Atlantic Monthly - - (free e books to read txt) 📗

is now as big as your hand, and now it covers a county. That story of Thor, who was set to drain the drinking-horn in Asgard, and to wrestle with the old woman, and to run with the runner Lok, and presently found that he had been drinking up the sea, and wrestling with Time, and racing with Thought, describes us who are contending, amid these seeming trifles, with the supreme energies of Nature. We fancy we have fallen into bad company and squalid condition, low debts, shoe-bills, broken glass to pay for, pots to buy, butcher’s meat, sugar, milk, and coal. “Set me some great task, ye gods! and I will show my spirit.” “Not so,” says the good Heaven; “plod and plough, vamp your old coats and hats, weave a shoestring; great affairs and the best wine by and by.” Well, ‘tis all phantasm; and if we weave a yard of tape in all humility and as well as we can, long hereafter we shall see it was no cotton tape at all, but some galaxy which we braided, and that the threads were Time and Nature.

We cannot write the order of the variable winds. How can we penetrate the law of our shifting moods and susceptibility? Yet they differ as all and nothing. Instead of the firmament of yesterday, which our eyes require, it is to-day an eggshell which coops us in; we cannot even see what or where our stars of destiny are. From day to day, the capital facts of human life are hidden from our eyes. Suddenly the mist rolls up, and reveals them, and we think how much good time is gone, that might have been saved, had any hint of these things been shown. A sudden rise in the road shows us the system of mountains, and all the summits, which have been just as near us all the year, but quite out of mind. But these alternations are not without their order, and we are parties to our various fortune. If life seems a succession of dreams, yet poetic justice is done in dreams also. The visions of good men are good; it is the undisciplined will that is whipped with bad thoughts and bad fortunes. When we break the laws, we lose our hold on the central reality. Like sick men in hospitals, we change only from bed to bed, from one folly to another; and it cannot signify much what becomes of such castaways,—wailing, stupid, comatose creatures,—lifted from bed to bed, from the nothing of life to the nothing of death.

In this kingdom of illusions we grope eagerly for stays and foundations. There is none but a strict and faithful dealing at home, and a severe barring out of all duplicity or illusion there. Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth. I look upon the simple and childish virtues of veracity and honesty as the root of all that is sublime in character. Speak as you think, be what you are, pay your debts of all kinds. I prefer to be owned as sound and solvent, and my word as good as my bond, and to be what cannot be skipped, or dissipated, or undermined, to all the éclat in the universe. A little integrity is better than any career. This reality is the foundation of friendship, religion, poetry, and art. At the top or at the bottom of all illusions I set the cheat which still leads us to work and live for appearances, in spite of our conviction, in all sane hours, that it is what we really are that avails with friends, with strangers, and with fate or fortune.

One would think from the talk of men, that riches and poverty were a great matter; and our civilization mainly respects it. But the Indians say, that they do not think the white man with his brow of care, always toiling, afraid of heat and cold, and keeping within doors, has any advantage of them. The permanent interest of every man is, never to be in a false position, but to have the weight of Nature to back him in all that he does. Riches and poverty are a thick or thin costume; and our life—the life of all of us—identical. For we transcend the circumstance continually, and taste the real quality of existence; as in our employments, which only differ in the manipulations, but express the same laws; or in our thoughts, which wear no silks, and taste no ice-creams. We see God face to face every hour, and know the savour of Nature.

The early Greek philosophers Heraclitus and Xenophanes measured their force on this problem of identity. Diogenes of Apollonia said, that unless the atoms were made of one stuff, they could never blend and act with one another. But the Hindoos, in their sacred writings, express the liveliest feeling, both of the essential identity, and of that illusion which they conceive variety to be. “The notions, ‘I am,’ and ‘This is mine,’ which influence mankind, are but delusions of the mother of the world. Dispel, O Lord of all creatures! the conceit of knowledge which proceeds from ignorance.” And the beatitude of man they hold to lie in being freed from fascination.

The intellect is stimulated by the statement of truth in a trope, and the will by clothing the laws of life in illusions. But the unities of Truth and of Right are not broken by the disguise. There need never be any confusion in these. In a crowded life of many parts and performers, on a stage of nations, or in the obscurest hamlet in Maine or California, the same elements offer the same choices to each new comer, and, according to his election, he fixes his fortune in absolute nature. It would be hard to put more mental and moral philosophy than the Persians have thrown into a sentence:—

“Fooled thou must be, though wisest of the wise; Then be the fool of virtue, not of vice.”

 

THE GIFT OF TRITEMIUS.

 

Tritemius of Herbipolis one day, While kneeling at the altar’s foot to pray, Alone with God, as was his pious choice, Heard from beneath a miserable voice,— A sound that seemed of all sad things to tell, As of a lost soul crying out of hell.

Thereat the Abbot rose, the chain whereby His thoughts went upward broken by that cry, And, looking from the casement, saw below A wretched woman, with gray hair aflow, And withered hands stretched up to him, who cried For alms as one who might not be denied.

She cried: “For the dear love of Him who gave His life for ours, my child from bondage save, My beautiful, brave first-born, chained with slaves In the Moor’s galley, where the sun-smit waves Lap the white walls of Tunis!” “What I can I give,” Tritemius said,—“my prayers.” “O man Of God!” she cried, for grief had made her bold, “Mock me not so; I ask not prayers, but gold; Words cannot serve me, alms alone suffice; Even while I plead, perchance my first-born dies!”

“Woman!” Tritemius answered, “from our door None go unfed; hence are we always poor. A single soldo is our only store. Thou hast our prayers; what can we give thee more?”

“Give me,” she said, “the silver candlesticks On either side of the great crucifix; God well may spare them on His errands sped, Or He can give you golden ones instead.”

Then said Tritemius, “Even as thy word, Woman, so be it; and our gracious Lord, Who loveth mercy more than sacrifice, Pardon me if a human soul I prize Above the gifts upon His altar piled! Take what thou askest, and redeem thy child.”

But his hand trembled as the holy alms He laid within the beggar’s eager palms; And as she vanished down the linden shade, He bowed his head and for forgiveness prayed.

So the day passed; and when the twilight came He rose to find the chapel all a-flame, And, dumb with grateful wonder, to behold Upon the altar candlesticks of gold!

 

THE MOURNING VEIL.

 

Then in life’s goblet freely press The leaves that give it bitterness, Nor prize the colored waters less, For in thy darkness and distress New light and strength they give

And he who has not learned to know How false its sparkling bubbles flow, How bitter are the drops of woe With which its brim may overflow, He has not learned to live.

LONGFELLOW.

 

It was sunset. The day had been one of the sultriest of August. It would seem as if the fierce alembic of the last twenty-four hours had melted it like the pearl in the golden cup of Cleopatra, and it lay in the West a fused mass of transparent brightness. The reflection from the edges of a hundred clouds wandered hither and thither, over rock and tree and flower, giving a strange, unearthly brilliancy to the most familiar things.

A group of children had gathered about their mother in the summer-house of a garden which faced the sunset sky. The house was one of those square, stately, wooden structures, white, with green blinds, in which of old times the better classes of New England delighted, and which remain to us as memorials of a respectable past. It stood under the arches of two gigantic elms, and was flanked on either side with gardens and grounds which seemed designed on purpose for hospitality and family freedom.

The evening light colored huge bosquets of petunias, which stood with their white or crimson faces looking westward, as if they were thinking creatures. It illumined flame-colored verbenas, and tall columns of pink and snowy phloxes, and hedges of August roses, making them radiant as the flowers of a dream.

The group in the summer-house requires more particular attention. The father and mother, whom we shall call Albert and Olivia, were of the wealthiest class of the neighbouring city, and had been induced by the facility of railroad travelling, and a sensible way of viewing things, to fix their permanent residence in the quiet little village of Q–-. Albert had nothing in him different from multitudes of hearty, joyous, healthily constituted men, who subsist upon daily newspapers, and find the world a most comfortable place to live in. As to Olivia, she was in the warm noon of life, and a picture of vitality and enjoyment. A plump, firm cheek, a dark eye, a motherly fulness of form, spoke the being made to receive and enjoy the things of earth, the warm-hearted wife, the indulgent mother, the hospitable mistress of the mansion. It is true that the smile on the lip had something of earthly pride blended with womanly sweetness,—the pride of one who has as yet known only prosperity and success, to whom no mischance has yet shown the frail basis on which human hopes are built. Her foot had as yet trod only the high places of life, but she walked there with a natural grace and nobleness that made every one feel that she was made for them and they for her.

Around the parents were gathered at this moment a charming group of children, who with much merriment were proceeding to undo a bundle the father had just brought from the city.

“Here, Rose,” said little Amy, a blue-eyed, flaxen-haired pet, who seemed to be a privileged character, “let me come; don’t be all night with your orderly ways; let me cut that string.” A sharp flash of the scissors, a quick report of the bursting string, and the package lay opened to the little marauder. Rose drew back, smiled, and gave an indulgent look at her eager younger sister and the two little ones who immediately gathered around. She was one