I mistake not in
claiming so much for her, so much beauty, and sweetness,
and greatness. Are these lover's errors, does my im-
agination sport with my understanding, and do I no
longer perceive, and compare accurately? Even if a
self-deceiver, should I not rest content in such deceit.
It is this I have longed for so many years, to have be-
fore me a beauty that excels the brilliant colors of
imagination, and adds a secret force to my apprehension.
She, - Frances, is the only daughter of a worthy lawyer
in the mountain village, and her power of adorning a
sheltered home is moulded into perfect security. I will
not say I made rapidly her acquaintance, but I feel that a
mysterious sympathy has drawn us together, has united
us, from the first. I am now familiar with the lesser
traits of her singular beauty, her excellent feeling for the
gayer aspects of life, her generous vivacity, her deep
modesty, and that love of existence which feeds upon
the every day without becoming gross.
In ineeting with this person, I naturally perceive that
this is a crisis in my hitherto silent organization. Be-
cause the supply of a wish, indulged in with but little
hope of satisfaction, shows me I must not delay, but open
at once this blissful gate leading out of darkness. I must
rush forward, not stand knocking long at this first en-
trance into day. Presumptuous youth! yes, it is for me
to be presumptuous; if born in the north, I am in pulse
the native of the south. The blood circulates with elec-
tric speed through my veins. If nature has hitherto
stood so cold, and vast, a firm monitor, an unapproachable
beauty, masked, yet desired, may I not resolve to ac-
cept the first flower that blooms for me to cherish. I
read in her eloquent eye the steadfast faith that serenely
rests in my heart, and know it is impossible that she is
not wholly mine. I cannot explain to you how surpris-
ing an influence this event must exert on all my plans,
and how I have considered, and seen it to be possible to
adopt the system, the views of my race. Before, I did
not know that truly I was a man, nor was I indissolubly


1844.)
449
Youth of the Poet and the Painter.
connected with the dream of youth. I have been a sol-
itary, a vague, if an independent person; I have shad-
owed out great designs impossible to fulfil ; I have been
stimulated by motives which had their origin in poverty,
and the frozen centre of self. How has the ring of ne-
cessity been sown with flowers, fragrant and blooming.
The voyage of existence shall not end in uncertainty
without touching at fortunate isles.
I am strong ; I am encouraged. Too long I followed
a solitary path, leading anywhere rather than to consistent
happiness. I now perceive the relation of many sayings
of friends and advisers, to reality, that I vainly imagined
before were unconnected with truth. I am not afraid, in
opening the deepest chambers of my being, that you can-
not comprehend what I mean, even if my expressions
need perfecting. I see her pass in the street, from the
window. That glance on the ground, that open brow,
that proud and elegant figure. I must go, I must join
her.
Farewell, dear friend.
EDWARD.
happiness. Path, leading encouragedles.
LETTER XXVII.
JAMES HOPE TO MATHEWS GRAY.
MY DEAR GRAY,
I should have addressed you many times, had I been
able to unfold the result of impressions, that much con-
versation with art must have stamped in my mind.
Many months of study must elapse before I see clearly,
and in the mean time, I would offer a comment upon
your letter, which advised me to remain at home, and
draw from the unfailing springs of nature. In this
advice, if I inay call the devotion of your heart and
mind to my welfare, by such a common place term, I
see the tendency that you possess, to base every pursuit
upon nature. It may be true, that situated as the artist
is in America, the child of a new period, emphatically
so, in the history of the present age, he should apply
himself to the development of a new side of art, and
this view of the matter will apply to poetry. The
VOL. IV. — NO. IV.
57


450
(April,
Youth of the Poet and the Painter.
American
seek to his style, material:ginal, to
American poet must not direct his verse by any model, if
he would seek to be the prophet of his age, but must
create his public, his style, his success. England or
Italy cannot furnish him with material.
If I allow the possibility of the original, to the poet,
why not equally to the painter. Is not painting a kin-
dred art, and does it not maintain itself by the power of
the painter, free from trammel, independent and self-sus-
tained. I confess, I cannot see how the comparison
holds good between the poet and the painter, when we
carry it to this length. I think painting more the pro-
perty of art, than poetry. Painting, in many respects,
ranks with the best prose, and when it rises into the
region of poetry, never loses its connection with earth.
It is not so nearly related to what we call the infinite, or
what we better speak of as the un-named; poetry is the
religion, painting is the religion carried out in fact, of
art, and both are equally important, and intrinsically
beautiful.
The great composer almost stands alone, for what do
the mass of his auditors bear away, except a vague, if
pleasing recollection; they know nothing intimately;
they do not possess even a part of his design, as a property.
Music seems to me a very exclusive art, and painting
enjoys a more open and finished existence. I cannot help
feeling, how happy is the choice of the painter. He is
not allowed to fail; he must be admirable, or nothing.
Mediocre verses, by dint of good print, fair paper, and
ingenious reviewing, may attract considerable praise, but
the expensive frame only leads us to condemn the picture
more, if it be not good.
I am led to these remarks by the sight of celebrated
pictures, and feel the immense superiority of the great
artist to his host of unknown imitators. No artist at-
tracts me more than Claude. In his works you will not
find sublimity, daring, not even splendor. But how has
he enchanted nature, by the magical violet of his skies,
his soft and warm greens, his skill evermore combining,
evermore repeating, if you will, in such attractive repro-
duction. It is like the face of the old world, as we call
it; the morning never rises with the same cloud, and the
faintest dawn has a certain force, unlike all others. This


1844.)
451
Youth of the Poet and the Painter.
architecture of Claude's, is the best pictorial architecture.
Pure, but not coldly unimpassioned, classical without stiff-
ness, romantic without rudeness, the Corinthian of land-
scape. His festivals, his shepherdess, driving a few goats,
the only figure of a simple twilight-scene, where the few
lines of the landscape are edged with a few soft outlines
of foliage, these sunsets over the waters gilding these
easy yet possibly active ships, seem as if any day one
could copy at least, so plain a style, so quiet a manner,
yet who has ever copied Claude. And how does art
bud and bloom in our dear land, so dear to the wan-
derer; when I see the stars and stripes, since I left you,
my heart beats as if they were the face of a friend.
Ever yours,
HoPE.
LETTER XXVIL
MATHEWS GRAY TO JAMES HOPE.
My Dear HOPE,
I shall not resign the idea, that it is the best time now,
to lay the broad foundation for a school of American art.
The dawn of this republic, whose career promises to be
as long, as it is already brilliant, should excite new emo-
tions in the breasts of the artists. Sacred is imitation,
sacred are the lines written by men, but let us love the
day that is, and believe in an ever-present creative spirit,
I shall be told that our history is too recent for song, its
figures too active for outline, but surely should our wildness
be embalmed before it has evaporated. I walk through
the forest, or glide upon the river; I enjoy the day, where
neither Greece nor Rome passed theirs ; let us picture for
the next age, what actually is, and not leave the Niebuhrs
of that day, to dispute about our history. We are not
too busy, we are not too idle, to devote a few years of
time, to sanctify the early annals of a nation, of a
people.
You will all present your graduating tickets, received
from the elder schools of art, and maintain that by fol-
lowing near to nature, and attempting to set forth facts
just at hand, we must end in nothing. It might not be


452
[April,
Youth of the Poet and the Painter.
well to call them historical pictures, the broad wilderness,
the Indian council-fire, the combats between the old and
the new, between the regular and the militia, liberty and
independence, the craving for novelty, and the like, but
did not Raphael portray with matchless fidelity the faith
and fancy of his day, and was Hogarth less true to his.
Art must come, you will say, in good time, and woe to
him, who endeavors to drag it forth at the unpropitious
moment; I think what is called “Art," has only a facti-
tious existence. I sometimes fancy I have the true
American spirit. There are patriots, not a few, those
who expound the laws abound, and we possess social
philosophers by the million. I am a lover of my country,
in itself; I desire to see the grand moments, of so aspir-
ing a youth, fitly sung, fitly pictured. The old, the time-
worn, the past, not too closely, O learned student, cram
us so young with these.
Let England, let the world, say what bad things it will
of America, let Americans vilify the national tastes, I see
no country, where merit sooner finds its true reward.
We do not neglect poets, painters, scholars; we are proud
to excess, if so be any man has a gift from God, whereby
he can well discern this beauty that is in the world.
No people will so little suffer that any of their reputation
shall be lost. It is an old and a tough story, that we are a
nation only allied to money-making. Some poet does
not receive his expected patronage, for writing some
useless sonnets, and therefore writes some more, to abuse
his customers for their neglect.
The Americans seem cold to art; it is their trick, and
I love them for it. In appearance, they defer to matter;
in truth, they do esteem beauty and virtue. They have
not time, to say that they would say, about a thousand
matters, which presently we shall hear of. The wood
must be felled, cabins built, corn planted, crops garnered,
and then perhaps a few words about life, and its comple-
tion. And how does it all concern you? I must have
you feel like an American, among the ruins of those
empires, and see American forms, and model American
architectures. For after all my dear Hope, it is at home,
that you must build the palace of your good fame, and in
your native granite. From foreign lands come many


1844.)
453
Youth of the Poet and the Painter.
things, which adorn and sweeten existence, but only from
the soil of our country, spring the fair trees under whose
wide boughs, the people are sheltered. Excuse me for
writing of this so much to-day, but so often am I called
to speak of anything rather than of patriotism, that I
must unbosom. Write often to your friend,
M. G.
LETTER XXVIII.
seasons of but for me, that newborn cares make the one
EDWARD ASHFORD TO JAMES HOPE.
Like the soft steps of a girl, graceful and tender, so
melteth the spring into the summer, and the blossoms on
every tree deck gaily the landscape, and make the old
woods to rejoice in their newborn caresses. It was a
pleasant thing for me, that I came to see you wedded,
seasons of buds and flowers, while, far on their frosty
chariots, the dark, sere elders of your race sternly career.
Ye have smiled, blessed days, ye have smiled tenderly,
for I needed your genial caresses. Ye have said to the
child of the south, -0 child, among the mountains we
will plant your path with roses, with violets, and the
sweet offerings of the many-colored forest ; thy days
were full of tears, many and sad, but the sun has risen,
and the world is fair.
I have looked in those dark eyes, not to be disap-
pointed. Ah! well did my Frances know, that my heart
would have been rent asunder, as the atom of frost rends
the iron, if but a cold word had fallen in the early sum-
mer of my love. This is a fearful world, says the
moralist, but love casteth out fear. My dear Hope, for-
get those years of suffering, in which you suffered with
me, for in some constitutions winter precedes spring.
Even now I feel I needed one thing more to complete
my happiness, for at my marriage you were not there.
My mother came, and my sister, and my uncle, all look-
ing as bright as possible, and mightily contented, and I
quite took to the good people. We were married in Cray-
ton, where I am living. Is it not remarkable, I am
actually “keeping house,” as they call it. It is a kind of
cottage, with low, sloping roof, deep piazza, far from the


454
[April,
Youth of the Poet and the Painter.
road, and an avenue of elms leads to it. Around, you see
ample fields, and a garden in the rear. I grasp the shovel,
and imagine myself throwing up the earth. Over the
cottage a mighty elm expands its green pavilion, and there
the orioles build ; sometimes I see their fiery breasts glow-
ing through the leaves. I have called my cottage by
your name. I know it sounds a little English perhaps, –
“ Hope Cottage"; but where I live, is it not also where
you do. I think you will like this nest. It is an im-
bowered place, rural enough, yet by no means rustic,
tasteful, yet not sub-urban. It is true, that the inside of
my little dwelling pleases me most. From the parlor
where I now sit, with Frances by my side, I see the lofty
range of mountains that encircles the valley, the lakes,
the distant river, and many a roof of the husbandmen
light in the beams of the sun; I see the calm, beautiful
face of day.
It is like him, you will say, not a word of his wife.
My wife ! should we not make a very low bow to the
judiciary for permitting us to have wives. And yet one
hears of divorces. It is beautifully quiet here, far off the
road, and Frances sings in the evenings, when no other
sound can be heard. I am sure you will like her sing-
ing, free and sweet, like herself. Are you not coming
back to pass a day at my house? “Bravo, Mr. Land-
lord.”
Your friend,
EDWARD.


1844.]
455
The Twin Loves.
THE TWIN LOVES.
From out the sphere where ages I had moved
With silent joy among the stars divine,
With sudden bound I started, for I loved
No longer their dim, silent, silvery shine.
Burning within me was a grief more dear
Than all the pleasures of that starry sphere,
That sprang from earth, yet ever looked toward heaven.
And that I loved more dearly, that I knew
That all its fire and its course uneven
Were born from other worlds, away from view,
Where dæmons wail, and yet where love is true.
Truer and fiercer than the quiet light
That shines eternal in our heavenly dome;
And if it spring from earth and care, and blight
With its dark fire the sweetness of its home,
Points yet toward highest heaven, whither nought else can
come.
Forth sprang I from my cloudy seat above,
And towards the earth I bent my winged way;
And as I passed did from my brow remove
The diadem of time, that ages gray
Spent in that spheral life upon my head did lay.
Then from me passed remembrance and its grief,
From me went all the lore that I had learned,
So far away, that a faint dim belief
Of what had been before within me burned,
But vague and shadowy; all my strength was turned,
To weakness, and I wept ;- as who would not,
Cast on this world's cold shore, before him such sad lot.


456
(April,
The Twin Loves.
Then when I raised my eyes, behold there sate
Two shadowy forms beside me. They did seem
Brothers in age and beauty, if their state
Were not beyond all age. 'Twas not a dream,
For these twin forms still on my pathway gleam,
Still light the dark sad path that I must go,
Still dry the tears that thou alone mayest know.
Like, yet dissimilar, their figures were ; —
One like the Grecian Eros gazed on me
So statue-like, so earnest, so severe;
And bis deep eyes seemed fixed tenderly
Not on the weeping child, but anxiously
To watch the swelling of the germ within,
Round which the body's veil, clustered full light and
thin.
The other smiled upon my infant form,
Twined his warm fingers in my waving hair,
And said; “Oh come with me into the storm
Of this world's sadness; thee I'll shield from care;
I'll bid the blustering winds, they shall forbear,
And only sunny zephyrs dare to breathe
Within the magic circle that I'll wreathe.”
He sang to me of earthly love, and bright
Flooded the colors on his canvass then,
He sang to me of hopes and dear delight
Most fondly cherished by the sons of men ;
He sang of home. — "Ah, child, thou too mayest gain
A portion in this paradise, with me
Wilt thou but sail over this summer sea.”
Aye while he spoke dreamy enchantment fell
From his sweet lips, and I, entranced away,
Lent myself to the mastery of his spell,
As many another had before that day.


1844.]
457
The Twin Loves.
But while I watched the ever-changing play
Of joy upon his features smooth and clear,
Behold! his brother's voice, in accent calm I hear.
High and imperial was its tone; - it sounded
First like the trumpet in its thrilling cheer,
And as its clear stern note the sweetness wounded
That but then filled the air, it seemed severe;
But as it followed on its high career
My soul was strengthened, so that the proud tone
Answered to power within me like its own.
His earnest eye was fixed upon the ground,
Yet sometimes did it read far into mine;
No story of earth's love his tale did bound,
High and exalted was his front divine ;
Yet round his feet sweet flowers of earth did twine, -
Not ever, — for he turned his steps away,
And in a rocky path he went his way.
Ask you if I him followed ? Aye we wend,
I and his brother, on that pathway wild ;
And when its roughness the boy's feet offend,
In my strong arms I bear the sorrowing child,
And soothe him till comes back, serene and mild,
Love's early joy. So with him may I go
Still heavenward, and not stay, even with love, below.
VOL. IV. NO. IV.
58
:


458
(April,
Dialogue.
DIALOGUE.
SCENE is in a chamber, in the upper story of a city boarding house.
The room is small, but neat and furnished with some taste. There
are books, a few flowers, even a chamber organ. On the wall hangs
a fine engraving from one of Dominichino's pictures. The curtain
is drawn up, and shows the moonlight falling on the roofs and chim-
nies of the city and the distant water, on whose bridges threads of
light burn dully.
To Aglauron enter Laurie. A kindly greeting having
been interchanged,
Laurie. It is a late hour, I confess, for a visit, but com-
ing home I happened to see the light from your window,
and the remembrance of our pleasant evenings here in
other days came so strongly over me, that I could not help
trying the door.
Aglauron. I do not now see you here so often, that I
could afford to reject your visits at any hour.
L. (Seating himself, looks round for a moment with an
expression of some sadness.) All here looks the same, your
fire burns bright, the moonlight I see you like to have come
in as formerly, and we, - we are not changed, Aglauron ?
A. I am not.
L. Not towards me?
A. You have elected other associates, as better pleasing
or more useful to you than I. Our intercourse no longer
ministers to my thoughts, to my hopes. To think of you
with that habitual affection, with that lively interest I once
did, would be as if the mutilated soldier should fix his eyes
constantly on the empty sleeve of his coat. My right hand
being taken from me, I use my left.
L. You speak coldly, Aglauron; you cannot doubt that
my friendship for you is the same as ever.
A. You should not reproach me for speaking coldly.
You have driven me to subdue my feelings by reason, and
the tone of reason seems cold because it is calm.
You say your friendship is the same. Your thoughts of
your friend are the same, your feelings towards him are
not. Your feelings flow now in other channels.
L. Am 1 to blame for that?
A. Surely not. No one is to blame ; if either were so,


1844.)
459
Dialogue.
it would be I, for not possessing more varied powers to
satisfy the variations and expansions of your nature.
L. But have I not seemed heartless to you at times ?
A. In the moment, perhaps, but quiet thought always
showed me the difference between heartlessness and the
want of a deep heart.
Nor do I think this will eventually be denied you. You
are generous, you love truth. Time will make you less
restless, because less bent upon yourself, will give depth
and steadfastness to that glowing heart. Tenderness will
then come of itself. You will take upon you the bonds of
friendship less easily and knit them firmer.
L. And you will then receive me?
A. I or some other; it matters not.
L. Ah! you have become indifferent to me.
A. What would you have? That gentle trust, which
seems to itself immortal, cannot be given twice. What
is sweet and flower-like in the mind is very timid, and can
only be tempted out by the wooing breeze and infinite
promise of spring. Those flowers, once touched by a cold
wind, will not revive again.
L. But their germs lie in the earth.
A. Yes, to await a new spring! But this conversation
is profilless. Words can neither conceal, nor make up for
the want of flowing love. I do not blame you, Laurie, but
I cannot afford to love you as I have done any more, nor
would it avail either of us, if I could. Seek elsewhere
what you can no longer duly prize from me. Let us not
seek to raise the dead from their tombs, but cherish rather
the innocent children of to-day.
L. But I cannot be happy unless there is a perfectly
good understanding between us.
A. That, indeed, we ought to have. I feel the power of
understanding your course, whether it bend my way or not.
I need not communication from you, or personal relation
to do that,
“ Have I the human kernel first examined,
Then I know, too, the future will and action."
I have known you too deeply to misjudge you, in the long
run.
L. Yet you have been tempted to think me heartless.


460
(April,
Dialogue.
A. For the moment only ; have I not said it? Thought
always convinced me that I could not have been so shallow
as to barter heart for anything but heart. I only, by the
bold play natural to me, led you to stake too high for your
present income. I do not demand the forfeit on the friendly
game. Do you understand me?
L. No, I do not understand being both friendly and
cold.
A. Thou wilt, when thou shalt have lent as well as
borrowed.
I can bring forward on this subject gospel independent
of our own experience. The poets, as usual, have thought
out the subject for their age. And it is an age where the
complex and subtle workings of its spirit make it not easy
for the immortal band, the sacred band of equal friends, to
be formed into phalanx, or march with equal step in any
form.
Soon after I had begun to read some lines of our hor-
oscope, I found this poem in Wordsworth, which seemed
to link into meaning many sounds that were vibrating
round me.
A COMPLAINT.
There is a change, and I am poor;
Your Love hath been, nor long ago,
A Fountain at my fond Heart's door,
Whose only business was to flow;
And flow it did; not taking heed
Of its own bounty, or my need.
What happy moments did I count,
Blest was I then all bliss above;
Now, for this consecrated Fount
Of murmuring, sparkling, living love,
What have I shall I dare to tell ?
A comfortless and hidden WELL.
A Well of love, it may be deep,
I trust it is, and never dry;
What matter? if the Waters sleep
In silence and obscurity,
Such change, and at the very door
Of my fond heart, hath made me poor.
This, at the time, seemed unanswerable; yet, afterwards,
I found among the writings of Coleridge what may serve as
· a sufficient answer.


1844.)
461
Dialogue.
A SOLILOQUY.
Unchanged within to see all changed without,
Is a blank Tot and hard to bear, no doubt.
Yet why at other's wanings shouldst thou fret ?
Then only might'st thou feel a just regret,
Hadst thou withheld thy love, or hid thy light
In selfish forethought of neglect and slight,
O wiselier, then, from feeble yearnings freed,
While, and on whom, thou mayst, shine on! nor heed
Whether the object by reflected light
Return thy radiance or absorb it quite ;
And though thou notest from thy safe recess
Old Friends burn dim, like lamps in noisome air,
Love them for what they are; nor love them less,
Because to thee they are not what they were.
L. Do you expect to be able permanently to abide by
such solace ?
A. I do not expect so Olympian a calmness, that at first,
when the chain of intercourse is broken, when confidence
is dismayed, and thought driven back upon its source, I
shall not feel a transient pang, even a shame, as when
“The sacred secret hath flown out of us,
And the heart been broken open by deep care."
The wave receding, leaves the strand for the moment for-
lorn, and weed-bestrown.
L. And is there no help for this ? Is there not a pride,
a prudence, identical with self-respect, that could preserve
us from such mistakes ?
A. If you can show me one that is not selfish fore-
thought of neglect or slight, I would wear it and recom-
mend it as the desired amulet. As yet, I know no pride,
no prudence except love of truth.
Would a prudence be desirable that should have hin-
dered our intimacy ?
L. Ah no! it was happy, it was rich.
A. Very well then, let us drink the bitter with as good
a grace as the sweet, and for to-night talk no more of
ourselves.
L. To talk then of those other, better selves, the
poets. I can well understand that Coleridge should have
drunk so deeply as he did of this bitter-sweet. His nature
was ardent, intense, variable in its workings, one of tides,
crises, fermentations. He was the flint from which the


462
(April,
Dialogue.
spark must be struck by violent collision. His life was a
mass in the midst of which fire glowed, but needed time
to transfuse it, as his heavenly eyes glowed amid such
heavy features. The habit of taking opium was but an
outward expression of the transports and depressions to
which he was inly prone. In him glided up in the silence,
equally vivid, the Christabel, the Geraldine. Through
his various mind
“ Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man,
Down to a sunless sea."
He was one of those with whom
“ The meteor offspring of the brain
Unnourished wane,
Faith asks her daily bread,
And fancy must be fed."
And when this was denied,
“Came a restless state, 'twixt yea and nay,
His faith was fixed, his heart all ebb and flow;
Or like a bark, in some half-sheltered bay,
Above its anchor driving to and fro."
Thus we cannot wonder that he, with all his vast men-
tal resources and noble aims, should have been the bard
elect to sing of Dejection, and that the pages of his prose
works should be blistered by more painful records of per-
sonal and social experiences, than we find in almost any
from a mind able to invoke the aid of divine philosophy,
a mind touched by humble piety. But Wordsworth, who
so early knew, and sought, and found the life, and the
work he wanted, whose wide and equable thought flows
on like a river through the plain, whose verse seemed to
come daily like the dew to rest upon the flowers of home
affections, we should think he might always have been
with his friend, as he describes two who had grown up
together,
“ Each other's advocate, each other's stay,
And strangers to content, if long apart,
Or more divided than a sportive pair
Of sea-fowl, conscious both that they are hovering
Within the eddy of a common blast,
Or hidden only by the concave depth
Of neighboring billows from each other's sight."


1844.]
463
Dialogue.
And that we should not find in him traces of the sort of
wound, nor the tone of deep human melancholy that we
find in this Complaint, and in the sonnet, “Why art thou
silent."
A. I do not remember that.
L. It is in the last published volume of his poems,
though probably written many years before.
“ Why art thou silent? Is thy love a plant
of such weak fibre that the treacherous air
Of absence withers what was once so fair ?
Is there no debt to pay, no boon to grant ?
Yet have my thoughts for thee been vigilant,
(As would my deeds have been) with hourly care,
The mind's least generous wish a mendicant
For nought but what thy happiness could spare.
Speak, though this soft warm heart, once free to hold
A thousand tender pleasures, thine and mine,
Be left niore desolate, more dreary cold,
Than a forsaken bird's nest filled with snow,
Mid its own bush of leafless eglantine;
Speak, that my torturing doubts their end may know.”
A. That is indeed the most pathetic description of the
speechless palsy that precedes the death of love.
“Is there no debt to pay, no boon to grant ? "
But Laurie, how could you ever fancy a mind of poetic
sensibility would be a stranger to this sort of sadness ?
What signifies the security of a man's own position and
choice? The peace and brightness of his own lot? If he
has this intelligent sensibility can he fail to perceive the
throb that agitates the bosom of all nature, or can his own
fail to respond to it?
In the eye of man, or in the sunset clouds, from the
sobs of literature, or those of the half-spent tempest, can
he fail to read the secrets of fate and time, of an over-
credulous hope, a too much bewailed disappointment?
Will not a very slight hint convey to the mind in which
the nobler faculties are at all developed, a sense of the
earthquakes which may in a moment upheave his vine-
yard and whelin his cottage beneath rivers of fire. Can
the poet at any time, like the stupid rich man, say to his
soul, “ Eat, drink, and be merry." No, he must ever say
to his fellow man, as Menelaus to his kingly brother,
“Shall my affairs
Go pleasantly, while thine are full of woe."


464
(April,
Dialogue.
Oh never could Wordsworth fail beside his peaceful lake
to know the tempests of the ocean. Beside, to an equable
temperament sorrow seems sadder than it really is, for
such know less of the pleasures of resistance.
It needs not that one of deeply thoughtful mind be
passionate, to divine all the secrets of passion. Thought
is a bee that cannot miss these flowers.
Think you that if Hamlet had held exactly the position
best fitted to his nature, had his thoughts become acts,
without any violent willing of his own, had a great people
paid life-long homage to his design, had he never detected
the baseness of his mother, nor found cause to suspect the
untimely fate of his father, had that “ rose of May, the
sweet Ophelia," bloomed safely at his side, and Horatio
always been near, with his understanding mind and spot-
less hands, do you think all this could have preserved
Hamlet from the astounding discovery that
“A man may smile, and smile, and be a villain?”
That line, once written on his tables, would have required
the commentary of many years for its explanation.
L. He was one by nature adapted to consider too
curiously,” for his own peace.
A. All thoughtful minds are so.
L. All geniuses have not been sad.
A. So far as they are artistic, merely, they differ not
from instinctive, practical characters, they find relief in work.
But so far as they tend to evolve thought, rather than
to recreate the forms of things, they suffer again and
again the pain of death, because they open the gate to
the next, the higher realm of being. Shakspeare knew
both, the joy of creation, the deep pang of knowledge, and
this last he has expressed in Hamlet with a force that vi-
brates almost to the centre of things.
L. It is marvellous, indeed, to hear the beautiful young
prince catalogue
“The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, * * * *
* * The whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, * * *
* * * * The spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes."


1844.]
465
Dialogue.
To thee, Hamlet, so complete a nature,
“The expectancy and rose of the fair state,
The noble and most sovereign reason,
The unmatched form and feature of blown youth,”
could such things come so near ? Who then shall hope a
refuge, except through inborn stupidity or perfected faith?
A. Ay, well might he call his head a globe! It was
fitted to comprehend all that makes up that “ quintessence
of dust, how noble in reason; how infinite in faculties ; in
form, and moving, how express and admirable ; in action
how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god; the
beauty of the world, the paragon of animals !” yet to
him, only a quintessence of dust!
L. And this world only “a sterile promontory."
A. Strange, that when from it one can look abroad into
the ocean, its barrenness should be so depressing. But man
seems to need some shelter, both from wind and rain.
L. Could he not have found this in the love of Ophelia ?
A. Probably not, since that love had so little power to
disenchant the gloom of this period. She was to him a
flower to wear in his bosom, a child to play the lute at his
feet. We see the charm of her innocence, her soft credul-
ity, as she answers her brother,
“No more, but so?"
The exquisite grace of her whole being in the two lines
“ And I of ladies most deject and wretched
That sucked the honey of his music vows."
She cannot be made to misunderstand him; his rude
wildness crushes, but cannot deceive her heart. She has no
answer to his outbreaks but
"O help him, you sweet Heavens!”
But, lovely as she was, and loved by him, this love could
have been only the ornament, not, in any wise, the food of
his life. The moment he is left alone, his thoughts revert
to universal topics; it was the constitution of his mind, no
personal relation could have availed it, except in the way
of suggestion. He could not have been absorbed in the
present moment. Still it would have been
“Heaven and earth!
Must I remember ? "
VOL. IV. — NO. IV.
59


466
[April,
Dialogue.
L. Have you been reading the play of late ?
A. Yes; hearing Macready, one or two points struck
me that have not before, and I was inclined to try for my
thousandth harvest from a new study of it.
Macready gave its just emphasis to the climax -
“I'll call thee Hamlet,
King, father, royal Dane,”
so unlike in its order to what'would have been in any other
mind, as also to the two expressions in the speech so deli-
cately characteristic,
“ The glimpses of the moon."
and
“With thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls.”
I think I have in myself improved, that I feel more than
ever what Macready does not, the deep calmness, always
apparent beneath the delicate variations of this soul's at-
mosphere.
“The readiness is all.”
This religion from the very first harmonizes all these
thrilling notes, and the sweet bells, even when most jangled
out of tune, suggest all their silenced melody.
From Hamlet I turned to Timon and Lear; the tran-
sition was natural yet surprising, from the indifference and
sadness of the heaven-craving soul to the misanthropy of
the disappointed affections and wounded trust. Hamlet
would well have understood them both, yet what a firma-
ment of spheres lies between his “ pangs of despised
love," and the anguish of Lear.
“O Regan, Goneril!
Your old kind father, whose frank heart gave you all —
O that way madness lies, let me shun that,
No more of that.”
"I tax you not, you elements, with unkindness;
· I never gave you kingdom, called you children.”
It rends the heart only; no grief would be possible from
a Hamlet, which would not, at the same time, exalt the
soul.


1844.]
467
Dialogue.
The outraged heart of Timon takes refuge at once in
action, in curses, and bitter deeds. It needs to be relieved
by the native baseness of Apemantus's misanthropy, base-
ness of a soul that never knew how to trust, to make it
dignified in our eyes. Timon, estranged from men, could
only die; yet the least shade of wrong in this heaven-ruled
world would have occasioned Hamlet a deeper pain than
Timon was capable of divining. Yet Hamlet could not
for a moment have been so deceived as to fancy man
worthless, because many men were; he knew himself too
well, to feel the surprise of Timon when his steward proved
true.
“Let me behold
Thy face. - Surely this man was born of woman. -
Forgive my general and exceptless rashness,
You perpetual-sober gods! I do proclaim
One honest man."
He does not deserve a friend that could draw higher
inferences from his story than the steward does.
“ Poor honest lord, brought low by his own heart,
Undone by goodness! Strange, unusual blood,
When man's worst sin is, he does too much good!
Who then dares to be half so kind again ?
For bounty that makes gods, doth still mar men.”
Timon tastes the dregs of the cup. He persuades him-
self that he does not believe even in himself.
“ His semblable, even himself, Timon disdains.”
“Who dares, who dares
In purity of manhood to stand up
And say this man's a flatterer, if one be
So are they all."
L. You seem to have fixed your mind, of late, on the
subject of misanthropy!
A. I own that my thoughts have turned of late on that
low form which despair assumes sometimes even with the
well disposed. Yet see how inexcusable would it be in
any of these beings. Hamlet is no misanthrope, but he
has those excelling gifts, least likely to find due response
from those around him. Yet he is felt, almost in his due
sense, by two or three.


468
[April,
Dialogue.
Lear has not only one faithful daughter, whom he knew
not how to value, but a friend beside.
Timon is prized by the only persons to whom he was
good, purely from kindliness of nature, rather than the joy
he expected from their gratitude and sympathy, his ser-
vants.
Tragedy is always a mistake, and the loneliness of the
deepest thinker, the widest lover, ceases to be pathetic to
us, so soon as the sun is high enough above the mountains.
Were I, despite the bright points so numerous in their
history and the admonitions of my own conscience, inclined
to despise my fellow men, I should have found abundant
argument against it during this late study of Hamlet. In
the streets, saloons, and lecture rooms, we continually hear
comments so stupid, insolent, and shallow on great and
beautiful works, that we are tempted to think that there is
no Public for anything that is good ; that a work of genius
can appeal only to the fewest minds in any one age, and
that the reputation now awarded to those of former times
is never felt, but only traditional. Of Shakspeare, so
vaunted a name, little wise or worthy has been written,
perhaps nothing so adequate as Coleridge's comparison of
him to the Pine-apple; yet on reading Hamlet, his greatest
work, we find there is not a pregnant sentence, scarce a
word that men have not appreciated, have not used in
myriad ways. Had we never read the play, we should
find the whole of it from quotation and illustration familiar
to us as air. That exquisite phraseology, so heavy with
meaning, wrought out with such admirable minuteness, has
become a part of literary diction, the stock of the literary
bank ; and what set criticism can tell like this fact how great
was the work, and that men were worthy it should be
addressed to them ?
L. The moon looks in to tell her assent. See she has
just got above that chimney. Just as this happy certainty
has with you risen above the disgusts of the day.
A. She looks surprised as well as complacent.
L. She looks surprised to find me still here. I must
say good night. My friend, good night.
A. Good night, and farewell.
L. You look as if it were for some time.


1844.]
The Consolers.
469
A. That rests with you. You will generally find me
here, and always I think like-minded, if not of the same
mind.
An ancient sage had all things deeply tried,
And, as result, thus to his friends he cried,
“o friends, there are no friends." And to this day
Thus twofold moves the strange magnetic sway,
Giving us love which love must take away.
Let not the soul for this distrust its right,
Knowing when changeful moons withdraw their light,
Then myriad stars, with promise not less pure,
New loves, new lives to patient hopes assure,
So long as laws that rule the spheres endure.
THE CONSOLERS.
Consolers of the solitary hours
When I, a pilgrim, on a lonely shore
Sought help, and found none — save in those high powers
That then I prayed might never leave me more!
There was the blue, eternal sky above,
There was the ocean silent at my feet,
There was the universe - but nought to love;
The universe did its old tale repeat.
Then came ye to me, with your healing wings,
And said, “ Thus bare and branchless must thou be,
Ere thou couldst feel the wind from heaven that springs."
And now again fresh leaves do bud for me, -
Yet let me feel that still the spirit sings
Its quiet song, coming from heaven free.


470
[April,
To Readers.
TO READERS.
A voice, a heart, a free, unfettered pen,
My life in its own shape not rudely tasked,
If I could journey o'er my path again,
No entertainment could be better asked,
Not wealth, not fame, nor gentlemen to see,
Rather would I consort with liberty.
That which I must not buy, I do demand,
My way to worship God, my company,
The service of my own decisive hand,
The love that by its life is deeply free,
Flattered by those I live with, -O not so,
If I have dropped the seed, then may it grow.
Yet I would perish rather, and be dead
Within this mortal mind than lose my right
Upon a nobler fruitage to be fed,
And spring where blooms more excellent delight,
To man, shall time remain the sacred thing,
Shall poets for reward demand to sing ?
Bring to my lays thy heart, if it be thine,
Read what is written and no meaning see,
Think that I am a barren, useless vine,
There is no bond agreed 'twixt thee and me,
That thou shouldest read the meaning clearly writ,
Yet thou and I may both be part of it.
O Reader, if my heart could say,
How in my blood thy nature runs,
Which manifesteth no decay,
The torch that lights a thousand suns,
How thou and I, are freely lent,
A little of such element.


1844.1
471
The Death of Shelley.
471
If I could say, what landscape says,
And human pictures say far more,
If I could twine our sunny days,
With the rich colors, on the floor
Of daily love, how thou and I,
Might be refreshed with charity.
For pleasant is the softening smile
Of winter sunset o'er the snow,
And blessed is this spheral isle
That through the cold, vast void must go,
The current of the stream is sweet,
Where many waters closely meet.
C.
THE DEATH OF SHELLEY.
Fair was the morn, - a little bark bent
Like a gull o'er the waters blue,
And the mariners sang in their merriment,
For Shelley the faithful and true,
Shelley was bound on his voyage o'er the sea,
And wherever he sailed the heart beat free.
And a dark cloud flew, and the white waves hurled
The crests in their wrath, at the angry wind,
The little bark with its sails unfurled,
While the dreadful tempest gathered behind, -
With the book of Plato pressed to his heart,
Came to the beach Shelley's mortal part,
Then a pyre they kindled by ocean side,
Poets were they who Shelley did burn,
The beautiful flame to Heaven applied,
The ashes were pressed in the marble urn,
In Rome shall those ashes long remain,
And from Shelley's verse spring golden grain.


472
[April,
A Song of the Sea.
.
A SONG OF THE SEA.
WHERE the breeze is an emerald green,
The breath of the fathomless deep,
Fresh, pure, living it falls on the scene,
While the little waves tremblingly creep,
So the air of the soul hath this firmness of cheer,
And over it thoughts like wild vessels veer.
'T is a breeze from the shore that uplifts
The surface, and tosses it far,
But the depths are unmoved, and the drifts
Of white foam like the cloud o'er the star,
Hurry on, madly roam, but the light is unmoved,
Like the heart of the bride for the mate she has loved.
I would sail on the sea in my boat,
I would drift with the rolling tide,
In the calm of green harbors I float,
On the black mountainous chasms I ride,
I am never at anchor, I never shall be,
I am sailing the glass of infinity's sea.
Rage on, strongest winds, for the sail
Has ropes to the fast trimly set,
My heart which is oak cannot fail,
And the billows I cheered that I met,
Cold, — no, good breeze thou art comfort to me,
There are vessels I hail on the generous sea.


1844.)
473
Fourierism.
473
TO THE POETS.
Ye who sing the maiden's kiss,
And the silver sage's thought,
Loveliness of inward bliss,
And the graver learning taught,
Tell me, are your skies and streams
Real, or the shape of dreams.
Many rainy days may go,
Many clouds the sun obscure,
And your verses clearer grow,
And your lovely songs more pure,
Mortals are we, but ye are
Burning keenly like a star.
FOUBIERISM.
In the last week of December, 1843, and first week of
January, 1844, a Convention was held in Boston, which
may be considered as the first publication of Fourierism in
this region.
The works of Fourier do not seem to have reached us,
and this want of text has been ill supplied by various
conjectures respecting them; some of which are more re-
markable for the morbid imagination they display than for
their sagacity. For ourselves we confess to some remem-
brances of vague horror, connected with this name, as if it
were some enormous parasitic plant sucking the life prin-
ciples of society, while it spread apparently an equal shade,
inviting man to repose under its beautiful but poison-
dropping branches. We still have a certain question about
VOL. IV. NO. IV. 60


474
(April,
Fourierism.
Fourierism, considered as a catholicon for evil, but our
absurd horrors were dissipated, and a feeling of genuine
respect for the friends of the movement ensured, as we
heard the exposition of the doctrine of Association, by Mr.
Channing, and others. That name already consecrated
to humanity, seemed to us to have worthily fallen, with
the mantle of the philanthropic spirit, upon this eloquent
expounder of socialism ; in whose voice and countenance,
as well as in his pleadings for humanity, the spirit of
his great kinsman still seemed to speak.
We cannot sufficiently lament that there was no reporter
of the speech in which Mr. Channing set forth the argu-
ment derived from the analogy of nature, against the
doctrine of community of goods to the exclusion of indi-
vidual property. It was the general scope of the argument,
to show that Life was forever tending to individuality of
expression, and could not be refused the material order
also, as a field for the scope of this tendency, and that
individual property was the expression of this universal
law; the lowest expression certainly, but still an expres-
sion. It would not be fair to give a garbled report of his
masterly and delicate sketch of the ultimate result of
denying this principle. He divided the truth on this sub-
ject to right and left, with the sword of pure spirit. Let
it be sufficient to say, that only the ecstasy of self-love
could understand it as casting personal reflections; and
that it could not be expected to find an understanding
heart with the ecstasy of destructiveness, which has seized
many modern reformers.
But in the absence of reports of this and other speeches,
we will give a sketch of Fourierism, as we gathered it from
the debates of the Convention, and conversation with
its friends; and then take the liberty of stating some
qualifications, and limitations, which seem to have escaped
the attention of its enthusiastic disciples. The general
view upon which Fourier proceeds is this: that there is in
the Divine Mind a certain social order, to which man is
destined, and which is discoverable by man, according to
his truth in thought to the two poles of Christian perfection,
Love of God and Love of Man.
He assumes the fact, which will hardly be disputed, that
the present social organizations are not this divine order;


1844.]
475
Fourierism.
but that they perpetually and necessarily generate external
evils, which so complicate the temptations of man, as to
make innocence impossible, and virtue only the meed of
crucifixion; nor even attainable by that, except in in-
stances of beings endowed with supernatural energy. For
the proof of this fact, he appeals to all history and all
experience.
Environed, as he felt himself also to be by this extreme
disorder, yet Fourier had the courage to attempt to dis-
cover the Divine order, and labored forty years at the work.
Brought up in mercantile life, and keeping this position,
which enabled him to know personally the customs and
laws of trade, as it is; and endowed with a genius for
calculation, which, in the service of justice and benevo-
lence, followed out the bearings of these customs and laws,
and the effects of large monopolies upon the social hap-
piness and moral character of the various men directly and
indirectly affected by them; he yet, to use his own words,
·labored in distraction for seven years, before he obtained
the clue.' At last, having seen that Labor stands, in the
social world, for the analogous fact of motion in the physical,
he pronounced the word Attraction, which arranged to his
mind the universe of men, as once before, that same word,
to a kindred genius, arranged the universe of matter.
The question then became, what is that social arrange-
ment, so broad, and so elastic, that every man shall find,
at every hour of the day, and every season of his life,
just that labor which is to him attractive and not repug-
nant.
As Fourier places among the constituent passions of men
every social charity, and even a passion for self-sacrifice,
he could maintain that there is nothing done, and nothing
to be done in the world, which might not find a willing
agent, were circumstances properly arranged.
But to induce a desire after this arrangement, and evoke
the ability to make it, mankind must have its scientific
foundations, or harmony with the nature of things, made
manifest to their reason. Man therefore must be analyzed
into his constituent powers; and then the tendencies of
each of these powers be studied out, and corresponding
circumstances imagined, which should yield to each power
its legitimate range; for such circumstances must neces-


476
(April,
Fourierism.
sarily be the Divine Order of Society to which man is
destined,
Thus analyzed, man, according to Fourier, is constituted
of twelve fundamental passions, consisting, firstly, of the
five senses; secondly, of the four social passions, friend-
ship, ambition, love, and the parental sentiment; and
thirdly, of three intellectual powers, whose strange names,
according to our best recollection, are Cabalism, Alterna-
tism, and Emulation.
The training of these twelve powers into their appro-
priate activities, that each may contribute its share, both to
the harmony of the Universe, and the unity of the individ-
ual, is what Fourier calls the social development of the
passions.
This view of the constituency of man and the necessity
of his training, may be made plainer perhaps by translating
his language into that of another remarkable thinker, who
seems to have had, fundamentally, the same view. Swe-
denborg says, that man's soul is made up of Loves, and
every Love must find its Wisdom, the marriage unions of
Love and Wisdom, being made manifest in Uses. The
Angel of Love must find the Angel of Wisdom to whom it is
betrothed, on penalty of becoming a devil, says Swedenborg.
If the passions do not find their developments, by the law of
groups and series, says Fourier, they become principles of
disorder, and produce what we see now all around us,
a world lying in wickedness and dead in sin.
There is one of man's passions which has found its
social development, so far as to become an illustration of
the meaning of this theory with regard to all the rest; and
this is the Passion of Hearing. Music is the Wisdom of
this Passion; and the progress of this science has involved
the large variety of musical instruments, and created the
song, the chorus, the opera, the oratorio, and the orchestra.
So, according to Fourier, each of the senses, each of the
social passions, each of the intellectual powers, in finding
its legitimate scope, must create a music in its sphere, with
instruments corresponding, and weave men into groups
corresponding with the chorus, the opera, the oratorio, and
the orchestra. And there are intimations of this. The
passion of Sight has created Painting, Sculpture, Archi-
tecture. And even what seem to be the humbler powers of


1844.]
477
Fourierism.
Touch, Taste, Smell, have not failed to bring the tribute of
their exactions to the comforts and elegancies of life, and
the science of vitality.
One obvious and undisputed function of the senses, is
to build up bodies, and contribute to physical well-being.
But this is not all. There is another function which the
senses have to perform, beside this obvious one; and also
beside the transcendental one of creating harmonies in
five different modes; even though we may admit that all
these harmonies may rise to the spiritual elevation of that
divine art which Beethoven has carried to the acme of
symbolizing the highest intellectual, moral, and even reli-
gious exercises of the soul. This function is to perfect
the Earth on which we live, and make it not only yield
its treasures for physical well-being to every creature, but
perform adequately its part in the Sidereal Universe,
At this point of Fourier's system, there opens upon us
a quite poetical extent of view. Geologists and geograph-
ers have intimated to us heretofore, that the earth needs
to be dressed and kept by men, in order not to become in
several ways desert, and that the climates, which depend
much more upon the state of the surface of the earth, than
upon its relations with the sun, should be ameliorated,
Fourier would demonstrate that the cursing of the ground
for man's sake, sung of by the old Hebrew prophet, is no
metaphor; but that, literally, man's falling below his destiny,
has, as its natural consequence, the return of the earth to
a state of chaos. He demonstrates, that, following out the
suggestions of the senses of taste and smell, the human
race must cultivate the whole vegetable creation, if not the
animal, to a perfection which would involve an agricultural
science, absolutely sublime in its extent; while the spring-
carriage, and easy railroad car, and every contribution the
mechanical arts have made to the commodity of man,
would fall among the meanest and vulgarest class of the
innumerable results of seeking for the wisdom of the sense
of Touch.
But is the earth to be restored to the state of Paradise,
through the labors of man, merely to react upon his physi-
cal nature, and contribute to his personal enjoyments ? By
no means. But the earth thus cultivated and perfected,
shall shine as a brighter star in the firmament of other


478
(April,
Fourierism.
develop universe, art, have chaining of the
worlds ; shall hold, by its imponderable fluids, a more
perfect relation with the sun, and through that star with the
whole sidereal heavens.
It is hardly fair to Fourier to touch, without entering into
his reasonings, upon a part of his system which is so origi-
nal, and which requires, in order to be appreciated, at least
all that he has himself said upon it.
If the development and training of the senses to results
of science and art, have these wide bearings upon the
sidereal universe, we may not doubt that Fourier makes the
development and bearings of the social passions, open
another captivating and exalting vista of thought.
The word Friendship, in this nomenclature, stands for
the sentiment of humanity, in its widest and in its most
delicate relations. Fourier attempts to show that to give
this passion its scope, the social system, which is according
to the divine order, will realize in its institutions all, and
more than all, that declarations of the Rights of man have
ever suggested; all that his hopes have aspired to and
expressed, under the images of the Millennium and Fifth
Monarchy.
And to balance this great liberty, the second social pas-
sion must have its scope. This passion, which he defines
as the love of order, in graduating persons according to
their comparative worth with relation to each other, he
calls Ambition ; thus casting out of this word its bad
meaning, - for its object is no longer the exaltation of self,
but of worth. It gives to every man and woman their
exact place in the social scale, and justifies the idea of
government. By the balance of the two passions of Friend-
ship and Ambition, Liberty and Law will become, as they
should do, the poles of a living political order.
The Passions of Love, and the Parental Sentiment, will
also, when, through a general ease of circumstances, they
are left free to find their legitimate exercises, dignify woman
universally; and by consequence, purify the institution of
marriage, and unfold the family, to their highest ends of
refining, and sanctifying, and cherishing human beings, into
the richest forms of life.
The Christian world, as it is, can hardly fail to acknow-
ledge, that although Christianity has sanctified the formula
of monogamy, yet the whole deep significance of that insti-


1844.]
479
Fourierism.
tution is yet to be widely appreciated. To marry from
any consideration but the one of sentiment, must be
considered a crime, before mankind will cease from
that adultery of the heart, of which Christ warned his
disciples.
Lastly, the three intellectual passions into which Fourier
analyzes the Reason, have for their office to estimate the
natures and ends of the foregoing nine passions, and inter-
weave them into one web of life, according to their natures
and ends; and then they will take the still higher range, of
enjoying the divine order, and tracing in the happiness
thence resulting, the image of God.
We see from the above rude outline, that Fourier thinks
he has discovered the divine order, which is the true organ-
ization of society, by studying each of the twelve passions
of man, with the same respect that the passion of hearing has
been studied, in order to derive from thence the present
living art of music. He thinks, that by following out the
results of this study in practice, the earth would be culti-
vated and restored to the state of Paradise ; with the super-
structure thereon of a world of art, in harmony with the
beauty of nature. Also, that political institutions would
combine all desirable liberty, with all that can come from
the observance of law, by distributing all men according to
the gradation of their natures; and that individual families
would be established in the purest and most powerful form;
lastly, that the functions of Reason would be vindicated to
their worthiest objects, of perpetually unfolding and keep-
ing in order this great estate of man, internal and external.
If Fourier had done nothing but suggest to his race, that
the divine order of society was a possible discovery, and
thus have given a noble object to human investigations, and
presented a worthy prize for human energy, in this direction,
he would have done much. It is claimed, however, by those
who have studied his works, that he has done a great deal
more; that he has himself successfully worked at the practi-
cal problems; and the Phalanx which he has discovered
in detail, is, as it were, a house already builded, into which
men may go, and at once live, freed from a multitude of the
evils that press upon the modern civilized state. A word
or two in explanation of this Phalanx.
It is not a community of goods. It is a state of society


480
(April,
·
Fourierism.
produse parte he memand more in then the P
which provides a public fund, as all societies do, and on a
better security for its return in just proportions to those who
produce it, but which admits of individual property as much
as any partnership in trade. It is indeed a great partner-
ship, in which the members throw in capital of three species,
namely, labor, skill, and money, (which last is the re-
presentative of past labor and skill.) All these species of
capital will draw a large interest, when the Phalanx is in
operation ; but in order to prevent any great inequality of
the third species of capital, (money,) it is a fundamental
law of the Phalanx that small sums shall draw interest in a
larger ratio than large ones. The common property, accu-
mulated by the Phalanx in its corporate capacity, shall be
subject to the will of the members, expressed by ballot and
otherwise ; its general destination being to provide for all
children, without distinction of rank or birth, an individually
appropriate education, according to their genius and capaci-
ty; also to provide public conveniencies, and common
comforts and amusements, and means of expressing their
genius, to all the members.
The labor in the Phalanx will be organized upon scientific
principles, i. e. by the law of groups and series, and indi-
vidual genius and disposition will be the guide as to the
distribution of the members into the several groups and
series. The well being and good training of the laborer
will never be sacrificed to the external object of the labor,
for Fourier endeavors to demonstrate that, in the divine
order, the necessity of such a sacrifice never can occur,
even though all ends are answered.
The first objection that strikes a spiritual or intellectual
person, at the presentation of Fourierism, is its captivating
material aspect. A system which accepts the social pas-
sions, and even the senses of man in full, and puts them
on the same ground with the functions of Reason, seems to
be a dead-leveller.
Undoubtedly, at first sight, it is especially captivating to
the sensualist. But, on a little investigation, it will be found
to present no bed of roses for the sluggard, nor paradise
for the mere epicure. The discharge of the external func-
tions of the senses, involves the keenest and most health-
giving labor, though a labor that must have all the charac-
teristics of the chase, and other chosen amusements of


1844.)
481
Fourierism.
But then, the social pown rule, nor the please
the free
manly men and women; nor can the labor fall upon any
one to the degree of making a drudge.
Also, the abundance which this discharge of the external
functions of the senses will bring forth from the earth, to
the physical well-being of man, will leave him leisure to
follow out the leadings of his social passions, which now
are cramped and warped from their objects, by the necessity
that rests upon every man to scramble, in order to get his
sufficiency out of the present scarcity of provisions on the
globe. For, undoubtedly, it is because poverty is in the
world, and because all the accumulated riches, if divided,
would not leave even a competence to each, that even the
rich cannot get rid of this all-devouring instinct of hoard-
ing, or getting more. Were every man assured of the neces-
sities and comforts of life, where would be the stimulus to
this morbid passion for gain, which consumes the civilized
man, and makes him sacrifice the purity and warmth of his
friendship, love, and parental sentiment ?
But, then, the social passions, thus set free to act, do not
carry within them their own rule, nor the pledge of confer-
ring happiness. They can only get this from the free
action upon them of the intellectual passions which consti-
tute human Reason.
But these functions of Reason,- do they carry within
themselves the pledge of their own continued health and
harmonious action ?
Here Fourierism stops short, and, in so doing, proves
itself to be, not a life, a soul, but only a body. It may be
a magnificent body for humanity to dwell in for a season ;
and one for which it may be wise to quit old diseased
carcases, which now go by the proud name of civilization.
But if its friends pretend, for what has been now described,
any higher character than that of a body, thus turning men
froin seeking for principles of life essentially above organ-
ization, it will prove but another, perhaps a greater curse.
In being a body, however, it is as much entitled to con-
sideration, as any other body which has been created. It
has the presumptive advantage of being a creation of the
Christian life. The question is, whether the Phalanx ac-
knowledges its own limitations of nature, in being an
organization, or opens up any avenue into the source of life
that shall keep it sweet, enabling it to assimilate to itself
contrary elements, and consume its own waste; so that,
VOL. IV. — NO. IV.
61


482
(April,
Fourierism.
Phænix-like, it may renew itself forever in great and finer
forms.
This question, the Fourierists in the Convention, from
whom alone we have learnt anything of Fourierism, did not
seem to have considered.
But this is a vital point. Did our time and space permit,
we should be tempted to follow out some curious analogies,
suggested to us by reading Karl Ottfried Mueller's History
of the Dorians. In looking over Fourier's analysis of
human nature, as given above, we notice that every one of
his passions, whether sensuous, social, or intellectual, was re-
cognised as a god, by some separate tribe in antiquity. The
Oriental religions, with the exception of the Hebrew, and the
European also, consisted in deifications of the Forces and
and the Functions of Being. The Dorians alone, in their fideli-
ty to the beautiful individuality of their Apollo, gave to Gre-
tcian culture that polarity which is essential to a reproductive
life ; and made Greece what it is in the history of humanity.
But it is not our purpose to recommend the worship of
Apollo to the Fourierists. The Word of God, the doctrine
of the expiation, which even divinity must make, if it would
act upon earth ; all that Apollo beautifully intimated in his
human form of superhuman beauty ; in his destruction of
the Pythoness; or in his pilgrimage to Tempe, where Jove
made inquisition for blood; or in his reappearance from the
Hyperborean land of perpetual summer, with wheat sheaves
for men; all is symbolized and realized in Christ. And
this is now the only name under heaven, by which men may
be saved from spiritual death. Christian churches in the
midst of a Phalanx, might be the Dorian cities of another
Greece. Only let each member be at once subject and law.
giver, like à Lycurgus, pupil and master like a Pythagoras;
like Lacedemon, fighting and conquering for self-preserva-
lion only, and the liberty of the conquered.
In a former article, we suggested the idea, that the Christ-
jan churches planted by the Apostles, were only initiatory
institutions, to be lost, like the morning star, in the deeper
glory of a kingdom of heaven on earth, which we then
fancied Socialism would bring about.
Since then, by the study of ancient nationalities, and also
of Neander's History of the Churches of Christ up to the time
of Constantine, together with observations on the attempt at
West Roxbury, we have come to see that initiatory churches


1844.]
483
Fourierism.
will have an office as long as men are born children; and
that a tremendous tyranny is necessarily involved by con-
stituting society itself the VISIBLE church of Christ. Those
who have ideas, and who, individually, and free from human
constraining, have pledged themselves to live by them
alone, or dic, must be a select body, in the midst of the
instinctive life that is perpetually arriving on the shores of
Being, and which it is not fair or wise to catch up and
christen before it can understand its position, and give its
consent. We must be men before we are Christians, else
we shall never be either Christians or men.
The life of the world is now the Christian life. For
eighteen centuries, Art, Literature, Philosophy, Poetry,
have followed the fortunes of the Christian idea. Ancient
history is the history of the apotheosis of Nature, or
natural religion; modern history is the history of an Idea,
or revealed religion. In vain will any thing try to be,
which is not supported thereby. Fourier does homage 10
Christianity with many words. But this may be cant,
though it thinks itself sincere. Besides, there are many
things which go by the name of Christianity, that are not it.
Let the Fourierists see to it, that there be freedom in their
Phalanx for churches, unsupported by its material organiza-
tion, and lending it no support on its material side, Inde-
pendently existing, within them, but not of them, feeding on
ideas, forgetting that which is behind, petrified into per
formance, and pressing on to the stature of the perfect
man, they will finally spread themselves in spirit over the
whole body.
In fine, it is our belief, that unless the Fourierist bodies
are made alive by Christ, their constitution will not march;'
and the galvanic force of reaction, by which they move for
a season, will not preserve them from corruption. As 'the
corruption of the best is the worst,' the warmer their friends
are, the more awake should they be to this danger, and the
more energetic to avert it.
We understand that Brook Farm has become a Fourier-
ist establishment. We rejoice in this, because such per-
sons as form that association will give it a fair experiment,
We wish it God-speed. May it become a University where
the young American shall learn his duties, and becoine
worthy of this broad land of his inheritance.
E. P. P.


484
[April,
The Young American.
THE YOUNG AMERICAN.
A Lecture read before the Mercantile Library Association, in Boston, at
the Odeon, Wednesday, 7 February, 1844.
GENTLEMEN :
It is remarkable, that our people have their intellectual
culture from one country, and their duties from another.
Our books are European. We were born within the
fame and sphere of Shakspeare and Milton, of Bacon,
Dryden and Pope ; our college text-books are the writ-
ings of Butler, Locke, Paley, Blackstone, and Stewart;
and our domestic reading has been Clarendon and Hume,
Addison and Johnson, Young and Cowper, Edgeworth and
Scott, Southey, Coleridge and Wordsworth, and the Edin-
burgh and Quarterly Reviews. We are sent to a feudal
school to learn democracy. A gulf yawns for the young
American between his education and his work. We are
like the all-accomplished banker's daughter, who, when her
education was finished, and her father had become a bank-
rupt, and she was asked what she could do for him in his
sickness and misfortunes, - could she make a shirt, mix
bread, scald milk pans? No, but she could waltz, and cut
rice-paper, and paint velvet, and transfer drawings, and
make satin stitch, and play on the clavichord, and sing
German songs, and act charades, and arrange tableaux, and
a great many other equally useful and indispensable per-
formances. It has seemed verily so with the education of
our young men; the system of thought was the growth of
monarchical institutions, whilst those that were flourishing
around them were not consecrated to their imagination nor
interpreted to their understanding.
This false state of things is newly in a way to be cor-
rected. America is beginning to assert itself to the senses
and to the imagination of her children, and Europe is re-
ceding in the same degree. This their reaction on educa-
tion gives a new importance to the internal improvements
and to the politics of the country.
There is no American citizen who has not been stimu-
lated to reflection by the facilities now in progress of con-
struction for travel and the transportation of goods in the


1844.]
485
The Young American.
United States. The alleged effect to augment dispropor-
tionately the size of cities, is in a rapid course of fulfilment
in this metropolis of New England.
The growth of Boston, never slow, has been so accele-
rated since the railroads have been opened which join it to
Providence, to Albany, and to Portland, that the extreme
depression of general trade has not concealed it from the
most careless eye. The narrow peninsula, which a few
years ago easily held its thirty or forty thousand people,
with many pastures and waste lands, not to mention the
large private gardens in the midst of the town, has been
found too strait when forty are swelled to a hundred thou-
sand. The waste lands have been fenced in and builded
over, the private gardens one after the other have become
streets. Boston proper consisted of seven hundred and
twenty acres of land. Acre after acre has been since won
from the sea, and in a short time the antiquary will find it
difficult to trace the peninsular topography. Within the
last year, the newspapers tell us, from twelve to fifteen
hundred buildings of all sorts have been erected, many of
them of a rich and durable character. And because each
of the new avenues of iron road ramifies like the bough of
a tree, the growth of the city proceeds at a geometrical
rate. Already a new road is shooting northwest towards
the Connecticut and Montreal; and every great line of road
that is completed makes cross sections from road to road
more practicable, so that the land will presently be mapped
in a network of iron.
This rage for road building is beneficent for America,
where vast distance is so main a consideration in our do-
mestic politics and trade, inasmuch as the great political
promise of the invention is to hold the Union staunch,
whose days seemed already numbered by the mere incon-
venience of transporting representatives, judges, and offi-
cers, across such tedious distances of land and water.
Not only is distance annihilated, but when, as now, the
locomotive and the steamboat, like enormous shuttles, shoot
every day across the thousand various threads of national
descent and employment, and bind them fast in one web,
an hourly assimilation goes forward, and there is no danger
that local peculiarities and hostilities should be preserved.
The new power is hardly less noticeable in its relation


486
(April,
The Young American.
to the immigrant population, chiefly to the people of Ire-
lạnd, as having given employment to hundreds of thousands
of the natives of that country, who are continually arriving
in every vessel from Great Britain.
In an uneven country the railroad is a fine object in the
making. It has introduced a multitude of picturesque
traits into our pastoral scenery. The tunneling of moun-
tains, the bridging of streams, the bold mole carried out
into a broad silent meadow, silent and unvisited by any but
its own neighbors since the planting of the region; the en-
counter at short distances along the track of gangs of
laborers ; the energy with which they strain at their tasks;
the cries of the overseer or boss; the character of the
work itself, which so violates and revolutionizes the primal
and immemorial forms of nature ; the village of shanties,
at the edge of beautiful lakes until now the undisturbed
haunt of the wild duck, and in the most sequestered nooks
of the forest, around which the wives and children of the
Irish are seen ; the number of foreigners, men and women,
whom now the woodsman encounters singly in the forest
paths; the blowing of rocks, explosions all day, with the
occasional alarm of frightful accident, and the indefinite
promise of what the new channel of trade may do and
undo for the rural towns, keep the senses and imagination
active; and the varied aspects of the enterprise make it
the topic of all companies, in cars and boats, and by fire-
sides.
This picture is a little saddened, when too nearly seen,
by the wrongs that are done in the contracts that are made
with the laborers. Our hospitality to the poor Irishman
has not much merit in it. We pay the poor fellow very ill.
To work from dark to dark for sixty, or even fifty cents a
day, is but pitiful wages for a married man. It is a pit-
tance when paid in cash ; but when, as generally happens,
through the extreme wants of the one party, met by the
shrewdness of the other, he draws his pay in clothes and
food, and in other articles of necessity, his case is still
worse ; he buys everything at disadvantage, and has no ad-
viser or protector. Besides, the labor done is excessive, and
the sight of it reminds one of negro-driving. Good fariners
and sturdy laborers say that they have never seen so much
work got out of a man in a day. Poor fellows! Hear their


1844.)
487
The Young American.
stories of their exodus from the old country, and their land-
ing in the new, and their fortunes appear as little under
their own control as the leaves of the forest around them.
As soon as the ship that brought them is anchored, one is
whirled off to Albany, one to Ohio, one digs at the levee
at New Orleans, and one beside the waterwheels at Lowell,
some fetch and carry on the wharves of New York and
Boston, some in the woods of Maine. They have too
little money, and too little knowledge, to allow them the
exercise of much more election of whither to go, or what
to do, than the leaf that is blown into this dike or that
brook to perish.
And yet their plight is not so grievous as it seems. The
escape from the squalid despair of their condition at home,
into the unlimited opportunities of their existence here,
must be reckoned a gain. The Irish father and mother are
very ill paid, and are victims of fraud and private oppres-
sion ; but their children are instantly received into the
schools of the country; they grow up in perfect communi-
cation and equality with the native children, and owe to
their parents a vigor of constitution which promises them
at least an even chance in the competitions of the new
generation. Whether it is this confidence that puts a drop
of sweetness in their cup, or whether the buoyant spirits
natural to the race, it is certain that they seem to have
almost a monopoly of the vivacity and good nature in our
towns, and contrast broadly, in that particular, with the
native people. In the village where I reside, through
which a railroad is being built, the charitable ladies, who,
moved by the report of the wrongs and distresses of the
newly arrived laborers, explored the shanties, with offers of
relief, were surprised to find the most civil reception, and
the most bounding sportfulness from the oldest to the
youngest. Perhaps they may thank these dull shovels
as safe vents for peccant humors ; and this grim day's
work of fifteen or sixteen hours, though deplored by all the
humanity of the neighborhood, is a better police than the
sheriff and his deputies.
1. But I have abstained too long from speaking of that
which led me to this topic, — its importance in creating an ·
American sentiment. An unlooked for consequence of the
railroad, is the increased acquaintance it has given the


488
[April,
The Young American.
American people with the boundless resources of their own
soil. If this invention has reduced England to a third of its
size, by bringing people so much nearer, in this country it has
given a new celerity to time, or anticipated by fifty years
the planting of tracts of land, the choice of water-privi-
leges, the working of mines, and other natural advantages.
Railroad iron is a magician's rod, in its power to evoke the
sleeping energies of land and water.
The railroad is but one arrow in our quiver, though it
has great value as a sort of yard-stick, and surveyor's line.
The bountiful continent is ours, state on state, and territory
on territory, to the waves of the Pacific sea;
“Our garden is the immeasurable earth,
The heaven's blue pillars are Medea's house,"
and new duties, new motives await and cheer us. The task
of planting, of surveying, of building upon this immense tract,
requires an education and a sentiment commensurate thereto.
A consciousness of this fact, is beginning to take the place
of the purely trading spirit and education which sprang up
whilst all the population lived on the fringe of sea-coast.
And even on the coast, prudent men have begun to see
that every American should be educated with a view to the
values of land. The arts of engineering and of architecture
are studied; scientific agriculture is an object of growing
attention; the mineral riches are explored ; limestone,
coal, slate, and iron; and the value of timber-lands is en-
hanced.
Columbus alleged as a reason for seeking a continent in
the West, that the harmony of nature required a great
tract of land in the western hemisphere, to balance the
known extent of land in the eastern; and it now appears
that we must estimate the native values of this immense
region to redress the balance of our own judgment, and
appreciate the advantages opened to the human race in this
country, which is our fortunate home. The land is the
appointed remedy for whatever is false and fantastic in our
culture. The great continent we inhabit is to be physic
and food for our mind, as well as our body. The land,
with its tranquillizing, sanative influences, is to repair the
errors of a scholastic and traditional education, and bring
us into just relations with men and things.


1844.)
489
The Young American.
This habit of living in the presence of these invitations
of natural wealth is not inoperative; and this habit, com-
bined with the moral sentiment which, in the recent years,
has interrogated every institution, and usage, and law, has,
very naturally, given a strong direction to the wishes and
aims of active young men to withdraw from cities, and
cultivate the soil. This inclination has appeared in the
most unlooked for quarters, in men supposed to be absorbed
in business, and in those connected with the liberal profes-
sions. And since the walks of trade were crowded, whilst
that of agriculture cannot easily be, inasmuch as the farmer
who is not wanted by others, can yet grow his own bread,
whilst the manufacturer or the trader who is not wanted, can-
not, this seemed a happy tendency. For, beside all the mor-
al benefit which we may expect from the farmer's profession,
when a man enters it from moral causes, this promised the
conquering of the soil, plenty, and beyond this, the adorn-
ing of the whole continent with every advantage and
ornament which labor, ingenuity, and affection for a man's
home, could suggest. This great savage country should be
furrowed by the plough, and combed by the harrow; these
rough Alleganies should know their master; these foaming
torrents should be bestridden by proud arches of stone;
these wild prairies should be loaded with wheat; the
swamps with rice; the hill-tops should pasture innumerable
sheep and cattle ; the interminable forests should become
graceful parks, for use and for delight.
In this country, where land is cheap, and the disposition
of the people pacific, every thing invites to the arts of agri-
culture, of gardening, and domestic architecture. Public
gardens, on the scale of such plantations in Europe and
Asia, are now unknown to us. There is no feature of the
old countries that more agreeably and newly strikes an
American, than the beautiful gardens of Europe; such as
the Boboli in Florence, the Villa Borghese in Rome, the
Villa d'Este in Tivoli : works easily imitated here, and
which might well make the land dear to the citizen, and
inflame patriotism. It is the fine art which is left for us,
now that sculpture, and painting, and religious and civil
architecture have become effete, and have passed into second
childhood. We have twenty degress of latitude wherein
to choose a seat, and the new modes of travelling enlarge the
vol. IV. - NO. IV.
62


490
(April,
The Young American.
opportunity of selection, by making it easy to cultivate very
distant tracts, and yet remain in strict intercourse with the
centres of trade and population. And the whole force of all
the arts goes to facilitate the decoration of lands and dwell-
ings. A garden has this advantage, that it makes it indifferent
where you live. A well-laid garden makes the face of the
country about you of no account; low or high, grand or
mean, you have made a beautiful abode worthy of man.
If the landscape is pleasing, the garden shows it, - if tame,
it excludes it. A little grove, which any farmer can find,
or cause to grow near his house, will, in a few years, so fill
the eye and mind of the inhabitant, as to make cataracts
and chains of mountains quite unnecessary to his scenery;
and he is so contented with his alleys, woodlands, orchards,
and river, that Niagara, and the Notch of the White Hills,
and Nantasket Beach, are superfluities. And yet the selec-
tion of a fit houselot has the same advantage over an in-
different one, as the selection to a given employment of a
man who has a genius for that work. In the last case, all
the culture of years will never make the most painstaking
scholar his equal : no more will gardening give the advan-
tage of a happy site to a house in a hole or on a pinnacle.
“God Almighty first planted a garden," says Lord Bacon,
"and it is the purest of human pleasures. It is the greatest
refreshment to the spirits of man, without which, buildings
and palaces are but gross handyworks; and a man shall ever
see that when ages grow to civility and elegancy, men come
to build stately, sooner than to garden finely, as if garden-
ing were the greater perfection." Bacon has followed up this
sentiment in his two Essays on Buildings, and on Gardens,
with many pleasing details on the decoration of lands;
and Aubrey has given us an engaging account of the man-
ner in which Bacon finished his own manor at Gorhambury.
In America, we have hitherto little to boast in this kind.
The cities continually drain the country of the best part of
its population : the flower of the youth, of both sexes, goes
into the towns, and the country is cultivated by a so much
inferior class. The land, — travel a whole day togeth-
er, - looks poverty-stricken, and the buildings plain and
poor. In Europe, where society has an aristocratic
structure, the land is full of men of the best stock, and the
best culture, whose interest and pride it is to remain half


1844.)
491
The Young American.
the year on their estates, and to fill them with every con-
venience and ornament. Of course these make model
farms, and model architecture, and are a constant educa-
tion to the eye of the surrounding population. Whatever
events in progress shall go to disgust men with cities, and
infuse into them the passion for country-life, and country-
pleasures, will render a prodigious service to the whole face
of this continent, and will further the most poetic of all
the occupations of real life, the bringing out by art the
native but hidden graces of the landscape.
I look on such improvements, also, as directly tending
to endear the land to the inhabitant, and give him whatever
is valuable in local attachment. Any relation to the land,
the habit of tilling it, or mining it, or even hunting on it,
generates the feeling of patriotism. He who keeps shop
on it, or he who merely uses it as a support to his desk and
ledger, or to his manufactory, values it very little. The
vast majority of the people of this country live by the land,
and carry its quality in their manners and opinions. We
in the Atlantic states, by position, have been commercial,
and have, as I said, imbibed easily an European culture.
Luckily for us, now that steam has narrowed the Atlantic
to a strait, the nervous, rocky West is intruding a new and
continental element into the national mind, and we shall
yet have an American genius. How much better when
the whole land is a garden, and the people have grown up
in the bowers of a paradise. Without looking, then, to
those extraordinary social influences which are now acting
in precisely this direction, but only at what is inevitably
doing around us, I think we must regard the land as a
commanding and increasing power on the American citizen,
the sanative and Americanizing influence, which promises
to disclose new powers for ages to come.
2. In the second place, the uprise and culmination of the
new and anti-feudal power of Commerce, is the political
fact of most significance to the American at this hour.
We cannot look on the freedom of this country, in con-
nexion with its youth, without a presentiment that here shall
laws and institutions exist on some scale of proportion to
the majesty of nature. To men legislating for the vast
area betwixt the two oceans, betwixt the snows and the
tropics, somewhat of the gravity and grandeur of nature


492
(April,
The Young American.
will infuse itself into the code. A heterogenous popula-
tion crowding on all ships from all corners of the world to the
great gates of North America, namely, Boston, New York,
and New Orleans, and thence proceeding inward to the prai-
rie and the mountains, and quickly contributing their pri-
vate thought to the public opinion, their toll to the treasury,
and their vote to the election, it cannot be doubted that
the legislation of this country should become more catholic
and cosmopolitan than that of any other. It seems so
easy for America to inspire and express the most expansive
and humane spirit; new-born, free, healthful, strong, the
land of the laborer, of the democrat, of the philanthropist,
of the believer, of the saint, she should speak for the
human race. America is the country of the Future. From
Washington, its capital city, proverbially the city of
magnificent distances, through all its cities, states, and
territories, it is a country of beginnings, of projects, of vast
designs, and expectations. It has no past: all has an
onward and prospective look. And herein is it fitted to
receive more readily every generous feature which the wis-
dom or the fortune of man has yet to impress.
Gentlemen, there is a sublime and friendly Destiny by
which the human race is guided, the race never dying,
the individual never spared, - to results affecting masses
and ages. Men are narrow and selfish, but the Genius, or
Destiny, is not narrow, but beneficent. It is not discovered
in their calculated and voluntary activity, but in what
befalls, with or without their design. Only what is inevita-
ble interests us, and it turns out that love and good are
inevitable, and in the course of things. That Genius has
infused itself into nature. It indicates itself by a small
excess of good, a small balance in brute facts always
favorable to the side of reason. All the facts in any part
of nature shall be tabulated, and the results shall indicate
the same security and benefit; so slight as to be hardly
observable, and yet it is there. The sphere is found flat-
tened at the poles, and swelled at the equator; a form
flowing necessarily from the fluid state, yet the form, the
mathematician assures us, required to prevent the great
protuberances of the continent, or even of lesser mountains
cast up at any time by earthquakes, from continually derang-
ing the axis of the earth. The census of the population is


1844.]
493
The Young American.
found to keep an invariable equality in the sexes, with a
trifling predominance in favor of the male, as if to counter-
balance the necessarily increased exposure of male life in
war, navigation, and other accidents. Remark the unceasing
effort throughout nature at somewhat better than the actual
creatures: amelioration in nature, which alone permits and
authorizes amelioration in mankind. The population of the
world is a conditional population; these are not the best,
but the best that could live in the existing state of soils,
of gases, animals, and morals: the best that could yet live;
there shall be a better, please God. This Genius, or Des-
tiny, is of the sternest administration, though rumors exist
of its secret tenderness. It may be styled a cruel kind-
ness, serving the whole even to the ruin of the member;
a terrible communist, reserving all profits to the community,
without dividend to individuals. Its law is, you shall have
every thing as a member, nothing to yourself. For Nature
is the noblest engineer, yet uses à grinding economy,
working up all that is wasted today into tomorrow's
creation ; - not a superfluous grain of sand, for all the
ostentation she makes of expense and public works. It is
because Nature thus saves and uses, laboring for the general,
that we poor particulars are so crushed and straitened, and
find it so hard to live. She flung us out in her plenty, but
we cannot shed a hair, or a paring of a nail, but instantly
she snatches at the shred, and appropriates it to the general
stock. Our condition is like that of the poor wolves : if
one of the flock wound himself, or so much as limp, the
rest eat him up incontinently.
That serene Power interposes an irresistible check upon
the caprices and officiousness of our wills. His charity is
not our charity. One of his agents is our will, but that
which expresses itself in our will, is stronger than our will.
We are very forward to help it, but it will not be acceler-
ated. It resists our meddling, eleemosynary contrivances.
We devise sumptuary laws and relief laws, but the princi-
ple of population is always reducing wages to the lowest
pittance on which human life can be sustained. We legis-
late against forestalling and monopoly; we would have a
common granary for the poor ; but the selfishness which
stores and hoards the corn for high prices, is the preventive
of famine ; and the law of self-preservation is surer policy


494
(April,
The Young American.
than any legislation can be. We concoct eleemosynary sys-
tems, and it turns out that our charity increases pauperism.
We inflate our paper currency, we repair commerce with
unlimited credit, and are presently visited with unlimited
bankruptcy.
It is easy to see that we of the existing generation are
conspiring with a beneficence, which, in its working for
conring generations, sacrifices the passing one, which in-
fatuates the most selfish men to act against their private
interest for the public welfare. We build railroads, we
know not for what or for whom ; but one thing is very
certain, that we who build will receive the very smallest
share of benefit therefrom. Immense benefit will accrue ;
they are essential to the country, but that will be felt not
until we are no longer countrymen. We do the like in
all matters :
“Man's heart the Almighty to the Future set
By secret and inviolable springs."
We plant trees, we build stone houses, we redeem the
waste, we make long prospective laws, we found colleges,
hospitals, but for many and remote generations. We
should be very much mortified to learn that the little
benefit we chanced in our own persons to receive was the
utmost they would yield.
The history of commerce, which of course includes
the history of the world, is the record of this beneficent
tendency. The patriarchal form of government readily
becomes despotic, as each person may see in his own
family. Fathers wish to be the fathers of the minds of
their children, as well as of their bodies, and behold with
great impatience a new character and way of thinking
presuming to show itself in their own son or daughter.
This feeling, which all their love and pride in the powers
of their children cannot subdue, becomes petulance and
tyranny when the head of the clan, the emperor of an
empire, deals with the same difference of opinion in his
subjects. Difference of opinion is the one crime which
kings never forgive. An empire is an immense egotism.
"I am the State," said the French Louis. When a
French ambassador mentioned to Paul of Russia, that a
man of consequence in St. Petersburgh was interesting


1844.)
495
The Young American.
himself in some matter, the Czar vehemently interrupted
him with these words, "There is no man of conse-
quence in this empire, but he with whom I am actually
speaking ; and so long only as I am speaking to him, is he
of any consequence." And Nicholas, the present emperor,
is reported to have said to his council, “Gentlemen, the
age is embarrassed with new opinions. Rely on me,
gentlemen, I shall oppose an iron will to the progress of
liberal opinions."
It is very easy to see that this patriarchal or family
management gets to be rather troublesome to all but the
papa; the sceptre comes to be a crowbar. And this very
unpleasant egotism, Feudalism or the power of Aris-
tocracy opposes, and finally destroys. The king is com-
pelled to call in the aid of his brothers and cousins, and
remote relations, to help him keep his overgrown house
in order; and this club of noblemen always come at last
to have a will of their own; they combine to brave the
sovereign, and call in the aid of the people. Each chief
attaches as many followers by kindness, and maintenance,
and gifts, as he can; and as long as war lasts, the nobles,
who must be soldiers, rule very well. But when peace
comes, the nobles prove very whimsical and uncomforta-
ble masters; their frolics turn out to be very insulting
and degrading to the commoner. Feudalism grew to be
a bandit and brigand.
Meantime Trade (or the merchant and manufacturer)
had begun to appear: Trade, a plant which always grows
wherever there is peace, as soon as there is peace, and as
long as there is peace. The luxury and necessity of the
noble fostered it. And as quickly as men go to foreign
parts, in ships or caravans, a new order of things springs
up; new ideas awake in their minds. New command
takes place, new servants and new masters. Their in-
formation, their wealth, their correspondence, have made
them quite other men than left their native shore. They
are nobles now, and by another patent than the king's.
Feudalism had been good, had broken the power of the
kings, and had some very good traits of its own ; but it
had grown mischievous, it was time for it to die, and, as
they say of dying people, all its faults came out. Trade
was the strong man that broke it down, and raised a


496
(April,
The Young American.
new and unknown power in its place. It is a new agent
in the world, and one of great function ; it is a very in-
tellectual force. This displaces physical strength, and
instals computation, combination, information, science, in
its room. It calls out all force of a certain kind that
slumbered in the former dynasties. It is now in the
midst of its career. Feudalism is not ended yet. Our
governments still partake largely of that element. Trade
goes to make the governments insignificant, and to bring
every kind of faculty of every individual that can in any
manner serve any person, on sale. Instead of a huge
Army and Navy, and Executive Departments, it tends to
convert Government into a bureau of intelligence, an
Intelligence-Office, where every man may find what he
wishes to buy, and expose what he has to sell, not only
produce and manufactures, but art, skill, and intellectual
and moral values. This is the good and this the evil of
trade, that it goes to put everything into market, talent,
beauty, virtue, and man himself. .
. By this means, however, it has done its work. It has
its faults, and will come to an end, as the others do. We
rail at Trade, and the philosopher and lover of man have
much harm to say of it; but the historian of the world
will see that Trade was the principle of Liberty; that
Trade planted America and destroyed Feudalism ; that it
makes peace and keeps peace, and it will abolish slavery.
We complain of the grievous oppression of the poor, and
of its building up a new aristocracy on the ruins of the
aristocracy it destroyed. But there is this immense dif-
ference, that the aristocracy of trade has no permanence,
is not entailed, was the result of toil and talent, the result
of merit of some kind, and is continually falling, like the
waves of the sea, before new claims of the same sort.
Trade is an instrument in the hands of that friendly
Power which works for us in our own despite. We de-
sign it thus and thus ; but it turns out otherwise and far
better. This beneficent tendency, omnipotent without
violence, exists and works. Every observation of his-
tory inspires a confidence that we shall not go far wrong;
that things mend. That is it. That is the moral of all
we learn, that it warrants Hope, Hope, the prolific mother
of reforms. Our part is plainly not to throw ourselves


1844.]
497
The Young American.
across the track, not to block improvement, and sit till we
are stone, but to watch the uprise of successive morn-
ings, and to conspire with the new works of new days.
Government has been a fossil ; it should be a plant. I
conceive that the office of statute law should be to ex-
press, and not to impede the mind of mankind. New
thoughts, new things. Trade was one instrument, but
Trade is also but for a time, and must give way to some-
what broader and better, whose signs are already dawn-
ing in the sky.
3. I pass in the third place to speak of the signs of that
which is the sequel of trade.
It is in consequence of the revolution in the state of
society wrought by trade, that Government in our times
is beginning to wear so clumsy and cumbrous an appear-
ance. We have already seen our way to shorter methods.
The time is full of good signs. Some of them shall
ripen to fruit. All this beneficent socialism is a friendly
omen, and the swelling cry of voices for the education of
the people, indicates that Government has other offices
than those of banker and executioner. Witness the new
movements in the civilized world, the Communism of
France, Germany, and Switzerland; the Trades' Unions ;
the English League against the Corn Laws; and the
whole Industrial Statistics, so called. In Paris, the
blouse, the badge of the operative, has begun to make its
appearance in the saloons. Witness too the spectacle of
three Communities which have within a very short time
sprung up within this Commonwealth, beside several
others undertaken by citizens of Massachusetts within
the territory of other States. These proceeded from a
variety of motives, from an impatience of many usages
in common life, from a wish for greater freedom than the
manners and opinions of society permitted, but in great
part from a feeling that the true offices of the State, the
State had let fall to the ground ; that in the scramble of
parties for the public purse, the main duties of govern-
ment were omitted, the duty to instruct the ignorant,
to supply the poor with work and with good guidance.
These communists preferred the agricultural life as the
most favorable condition for human culture; but they
thought that the farm, as we manage it, did not satisfy
VOL. IV. — NO. IV.
63


498
(April,
The Young American.
the right ambition of man. The farmer, after sacri-
ficing pleasure, taste, freedom, thought, love, to his
work, turns out often a bankrupt, like the merchant.
This result might well seem astounding. All this
drudgery, from cockcrowing to starlight, for all these
years, to end in mortgages and the auctioneer's flag, and
removing from bad to worse. It is time to have the
thing looked into, and with a sifting criticism ascertained
who is the fool. It seemed a great deal worse because
the farmer is living in the same town with men who pre-
tend to know exactly what he wants. On one side, is
agricultural chemistry, coolly exposing the nonsense of
our spendthrift agriculture and ruinous expense of ma-
nures, and offering, by means of a teaspoonful of artificial
guano, to turn a sandbank into corn; and, on the other,
the farmer, not only eager for the information, but with
bad crops and in debt and bankruptcy, for want of it.
Here are Etzlers and countless mechanical projectors,
who, with the Fourierists, undoubtingly affirin that the
smallest union would make every man rich; – and, on
the other side, is this multitude of poor men and women
seeking work, and who cannot find enough to pay their
board. The science is confident, and surely the poverty
is real. If any means could be found to bring these two
together!
This was one design of the projectors of the Associa-
tions which are now making their first feeble experiments.
They were founded in love, and in labor. They propos-
ed, as you know, that all men should take a part in the
manual toil, and proposed to amend the condition of men
by substituting harmonious, for hostile industry. It was
a noble thought of Fourier, which gives a favorable idea
of his systein, to distinguish in his Phalanx a class as the
Sacred Band, by whom whatever duties were disagree-
able, and likely to be omitted, were to be assumed.
At least, an economical success seemed certain for the
'enterprise, and that agricultural association must, sooner
or later, fix the price of bread, and drive single farmers
into association, in self-defence; as the great commercial
and manufacturing companies had already done. The
Community is only the continuation of the same move-
ment which made the joint-stock companies for manufac-


1844.]
499
The Young American...
tures, mining, insurance, banking, and so forth. It has
turned out cheaper to make calico by companies; and it
is proposed to plant corn, and to bake bread by companies,
and knowing men affirın it will be tried until it is done.
Undoubtedly, abundant mistakes will be made by these
first adventurers, which will draw ridicule on their
schemes. I think, for example, that they exaggerate the
importance of a favorite project of theirs, that of paying
talent and labor at one rate, paying all sorts of service at
one rate, say ten cents the hour. They have paid it so; ,
but not an instant would a dime remain a dime. In one
hand it became an eagle as it fell, and in another hand a
copper cent. For, obviously, the whole value of the
dime is in knowing what to do with it. One man buys
with it a land-title of an Indian, and makes his posterity
princes; or buys corn enough to feed the world ; or pen,
ink, and paper, or a painter's brush, by which he can
communicate himself to the human race as if he were
fire ; and the other buys plums and gooseberries. Money
is of no value: it cannot spend itself. All depends on
the skill of the spender.
Whether, too, the objection almost universally felt by
such women in the community as were mothers, to an
associate life, to a common table, and a common nursery,
&c., setting a higher value on the private family with
poverty, than on an association with wealth, will not
prove insuperable, remains to be determined.
But the Communities aimed at a much greater success
in securing to all their members an equal, and very
thorough education. And the great aims of the move-
ment will not be relinquished, even if these attempts fail,
but will be prosecuted by like-minded men in all society, .
until they succeed.
This is the value of the Communities; not what they
have done, but the revolution which they indicate as on
the way. Yes, Government must educate the poor man.
Look across the country from any hill-side around us,
and the landscape seems to crave Government. The
actual differences of men must be acknowledged, and met
with love and wisdom. These rising grounds which
command the champaign below, seem to ask for lords,
true lords, land-lords, who understand the land and its


500
[April,
The Young American.
uses, and the applicabilities of men, and whose govern-
ment would be what it should, namely, mediation be-
tween want and supply. How gladly would each citizen
pay a commission for the support and continuation of such
good guidance. Goethe said, 'no man should be rich
but those who understand it :' and certainly the poor are
prone to think that very few of the rich understand how
to use their advantage to any good purpose; they have
not originality, nor even grace in their expenditure. But
if this is true of wealth, it is much more true of power;
none should be a governor who has not a talent for
governing. Now many people have a native skill for
carving out business for many hands; a genius for the
disposition of affairs; and are never happier than when
difficult practical questions which embarrass other men,
are to be solved: all lies in light before them : they are
in their element. Could any means be contrived to ap-
point only these! There really seems a progress towards
such a state of things, in which this work shall be done
by these natural workmen: and this, not certainly through
any increased discretion shown by the citizens at elec-
tions, but by the gradual contempt into which official
government falls, and the increasing disposition of private
adventurers to assume its fallen functions. Thus the
Post Office is likely to go into disuse before the private
transportation shop of Harnden and his competitors. The
currency threatens to fall entirely into private hands.
Justice is continually administered more and more by
private reference, and not by litigation. We have feudal
governments in a commercial age. It would be but an
easy extension of our commercial system, to pay a private
emperor a fee for services, as we pay an architect, or engi-
neer, or a lawyer for advice. If any man has a talent for
righting wrong, for administering difficult affairs, for
counselling poor farmers how to turn their estates to good
husbandry, for combining a hundred private enterprises
to a general benefit, let him in the county-town, or in
Court-street, put up his sign-board, Mr. Smith, Gover-
nor, Mr. Johnson, Working king.
How can our young men complain of the poverty of
things in New England, and not feel that poverty as a
demand on their charity to make New England rich ?


1844.]
501
The Young American.
Where is he who seeing a thousand men useless and un-
happy, and making the whole region look forlorn by their
inaction, and conscious hiniself of possessing the faculty
they want, does not hear his call to go and be their king ?
We must have kings, and we must have nobles. Na-
ture is always providing such in every society, — only let
us have the real instead of the titular. Let us have our
leading and our inspiration from the best. The actual
differences in personal power are not to be disputed. In
every society some men are born to rule, and some to
advise. Let the powers be well directed, directed by
love, and they would everywhere be greeted with joy and
honor. The chief is the chief all the world over, only
not his cap and his plume. It is only their dislike of the
pretender, which makes men sometimes unjust to the
true and finished man. If society were transparent, the
noble would everywhere be gladly received and accredit-
ed, and would not be asked for his day's work, but would
be felt as benefit, inasmuch as he was noble. That
were his duty and stint, — to keep himself pure and
purifying, the leaven of his nation. I think I see place
and duties for a nobleman in every society ; but it is not
to drink wine and ride in a fine coach, but to guide and
adorn life for the multitude by forethought, by elegant
studies, by perseverance, self-devotion, and the remem-
brance of the humble old friend, by making his life
secretly beautiful.
I call upon you, young men, to obey your heart, and be
the nobility of this land. In every age of the world,
there has been a leading nation, one of a more gener-
ous sentiment, whose eminent citizens were willing to
stand for the interests of general justice and humanity, at
the risk of being called, by the men of the moment,
chimerical and fantastic. Which should be that nation
but these States? Which should lead that movement, if
not New England ? Who should lead the leaders, but
the Young American ? The people, and the world, is
now suffering from the want of religion and honor in its
public mind. In America, out of doors all seems a mar-
ket; in doors, an air-tight stove of conventionalism.
Every body who comes into our houses savors of these
precious habits; the men of the market, the women of


--
--
---
-
-
502
The Young American.
[April,
---
the custom. I find no expression in our state papers or
legislative debate, in our lyceums or churches, specially
in our newspapers, of a high national feeling, no lofty
counsels that rightfully stir the blood. I speak of those
organs which can be presumed to speak a popular sense.
They recommend only conventional virtues, whatever
will earn and preserve property; always the capitalist;
the college, the church, the hospital, the theatre, the hotel,
the road, the ship, of the capitalist, - whatever goes to
secure, adorn, enlarge these, is good ; what jeopardizes any
of these, is damnable. The opposition papers, so-
called, are on the same side. They attack the great
capitalist, but with the aim to make a capitalist of the
poor man. The opposition is between the ins and the
outs; between those who have money, and those who
wish to have money. But who announces to us in jour-
nal, or in pulpit, or in the street,
“ Man alone
Can perform the impossible."
I take pleasure in adding the succeeding lines from the
ode of the German poet: -
“He distinguishes,
Chooses, and judges,
He can impart to the
Moment duration.
Noble be man,
Helpful and good!
Since that alone
Distinguishes him
From all the beings
Which we know.
Hail to the unknown
Higher powers
Whom we divine !
His pattern teach us
Faith in them!”
I shall not need to go into an enumeration of our na-
tional defects and vices which require this Order of
Censors in the state. I might not set down our most
proclaimed offences as the worst. It is not often the
worst trait that occasions the loudest outcry. Men com-


1844.)
503
The Young American.
plain of their suffering, and not of the crime. I fear little
from the bad effect of Repudiation ; I do not fear that it
will spread. Stealing is a suicidal business; you cannot
repudiate but once. But the bold face and tardy repent-
ance permitted to this local mischief, reveal a public mind
so preoccupied with the love of gain, that the common
sentiment of indignation at fraud does not act with its
natural force. The more need of a withdrawal from the
crowd, and a resort to the fountain of right, by the brave.
The timidity of our public opinion, is our disease, or,
shall I say, the publicness of opinion, the absence of pri-
vate opinion. Good-nature is plentiful, but we want
justice, with heart of steel, to fight down the proud.
The private mind has the access to the totality of good-
ness and truth, that it may be a balance to a corrupt
society; and to stand for the private verdict against popu.
lar clamor, is the office of the noble. If a humane
measure is propounded in behalf of the slave, or of the
Irishman, or the Catholic, or for the succor of the poor,
that sentiment, that project, will have the homage of the
hero. That is his nobility, his oath of knighthood, to
succor the helpless and oppressed ; always to throw him-
self on the side of weakness, of youth, of hope, on the
liberal, on the expansive side, never on the defensive, the
conserving, the timorous, the lock and bolt system. More
than our good will we may not be able to give. We have
our own affairs, our own genius, which chains us to our
proper work. We cannot give our life to the cause of
the debtor, of the slave, or the pauper, as another is
doing, but one thing we are bound to, not to blaspheme
the sentiment and the work of that man, not to throw
stumbling blocks in the way of the abolitionist, the phi-
lanthropist, as the organs of influence and opinion are
swift to do. It is for us to confide in the beueficent Su-
preme Power, and not to rely on our money, and on the
state because it is the guard of money. At this moment,
the terror of old people and of vicious people, is lest the
Union of these States be destroyed. As if the Union
had any other real basis than the good pleasure of a ma-
jority of the citizens to be united. But the wise and
just man will always feel that he stands on his own feet;
that he imparts strength to the state, not receives security


504
[April,
The Young American.
from it; and that if all went down, he and such as he
would quite easily combine in a new and better consti-
tution. Every great and memorable community has con-
sisted of formidable individuals, who, like the Roman or
the Spartan, lent his own spirit to the state and so made
it great. Yet only by the supernatural is a man strong:
only by confiding in the Divinity which stirs in us.
Nothing is so weak as an egotist. Nothing is mightier
than we, when we are vehicles of a truth before which
the state and the individual are alike ephemeral.
Gentlemen, the development of our American internal
resources, the extension to the utmost of the commercial
system, and the appearance of new moral causes which
are to modify the state, are giving an aspect of greatness
to the Future, which the imagination fears to open. One
thing is plain for all men of common sense and common
conscience, that here, here in America, is the home of
man. After all the deductions which are to be made for
our pitiful and most unworthy politics, which stake every
gravest national question on the silly die, whether James
or whether Jonathan shall sit in the chair and hold the
purse, after all the deduction is made for our frivolities
and insanities, there still remains an organic simplicity
and liberty, which, when it loses its balance redresses it-
self presently, which offers opportunity to the human
mind not known in any other region.
It is true, the public mind wants self-respect. We
are full of vanity, of which the most signal proof is our
sensitiveness to foreign and especially English censure.
One cause of this is our immense reading, and that read-
ing chiefly confined to the productions of the English
press. But a more misplaced sensibility than this tender-
ness to fame on the subject of our country and civil
institutions, I cannot recall. Could we not defend
and apologize for the sun and rain. Here are we, men
of English blood, planted now for five, six, or seven
generations on this immense tract in the temperate zone,
and so planted at such a conjuncture of time and events,
that we have left behind us whatever old and odious es-
tablishments the mind of men had outgrown. The
unsupportable burdens under which Europe staggers, and
almost every month mutters 'A Revolution ! a Revolu-
One calisees to foreign hash the most siste


1844.]
505
The Young American.
tion !' we have escaped from as by one bound. No
thanks to us; but in the blessed course of events it did
happen that this country was not open to the Puritans
until they had felt the burden of the feudal system, and
until the commercial era in modern Europe had dawned,
so that without knowing what they did, they left the
whole curse behind, and put the storms of the Atlantic
between them and this antiquity. And the ſelling of the
forest, and the settling in so far of the area of this
continent, was accomplished under the free spirit of trad-
ing communities with a complete success. Not by our
right hand, or foresight, or skill, was it done, but by the
simple acceptance of the plainest road ever shown men
to walk in. It was the human race, under Divine lead-
ing, going forth to receive and inhabit their patrimony.
And now, if any Englishman, or Frenchman, or Spaniard,
or Russian, or German, can find any food for merriment
in the spectacle, make him welcome to shake his sides.
There never was a people that could better afford to be
the subject of a little fun, than we. An honest man may,
perhaps, wonder how, with so much to call forth con-
gratulation, our lively visiters should be so merry and
critical. Perhaps they have great need of a little
holiday and diversion from their domestic cares, like
other house-keepers who have a heavy time of it at
home, and need all the refreshment they can get from
kicking up their feet a litile now that they have got away
on a frolic.
It is also true, that, to imaginative persons in this
country, there is somewhat bare and bald in our short
history, and unsettled wilderness. They ask, who would
live in a new country, that can live in an old ? Europe
is to our boys and girls, what novels and romances
are ; and it is not strange they should burn to see the
picturesque extremes of an antiquated country. But
it is one thing to visit the pyramids, and another to
wish to live there. Would they like tithes to the clergy,
and sevenths to the government, and horse-guards, and
licensed press, and grief when a child is born, and threat-
ening, starved weavers, and a pauperism now constituting
one-thirteenth of the population ? Instead of the open
ſuture expanding here before the eye of every boy to
VOL. IV. — NO. IV.
.64


506
(April,
The Young American.
vastness, would they like the closing in of the future to
a narrow slit of sky, and that fast contracting to be no
future? One thing, for instance, the beauties of aristoc-
racy, we commend to the study of the travelling Ameri-
can. The English, the most conservative people this
side of India, are not sensible of the restraint, but an
American would seriously resent it. The aristocracy, in-
corporated by law and education, degrades life for the un-
privileged classes. It is a questionable compensation to the
embittered feeling of a proud commoner, the reflection that
the worthless lord who, by the magic of title, paralyzes his
arm, and plucks from him half the graces and rights of a
man, is himself also an aspirant excluded with the same
ruthlessness from higher circles, since there is no end to
the wheels within wheels of this spiral heaven. Some-
thing may be pardoned to the spirit of loyalty when it
becomes fantastic ; and something to the imagination,
for the baldest life is symbolic. Philip II. of Spain
rated his ambassador for neglecting business of great
importance in Italy, whilst he debated some point of
honor with the French ambassador; “You have left
a business of importance for a ceremony." The am-
bassador replied, "How? for a ceremony? your maj-
esty's self is but a ceremony." In the East, where
the religious sentiment comes in to the support of
the aristocracy, and in the Romish church also, there
is a grain of sweetness in the tyranny; but in England,
the fact seems to me intolerable, what is commonly
affirmed, that such is the transcendent honor accorded to
wealth and birth, that no man of letters, be his eminence
what it may, is received into the best society, except as a
lion and a show. It seems to me, that with the lights
which are now gleaming in the eyes of all men, residence
in that country becomes degradation to any man not em-
ployed to revolutionize it. The English have many
virtues, many advantages, and the proudest history of
the world; but they need all, and more than all the
resources of the past to indemnify a heroic gentleman in
that country for the mortifications prepared for him by
the system of society, and which seem to impose the
alternative to resist or to avoid it. That there are
mitigations and practical alleviations to this rigor, is
your nam
the
themes in


1844.)
507
Herald of Freedom.
not an excuse for the rule. Commanding worth,
and personal power must sit crowned in all companies,
nor will extraordinary persons be slighted or affronted in
any company of civilized men. But the system is an in-
vasion of the sentiment of justice and the native rights
of men, which, however decorated, must lessen the value
of English citizenship. It is for Englishmen to consider,
not for us : we only say, let us live in America, too
thankful for our want of feudal institutions. Our houses
and towns are like mosses and lichens, so slight and new;
but youth is a fault of which we shall daily mend. And
really at last all lands are alike. Ours, too, is as old as
the Flood, and wants no ornament or privilege which
nature could bestow. Here stars, here woods, here hills,
here animals, here men abound, and the vast tendencies
concur of a new order. If only the men are well em-
ployed in conspiring with the designs of the Spirit who
led us hither, and is leading us still, we shall quickly
enough advance out of all hearing of other's censures,
out of all regrets of our own, into a new and more excel-
lent social state than history has recorded.
HERALD OF FREEDOM.*
We have occasionally, for several years, met with
a number of this spirited journal, edited, as abolitionists
need not be informed, by Nathaniel P. Rogers, once a
counsellor at law in Plymouth, still further up the Merri-
mack, but now, in his riper years, come down the hills thus
far, to be the Herald of Freedom to those parts. We have
been refreshed not a little by the cheap cordial of his edi.
torials, flowing like his own mountain-torrents, now clear
and sparkling, now foaming and gritty, and always spiced
with the essence of the fir and the Norway pine; but never
dark nor muddy, nor threatening with smothered murmurs,
* Herald of Freedom; published weekly by the New Hampshire Anti-Slavery
Society : Concord, N. H. Vol. X. No. 1.


508
(April,
Herald of Freedom.
like the rivers of the plain. The effect of one of his
effusions reminds us of what the hydropathists say about
the electricity in fresh spring-water, compared with that
which has stood over night to suit weak nerves. We
do not know of another notable and public instance of such
pure, youthful, and hearty indignation at all wrong. The
church itself must love it, if it have any heart, though he
is said to have dealt rudely with its sanctity. His clean
attachment to the right, however, sanctions the severest
rebuke we have read.
We have neither room, nor inclination, to criticise this
paper, or its cause, at length, but would speak of it in
the free and uncalculating spirit of its author. Mr. Rogers
seems to us to occupy an honorable and manly position in
these days, and in this country, making the press a living
and breathing organ to reach the hearts of men, and not
merely “fine paper, and good type,” with its civil pilot
sitting aft, and magnanimously waiting for the news to
arrive, - the vehicle of the earliest news, but the latest
intelligence, — recording the indubitable and last results,
the marriages and deaths, alone. The present editor is
wide awake, and standing on the beak of his ship; not as a
scientific explorer under government, but a yankee sealer,
rather, who makes those unexplored continents his harbors
in which to refit for more adventurous cruises. He is a
fund of news and freshness in himself, — has the gift of
speech, and the knack of writing, and if anything impor-
tant takes place in the Granite State, we may be sure that
we shall hear of it in good season. No other paper that
we know keeps pace so well with one forward wave of the
restless public thought and sentiment of New England, and
asserts so faithfully and ingenuously the largest liberty in all
things. There is, beside, more unpledged poetry in his prose,
than in the verses of many an accepted rhymer ; and we
are occasionally advertised by a mellow hunter's note from
his trumpet, that, unlike most reformers, his feet are still
where they should be, on the turf, and that he looks out
from a serener natural life into the turbid arena of politics.
Nor is slavery always a sombre theme with him, but invest-
ed with the colors of his wit and fancy, and an evil to
be abolished by other means than sorrow and bitterness of
complaint. He will fight this fight with what cheer may


1844.)
Herald of Freedom.
509
be. But to speak of his composition. It is a genuine
yankee style, without fiction, — real guessing and calculat-
ing to some purpose, and reminds us occasionally, as
does all free, brave, and original writing, of its great
master in these days, Thomas Carlyle. It has a life
above grammar, and a meaning which need not be parsed
to be understood. But like those same mountain-torrents,
there is rather too much slope to his channel, and the
rainbow sprays and evaporations go double-quick-time to
heaven, while the body of his water falls headlong to the
plain. We would have more pause and deliberation,
occasionally, if only to bring his tide to a head, — more fre-
quent expansions of the stream, still, bottomless mountain
tarns, perchance inland seas, and at length the deep ocean
itself.
We cannot do better than enrich our pages with a few
extracts from such articles as we have at hand. Who can
help sympathizing with his righteous impatience, when in-
vited to hold his peace or endeavor to convince the under-
standings of the people by well ordered arguments ?
-“ Bandy compliments and arguments with the somnambulist, on 'table
rock,' when all the waters of Lake Superior are thundering in the great
horse-shoe, and deafening the very war of the elements! Would you
not shout to him with a clap of thunder through a speaking-trumpet,
if you could command it, if possible to reach his senses in his appal.
ing extremity! Did Jonah arguſy with the city of Nineveh, yet
forty days,' cried the vagabond prophet, "and Nineveh shall be over-
thrown! That was his salutation. And did the • Property and Stand-
ing' turn up their noses at him, and set the mob on to him? Did the
clergy discountenance him, and call him extravagant, misguided, a
divider of churches, a disturber of parishes ? What would have be-
come of that city, if they had done this? Did they approve his
principles' but dislike his measures' and his 'spirit'!!
“Slavery must be cried down, denounced down, ridiculed down, and
pro-slavery with it, or rather before it. Slavery will go when pro-
slavery starts. The sheep will follow when the bell-wether leads.
Down, then, with the bloody system, out of the land with it, and out of
the world with it, — into the Red Sea with it. Men sha 'nt be enslaved
in this country any longer. Women and children sha'nt be flogged
here any longer. If you undertake to hinder us, the worst is your
own." — " But this is all fanaticism. Wait and see."
He thus raises the anti-slavery war-whoop' in New
Hampshire, when an important convention is to be held,
sending the summons
_"To none but the whole-hearted, fully-committed, cross-the-Rubicon
spirits.” — “From rich old Cheshire,' from Rockingham, with her


510
(April,
Herald of Freedom.
horizon setting down away to the salt sea.” — “From where the sun
sets behind Kearsage, even to where he rises gloriously over Moses
Norris's own town of Pittsfield ; and from Amoskeag to Ragged Moun-
tains, — Coos — Upper Coos, home of the everlasting hills, send out
your bold advocates of human rights, - wherever they lay, scattered
by lonely lake, or Indian stream, or "Grant,' or Location,' — from
the trout-haunted brooks of the Amoriscoggin, and where the adven-
turous streamlet takes up its mountain march for the St. Lawrence.
“Scattered and insulated men, wherever the light of philanthropy and
liberty has beamed in upon your solitary spirits, come down to us like
your streams and clouds;- and our own Grafton, all about among
your dear hills, and your mountain-flanked valleys – whether you home
along the swift Ammonosuck, the cold Pemigewassett, or the ox-bowed
Connecticut."-
- “We are slow, brethren, dishonorably slow, in a cause like ours.
Our feet should be as "hinds' feet.' 'Liberty lies bleeding.' The
leaden-colored wing of slavery obscures the land with its baleful
shadow. Let us come together, and inquire at the hand of the Lord,
what is to be done."
And again ; on occasion of the New England Conven-
tion, in the Second-Advent Tabernacle, in Boston, he
desires to try one more blast, as it were, on Fabyan's
White Mountain horn.'
“Ho, then, people of the Bay State, - men, women, and children;
children, women, and men, scattered friends of the friendless, whereso-
ever ye inhabit, — if habitations ye have, as such friends have not
always, along the sea-beat border of Old Essex and the Puritan
Landing, and up beyond sight of the sea-cloud, among the inland hills,
where the sun rises and sets upon the dry land, in that vale of the
Connecticut, too fair for human content, and too fertile for virtuous in-
dustry, — where deepens that haughtiest of earth's streams, on its sea-
ward way, proud with the pride of old Massachusetts. Are there any
friends of the friendless negro haunting such a valley as this? In
God's name, I fear there are none, or few, for the very scene looks
apathy and oblivion to the genius of humanity. I blow you the sum-
mons though. Come, if any of you are there.
“ And gallant little Rhode Island ; transcendent abolitionists of the
tiny commonwealth. I need not call you. You are called the year
round, and, instead of sleeping in your tents, stand harnessed, and with
trumpets in your hands, - every one!
“ Connecticut! yonder, the home of the Burleighs, the Monroes, and
the Hudsons, and the native land of old George Benson! are you
ready? "All ready!'.
“ Maine here, off east, looking from my mountain post, like an ever-
glade. Where is your Sam. Fessenden, who stood storm-proof 'gainst
New Organization in '38 ? Has he too much name as a jurist and
an orator, to be found at a New England Convention in 43 ? God
forbid. Come one and all of you from Down East,' to Boston, on the
30th, and let the sails of your coasters whiten all the sea-road. Alas!
there are scarce enough of you to man a fishing boat. Come up,
mighty in your fewness.


1844.)
511
Herald of Freedom.
“ And green Vermont, what has become of your anti-slavery host, -
thick as your mountain maples, - mastering your very politics, — not
by balance of power, but by sturdy majority. Where are you now?
Will you be at the Advent Meeting on the 30th of May? Has anti-
slavery waxed too trying for your off-hand, how-are-ye, humanity ?
Have you heard the voice of Freedom of late? Next week will
answer.
“ Poor, cold, winter-ridden New Hampshire, — winter-killed, I like to
have said, she will be there, bare-foot, and bare-legged, making
tracks like her old bloody-footed volunteers at Trenton. She will be
there, if she can work her passage. I guess her minstrelsy* will, - for
birds can go independently of car, or tardy stage-coach. "
- "Let them come as Macaulay says they did to the siege of
Rome, when they did not leave old men and women enough to begin
the harvests. Oh how few we should be, if every soul of us were
there. How few, and yet it is the entire muster-roll of Freedom for all
the land. We should have to beat up for recruits to complete the
army of Gideon, or the platoon at the Spartan straits. The foe are like
the grasshoppers for multitude, as for moral power. Thick grass mows
the easier, as the Goth said of the enervated millions of falling Rome.
They can't stand too thick, nor too tall for the anti-slavery scythe.
Only be there at the mowing."
In noticing the doings of another Convention, he thus
congratulates himself on the liberty of speech which anti-
slavery concedes to all, - even to the Folsoms and Lam-
sons: -
“ Denied a chance to speak elsewhere, because they are not mad
after the fashion, they all flock to the anti-slavery boards as a kind of
Asylum. And so the poor old enterprise has to father all the oddity of
the times. It is a glory to anti-slavery, that she can allow the poor
friends the right of speech. I hope she will always keep herself able
to afford it. Let the constables wait on the State House, and Jail, and
the Meeting Houses. Let the door-keeper at the Anti-Slavery Hall be
that tall, celestial-faced Woman, that carries the flag on the National
Standard, and says, “ without concealment,' as well as without com-
promise. Let every body in, who has sanity enough to see the beauty
of brotherly kindness, and let them say their fantasies, and magnani-
mously bear with thein, seeing unkind pro-slavery drives them in upon
us. We shall have saner and sensibler meetings then, than all others in
the land put together.”
More recently, speaking of the use which some of the
clergy have made of Webster's plea in the Girard case,
as a seasonable aid to the church, he proceeds:
“ Webster is a great man, and the clergy run under his wing. They
had better employ him as counsel against the Comeouters. He would'nt
trust the defence on the Girard will plea though, if they did. He
would not risk his fame on it, as a religious argument. He would go
* The Hutchinsons.


512
(April,
Herald of Freedom.
and consult William Bassett, of Lynn, on the principles of the Come-
outers,' to learn their strength; and he would get him a testament,
and go into it as he does into the Constitution, and after a year's study
of it he would hardly come off in the argument as he did from the
conflict with Carolina Hayne. On looking into the case, he would
advise the clergy not to go to trial, - to settle, — or, if they could 'nt,
to leave it out to a reference of orthodox deacons.””
We will quote from the same sheet his indignant and
touching satire on the funeral of those public officers who
were killed by the explosion on board the Princeton, to-
gether with the President's slave; an accident which re-
minds us how closely slavery is linked with the government of
this nation. The President coming to preside over a nation
of free men, and the man who stands next to him a slave !
" I saw account," says he, “ of the burial of those slaughtered
politicians. The hearses passed along, of Upshur, Gilmer, Kennon,
Maxcy, and Gardner, - but the dead slave, who fell in company with
them on the deck of the Princeton, was not there. He was held their
equal by the impartial gun-burst, but not allowed by the bereaved na-
tion a share in the funeral."...." Out upon their funeral, and upon
the paltry procession that went in its train. Why did ’nt they enquire
for the body of the other man who fell on that deck! And why has 'nt
the nation inquired, and its press? I saw account of the scene in a
barbarian print, called the Boston Atlas, and it was dumb on the
absence of that body, as if no such man had fallen. Why, I demand
in the name of human nature, was that sixth man of the game brought
down by that great shot, left unburried and above ground, — for there
is no account yet that his body has been allowed the right of sepul.
ture.” .... " They did'nt bury hin even as a slave. They did ’nt assign hin
a jim-crow place in that solemn procession, that he might follow to
wait upon his enslavers in the land of spirits. They have gone there
without slaves or waiters." .... “ The poor black man,- they cnslaved
and imbruted him all his life, and now he is dead, they have, for aught
appears, left him to decay and waste above ground. Let the civilized
world take note of the circuinstance."
We deem such timely, pure, and unpremeditated expres-
sions of a public sentiment, such publicity of genuine in-
dignation and humanity, as abound every where in this
journal, the most generous gifts a man can make, and should
be glad to see the scraps from which we have quoted, and
the others which we have not seen, collected into a volume.
It might, perchance, penetrate into some quarters which
the unpopular cause of freedom has not reached.
Long may we hear the voice of this Herald.
H. D. T.


1844.)
513
Fragments of Pindar.
FRAGMENTS OF PINDAR.
[The following fragments of Pindar, found in ancient authors, should
have been inserted at the end of the translations contained in our last
number.]
THE FREEDOM OF GREECE.
First at Artemisium
The children of the Athenians laid the shining
Foundation of freedom,
And at Salamis and Mycale,
And in Platæa, making it firm
As adamant.
FROM STRABO.
Apollo.
Having risen he went
Over land and sea,
And stood over the vast summits of mountains,
And threaded the recesses, penetrating to the foundations of
the groves.
FROM PLUTARCH.
Heaven being willing, even on an osier thou mayest sail.
Thus rhymed by the old translator of Plutarch;
" Were it the will of heaven, an osier bough
Were vessel safe enough the seas to plough.”
FROM SEXTUS EMPIRICUS.
Honors and crowns of the tempest-footed
Horses delight one;
Others life in golden chambers;
And some even are pleased traversing securely
The swelling of the sea in a swift ship.
VOL. IV. No. IV.
65


514
[April,
Fragments of Pindar.
FROM STOBÆUS.
This I will say to thee, -
The lot of fair and pleasant things
It behoves to show in public to all the people;
But if any adverse calamity sent from heaven befall
Men, this it becomes to bury in darkness.
FROM CLEMENS OF ALEXANDRIA.
To Heaven it is possible from black
Night to make arise unspotted light,
And with cloud-blackening darkness to obscure
The pure splendor of day.
FROM THE SAME.
First, indeed, the Fates brought the wise-counselling
Uranian Themis, with golden horses,
By the fountains of Ocean to the awful ascent
Of Olympus, along the shining way,
To be the first spouse of Zeus the Deliverer.
And she bore the golden-filletted, fair-wristed
Hours, preservers of good things.
Equally tremble before God
And a man dear to God.
FROM ALIUS ARISTIDES.
Pindar used such exaggeration (in praise of poetry] as to say
that even the gods themselves, when at his marriage Zeus
asked if they wanted any thing, “asked him to make certain
gods for them who should celebrate these great works and all
his creation with speech and song."
FROM STOBÆUS.
Pindar said of the physiologists, that they "plucked the un-
ripe fruit of wisdom."
FROM THE SAME.
Pindar said that “ hopes were the dreams of those awake."
T.


1844.]
515
The Tragic.
THE TRAGIC.
He has seen but half the universe who never has been
shown the House of Pain. As the salt sea covers more
than two thirds of the surface of the globe, so sorrow
encroaches in man on felicity. The conversation of men
is a mixture of regrets and apprehensions. I do not know
but the prevalent hue of things to the eye of leisure is
melancholy. In the dark hours, our existence seems to be
a defensive war, a struggle against the encroaching All,
which threatens surely to engulf us soon, and is impatient
of our short reprieve. How slender the possession that yet
remains to us; how faint the animation ! how the spirit
seems already to contract its domain, retiring within nar-
rower walls by the loss of memory, leaving its planted
fields to erasure and annihilation. Already our own
thoughts and words have an alien sound. There is a si-
multaneous diminution of memory and hope. Projects
that once we laughed and leaped to execute, find us now
sleepy and preparing to lie down in the snow. And in the
serene hours we have no courage to spare. We cannot
afford to let go any advantages. The riches of body or of
mind which we do not need today, are the reserved fund
against the calamity that may arrive tomorrow. It is
usually agreed that some nations have a more sombre tem-
perament, and one would say that history gave no record
of any society in which despondency came so readily to
heart as we see it and feel it in ours. Melancholy cleaves
to the English mind in both hemispheres as closely as to
the strings of an Æolian harp. Men and women at thirty
years, and even earlier, have lost all spring and vivacity, and
if they fail in their first enterprizes, they throw up the
game. But whether we, and those who are next to us, are
more or less vulnerable, no theory of life can have any
right, which leaves out of account the values of vice, pain,
disease, poverty, insecurity, disunion, fear, and death.
What are the conspicuous tragic elements in human na-
ture?
The bitterest tragic element in life to be derived from


516
[April,
The Tragic.
an intellectual source is the belief in a brute Fate or
Destiny; the belief that the order of nature and events is
controlled by a law not adapted to man, nor man to
that, but which holds on its way to the end, serving him if
his wishes chance to lie in the same course, - crushing
him if his wishes lie contrary to it, — and heedless whether
it serves or crushes him. This is the terrible idea that lies
at the foundation of the old Greek tragedy, and makes the
Edipus and Antigone and Orestes objects of such hope-
less commiseration. They must perish, and there is no
over-god to stop or to mollify this hideous enginery that
grinds and thunders, and takes them up into its terrific
system. The same idea makes the paralyzing terror with
which the East Indian mythology haunts the imagination.
The same thought is the predestination of the Turk.
And universally in uneducated and unreflecting persons, on
whom too the religious sentiment exerts little force, we
discover traits of the same superstition ; 'if you baulk
water, you will be drowned the next time:' if you count
ten stars, you will fall down dead:' 'if you spill the salt ;'
if your fork sticks upright in the floor;' 'if you say the
Lord's prayer backwards; ' - and so on, a several penalty,
nowise grounded in the nature of the thing, but on an
arbitrary will. But this terror of contravening an unascer-
tained and unascertainable will, cannot coexist with reflec-
tion : it disappears with civilization, and can no more be
reproduced than the fear of ghosts after childhood. It
is discriminated from the doctrine of Philosophical Ne-
cessity herein : that the last is an Optimism, and there-
fore the suffering individual finds his good consulted in the
good of all, of which he is a part. But in Destiny, it is
not the good of the whole or the best will that is enacted,
but only one particular will. Destiny properly is not a
will at all, but an immense whim; and this is the only
ground of terror and depair in the rational mind, and of
tragedy in literature. Hence the antique tragedy, which
was founded on this faith, can never be reproduced.
But after the reason and faith have introduced a better
public and private tradition, the tragic element is somewhat
circumscribed. There must always remain, however, the
hindrance of our private satisfaction by the laws of the
world. The law which establishes nature and the human


1844.]
517
The Tragic.
race, continually thwarts the will of ignorant individuals,
and this in the particulars of disease, want, insecurity, and
disunion.
But the essence of tragedy does not seem to me to lie
in any list of particular evils. After we have enumerated
famine, fever, inaptitude, mutilation, rack, madness, and
loss of friends, we have not yet included the proper tragic
element, which is Terror, and which does not respect defi-
nite evils but indefinite; an ominous spirit which haunts
the afternoon and the night, idleness and solitude. A low
haggard sprite sits by our side “casting the fashion of
uncertain evils," - a sinister presentiment, a power of the
imagination to dislocate things orderly and cheerful, and
show them in startling disarray. Hark! what sounds on
the night wind, the cry of Murder in that friendly house :
see these marks of stamping feet, of hidden riot. The
whisper overheard, the detected glance, the glare of malig-
nity, ungrounded fears, suspicions, half-knowledge, and
mistakes darken the brow and chill the heart of men.
And accordingly it is natures not clear, not of quick and
steady perceptions, but imperfect characters from which
somewhat is hidden that all others see, who suffer most
from these causes. In those persons who move the pro-
foundest pity, tragedy seems to consist in temperament,
not in events. There are people who have an appetite for
grief, pleasure is not strong enough and they crave pain,
mithridatic stomachs which must be fed on poisoned bread,
natures so doomed that no prosperity can soothe their
ragged and dishevelled desolation. They mis-hear and
mis-behold, they suspect and dread. They handle every
nettle and ivy in the hedge, and tread on every snake in
the meadow.
“Come bad chance,
And we add to it our strength,
And we teach it art and length,
Itself o'er us to advance.”
Frankly then it is necessary to say that all sorrow dwells
in a low region. It is superficial; for the most part fan-
tastic, or in the appearance and not in things. Tragedy is
in the eye of the observer, and not in the heart of the
sufferer. It looks like an insupportable load under which


518
(April,
The Tragic.
earth moans aloud, but analyze it; it is not I, it is not you,
it is always another person who is tormented. If a man
says, lo I suffer, – it is apparent that he suffers not, for
grief is dumb. It is so distributed as not to destroy.
That which would rend you, falls on tougher textures. That
which seems intolerable reproach or bereavement, does not
take from the accused or bereaved man or woman appetite
or sleep. Some men are above grief, and some below it.
Few are capable of love. In phlegmatic natures calamity
is unaffecting, in shallow natures it is rhetorical. Trag-
edy must be somewhat which I can respect. A querulous
habit is not tragedy. A panic such as frequently in ancient
or savage nations put a troop or an army to flight without
an enemy; a fear of ghosts; a terror of freezing to death
that seizes a man in a winter midnight on the moors; a
fright at uncertain sounds heard by a family at night in
the cellar or on the stairs; are terrors that make the knees
knock and the teeth chatter, but are no tragedy, any more
than sea-sickness, which may also destroy life. It is full of
illusion. As it comes, it has its support. The most exposed
classes, soldiers, sailors, paupers, are nowise destitute of
animal spirits. The spirit is true to itself, and finds its
own support in any condition, learns to live in what is
called calamity, as easily as in what is called felicity, as the
frailest glass-bell will support a weight of a thousand
pounds of water at the bottom of a river or sea, if filled
with the same.
A man should not commit his tranquillity to things, but
should keep as much as possible the reins in his own hands,
rarely giving way to extreme emotion of joy or grief. It
is observed that the earliest works of the art of sculpture
are countenances of sublime tranquillity. The Egyptian
sphinxes, which sit today as they sat when the Greek came and
saw them and departed, and when the Roman came and saw
them and departed, and as they will still sit when the Turk,
the Frenchman, and the Englishman, who visit them now,
shall have passed by, “ with their stony eyes fixed on the
East and on the Nile," have countenances expressive
of complacency and repose, an expression of health, de-
serving their longevity, and verifying the primeval sentence
of history on the permanency of that people ; « Their
strength is to sit still." To this architectural stability of


1844.)
519
The Tragic.
the human form, the Greek genius added an ideal beauty,
without disturbing the seals of serenity; permitting no
violence of mirth, or wrath, or suffering. This was true to
human nature. For, in life, actions are few, opinions even
few, prayers few ; loves, hatreds, or any emissions of the
soul. All that life demands of us through the greater part
of the day, is an equilibrium, a readiness, open eyes and
ears, and free hands. Society asks this, and truth, and
love, and the genius of our life. There is a fire in some
men which demands an outlet in some rude action ; they
betray their impatience of quiet by an irregular Catalinarian
gait; by irregular, faltering, disturbed speech, too emphatic
for the occasion. They treat trifles with a tragic air. This
is not beautiful. Could they not lay a rod or two of stone
wall, and work off this superabundant irritability. When
two strangers meet in the highway, what each demands of
the other is, that the aspect should show a firm mind, ready
for any event of good or ill, prepared alike to give death
or to give life, as the emergency of the next moment may
require. We must walk as guests in nature, — not impas-
sioned, but cool and disengaged. A man should try time,
and his face should wear the expression of a just judge,
who has nowise made up his opinion, who fears nothing,
and even hopes nothing, but who puts nature and for-
tune on their merits: he will hear the case out, and
then decide. For all melancholy, as all passion, belongs
to the exterior life. Whilst a man is not grounded in the
divine life by his proper roots, he clings by some tendrils
of affection to society, - mayhap to what is best and
greatest in it, and in calm times it will not appear that he
is adrift and not moored; but let any shock take place in
society, any revolution of custom, of law, of opinion, and
at once his type of permanence is shaken. The disorder of
his neighbors appears to him universal disorder; chaos is
come again. But in truth he was already a driving wreck,
before the wind arose which only revealed to him his vaga-
bond state. If a man is centred, men and events appear
to him a fair image or reflection of that which he knoweth
beforehand in himself. If any perversity or profligacy
break out in society, he will join with others to avert the
mischief, but it will not arouse resentment or fear, because
he discerns its impassable limits. He sees already in the
ebullition of sin, the simultaneous redress.
Divine liten to Soin calm but let out law


520
[April,
The Tragic.
Particular reliefs, also, fit themselves to human calami-
ties, for the world will be in equilibrium, and hates all man-
ner of exaggeration. Time, the consoler, time, the rich
carrier of all changes, dries the freshest tears by obtrud-
ing new figures, new costumes, new roads, on our eye, new
voices on our ear. As the west wind lifts up again the
heads of the wheat which were bent down and lodged in
the storm, and combs out the matted and dishevelled grass
as it lay in night-locks on the ground, so we let in time as
a drying wind into the seed-field of thoughts which are
dank and wet, and low-bent. Time restores to them tem-
per and elasticity. How fast we forget the blow that
threatened to cripple us. Nature will not sit still ; the
faculties will do somewhat; new hopes spring, new affec-
tions twine, and the broken is whole again.
Time consoles, but Temperament resists the impression
of pain. Nature proportions her defence to the assault.
Our human being is wonderfully plastic, if it cannot win
this satisfaction here, it makes itself amends by running
out there and winning that. It is like a stream of water,
which, if dammed up on one bank, over-runs the other, and
flows equally at its own convenience over sand, or mud, or
marble. Most suffering is only apparent. We fancy it is
torture: the patient bas his own compensations. A tender
American girl doubts of Divine Providence whilst she reads
the horrors of the middle passage:" and they are bad
enough at the mildest; but to such as she these crucifixions
do not come: they come to the obtuse and barbarous, to
whom they are not horrid, but only a little worse than the
old sufferings. They exchange a cannibal war for the
stench of the hold. They have gratifications which would
be none to the civilized girl. The market-man never
damned the lady because she had not paid her bill, but the
stout Irish woman has to take that once a month. She,
however, never feels weakness in her back because of the
slave-trade. This self-adapting strength is especially seen
in disease. “ It is my duty," says Sir Charles Bell, “ to
visit certain wards of the hospital where there is no patient
admitted but with that complaint which most fills the im-
agination with the idea of insupportable pain and certain
death. Yet these wards are not the least remarkable for
the composure and cheerfulness of their inmates. The in-


1844.] Saturday and Sunday among the Creoles.
521
dividual who suffers, has a mysterious counterbalance to
that condition, which, to us who look upon her, appears to
be attended with no alleviating circumstance.” Analogous
supplies are made to those individuals whose character leads
them to vast exertions of body and mind. Napoleon said
to one of his friends at St. Helena, "Nature seems to
have calculated that I should have great reverses to endure,
for she has given me a temperament like a block of marble.
Thunder cannot move it; the shaft merely glides along.
The great events of my life have slipped over me without
making any impression on my moral or physical nature."
The intellect is a consoler, which delights in detaching,
or putting an interval between a man and his fortune, and
so converts the sufferer into a spectator, and his pain into
poetry. It yields the joys of conversation, of letters, and of
science. Hence also the torments of life become tuneful
tragedy, solemn and soft with music, and garnished with
rich dark pictures. But higher still than the activities of art,
the intellect in its purity, and the moral sense in its purity,
are not distinguished from each other, and both ravish us
into a region whereinto these passionate clouds of sorrow
cannot rise.
SATURDAY AND SUNDAY AMONG THE CREOLES.
A LETTER FROM THE WEST INDIES.
· I visited one of the enclosures where some of the springs
are, drawn thither by the vegetation which I could see from
the ship it contained. On entering the gate, I passed up
a rude walk bordered with guinea-grass, plantains, sugar-
cane, young cocoa-trees, &c., until I came to the springs,
around which the ground was clear of vegetation, except
short grass. This space was occupied by negro washer-
women, who pay tenpence a day for the use of the water.
They stood ranged down a long bench, on which their
tubs were placed, entirely naked above the waist, around
which their clothes were tied, but as unconscious as cows,
looking up with perfect unconcern as I passed along. I now
discovered where the buttons of my shirts and pantaloons
were gone, for, after soaping their clothes, I observed that
VOL. IV. NO. iv.
66


522
Saturday and Sunday among the Creoles. [April,
these women ground them without remorse between
two stones, one flat, the other convex. Several little
black children, from four to eight years old, (I presume
belonging to the women,) were also running about the en-
closure, as naked as frogs. I beckoned one of them to me,
and first called on him for his letters, which he ran off his
tongue very rapidly; next for the Lord's prayer, which he
discharged with equal fluency; and lastly, I asked him
for a Sunday-school hymn, which he, without the least
hesitation, and with perfect gravity, struck up, and though
I could not well understand what he sung, I could discover
by here and there a word, that it was a genuine hymn. I
now gave him a twopence-halfpenny, and some mangoes,
and he immediately ran towards his companions, - his
little abdominal and other protuberances shaking, as he
trotted off, like a calves-foot jelly. This trifling incident
amused me greatly. Jaques did not laugh louder when he
met the fool in the forest.
Other schools than Sunday schools I had little time to
visit. I went, however, to see one of some celebrity, kept
by Mr. Symmes and his son, containing between four and
five hundred pupils, white and colored. Mr. Symmes
confirmed the remark which is often made, that colored
children were fully equal to white, in point of intellect.
Those under his care gained more than the others, their
proportion of prizes at exhibitions, &c. The colored
children, on his benches, appeared to be as bright and as
clear-spirited as any set of children I ever saw. They were
ready and clear in their answers, and I thought contrasted
rather favorably with the white children intermingled with
them. In the infant school department, he called out a
little mulatto fellow, to act as fugler in their exercises,
which part he performed with much tact and adroitness.
One of these exercises was repeating in concert (the little
mulatto asking the questions) the story of the good Sa-
maritan; they all bowing as they pronounced the name of
Christ. Few among these colored children had any of that
heavy and stupid expression of countenance, so often to
be seen in the adult negro. But I believe experience
goes to prove that the negro intellect, in most cases, comes
to its limits at an early age, and seldom fullls its early
promise. Negro infants seldom have dull, lumpish fea-
tures; much less often, I think, than those of the whites.


1844.) Saturday and Sunday among the Creoles. 423
But at the age of, say, from ten to fourteen years, the
bright tints, morally and physically speaking, seem to fade
out, and symmetry of feature to vanish.
Mr. Symmes was from top to toe a school-master, and
his son Robert, a man grown, a right school-master's usher.
He was perfectly broken in, seemed to feel a profound rev.
erence for his father, and to live only in the humble hope
that he should be enabled to do his will. He was sallow,
pale-eyed, and wrinkled, with a face which I think had
never known how to smile. “Roby," his father called in
an habitually sharp tone of voice, from the opposite end of
the room, and Roby, without saying a word, dropped the
pencil with which he was assisting a boy in his sum,
crossed the room with a noiseless, shambling trot, came
close up to his father's desk, and then, in an humble tone,
and with a deferential bend, answered, “Sir." o Go
bring me such a book, Roby.” “ Yes, sir," and then,
with another bend, he broke again into his shambling trot,
hurrying to obey. And this scene occurred two or three
times during the hour I was in the room. He was the
most slave-like being I saw in the island. He should be
emancipated by a special act. The twenty million act has
not reached his case. It has not restored to life and action
his poor shrivelled soul, nor has it even assured him, as it
is beginning to assure some of the negroes, that he has a
soul which is his own. There was, however, no tyranny
in the case, at least none which was considered such by
either party. His father seemed to have much regard for
him, showed me, with much pride, his ornamental writing,
(Roby was the writing master,) and spoke, when he was out
of hearing, with some feeling, of his son's declining health.
Roby had been born a school-master's usher, He had early
been shaped to his father's purposes, and it had no doubt
long since been amicably settled between them, that one was
to be all-sufficient, and the other nobody. Affection often
proves a hardy plant. These two reminded me of ivy
taking root on a dry stone wall.
At the diocesan church, where the most wealthy and
influential individuals of both races appeared to attend,
there were very few negroes, and but little if any mingling
of the whites and colored, through the body of the church.
The latter chiefly occupied pews near the main entrance,
and appeared to be quite as well dressed and fashionable


524
Saturday and Sunday among the Creoles. [April,
as the whites. I attended there on the Sunday morning
after my arrival, and not knowing the hour of service,
went late. When I discovered this, on approaching the
door, I lingered for a moment or so, doubting to enter.
But directly the beadle, arrayed in robes of black bomba-
zine, with a stick in his hand, came forward, invited me in,
and immediately led me up near the pulpit, and shewed
me into what is called the magistrate's pew, in which cer-
tain municipal officers may, and some of them do sit,
and where are also placed respectable strangers. A fine-
looking young man was reading the service,—and he read
it beautifully too, especially the commandments,-giving the
seventh precisely in accordance with Dr. Johnson's instruc-
tions to Garrick. Thou shalt not bear false witness against
thy neighbor.' This fine reading led me to hope for a fine
sermon. But in this I was disappointed. It was a mere
jingle of religious common-places and metaphors, so ar-
ranged as to form antitheses, and the young man had an
antithetical voice,—the high and low tones both good. Sir
William Temple says, (in substance,) in his “ Observations
on the United Provinces," that national habits and pecul-
iarities, however some may suppose them a mere matter of
whim, will generally be found, on examination, to have
their origin in some necessity of circumstance or situa-
tion. And he refers the Pharisaical cleanliness of the
Hollanders, of which he gives many amusing instances in
his own experience, to the dampness of their climate.
They must scrub or grow mouldy. Perhaps the same
remark may apply to persons. Whenever you see any one
with a slouch in his gait, or who wears out one shoe faster
than the other, you will nearly always find, on a close scru
tiny, that one shoulder is a little higher, one leg a little
longer, or one side, in some way, a little more developed
than the other. Now this young man's antithetical voice
had, for aught I know, given him antithetical style. How-
ever this may be, his sermon consisted in nothing but a
continual pairing off together of opposite common-places.
“ This moment, man is so and so; the next, he is so and
so. Today, &c., &c.,” high key ; “tomorrow, &c.. &c.,"
low key. In short it was
"all see-saw, between that and this,
And he himself, one vile antithesis."


1844.)
525
The Moorish Prince.
THE MOORISH PRINCE.
FROM THE GERMAN OF FERDINAND FREILIGRATH.
By C. T. BROOKS.
His lengthening host through the palm-vale wound;
The purple shawl on his locks he bound;
He hung on his shoulders the lion-skin,
Martially sounded the cymbals din.
Like a sea of termites, that black, wild swarm
Swept, billowing onward : he flung his dark arm,
Encircled with gold, round his loved one's neck :
“For the feast of victory, maiden, deck!
“Lo! glittering pearls I've brought thee there,
To twine with thy dark and glossy hair,
And the corals, all snake-like, in Persia's green sea,
The dripping divers have fished for me.
“ See plumes of the ostrich, thy beauty to grace !
Let them nod, snowy white, o'er thy dusky face ;
Deck the tent, make ready the feast for me,
Fill the garlanded goblet of victory ! ”
And forth from his snowy and shimmering tent
The princely Moor in his armor went.
So looks the dark moon, when, eclipsed, through the gate
Of the silver-edged clouds she rides forth in her state.
A welcoming shout his proud host flings;
And "welcome!” the stamping steed's hoof rings;
For him rolls faithful the negro's blood,
And Niger's old, mysterious flood.


526
(April,
The Moorish Prince.
“Now lead us to victory, lead us to fight!"
They battled from morning far into the night;
The hollow tooth of the elephant blew
A blast that pierced each foeman through.
How scatter the lions! The serpents fly
From the rattling tambour; the flags on high,
All hung with skulls, proclaim the dead,
And the yellow desert is dyed in red.
So rings in the palm-vale the desperate fight;
But she is preparing the feast for the night;
She fills the goblets with rich palm-wines,
And the shafts of the tent-poles with flowers she twines.
With pearls, that Persia's green flood bare,
She winds her dark and curly hair;
Feathers are floating her brow to deck,
And gay shells gleam on her arms and neck.
She sits by the door of her lover's tent,
She lists the far war-horn till morning is spent;
The noon-day burns, the sun stings hot,
The garlands wither, she heeds it not.
The sun goes down in the fading skies,
The night-dew trickles, the glow-worm flies,
And the crocodile looks from the tepid pool
As if he, too, would enjoy the cool.
The lion, he stirs him and roars for prey,
The elephant-tusks through the jungles make way,
Home to her lair the giraffe goes,
And flower-leaves shut, and eyelids close.
Her anxious heart beats fast and high ::
When a bleeding, fugitive Moor, draws nigh:-
“Farewell to all hope now! The battle is lost!
Thy lover is captured, - he's borne to the coast, -


1844.)
527
The Moorish Prince.
“ They sell him to white men, — he's carried —” O spare!
The maiden falls headlong; she clutches her hair ;
All quivering she crushes the pearls in her hand,
She hides her hot cheek in the burning-hot sand.
PART II.
'T is fair-day; how sweeps the tempestuous throng
To circus and tilt ground, with shout and with song !
There's a blast of trumpets, the cymbal rings,
The deep drum rumbles, Bajazzo springs.
Come on! come on! - how swells the roar!
They fly as on wings, o'er the hard, flat foor;
| The British sorrel, the Turk’s black steed
From plumed beauty seek honor's meed.
And there, by the tilting-ground's curtained door,
Stands, silent and thoughtful, a curly-haired Moor.
The Turkish drum he beats full loud ;
On the drum is hanging a lion-skin proud.
He sees not the knights and their graceful swing,
He sees not the steeds and their daring spring;
The Moor's dry eye, with its stiff, wild stare,
Sees nought but the shaggy lion-skin there.
He thinks of the far, far-distant Niger,
And how he once chased there the lion and tiger;
And how he once brandished his sword in the fight,
And came not back to his couch at night.
And he thinks of her, who, in other hours,
Decked her hair with his pearls and plucked him her flowers;
His eye grew moist, — with a scornful stroke
He smote the drum-head, it rattled and broke.


528
(April,
The Visit.
THE VISIT.
Askest, 'How long thou shalt stay?'
Devastator of the day!
Know, each substance and relation
In all Nature's operation
Hath its unit, bound, and metre,
And every new compound
Is some product and repeater,
Some frugal product of the early found.
But the unit of the visit,
The encounter of the wise,
Say, what other metre is it
Than the meeting of the eyes ?
Nature poureth into nature
Through the channels of that feature.
Riding on the ray of sight
More fleet than waves or whirlwinds go,
Or for service or delight,
Hearts to hearts their meaning show,
Sum their long experience,
And import intelligence.
Single look has drained the breast,
Single moment years confessed.
The duration of a glance
Is the term of convenance,
And, though thy rede be church or state,
Frugal multiples of that.
Speeding Saturn cannot halt,
Linger, thou shalt rue the fault :
If Love his moment overstay,
Hatred's swift repulsions play.


1844.]
529
Ethnical Scriptures.
ETHNICAL SCRIPTURES.
CHALDÆAN ORACLES.
We owe to that eminent benefactor of scholars and
philosophers, the late Thomas Taylor, who, we hope, will
not long want a biographer, the collection of the “Oracles
of Zoroaster and the Theurgists," from which we extract
all the sentences ascribed to Zoroaster, and a part of the
remainder. We prefix a portion of Mr. Taylor's preface:-
“ These remains of Chaldæan theology are not only
venerable for their antiquity, but inestimably valuable for
the unequalled sublimity of the doctrines they contain.
They will doubtless, too, be held in the highest estimation
by every liberal mind, when it is considered that some of
them are the sources whence the sublime conceptions of
Plato flowed, and that others are perfectly conformable to
his most abstruse dogmas.
“I add, for the sake of those readers that are unac-
quainted with the scientific theology of the ancients, that
as the highest principle of things is a nature truly ineffable
and unknown, it is impossible that this visible world could
have been produced by him without mediums; and this
not through any impotency, but, on the contrary, through
transcendency of power. For if he had produced all
things without the agency of intermediate beings, all things
must have been, like himself, ineffable and unknown. It is
necessary, therefore, that there should be certain mighty
powers between the supreme principle of things and us:
for we, in reality, are nothing more than the dregs of the
universe. These mighty powers, from their surpassing
similitude to the first god, were very properly called by
the ancients, gods; and were considered by them as per-
petually subsisting in the most admirable and profound
union with each other, and the first cause; yet so as amidst
this union to preserve their own energy distinct from that
of the highest god. For it would be absurd in the extreme,
to allow that man has a peculiar energy of his own, and to
deny that this is the case with the most exalted beings.
Hence, as Proclus beautifully observes, the gods may be
VOL. IV.— NO. IV.
67


530
(April,
Ethnical Scriptures.
compared to trees rooted in the earth : for as these, by their
roots, are united with the earth, and become earthly in an
eminent degree, without being earth itself ; so the gods,
by their summits, are profoundly united to the first cause,
and by this means are transcendently similar to, without
being the first cause.
“ Lines, too, emanating from the centre of a circle, afford
us a conspicuous image of the manner in which these
mighty powers proceed from, and subsist in, the ineffable
principle of things. For here, the lines are evidently
things different from the centre, to which, at the same
time, by their summits, they are exquisitely allied. And
these summits, which are indescribably absorbed in the
centre, are yet no parts (i. e. powers) of it: for the centre
has a subsistence prior to them, as being their cause."
ORACLES OF ZOROASTER.
There is also a portion for the image (a) in the place (6)
every way splendid.
Nor should you leave the dregs of matter (c) in the
precipice (d).
Nor should you expel the soul from the body, lest in de-
parting it retain something (e).
(f) Direct not your attention to the immense measures
of the earth; for the plant of truth is not in the earth.
Nor measure the dimensions of the sun, by means of col-
lected rules; for it revolves by the eternal will of the
Father, and not fory our sake. Dismiss the sounding course
of the moon; for it perpetually runs through the exertions
of necessity. The advancing procession of the stars was
not generated for your sake. The wide-spread aërial wing
of birds, and the sections of victims and viscera are never
true : but all these are mere puerile sports, the foundations
(a) That is, the irrational soul, which is the image of the rational.
ib) That is, the region above the moon.
(c) i, e. The human body.
id) i. e. This terrestrial region.
(e) i. e. Lest it retain something of the more passive life.
if) This oracle is conformable to what Plato says in his Republic, that
a philosopher must astronomize above the heavens: that is to say, he
must speculate the celestial orbs, as nothing more than images of forms
in the intelligible world.


1844.]
531
Ethnical Scriptures.
of mercantile deception. Fly from these, if you intend
to open the sacred paradise of piety, where virtue, wisdom,
and equity, are collected together.
Explore the river (a) of the soul, whence, or in what
order, having become a servant to body, you may again rise
to that order from which you flowed, uniting operation to
sacred reason (b).
Verge not downward, a precipice lies under the earth,
which draws through a descent of seven steps (c), and
under which lies the throne of dire necessity.
You should never change barbarous names (d).
In a certain respect, the world possesses intellectual, in-
flexible sustainers (e).
Energize about the Hecatic sphere (f).
If you invoke me (g), all things will appear to you to be
a lion. For neither will the convex bulk of heaven then
be visible; the stars will not shine ; the light of the moon
will be concealed; the earth will not stand firm ; but all
things will be seen in thunder.
On all sides, with an unfigured (h) soul, extend the reins
of fire.
O man, thou subtle production (i), that art of a bold
nature !
In the left hand inward parts of Hecate (j) is the foun.
(a) i. e. The producing cause of the soul.
(6) By sacred reason, is meant the summit, or principal power of the
soul, which Zoroaster, in another place, calls the flower of intellect.
(c) i. e. The orbs of the seven planets.
(d) For in every nation there are names of divine origin, and which
possess an ineffable power in mystic operations,
(e) i. e. The fontal fathers, or intellectual gods. By inflexible, under-
stand stable power.
(f) This sphere was of gold. In the middle of it there was a sapphire;
and the sphere itself was turned round by means of a thong, made of
the hide of an ox. It was likewise every where inscribed with charac-
ters; and the Chaldæans turning it round, made certain invocations.
But it is called Hecatine, because dedicated to Hecate.
(g) By me is meant the fountain or cause of the celestial constellation
called the lion.
(h) By unfigured, understand most simple and pure; and by the reins
of fire, che unimpeded energy of the theurgic life of such a soul.
(i) Man is a subtle production, considered as the work of the secret art
of divinity. But he is of a bold nature, as exploring things more excel-
lent than himself.
(j) Hecate, according to the Chaldæans, is the centre of the intellec-
tual gods : and they say, that in her right hand parts she contains the
fountain of souls; and in her left, the fountain of the virtues.


532
[April,
Ethnical Scriptures.
tain of virtue, which wholly abides within, and does not
emit its virginal nature.
When you behold a sacred fire (a) without form, shining
with a leaping splendor through the profundities of the
whole world, hear the voice of fire.
You should not invoke the self-conspicuous image of
nature (6).
Nature persuades us that there are holy dæmons, and
that the blossoms of depraved matter (c) are useful and
good.
(d) The soul of mortals compels, in a certain respect,
divinity into itself, possessing nothing mortal, and is wholly
inebriated from deity ; for it glories in the harmony (@) under
which the mortal body subsists.
The immortal depth (f) of the soul should be the leader;
but vehemently extend all your eyes (g) upwards.
You should not defile the spirit (h), nor give depth to a
superficies.
Seek Paradise (0).
(j) The wild beasts of the earth shall inhabit thy vessel.
By extending a fiery intellect (k) to the work of piety,
you will also preserve the flowing body.
From the bosom therefore of the earth, terrestrial dogs
(1) leap forth, who never exhibit a true sign to mortal man.
The Father (m) perfected all things, and delivered them
(a) This oracle relates to the vision of divine light.
b) i. e. The image, to be invoked in the mysteries, must be intelligi-
ble, and not sensible.
(C) By the blossoms of depraved matter, understand the dæmons called
Evil; but which are not so essentially, but from their office.
(d) That is, the human soul, through its immortality and purity, be-
comes replete with a more excellent life, and divine illumination; and is,
as it were, raised above itself.
(e) i. e. Unapparent and intelligible harmony.
(f) i. e. The summit or flower of its nature.
(g) i. e. All the gnostic powers of the soul.
(h) Understand by the spirit, the aerial vehicle of the soul; and by the
superficies, the ethereal and lucid vehicle.
) The Chaldaic Paradise is the choir of divine powers about the
Father of the universe; and the empyrean beauties of the demiurgic
fountains.
() By the vessel is meant the composite temperature of the soul; and
by the wild beasts of the earth, terrestrial dæmons. These, therefore,
will reside in the soul which is replete with irrational affections.
. (k) i. e. An intellect full of divine light.
(1) i. e. Material dæmons.
(m) i. e. Saturn.


1844.]
533
Ethnical Scripture.
to the second intellect (a), which the nations of men call
the first.
The furies are the bonds of men (6)
The paternal intellect disseminated symbols (c) in souls.
(d) Those souls that leave the body with violence are
the most pure.
The soul being a splendid fire, through the power of the
father remains immortal, is the mistress (@) of life, and
possesses many perfections of the bosoms of the world.
The Father did not hurl forth fear, but infused persua-
sion (f).
The Father (g) has hastily withdrawn bimself, but has
not shut up his proper fire, in his own intellectual power.
There is a certain intelligible (h) which it becomes you
to understand with the flower of intellect.
The expelling powers (i) of the soul which cause her to
respire, are of an unrestrained nature.
it becomes you to hasten to the light and the rays of the
Father, whence a soul was imparted to you, invested with
an abundance of intellect.
All things are the progeny of one fire (j).
(k) That which intellect says, it undoubtedly says by
intellection.
(a) i. e. Jupiter.
b) That is, the powers that punish guilty souls, bind them to their
material passions, and in these, as it were, suffocate them; such punish-
ment being finally the means of purification. Nor do these powers only
afflict the vicious, but even such as convert themselves to an immaterial
essence; for these, through their connection with matter, require a purifi-
cation of this kind.
(c) That is, symbols of all the divine natures.
id) This oracle praises a violent death, because the soul, in this case,
is induced to hate the body, and rejoice in a liberation from it.
(e) The soul is the mistress of life, because it extends vital illumina-
tions to the body, which is, of itself, destitute of life.
(f) That is, as divinity is not of a tyrannical nature, he draws every
thing to himself by persuasion, and not by fear.
(g) That is, Saturn, the summit of the intellectual order, is perfectly
separated from all connection with matter; but, at the same time, imparts
his divinity to inferior natures.
(h) Meaning the intelligible, which immediately subsists after the
highest God.
(i) That is, those powers of the soul which separate it from the body.
C) That is, of one divine nature.
(K) That is, the voice of intellect is an intellectual, or, in other words,
an immaterial and indivisible energy.


534
April,
Ethnical Scriptures.
(a) Ha! ha! the earth from beneath bellows at these as
far as to their children.
You should not increase your fate (b).
Nothing imperfect proceeds, according to a circular
energy, from a paternal principle (c).
But the paternal intellect will not receive the will of the
soul, till she has departed from oblivion (d); and has spoken
the word, assuming the memory of her paternal sacred im-
pression.
When you behold the terrestrial (e) dæmon approach-
ing, vociferate and sacrifice the stone MNIZURIM.
Learn the intelligible, for it subsists beyond intellect( f ).
The intelligible lynges possess intellection themselves
from the Father, so far as they energize intellectually, being
moved by ineffable counsels.
He who knows himself, knows all things in himself, as
Zoroaster first asserted, and afterwards Plato in the first
Alcibiades. — Pici Mirand. Op. tom. 1, p. 211.
Since the soul perpetually runs, in a certain space of
time it passes through all things, which circulation being
accomplished, it is compelled to run back again through
(a) The meaning of the oracle is, that even the very children of the
impious are destined to subterranean punishments; and this, with the
greatest propriety; for those who, in a former life, have perpetrated
similar crimes, become, through the wise administration of Providence,
the members of one family.
(6) Fate is the full perfection of those divine illuminations which are
received by Nature ; but Providence is the immediate energy of deity.
Hence, when we energize intellectually, we are under the dominion of
Providence; but when corporeally, under that of Fate. The oracle,
therefore, admonishes to withdraw ourselves from corporeal energy.
(c) For divinity is self-perfect; and the imperfect cannot proceed from
the perfect.
(d) That is, till she has recovered her knowledge of the divine symbols,
and sacred reasons, from which she is composed; the former of which
she receives from the divine unities, and the latter from sacred ideas.
(c) Terrestrial dæmons are full of deceit, as being remote from divine
knowledge, and replete with dark matter; he, therefore, who desires to
receive any true information from one of these, must prepare an altar,
and sacrifice the stone Mnizurim, which has the power of causing an-
other greater dæmon to appear, who, approaching invisible to the material
dæmon, will give a true answer to the proposed question; and this to the
interrogator himself.
(f) The intelligible is twofold; one kind being coördinate with intel-
lect, but the other being of a super-essential characteristic.


1844.)
535
Ethnical Scriptures.
all things, and unfold the same web of generation in the
world, according to Zoroaster; who is of opinion, that the
same causes, on a time returning, the same effects will, in a
similar manner, return.-Ficin. de Immortal. Anim. p. 123.
ORACLES BY THE THEURGISTS.
Our voluntary sorrows germinate in us as the growth of
the particular life we lead.
On beholding yourself, fear.
Believe yourself to be above body, and you are.
Those robust souls perceive truth through themselves,
and are of a more inventive nature; such a soul being
saved through its own strength.
We should fly from the multitude of men going along in
a herd.
The powers build up the body of a holy man.
Not knowing that every god is good, ye are fruitlessly
vigilant.
Fiery hope should nourish you in the angelic region.
Ascending souls sing pæan.
To the persevering mortal the blessed immortals are
swift.
All things are governed and subsist in faith, truth, and
love.
The oracle says, Divinity is never so much turned away
from man, and never so much sends him in novel paths,
as when we make an ascent to the most divine of specula-
tions or works, in a confused and disordered manner, and,
as it adds, with unhallowed lips or unbathed feet. For, of
those who are thus negligent, the progressions are imper-
fect, the impulses are vain, and the paths are blind.
The orders prior to Heaven possess mystic silence.
Every intellect apprehends deity.
The intelligible is food to that which understands.
You will not apprehend it by an intellectual energy as
when understanding some particular thing.
It is not proper to understand that intelligible with vehe-
mence, but with the extended fame of an extended intel-
lect; a flame which measures all things, except that intel-
ligible. But it is requisite to understand this. For if you
incline your mind, you will understand it, though not vehe-


536
(April,
Ethnical Scriptures.
mently. It becomes you therefore, bringing with you the
pure convertible eye of your soul, to extend the void intel-
lect to the intelligible, that you may learn its nature, because
it has a subsistence above intellect.
SAYINGS OF PYTHAGORAS AND OF THE PYTHAGOREANS.
Follow God.
All things are possible to the Gods.
Choose the most excellent life, and custom will make it
pleasant.
This is the law of God, that virtue is the only thing that
is strong.
Abstain from such things as are an impediment to proph-
ecy, or to the purity and chastity of the soul, or to the
habit of temperance or of virtue.
It is necessary to beget children, for it is necessary to
leave those that may worship the Gods after us.
Other compacts are engraved in tables and pillars, but
those with wives are inserted in children.
It is holy for a woman, after having been connected with
her husband, to perform sacred rites on the same day, but
this is never holy after she has been connected with any
other man.
It is requisite to be silent, or to say something better than
silence.
The possessions of friends are common.
The animal which is not naturally noxious to the human
race should neither be injured nor slain.
Intoxication is the meditation of insanity.
The beginning is the half of the whole.
An oath should be taken religiously, since that which is
behind is long.
Be sober, and remember to be disposed to believe, for
these are the nerves of wisdom.
All the parts of human life, in the same manner as those
of a statue, ought to be beautiful.
When the wise man opens his mouth, the beauties of
his soul present themselves to the view, like the statues in a
temple.


1844.)
537
Millennial Church.
MILLENNIAL CHURCH.*
If we had space we should quote from the “Roll and
Book," the largest part of the sixteenth chapter, to which
we especially refer the candid and curious. Each reader
will, of course, interpret the sentences after his own light.
The biblical student will probably pronounce them rank
heresies, the scientific arrant nonsense, the poetic dull the-
ology; but upon the disciples of Association we might urge
them as a development of that law of union, under which
the “Church," from which the book proceeds, has flourished
for so many years, while numerous efforts on other princi-
ples have struggled for a season and failed.
It is interesting to observe, that while Fourier in France
was speculating on the attainment of many advantages by
union, these people have, at home, actually attained them.
Fourier has the merit of beautiful words and theories; and
their importation from a foreign land is made subject for
exultation by a large and excellent portion of our public;
but the Shakers have the superior merit of excellent actions
and practices; unappreciated, perhaps, because they are
not exotic. “ Attractive Industry and Moral Harmony,"
on which Fourier dwells so promisingly, have long charac-
terized the Shakers, whose plans have always in view the
passing of each individual into his or her right position, and
of providing suitable, pleasant, and profitable employment
for every one. A pretty close parallel could be drawn
between these two parties, were this the occasion to ad-
duce it.
Friendly reviewers commonly conclude with a strong
recommendation to read the book criticised. On this oc-
casion we urge no such course ; but rather that a perusal
of the work should be delayed until the reader is in a state
to appreciate it with fairness and candor. A condition
* A Holy, Sacred, and Divine ROLL and BOOK ; from the Lord God
of Heaven, to the Inhabitants of the Earth : revealed in the United
Society at New Lebanon, county of Columbia, State of New York,
United States of America. In two parts. Part 1. Received by the
church of this communion, and published in union with the same.
Printed in the United Society, Canterbury, N. H. 1843. 8vo. pp. 222.
VOL. IV, - NO. IV. 68


538
[April,
Millennial Church.
which, looking at the book and its pretensions from exoteric
ground, demands much suavity, even from the friendly
mind.
Considerable prejudice is occasionally harbored against
the Millennial Church, on the ground of the unnatural
doctrine and practice it is said to maintain on the impor-
tant subject of marriage. In the ordinary course of the
natural feelings, the idea of a celibate or virgin life, must
present itself as so cold, cheerless, and even ungodlike a
state of existence, that the man or woman living under the
influence of natural instincts is, by the law of nature,
bound to condemn any one who whispers a doubt of the
propriety of continually abiding subject to that law. Now,
upon this point, the doctrine of the Church is made plain
in the work before us. If not for the first time avowed, it
is at least brought out in bolder relief than in their previous
publications. It is simply this; that those who live, and
design to remain, in the order of nature, shall comply with
the law of nature; while those who are called to the order
of grace shall be permitted inoffensively to comply with
its law.
“I do require, saith the Lord, (who is descended to the earth in mer-
cy, and in heavy judgment,) that all such as desire to live in nature,
propagating their own species, keep the law of nature unviolated, as I
have commanded from the beginning.
“ And all such as desire to come into the gospel of grace, must keep
the law of grace, as I did command in the first appearing of my blessed
Son, your Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, who stands as the first true
Anointed One.”-p. 30.
Here we think the discussion may be very pacifically
allowed to remain. As to the impurities perpetrated by
many in the natural order of marriage, we are not disposed
to stain our page therewith, whether they be confessed or
unconfessed by the world. But we can join in the appeal
here made to such as determine to live in the natural order,
to conform to the natural law in respect to time, state, sea-
son and sensual indulgence. The argument might indeed
be respectfully carried a little further. A disputant has no
right to urge upon another any practice in conformity with
his (the disputant's) doctrine : but he has a right to insist
that his opponent shall exemplify his own theories. When
we find a multitude of people year after year, day after


1844.]
Millennial Church.
539
day, repeating the wish with apparent sincerity that God
our Father's “kingdom may come, and his will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven;" while such fervent minds are
instructed, by the very same authority which teaches them
thus to pray, that “in heaven they are neither married nor
given in marriage, but are as the angels are,” we have a
claim upon them to help to realize their own expressed de-
sires. This they ought to do, or cease their prayers. If
they comply with the former requisition, they are Shakers:
if with the latter, they are not Christians. Each party may,
at all events, in charity, let the other proceed in peace. The
Millennial Church declares its determination to do so. It
neither attempts to proselyte the world, nor to condemn it.
But, when invited to intercourse, it has the right to urge
upon the world a faithful adherence to its own purest ac-
knowledged principles; as the world has in like manner
the right to demand a strict compliance with the higher law
it professes to obey.
One point of considerable interest is clearly if not
agreeably stated in this volume. The children of nature
are anxious to learn whether they cannot continue in the
enjoyment of sensual delights, and yet be admitted into the
heavenly kingdom. In opposition to Christ's express dic-
tate, the modern Christian endeavors to persuade himself
that he can continue to indulge in all the human gratifica-
tions in the outer world, while he is wholly and fully sub-
ject to divine influence in the inner world. Such persons
imagine, or pretend to imagine, that all natural actions,
when performed strictly according to God's natural laws,
can consist with God's law of grace ruling in the soul.
Every one who thus imagines, can easily add the supple-
mental delusion, that his (or her) natural action is quite
pure, and thus is the empire of licentiousness maintained.
But, granting the utmost purity in natural actions, this
thought is directly at variance with Christ's instructions and
life. It is not possible to “forsake all," and yet retain
some things of the lower world, as the lower nature would
fondly persuade itself. The very supposition is evidence
that the querist is not yet a re-born being. Accordingly
we find this idea met in a note at page 209, in which it
is observed that “where the dominion of Christ is estab-


540
[April, 1844.
Millennial Church.
lished in souls, and where the law of grace reigns, the law
of nature is thereby superseded.”
And here lies the root of the prejudices of which we
have spoken. Could the Millennial Church, as other
Churches pretend to do, reconcile these irreconcilable op-
posites, it would be extremely in popular favor. Had the
child of nature no intuition of a state of grace, of a state
of being in which the soul is in all things, and at all times,
preferred to the body, he would never feel any hostility to
his re-born neighbor. But both these qualifications are in
him ; the natural in positive existence; the gracious in
possibility. And it is the consciousness of this latent germ
of grace within him, and the conviction that in some
degree its birth depends upon himself, which combine to
worry, anger, and vex the soul until it either boiis over in
fiery prejudice, or turns inwardly to Heavenly Love.
HUMAN NATURE. J. Chapman, London: and J. Munroe
& Co., Boston. 1844.
We have received this modest little volume, which ap-
pears to be the expansion of some critical notes on a work
by Rev. James Martineau, entitled “Endeavors after the
Christian Life.” The author combats the popular doc-
trines of Future Reward and Punishment, from the philo-
sophical ground. His proposition is, “that the highest
good for man consists in a conscious increase and pro-
gression in Being, or assimilation to God."














R.B.R., Period. 526.1/ y.4/
1843-13
343–1 FLUGTERHANATION TO SATIN
3 2044 054 766 878
ANDOVE