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_ NATURE.
The rounded world is fair to see,
Nine times folded in mystery:
Though baffled seers cannot impart
The secret of its laboring heart,
Throb thine with Nature's throbbing breast,
And all is clear from east to west.
Spirit that lurks each form within
Beckons to spirit of its kin;
Self-kindled every atom glows,
And hints the future which it owes.
VI. NATURE.
THERE are days which occur in this climate, at
almost any season of the year, wherein the world
reaches its perfection; when the air, the heavenly
bodies and the earth, make a harmony, as if nature
would indulge her offspring; when, in these bleak
upper sides of the planet, nothing is to desire
that we have heard of the happiest latitudes, and
we bask in the shining hours of Florida and Cuba;
when everything that has life gives sign of
satisfaction, and the cattle that lie on the ground
seem to have great and tranquil thoughts. These
halcyons may be looked for with a little more
assurance in that pure October weather which we
distinguish by the name of the Indian summer. The
day, immeasurably long, sleeps over the broad hills
and warm wide fields. To have lived through all its
sunny hours, seems longevity enough. The solitary
places do not seem quite lonely. At the gates of the
forest, the surprised man of the world is forced to
leave his city estimates of great and small, wise
and foolish. The knapsack of custom falls off his
back with the first step he makes into these precincts.
Here is sanctity which shames our religions, and
reality which discredits our heroes. Here we find
Nature to be the circumstance which dwarfs every other
circumstance, and judges like a god all men that come
to her. We have crept out of our close and crowded
houses into the night and morning, and we see what
majestic beauties daily wrap us in their bosom. How
willingly we would escape the barriers which render
them comparatively impotent, escape the sophistication
and second thought, and suffer nature to intrance us.
The tempered light of the woods is like a perpetual
morning, and is stimulating and heroic. The anciently
reported spells of these places creep on us. The
stems of pines, hemlocks, and oaks almost gleam like
iron on the excited eye. The incommunicable trees
begin to persuade us to live with them, and quit our
life of solemn trifles. Here no history, or church,
or state, is interpolated on the divine sky and the
immortal year. How easily we might walk onward into
the opening landscape, absorbed by new pictures and
by thoughts fast succeeding each other, until by
degrees the recollection of home was crowded out of
the mind, all memory obliterated by the tyranny of
the present, and we were led in triumph by nature.
These enchantments are medicinal, they sober and
heal us. These are plain pleasures, kindly and native
to us. We come to our own, and make friends with matter,
which the ambitious chatter of the schools would
persuade us to despise. We never can part with it; the
mind loves its old home: as water to our thirst, so is
the rock, the ground, to our eyes and hands and feet.
It is firm water; it is cold flame; what health, what
affinity! Ever an old friend, ever like a dear friend
and brother when we chat affectedly with strangers,
comes in this honest face, and takes a grave liberty
with us, and shames us out of our nonsense. Cities give
not the human senses room enough. We go out daily and
nightly to feed the eyes on the horizon, and require
so much scope, just as we need water for our bath.
There are all degrees of natural influence, from these
quarantine powers of nature, up to her dearest and
gravest ministrations to the imagination and the soul.
There is the bucket of cold water from the spring, the
wood-fire to which the chilled traveller rushes for
safety,--and there is the sublime moral of autumn and
of noon. We nestle in nature, and draw our living as
parasites from her roots and grains, and we receive
glances from the heavenly bodies, which call us to
solitude and foretell the remotest future. The blue
zenith is the point in which romance and reality meet.
I think if we should be rapt away into all that we
dream of heaven, and should converse with Gabriel and
Uriel, the upper sky would be all that would remain of
our furniture.
It seems as if the day was not wholly profane in
which we have given heed to some natural object.
The fall of snowflakes in a still air, preserving
to each crystal its perfect form; the blowing of
sleet over a wide sheet of water, and over plains;
the waving ryefield; the mimic waving of acres of
houstonia, whose innumerable florets whiten and
ripple before the eye; the reflections of trees
and flowers in glassy lakes; the musical steaming
odorous south wind, which converts all trees to
windharps; the crackling and spurting of hemlock
in the flames, or of pine logs, which yield glory
to the walls and faces in the sittingroom,--these
are the music and pictures of the most ancient
religion. My house stands in low land, with limited
outlook, and on the skirt of the village. But I go
with my friend to the shore of our little river,
and with one stroke of the paddle I leave the village
politics and personalities, yes, and the world of
villages and personalities behind, and pass into a
delicate realm of sunset and moonlight, too bright
almost for spotted man to enter without novitiate
and probation. We penetrate bodily this incredible
beauty; we dip our hands in this painted element;
our eyes are bathed in these lights and forms. A
holiday, a villeggiatura, a royal revel, the proudest,
most heart-rejoicing festival that valor and beauty,
power and taste, ever decked and enjoyed, establishes
itself on the instant. These sunset clouds, these
delicately emerging stars, with their private and
ineffable glances, signify it and proffer it. I am
taught the poorness of our invention, the ugliness of
towns and palaces. Art and luxury have early learned
that they must work as enhancement and sequel to this
original beauty. I am overinstructed for my return.
Henceforth I shall be hard to please. I cannot go back
to toys. I am grown expensive and sophisticated. I can
no longer live without elegance, but a countryman shall
be my master of revels. He who knows the most; he who
knows what sweets and virtues are in the ground, the
waters, the plants, the heavens, and how to come at
these enchantments,--is the rich and royal man. Only
as far as the masters of the world have called in
nature to their aid, can they reach the height of
magnificence. This is the meaning of their hanging-
gardens, villas, garden-houses, islands, parks and
preserves, to back their faulty personality with these
strong accessories. I do not wonder that the landed
interest should be invincible in the State with these
dangerous auxiliaries. These bribe and invite; not
kings, not palaces, not men, not women, but these
tender and poetic stars, eloquent of secret promises.
We heard what the rich man said, we knew of his villa,
his grove, his wine and his company, but the provocation
and point of the invitation came out of these beguiling
stars. In their soft glances I see what men strove to
realize in some Versailles, or Paphos, or Ctesiphon.
Indeed, it is the magical lights of the horizon and the
blue sky for the background which save all our works of
art, which were otherwise bawbles. When the rich tax the
poor with servility and obsequiousness, they should
consider the effect of men reputed to be the possessors
of nature, on imaginative minds. Ah! if the rich were
rich as the poor fancy riches! A boy hears a military
band play on the field at night, and he has kings and
queens and famous chivalry palpably before him. He hears
the echoes of a horn in a hill country, in the Notch
Mountains, for example, which converts the mountains
into an Aeolian harp,--and this supernatural tiralira
restores to him the Dorian mythology, Apollo, Diana,
and all divine hunters and huntresses. Can a musical
note be so lofty, so haughtily beautiful! To the poor
young poet, thus fabulous is his picture of society; he
is loyal; he respects the rich; they are rich for the
sake of his imagination; how poor his fancy would be,
if they were not rich! That they have some high-fenced
grove which they call a park; that they live in larger
and better-garnished saloons than he has visited, and
go in coaches, keeping only the society of the elegant,
to watering-places and to distant cities,--these make
the groundwork from which he has delineated estates of
romance, compared with which their actual possessions
are shanties and paddocks. The muse herself betrays
her son, and enhances the gifts of wealth and well-born
beauty by a radiation out of the air, and clouds, and
forests that skirt the road,--a certain haughty favor,
as if from patrician genii to patricians, a kind of
aristocracy in nature, a prince of the power of the air.
The moral sensibility which makes Edens and Tempes
so easily, may not be always found, but the material
landscape is never far off. We can find these
enchantments without visiting the Como Lake, or the
Madeira Islands. We exaggerate the praises of local
scenery. In every landscape the point of astonishment
is the meeting of the sky and the earth, and that is
seen from the first hillock as well as from the top
of the Alleghanies. The stars at night stoop down
over the brownest, homeliest common with all the
spiritual magnificence which they shed on the Campagna,
or on the marble deserts of Egypt. The uprolled clouds
and the colors of morning and evening will transfigure
maples and alders. The difference between landscape and
landscape is small, but there is great difference in
the beholders. There is nothing so wonderful in any
particular landscape as the necessity of being beautiful
under which every landscape lies. Nature cannot be
surprised in undress. Beauty breaks in everywhere.
But it is very easy to outrun the sympathy of
readers on this topic, which schoolmen called
natura naturata, or nature passive. One can hardly
speak directly of it without excess. It is as easy
to broach in mixed companies what is called "the
subject of religion." A susceptible person does not
like to indulge his tastes in this kind without the
apology of some trivial necessity: he goes to see a
wood-lot, or to look at the crops, or to fetch a
plant or a mineral from a remote locality, or he
carries a fowling-piece or a fishing-rod. I suppose
this shame must have a good reason. A dilettantism
in nature is barren and unworthy. The fop of fields
is no better than his brother of Broadway. Men are
naturally hunters and inquisitive of wood-craft,
and I suppose that such a gazetteer as wood-cutters
and Indians should furnish facts for, would take
place in the most sumptuous drawing-rooms of all the
"Wreaths" and "Flora's chaplets" of the bookshops;
yet ordinarily, whether we are too clumsy for so
subtle a topic, or from whatever cause, as soon as
men begin to write on nature, they fall into euphuism.
Frivolity is a most unfit tribute to Pan, who ought
to be represented in the mythology as the most
continent of gods. I would not be frivolous before
the admirable reserve and prudence of time, yet I
cannot renounce the right of returning often to this
old topic. The multitude of false churches accredits
the true religion. Literature, poetry, science are
the homage of man to this unfathomed secret, concerning
which no sane man can affect an indifference or
incuriosity. Nature is loved by what is best in us. It
is loved as the city of God, although, or rather because
there is no citizen. The sunset is unlike anything that
is underneath it: it wants men. And the beauty of nature
must always seem unreal and mocking, until the landscape
has human figures that are as good as itself. If there
were good men, there would never be this rapture in
nature. If the king is in the palace, nobody looks at
the walls. It is when he is gone, and the house is filled
with grooms and gazers, that we turn from the people to
find relief in the majestic men that are suggested by the
pictures and the architecture. The critics who complain
of the sickly separation of the beauty of nature from
the thing to be done, must consider that our hunting of
the picturesque is inseparable from our protest against
false society. Man is fallen; nature is erect, and serves
as a differential thermometer, detecting the presence or
absence of the divine sentiment in man. By fault of our
dulness and selfishness we are looking up to nature, but
when we are convalescent, nature will look up to us. We
see the foaming brook with compunction: if our own life
flowed with the right energy, we should shame the brook.
The stream of zeal sparkles with real fire, and not with
reflex rays of sun and moon. Nature may be as selfishly
studied as trade. Astronomy to the selfish becomes
astrology; psychology, mesmerism (with intent to show
where our spoons are gone); and anatomy and physiology
become phrenology and palmistry.
But taking timely warning, and leaving many things
unsaid on this topic, let us not longer omit our
homage to the Efficient Nature, natura naturans,
the quick cause before which all forms flee as the
driven snows; itself secret, its works driven
before it in flocks and multitudes, (as the ancient
represented nature by Proteus, a shepherd,) and in
undescribable variety. It publishes itself in
creatures, reaching from particles and spiculae
through transformation on transformation to the
highest symmetries, arriving at consummate results
without a shock or a leap. A little heat, that is
a little motion, is all that differences the bald,
dazzling white and deadly cold poles of the earth
from the prolific tropical climates. All changes
pass without violence, by reason of the two cardinal
conditions of boundless space and boundless time.
Geology has initiated us into the secularity of
nature, and taught us to disuse our dame-school
measures, and exchange our Mosaic and Ptolemaic
schemes for her large style. We knew nothing rightly,
for want of perspective. Now we learn what patient
periods must round themselves before the rock is
formed; then before the rock is broken, and the first
lichen race has disintegrated the thinnest external
plate into soil, and opened the door for the remote
Flora, Fauna, Ceres, and Pomona to come in. How far
off yet is the trilobite! how far the quadruped! how
inconceivably remote is man! All duly arrive, and
then race after race of men. It is a long way from
granite to the oyster; farther yet to Plato and the
preaching of the immortality of the soul. Yet all
must come, as surely as the first atom has two sides.
Motion or change and identity or rest are the first
and second secrets of nature:--Motion and Rest. The
whole code of her laws may be written on the thumbnail,
or the signet of a ring. The whirling bubble on the
surface of a brook admits us to the secret of the
mechanics of the sky. Every shell on the beach is a
key to it. A little water made to rotate in a cup
explains the formation of the simpler shells; the
addition of matter from year to year, arrives at last
at the most complex forms; and yet so poor is nature
with all her craft, that from the beginning to the end
of the universe she has but one stuff, -- but one stuff
with its two ends, to serve up all her dream-like
variety. Compound it how she will, star, sand, fire,
water, tree, man, it is still one stuff, and betrays
the same properties.
Nature is always consistent, though she feigns to
contravene her own laws. She keeps her laws, and
seems to transcend them. She arms and equips an
animal to find its place and living in the earth,
and at the same time she arms and equips another
animal to destroy it. Space exists to divide
creatures; but by clothing the sides of a bird with
a few feathers she gives him a petty omnipresence.
The direction is forever onward, but the artist
still goes back for materials and begins again with
the first elements on the most advanced stage:
otherwise all goes to ruin. If we look at her work,
we seem to catch a glance of a system in transition.
Plants are the young of the world, vessels of health
and vigor; but they grope ever upward towards
consciousness; the trees are imperfect men, and seem
to bemoan their imprisonment, rooted in the ground.
The animal is the novice and probationer of a more
advanced order. The men, though young, having tasted
the first drop from the cup of thought, are already
dissipated: the maples and ferns are still uncorrupt;
yet no doubt when they come to consciousness they too
will curse and swear. Flowers so strictly belong to
youth that we adult men soon come to feel that their
beautiful generations concern not us: we have had our
day; now let the children have theirs. The flowers jilt
us, and we are old bachelors with our ridiculous tenderness.
Things are so strictly related, that according to
the skill of the eye, from any one object the parts
and properties of any other may be predicted. If we
had eyes to see it, a bit of stone from the city wall
would certify us of the necessity that man must exist,
as readily as the city. That identity makes us all
one, and reduces to nothing great intervals on our
customary scale. We talk of deviations from natural
life, as if artificial life were not also natural. The
smoothest curled courtier in the boudoirs of a palace
has an animal nature, rude and aboriginal as a white
bear, omnipotent to its own ends, and is directly
related, there amid essences and billetsdoux, to
Himmaleh mountain-chains and the axis of the globe. If
we consider how much we are nature's, we need not be
superstitious about towns, as if that terrific or
benefic force did not find us there also, and fashion
cities. Nature, who made the mason, made the house.
We may easily hear too much of rural influences. The
cool disengaged air of natural objects makes them
enviable to us, chafed and irritable creatures with
red faces, and we think we shall be as grand as they
if we camp out and eat roots; but let us be men
instead of woodchucks and the oak and the elm shall
gladly serve us, though we sit in chairs of ivory on
carpets of silk.
This guiding identity runs through all the surprises
and contrasts of the piece, and characterizes every
law. Man carries the world in his head, the whole
astronomy and chemistry suspended in a thought.
Because the history of nature is charactered in his
brain, therefore is he the prophet and discoverer of
her secrets. Every known fact in natural science was
divined by the presentiment of somebody, before it was
actually verified. A man does not tie his shoe without
recognizing laws which bind the farthest regions of
nature: moon, plant, gas, crystal, are concrete geometry
and numbers. Common sense knows its own, and recognizes
the fact at first sight in chemical experiment. The
common sense of Franklin, Dalton, Davy and Black, is the
same common sense which made the arrangements which now
it discovers.
If the identity expresses organized rest, the counter
action runs also into organization. The astronomers
said, 'Give us matter and a little motion and we will
construct the universe. It is not enough that we should
have matter, we must also have a single impulse, one
shove to launch the mass and generate the harmony of
the centrifugal and centripetal forces. Once heave the
ball from the hand, and we can show how all this mighty
order grew.'--'A very unreasonable postulate,' said the
metaphysicians, 'and a plain begging of the question.
Could you not prevail to know the genesis of projection,
as well as the continuation of it?' Nature, meanwhile,
had not waited for the discussion, but, right or wrong,
bestowed the impulse, and the balls rolled. It was no
great affair, a mere push, but the astronomers were
right in making much of it, for there is no end to the
consequences of the act. That famous aboriginal push
propagates itself through all the balls of the system,
and through every atom of every ball; through all the
races of creatures, and through the history and
performances of every individual. Exaggeration is in
the course of things. Nature sends no creature, no man
into the world without adding a small excess of his
proper quality. Given the planet, it is still necessary
to add the impulse; so to every creature nature added
a little violence of direction in its proper path, a
shove to put it on its way; in every instance a slight
generosity, a drop too much. Without electricity the air
would rot, and without this violence of direction which
men and women have, without a spice of bigot and fanatic,
no excitement, no efficiency. We aim above the mark to
hit the mark. Every act hath some falsehood of exaggeration
in it. And when now and then comes along some sad, sharp-
eyed man, who sees how paltry a game is played, and refuses
to play, but blabs the secret;--how then? Is the bird flown?
O no, the wary Nature sends a new troop of fairer forms, of
lordlier youths, with a little more excess of direction to
hold them fast to their several aim; makes them a little
wrongheaded in that direction in which they are rightest,
and on goes the game again with new whirl, for a generation
or two more. The child with his sweet pranks, the fool of
his senses, commanded by every sight and sound, without any
power to compare and rank his sensations, abandoned to a
whistle or a painted chip, to a lead dragoon or a
gingerbread-dog, individualizing everything, generalizing
nothing, delighted with every new thing, lies down at night
overpowered by the fatigue which this day of continual
pretty madness has incurred. But Nature has answered her
purpose with the curly, dimpled lunatic. She has tasked
every faculty, and has secured the symmetrical growth of
the bodily frame by all these attitudes and exertions,--
an end of the first importance, which could not be trusted
to any care less perfect than her own. This glitter, this
opaline lustre plays round the top of every toy to his
eye to insure his fidelity, and he is deceived to his good.
We are made alive and kept alive by the same arts. Let the
stoics say what they please, we do not eat for the good of
living, but because the meat is savory and the appetite is
keen. The vegetable life does not content itself with
casting from the flower or the tree a single seed, but it
fills the air and earth with a prodigality of seeds, that,
if thousands perish, thousands may plant themselves; that
hundreds may come up, that tens may live to maturity; that
at least one may replace the parent. All things betray the
same calculated profusion. The excess of fear with which
the animal frame is hedged round, shrinking from cold,
starting at sight of a snake, or at a sudden noise, protects
us, through a multitude of groundless alarms, from some one
real danger at last. The lover seeks in marriage his private
felicity and perfection, with no prospective end; and nature
hides in his happiness her own end, namely, progeny, or the
perpetuity of the race.
But the craft with which the world is made, runs
also into the mind and character of men. No man
is quite sane; each has a vein of folly in his
composition, a slight determination of blood to
the head, to make sure of holding him hard to some
one point which nature had taken to heart. Great
causes are never tried on their merits; but the
cause is reduced to particulars to suit the size
of the partisans, and the contention is ever hottest
on minor matters. Not less remarkable is the overfaith
of each man in the importance of what he has to do or
say. The poet, the prophet, has a higher value for
what he utters than any hearer, and therefore it gets
spoken. The strong, self-complacent Luther declares
with an emphasis not to be mistaken, that "God himself
cannot do without wise men." Jacob Behmen and George
Fox betray their egotism in the pertinacity of their
controversial tracts, and James Naylor once suffered
himself to be worshipped as the Christ. Each prophet
comes presently to identify himself with his thought,
and to esteem his hat and shoes sacred. However this
may discredit such persons with the judicious, it helps
them with the people, as it gives heat, pungency, and
publicity to their words. A similar experience is not
infrequent in private life. Each young and ardent
person writes a diary, in which, when the hours of
prayer and penitence arrive, he inscribes his soul. The
pages thus written are to him burning and fragrant; he
reads them on his knees by midnight and by the morning
star; he wets them with his tears; they are sacred; too
good for the world, and hardly yet to be shown to the
dearest friend. This is the man-child that is born to
the soul, and her life still circulates in the babe.
The umbilical cord has not yet been cut. After some
time has elapsed, he begins to wish to admit his friend
to this hallowed experience, and with hesitation, yet
with firmness, exposes the pages to his eye. Will they
not burn his eyes? The friend coldly turns them over,
and passes from the writing to conversation, with easy
transition, which strikes the other party with
astonishment and vexation. He cannot suspect the writing
itself. Days and nights of fervid life, of communion
with angels of darkness and of light have engraved
their shadowy characters on that tear-stained book. He
suspects the intelligence or the heart of his friend.
Is there then no friend? He cannot yet credit that one
may have impressive experience and yet may not know how
to put his private fact into literature; and perhaps
the discovery that wisdom has other tongues and ministers
than we, that though we should hold our peace the truth
would not the less be spoken, might check injuriously
the flames of our zeal. A man can only speak so long as
he does not feel his speech to be partial and inadequate.
It is partial, but he does not see it to be so whilst he
utters it. As soon as he is released from the instinctive
and particular and sees its partiality, he shuts his
mouth in disgust. For no man can write anything who does
not think that what he writes is for the time the history
of the world; or do anything well who does not esteem his
work to be of importance. My work may be of none, but I
must not think it of none, or I shall not do it with
impunity.
In like manner, there is throughout nature something
mocking, something that leads us on and on, but
arrives nowhere; keeps no faith with us. All promise
outruns the performance. We live in a system of
approximations. Every end is prospective of some other
end, which is also temporary; a round and final success
nowhere. We are encamped in nature, not domesticated.
Hunger and thirst lead us on to eat and to drink; but
bread and wine, mix and cook them how you will, leave
us hungry and thirsty, after the stomach is full. It
is the same with all our arts and performances. Our
music, our poetry, our language itself are not
satisfactions, but suggestions. The hunger for wealth,
which reduces the planet to a garden, fools the eager
pursuer. What is the end sought? Plainly to secure the
ends of good sense and beauty, from the intrusion of
deformity or vulgarity of any kind. But what an operose
method! What a train of means to secure a little
conversation! This palace of brick and stone, these
servants, this kitchen, these stables, horses and
equipage, this bank-stock and file of mortgages; trade
to all the world, country-house and cottage by the
waterside, all for a little conversation, high, clear,
and spiritual! Could it not be had as well by beggars
on the highway? No, all these things came from successive
efforts of these beggars to remove friction from the
wheels of life, and give opportunity. Conversation,
character, were the avowed ends; wealth was good as it
appeased the animal cravings, cured the smoky chimney,
silenced the creaking door, brought friends together in
a warm and quiet room, and kept the children and the
dinner-table in a different apartment. Thought, virtue,
beauty, were the ends; but it was known that men of
thought and virtue sometimes had the headache, or wet
feet, or could lose good time whilst the room was getting
warm in winter days. Unluckily, in the exertions necessary
to remove these inconveniences, the main attention has
been diverted to this object; the old aims have been lost
sight of, and to remove friction has come to be the end.
That is the ridicule of rich men, and Boston, London,
Vienna, and now the governments generally of the world
are cities and governments of the rich; and the masses
are not men, but poor men, that is, men who would be rich;
this is the ridicule of the class, that they arrive with
pains and sweat and fury nowhere; when all is done, it is
for nothing. They are like one who has interrupted the
conversation of a company to make his speech, and now has
forgotten what he went to say. The appearance strikes the
eye everywhere of an aimless society, of aimless nations.
Were the ends of nature so great and cogent as to exact
this immense sacrifice of men?
Quite analogous to the deceits in life, there is,
as might be expected, a similar effect on the eye
from the face of external nature. There is in woods
and waters a certain enticement and flattery, together
with a failure to yield a present satisfaction. This
disappointment is felt in every landscape. I have seen
the softness and beauty of the summer clouds floating
feathery overhead, enjoying, as it seemed, their height
and privilege of motion, whilst yet they appeared not
so much the drapery of this place and hour, as
forelooking to some pavilions and gardens of festivity
beyond. It is an odd jealousy, but the poet finds
himself not near enough to his object. The pine-tree,
the river, the bank of flowers before him, does not
seem to be nature. Nature is still elsewhere. This or
this is but outskirt and far-off reflection and echo of
the triumph that has passed by and is now at its glancing
splendor and heyday, perchance in the neighboring fields,
or, if you stand in the field, then in the adjacent woods.
The present object shall give you this sense of stillness
that follows a pageant which has just gone by. What
splendid distance, what recesses of ineffable pomp and
loveliness in the sunset! But who can go where they are,
or lay his hand or plant his foot thereon? Off they fall
from the round world forever and ever. It is the same
among the men and women as among the silent trees; always
a referred existence, an absence, never a presence and
satisfaction. Is it that beauty can never be grasped? in
persons and in landscape is equally inaccessible? The
accepted and betrothed lover has lost the wildest charm
of his maiden in her acceptance of him. She was heaven
whilst he pursued her as a star: she cannot be heaven if
she stoops to such a one as he.
What shall we say of this omnipresent appearance
of that first projectile impulse, of this flattery
and balking of so many well-meaning creatures? Must
we not suppose somewhere in the universe a slight
treachery and derision? Are we not engaged to a
serious resentment of this use that is made of us?
Are we tickled trout, and fools of nature? One look
at the face of heaven and earth lays all petulance
at rest, and soothes us to wiser convictions. To the
intelligent, nature converts itself into a vast
promise, and will not be rashly explained. Her secret
is untold. Many and many an Oedipus arrives; he has
the whole mystery teeming in his brain. Alas! the
same sorcery has spoiled his skill; no syllable can
he shape on his lips. Her mighty orbit vaults like
the fresh rainbow into the deep, but no archangel's
wing was yet strong enough to follow it and report
of the return of the curve. But it also appears that
our actions are seconded and disposed to greater
conclusions than we designed. We are escorted on
every hand through life by spiritual agents, and a
beneficent purpose lies in wait for us. We cannot
bandy words with Nature, or deal with her as we deal
with persons. If we measure our individual forces
against hers we may easily feel as if we were the
sport of an insuperable destiny. But if, instead of
identifying ourselves with the work, we feel that the
soul of the workman streams through us, we shall find
the peace of the morning dwelling first in our hearts,
and the fathomless powers of gravity and chemistry,
and, over them, of life, preexisting within us in
their highest form.
The uneasiness which the thought of our helplessness
in the chain of causes occasions us, results from
looking too much at one condition of nature, namely,
Motion. But the drag is never taken from the wheel.
Wherever the impulse exceeds, the Rest or Identity
insinuates its compensation. All over the wide fields
of earth grows the prunella or self-heal. After every
foolish day we sleep off the fumes and furies of its
hours; and though we are always engaged with particulars,
and often enslaved to them, we bring with us to every
experiment the innate universal laws. These, while they
exist in the mind as ideas, stand around us in nature
forever embodied, a present sanity to expose and cure
the insanity of men. Our servitude to particulars betrays
into a hundred foolish expectations. We anticipate a new
era from the invention of a locomotive, or a balloon;
the new engine brings with it the old checks. They say
that by electro-magnetism your salad shall be grown from
the seed whilst your fowl is roasting for dinner; it is
a symbol of our modern aims and endeavors, of our
condensation and acceleration of objects;--but nothing
is gained; nature cannot be cheated; man's life is but
seventy salads long, grow they swift or grow they slow.
In these checks and impossibilities however we find our
advantage, not less than in the impulses. Let the
victory fall where it will, we are on that side. And the
knowledge that we traverse the whole scale of being,
from the centre to the poles of nature, and have some
stake in every possibility, lends that sublime lustre to
death, which philosophy and religion have too outwardly
and literally striven to express in the popular doctrine
of the immortality of the soul. The reality is more
excellent than the report. Here is no ruin, no discontinuity,
no spent ball. The divine circulations never rest nor linger.
Nature is the incarnation of a thought, and turns to a
thought again, as ice becomes water and gas. The world is
mind precipitated, and the volatile essence is forever
escaping again into the state of free thought. Hence the
virtue and pungency of the influence on the mind of natural
objects, whether inorganic or organized. Man imprisoned,
man crystallized, man vegetative, speaks to man impersonated.
That power which does not respect quantity, which makes the
whole and the particle its equal channel, delegates its smile
to the morning, and distils its essence into every drop of
rain. Every moment instructs, and every object: for wisdom
is infused into every form. It has been poured into us as
blood; it convulsed us as pain; it slid into us as pleasure;
it enveloped us in dull, melancholy days, or in days of
cheerful labor; we did not guess its essence until after a
long time. _
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