mountain- melodies and relating stories of adventure. Gradu- 392 ASCENT OF MONT BLANC. ally the conversation became less animated ; and, one after another, they sought some support for their heads. Yielding to the general influence, I repaired to my couch on the floor at one end of the room, where, with my " Bay State " for a mattress and a knapsack for a pillow, I was soon sound asleep. At ten o'clock I awoke ; and, hearing continued rappings at the door, went to it, only to receive a shower of hail in my face, and look out upon pitch darkness. A little more sleep ; and at eleven, again the pitiless storm, the driving hail, the utter dark- ness, and back to bed once more. At midnight, or a little past, I was awakened by the guides, and told that a star was visible. Anxious to confirm the good news, I sought the open air. One, two, three, were just visible overhead through the thin haze, which gradually disappeared ; and out came the stars one by one, until the whole heavens seemed studded with them, twinkling as in the clear cold of a winter's night. Beneath me, all was one dense mass of impenetrable cloud, gradually settling thicker and blacker into the valley. Soon a thunder- storm arose ; and, as I sat by the door watching it below me, the heavy peals of thunder came rolling up the sides of the mountain ; and the vivid lightning danced from cloud to cloud like some grand exhibi- tion, such as no human pyrotechnist would dare at- tempt. To add to the grandeur and sublimity of the scene, immense avalanches of ice, loosened by the rain and snow of the preceding day, from time to time came rumbling down, shaking the mountain ASCENT OF MONT BLANC. to its very foundation. This scene impressed me more than any thing else I saw in the mountains. A little more sleep, and at four o'clock began our preparations for the ascent. Every thing was bustle and confusion. A breakfast was to be prepared, with a hot cup of chocolate, ere we should encounter the deep snows and the cold breezes of the glaciers. But in the hot chocolate we were sadly disappointed ; for, after spending more than half an hour in melt- ing the ice and nicely preparing the beverage, to drink at the last moment before starting, with sur- prise and chagrin we found that a pair of the guides' mittens, made of chamois-skin, had been violently boiling in the bottom of the kettle during the whole time. They had fallen into the kettle during the night, and in the dark had been unnoticed by the porter as he filled it. We had no time to repair our misfortunes, much less disposition to taste the strangely seasoned mixture. The guides take especial care in clothing the tra- veller to protect him from the cold. They wind flax about his feet, which are the most exposed part ; put on two pairs of woollen stockings, with heavy leg- gins, extending above the knee, and firmly strapped to the foot, to prevent any thing like the entrance of snow ; double-milled drawers ; heavy Scotch-plaid pants ; immoderately thick flannel under-shirt ; dou- ble-breasted vest ; and two or three coats, according to the thickness. These constitute the principal part of the wardrobe. The fur about the neck and ears, a closely fitting hat, a veil, and spectacles, give a 394 ASCENT OF MONT BLANC. finishing touch to the unique costume. Robed in this manner, we started from the Grands Mulcts at five, A.M. As a first precaution, we tied ourselves together by ropes some fifteen feet long, firmly at- tached to the waist. The porters gave us a very hearty round of cheers, and wished us a speedy re- turn. They were to remain here until the morning was well advanced, and then, with the heavier bag- gage, to start for the village. The morning was as clear and beautiful as we could have wished. The rain and lightning had purified the atmosphere ; and there seemed absolutely nothing to obstruct the vision. Low down in the valleys were clouds ; and each had its own particular shade of color, varying from a light gray to a dark blue. Here and there a valley was entirely clear, and displayed, coursing along at its bottom, a silvery rivulet, perhaps the accumulated tears of the mighty glaciers, weeping at their fallen state. The guides were constantly exclaiming, as they looked about them, " Quel beau temps, il fait magnifique ; quel grandeur, quelle sublimite ! " The morning sun was beginning to gild the tops of the mountains, and, by reflection of its rays, to cast a delicate shade on every thing about us. I could not resist the temptation to stop and admire ; although the guides hurried me on, fearing lest the mid-day sun should melt the snow and render the walking dif- ficult ere we reached the summit. We had not gone far before a huge chasm, caused by the descent of an avalanche of ice from the Dome du Goute, inter- posed to stop our further progress. It seemed abso- ASCENT OF MONT BLANC. 395 lutely impassable ; and the demand of the guides a parler resulted in sending Devouassoud, the lightest and most active of the company, in search of some new path. He was successful; but it required a detour of more than a mile ; and then we were obliged to cross the chasm on a bridge of ice scarce three inches in width, and, in the narrowest place, not more than two feet in depth, thrown across like a piece of timber. Devouassoud went over first to try the strength of the bridge; while the athlete Couttet stood upon the edge and held firmly to the rope, letting it out slowly as he advanced. We were stationed lower down the mountain, and strongly braced ourselves to support them in case the bridge should give way. The first once safely over, assistance was afforded from both sides to the next. All went over in safety ; and in descending, though the sun had melted the ice considerably, it still re- mained true to its mission ; and we could not but praise the frail structure which had rendered us such good service. Three hours' fast walking brought us to the Grand Plateau, an irregularly level plain, with abrupt moun- tains on three sides. The sun was shining warmly; and, sheltered from the wind, we sat down upon the snow to take a repast from our chickens and other viands. Two or three miles' walking on the level snow brought us near the spot where the fatal acci- dent occurred to Dr. Hamel's party in 1820. The guides involuntarily shuddered as they pointed to the spot where, buried in the snow at an unknown 396 ASCENT OF MONT BLANC. depth, are preserved the bodies of their former faith- ful companions, and then rapidly hurried on. A steep and circuitous ascent of some four miles winds around the Rochers Rouges, and is called the Corridor. The first part of this rises at an angle of sixty degrees, and the newly fallen snow rendered it very difficult to climb. At this point, Sir Thomas Talfourd and his son were obliged to give up the journey ; and many others, from entire exhaus- tion, have been compelled to follow their example. The upper part was not so steep, but one continued and hard ascent. At the top of the Corridor is the famous Mur de la Cote, which, on account of the hardness of the ice, requires steps to be cut all the way to the top, a height of about two hundred feet. From the accounts I had read, and the pictures I had seen, of this terrible " wall," I had feared this part of the ascent very much ; but was agreeably disappointed. The little intervals of rest, while the guides were cutting the steps, sufficed to invigorate me; and, by the time we reached the top of the Cote, I felt quite refreshed. A little incident oc- curred here, which, though perplexing at the time, was of slight importance. We had brought a pistol along with us, intending to fire it from the summit ; but when near the top of the Mur de la Cote, on changing the knapsack from one guide to another, the pistol fell out ; and away it went, whirling on at a furious rate to the glacier beneath. It was vexa- tious to see it quietly lying some two hundred feet beneath us ; but we had no power to conjure it back. ASCENT OF MONT BLANC. 397 A walk of fifteen minutes brought us to the Petits Mulcts, the last rocks seen on the route ; and from this point commences the Calotte, or true Mont Blanc cone, which is ascended the entire distance by zigzags. From the first we had seen summits be- fore us, which, when we had climbed, displayed others equally: distant from us, until at last we began to lose all our confidence, and to doubt if there were really such a thing in existence ; but the moment the guides separate and say, " Here is the summit : will you ascend first ? " all doubts vanish; and a few steps more place you on the crowning point of all your labors, with a view burst- ing upon you which no pen can describe. Better might one attempt to tell the sublimity of lightning, or the grandeur of Niagara. A hundred miles are open to you in every direction ; mountains of im- mense height are directly below ; and, from an elevation of nearly sixteen thousand feet, France, Switzerland, Austria, and Italy are spread out like a map before you. It was just mid-day when we reached the top. The wind was blowing freshly ; but the sky was clear, and not a cloud to be seen. Directly over- head, the sky was of the deepest blue color, almost approaching black ; but, toward the horizon, it be- came a lighter and more common shade. The air was perfectly pure, with none of that indefinite haze which I have almost invariably found upon other oc- casions in Switzerland, even in the clearest weather, and which renders distance and distant objects par- 34 398 ASCENT OF MONT BLANC. tially obscure. The mountains and every thing within the extensive range of vision were clearly and sharply defined ; and the guides, who had all visited the place before, declared that they had never seen such an atmosphere. A range of snow-capped mountains on the east seems almost the first object to attract attention. It is the beautiful Monte Rosa, with its graceful pizzos, white, black, and red, which stand as faithful guardians to their lovely queen. The picture is more vividly impressed upon my mind than any other seen from the summit. The most varied and extensive view is toward the north-west. Directly beneath is the fine valley of Chamouni, with the old Priory scarcely distinguishable ; and the village itself, best pointed out by the smoke of the booming can- non, which apprised me that my friends were watch- ing. Hardly higher were the Flegere and Brevent, with a valley to separate them from the still greater Buet. Just beyond this was the beautiful Vale of Sixt ; then came the Mole ; and seemingly but a very short distance was the Lake of Geneva, quietly im- bosomed in hills. Crescentic in its form, it lay like a fragmentary mirror. The famed Jura were easily distinguished; and far beyond, and a little to the southward, spread out the plains of la belle France, watered by the meandering Rhone and Saone, visible as small silvery lines. Farther east, in the centre of Switzerland, the mountain-peaks rise without number, many of them covered with snow. Among these may be recog- ASCENT OF MONT BLANC. 399 nized the Jungfrau, Monch, Wetter, and Faul Horns ; and still more distant, standing up in clear and solitary grandeur, the famous Eighi Kulm. The south-east presents no prominent points, but seems one vast plain, with here and there a little hill rising in the midst. This view is terminated by a slight irregularity, as if to give a finish a kind of border or fringe to the charming landscape. It is the Apennines, stretched from the most southern point of sunny Italy, till they come within sight of the snow-clad monarch. The Mediterranean, it is said, has never been seen from this point by travellers ; but far, far away to the south, a little line of blue, differing from the horizon, was visible ; and the guides at once declared it must be the sea. To me it seemed incredible, as the Gulf of Genoa, the nearest part, cannot be less than one hundred and sixty or one hundred and seventy miles. But no doubts of mine could affect the decision of the guides ; and I was quite willing to abide by it, and, Balboa-like, consider myself the first discoverer. The extreme summit undoubtedly changes very much at different times. * In a picture I have lately seen, the summit is made to resemble nothing so much as a huge wasp's nest, round, and the sides covered with little ridges ; but at this time it had a very dif- ferent aspect. It was about three hundred feet in * A very beautiful series of four views of the Ascent of Mont Blanc, by John McGregor, Esq., has recently been published by Baxter, of London. The first, a view of the Glaciers at Sunset, is excellent ; the others might be improved . 400 ASCENT OF MONT BLANC. length, a little higher at one end than the other, and very sharp and narrow the entire length. The form and appearance were similar to a steep, tiled roof. The south-western extremity is an abrupt precipice of some hundreds of feet in depth. The wind was blowing strongly from the north-east ; and the only manner of remaining on the summit was by being attached with cords to the four guides, who remained lower down the side of the mountain. With one foot upon either side of Mont' Blanc, and aided by my faithful baton, I slowly advanced to the very highest part, the crowning point of Europe, if not, from its position and importance, of the whole world. I had a pebble in my pocket, which, the summer previous, I had taken from the extreme summit of Mount Washington. I broke it at this place, and left it, as a first greeting from the White Mountains the Mont Blanc of America to the Mont Blanc of Europe. It was with reluctance that I turned to leave the spot ; but I was obliged to obey the com- mands of the guides, whose faces were becoming quite blue from the effects of the wind and cold. The descent is in striking contrast with the ascent ; and so agreeable is it, that, were it performed first, I think half the world would make the journey. In- stead of continual climbing, panting, and struggling, there was a gentle, easy, and rapid movement, with- out any fatiguing effort. The iron-shod heels were firmly set in the hard snow ; and, leaning back on the batons, the company, still tied together, began slowly to slide down the snowy side. Soon we had accus- ASCENT OF MONT BLANC. 401 tomed ourselves to our new position, and, with con- fidence in our power of keeping right side up, in- creased our speed to a rapid, then to a furious, rate. Down, down, down we went, over hillocks and through valleys ; now striking on a ridge of snow, and now bounding into the air. " Don't be frightened ; you are neither a Pegasus, nor so high that gravita- tion will not reach you. You will come down again, even if it be some ten or fifteen feet below." On, on, till the whistle of the conductor sounds. " Down with the brakes ! " which consisted of the aforesaid iron heels and steel-pointed batons, and the train was almost instantly stopped. "Les Petits Mulets. Passengers will please dine." The dis- tance was more than a mile, which we had traversed in less than five minutes. After making a good din- ner from the remains of our cold fowls and leg of roast mutton, we started again, and, with walking, running, jumping, and sliding, managed to make good headway, and in two hours and three-quarters were at the Grands Mulets. At the foot of the Mur de la Cote, near where our pistol had been lying, we found two wine-bottles, which had been left by some former party. These, with one of our own, we started down the corridor in advance of us. At first they moved slowly, but, with increased momentum, soon went leaping from crag to crag and point to point, now whirling through the air, and again glissading on the smooth surface, until they were lost to sight. They had taken differ- ent directions ; and, supposing we had seen the last 34* 402 ASCENT OF MONT BLANC. of them, what was our surprise, on descending some three or four miles, to find the three bottles, unbroken, lying, side by side, at the bottom of a small crevasse, not far from the spot where Dr. Hamel's party were swept away ! " Peut-etre les trois guides sont pres de la-bas," said the honest David, as he drew a deep sigh and brushed away a tear. " Allons ! chacun fait son temps. C'est mieux dans la glace que dans la mer ! " Poor fellows ! they never pass this spot without thinking of their former companions, whose bodies are embalmed in the depths of the mighty glacier. But, with all its dangers, these noble-hearted fellows love the free mountain-life with an ardor almost amounting to devotion ; and, when deprived of it, a home-sickness seizes them, which has proved so common and fatal, that physicians have given it the name of Nostalgia. It is not strange that they should prefer a grave amid the glaciers to that which so many have found in the depths of the mighty ocean. The only accidents on the descent were the break- ing of one of the guides' batons while we were rapidly sliding, which caused him to make several revolutions before he could stop himself, all done, however, without injury. At another time, Simond carelessly slid over a covered crevasse where the snow was soft. Instantly it gave way ; and, quicker than thought, he twirled his baton across the cre- vasse, and sprang backward in time to save himself. On examining the opening, we found the crevasse about two feet wide, and of immeasurable depth. ASCENT OF MONT BLANC. 403 As we entered our " hotel " at the Grands Mulcts, we heard the report of the cannon from the valley below, repeated five times, the number of our party, showing that they knew of our position and safety. Our bills were soon settled, baggage packed up, and we en route again. The glaciers were for the last time crossed ; the moraines, with their trembling rocks and narrow paths, were passed ; the Chalet de la Para, with fresh whey and sociable old man, reached ; and then rapidly down the moun- tain-sides we went, until in two hours and three- quarters from the Grands Mulcts we were once more safely in the village of Chamouni ; thus mak- ing the entire descent in five and a half hours, a distance of about thirty-two miles. Here we found our friends, and in fact the whole village, in the streets, waiting to receive us. It is for the interest of the hotel-keepers at Cha- mouni to make the most possible of any uncommon occurrence ; and, on the occasion of an ascent, the village is all astir. The route up the mountain is visible the entire distance ; and visitors repair by hundreds to the Brevent, Flegere, and other [promi- nent points, where, with spy-glasses and lorgnettes, they watch the progress of the party, resembling black specks moving at snail-pace on the snow. Every inci- dent was noticed by the watchers with most powerful glasses, even to the sitting down to lunch, and the falling of the guide in the crevasse. It was nearly eight o'clock when we entered the village. All crowded around to learn particulars ; and all seemed 404 ASCENT OF MONT BLANC. to have a greater estimate of our fatigue than we felt at the time. Bouquets were placed in our hands ; and slowly we were allowed to wend our way through the crowd to our hotel. An arch had been erected in front of the house, through which we passed ; the house itself was trimmed and illuminated ; and the parlor had its centre-table covered with bouquets and champagne bottles, for myself and friends ; and I was then and there expected to relate to the com- pany something strange, wonderful, or terrible in respect to my adventure. Under the excitement I felt not fatigue, but was glad to escape from the heat of the room, the crowd of friends who were pressing about me, and the deafening reports of the cannon, which had now become almost continuous, into the comparative quiet of my own room. A cold bath and a change of clothing prepared me for a good dinner ; and then, to a few of my friends, I related all incidents connected with the ascent. Be- fore I retired to rest, the midnight stars were twin- kling, clear and bright, above the head of the old mountain-king, towards which I looked with min- gled feelings of awe, gratitude, and affection. My sleep was considerably disturbed by a severely pain- ful attack of ophthalmia, occasioned, I suppose, by the intense reflection of the sun on the white snow ; my eyes, at the time, not being sufficiently protected. This lasted but a few hours, when all painful reminiscences of the trip left me. On the following day, the guides brought me a for- mal document on stamped paper, signed by the Syn- ASCENT OF MONT BLANC. 405 die of the Commune of Chamouni, and bearing his seal of state, together with the signature of the di- rector-general of the guides, and the attestations of the four guides who accompanied me. This testifies in an exaggerated manner to my courage, intrepidi- ty, and coolness in the most perilous situations, and that this ascension was made in less time than had ever before been known. I keep the document as an evidence of the manner in which governments there do business, taking notice of the slightest occurrences. In the evening I gave a supper to the guides, according to the usual custom. Some indi- viduals who had before made the ascent, together with several friends, joined us ; and, with toasts, speeches, and songs, we passed an evening not soon to be forgotten. It made a happy termination of my connection with those brave fellows, who had ac- companied me up the mountain, through all the labor and fatigue, and whatever of insecurity there might have been. The difficulties and dangers attending this jour- ney have often been exaggerated. That it requires strong lungs, a steady head, and considerable exer- tion, no one, who has been to the top of Bunker-hill Monument, will for a moment doubt ; but the real dangers I deem very slight, and only of two kinds : First, from avalanches, against which it would be im- possible for the traveller to protect himself. But there are very few of these, perhaps not more than half a dozen occur annually along the route ; and there is only the very slightest possibility that one 406 ASCENT OF MONT BLANC. will occur at the precise time and spot where the party may be. Second, the crevasses, which may al- ways be avoided by a careful and observant guide. Regarding the rarefaction of the atmosphere, I expe- rienced no ill effects from it whatever. That we all had short, rapid, and panting respiration, is true ; but there are very few persons who have not experi- enced the same on ascending much smaller moun- tains. Indeed, the year previous, I had the same dif- ficulty, and to a still greater extent, on ascending Mount Washington ; so that it cannot be wholly at- tributed to the altitude. The sharp wind and cold temperature would do much toward producing the blue lips and nails ; and the over-exertion, continued for hours, would be sufficient to account for all drow- siness, congestion, dizziness, and fainting. With no little experience in mountain-climbing, I must say, that I have always been better able to bear the fatigue, with less ill effects afterwards, by re- fraining entirely from the use of stimulants during the time of the exertion ; and, I must strongly urge any who intend making a long and severe journey, particularly among mountains and mountain-scenery, to leave the brandy-flask and wine-bottle at home, and, as far as possible, induce their guides or com- panions to do the same. However much they may indulge at other times, they ought, on these occa- sions at least, to have a clear head and steady hand. I regret to say, that, from the testimony of all the guides whom I questioned on the subject, and from the accounts which have been published, a large ASCENT OF MONT BLANC. 407 number of those who have reached the summit of Mont Blanc, and a still greater number who have failed in the attempt, have had all the prostration of intoxication added to that of fatigue. In reply to the question often asked, " Would you advise any one else to make the trip ? " I would say : For the mere name of having been a little high- er than others, or for curiosity alone, most emphati- cally, No! But to one young, active, and strong, who is willing to undergo the necessary toil, fatigue, and effort, and run all risks of bad weather or fail- ure from any cause, for a single cloud is sufficient to destroy the whole pleasure, and leave but the remem- brance of hard work ; if he will incur all this for the chance of seeing the grandest and most magnifi- cent panorama the world presents, then go by all means ; and, if successful, it will afford him, as . it has me, many an hour of after-pleasure. BOSTON, Aug. 1, 1855. 14 DAY USE RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED LOAN DEPT. RENEWALS ONLY TEL. NO. 642-3405 This book is due on the last date stamped below, or on the date to which renewed. Renewed books are subject to immediate recall. SEP 1 9 1969 3 W S- LIBRARY USE ONU CIRCULATION DEPT. 2iA-40m-2,'69 (J6057slO)476 A-32 YB