^ ,-v Willard Fr acker & Company s EDITIONS OF ©he ip? ^ V .^ r^A" b .*** V fe- olN^ .v- SOLITARIUS to his DAEMON THREE PAPERS ". , . . he ( Socrates ) declared himself to be constantly in the companionship and under the guidance of a good Damon , . . ," Xenophon's Memorabilia. TO A. EDDY WELLS THESE EFFORTS ARE WARMLY DEDICATED COPYRIGHT BY WILLARD FRACKER & COMPANY " And poets and philosophers Who read man's heart so well ; But what they knew and what they guessed Were wide as heaven from hell." .... SO LIT A RI US DAEMON THREE PAPERS CHARLES EDWARD BARNS Stew \)0xh WILLARD FRACKER & CO T5 10 1,2 CONTENTS. THE EPHEMERIS OF NATURE ... 15 SOLITUDE i 37 THE POET'S PROVINCE .... 195 The Ep hemeris of Nature There is a temple in each vested hour Wherein some sacrifice to Truth is made ; And, too, a dread Golgotha where is laid That hostage unto death which once was power And purpose, but long lost. There is a Tower Of Silence in each day where are conveyed The bones of the dead moments curst and flayed Of vultures— godless sextons that devour Their heritage of love — and, all is done ! Look up, young soul ! Canst thou not rescue one — One moment of thy youth immortally? — Snatch back thy lost days from oblivion And so fulfil thy God's expectancy? Up, Youth ! or 't is too late ; and thy sand-glass be run. The Ephemeris of Nature \$ FIRST PAPER ©he IBphzmsxte of itatm?** Solitarlus comments r* * t\ on the modern Eth- CrOOd Daemon, Sit yOU ics of Disenchant- , t,.. r ment, and proceeds here. This is our feast- thence to affairs of a 1 ■, . ■, a 1 1 j * more genial nature, hour : let US be filled. A sorry symposiarch, you, with these sweet features awry, and the cup of grace — this genial oblation to the friend-proving gods — rattling timorously on the parted teeth as if 't were some martyr's hemlock you would to pledge me to heaven, rather than the peace-offering nectar we have brewed from the sweets of every zone, from the deeps of every sunken age, from the capping heights of every Utopian dream within our striving reach. Come ; is not the great, quivering heart of man Solitarius to his Damon large enough for a symposium of kings and patriarchs, though we be but poor craving beggars at the huge board, pray- ing and thankful for the merest crumbs that fall from the laps of poet, soldier, prophet, — all whose province is to think, whose duty is to act ? Why not indeed flatter existence into living — this hard- ened fact into a mellow rhapsody — this bodiless fiction into a living homily — this stern Buddhist's hell into a dreamer's heaven, if thereby we may find happiness for others and ourselves ? Let us at least be optimists — we poor 'churchyard game' — since this is the least tribute of grati- tude that mortal can offer up in homage to a beneficent Hand, — the most insub- stantial of cloaks to obscure our shrunk- en shapes from the eyes of a commiser- ating world that has quite enough of a task to keep its own volcanic heart from bursting the narrow confines, and setting free a volt of moulten pessimism that would immolate a race and sadden ten thousand eras of the recovering good and true. We have looked the great The Ephemeris of Nature 17 globe over for that 'coming man ' which we will not be persuaded is yet come, — for that prophet who shall deliver Art from the Philistine yoke, and prove us profound in resource. Together, good Daemon, have we searched every zone, every clime, every crevice and fissure in the crags of our stony mortality where Truth would most likely hide her new interpreter, to cradle him into a thing of power and promise ; and yet, O patient Daemon, we have found him not. But what found we instead ? A whole world at warring sword-points. What here the worshipper kisses with penace-breathing lips, there the scoffer damns as irrelevant and trivial. Here one philosopher weeps, and there another laughs, over the iden- tical problem, — a struggling, estranging, moping Heraclitus, and a merry, careless and jesting Abderite, mingling in strang- est unison their prayers for the universal solvent of the Why of life, — for more light, more time, more means wherewith as a leverage upon Nature and the great heart of man, they may reason as reasons 1 8 Soliiarius to his Dcetnon a god — with some assurance of success at the ultimatum. Here the devout man best expresses his reverence by uncover- ing the head ; to that one, equally rever- ent, such would be an act of profanation : he takes off his shoes : who dares say that they will ever meet upon a common relig- ious ground ? When the English drama wants a villain, it takes a Frenchman ; when the French drama requires a dupe, it takes an Englishman : who that des- pairs not of their ever becoming mutual each to each in any profound circle of thought, when the children of both are taught this antagonism from the cradle ? Here are tears : who shall say that they express not the extreme of joy as likely as some depth of sorrow ? Here is a divine history which our learned icono- clast proves profane ; since only truth is divine. Here a miracle proven a myth. Here our martyred philosopher proven a pompous Athenian vagabond ; our hero of a thousand years a brutal ignoramus ; our divine painter, a heartless rake ; the prophet of our reverence, an insinuating The Ephemeris of Nature 19 knave ; the God incarnate, a mere man. Yet this is the progressive age, in which progression means the subversion of all that we reverence in the past, and for the future — more progress. Who deplores not the decline and fall of Respect ? When shall this madness to crowd three lives into one, give way to a new doctrine of digestion, maturation, and peptonic repose ? Yet, good Daemon, we know that what- ever is, is right ; even as we disbelieve our popular sophist's formula : that what- ever is, is not. Aye, Daemon, still the more thoughtful of us believe firmly that whatever is, is truth, is right, is justice, is God. This is the child's first privilege , the greybeard prophet's last assurance. Through all the interregnum spaces, — these restless intervals now optimist, now pessimist, overruling hatred, deifying adoration, realism, romanticism, faith, doubting, which come and go as adoles- cent diseases, — through all, though often filled with the most denying aud sombre of systems and opinions, the heart of Solitarius to his Damon man is true. So, Daemon, let us adhere with reverence to our watchword. How infinitely easier is it to contemplate the laws of nature with a respectful believing that they are right and just, until proven otherwise. But the task is to prove them otherwise. It is now quite the fashion to prove them otherwise ; and only an im- oderate deal of moping, a criminal deal of idleness, and a melancholy deal of hys- teria and desultory chatter, is as far as we have yet progressed. You remem- ber that long-tressed philosopher-barber in the Latin quarter in Paris, who, while administering to my beard in a most abandoned and merciless manner, grew so rashly confidential as to confess his passion — somewhat Shelleyan as we all know — for reforming the world ; but he still shaves whiskers at five sous a shave, and the old world as abominable a pit of plagues as ever. He is one of that army of sighing philosophers — a new and most promising sect, by the way — who cannot produce an idea, but can better yours ; who, like Archimedes, are certain they could move the world if thev had where- The Ephemeris of Nature on to stand, and yet do n't know how to hone a razor. We would, following out the dogmas of this statistical, atheistical age, enlighten by doubt, progress by sup- pression, reform by conforming. We have societies for the suppression of most everything nowadays : for the suppres- sion of vice ; of cruelties ; of saloons ; of religious superstition ; of the increase ratio of the human race over available resource ; of poverty ; of foreign inroads ; suppression of — God wot not what, good Daemon, while, too, all our creeds and systems are suppressive — suppressive of every other creed, of every other system. How vastly easier it is, O Daemon, to bear down than to bear up ; to reform by crushing rather that by enlightening and edifying ! But what will withstand the onslaught of a regiment of reformers with God and the grand law of gravita- tion on their side ? — not even the Chris- tian religion, it is argued. Two armies meet ; the watchword of the one is, ' God and Suppression!' — of the other, the shibboleth is, ' God and liberty ! ' Both Solitarius to his Daemon are right, for God is with both if with either ; it now descends into a question of material law. God and gravitation prevail ; God and he who would remedy by lifting the man above his pleasant vices that he himself disdain them, in- stead of crushing the vice, fall. Hence the suppressive era. And thus is it, O revered and indul- gent friend, that in this flood-tide of af- fairs worldly which we suffer not to ebb even if such be but in accordance with a most natural and vindictive law, there is but one man that really and truly lives, who gets the good out of life that proves existence something more than a pen- ance for some ancient sin : that one is the universal respecter, — the willing be- liever of that which unbelief only gives unhappiness. It is he who is brave enough to withstand the inroads of ques- tionable exotics in the clean, clear gar- dens of the thinking heart, refreshing the senses and lightening the souls of all that enter therein for edification and repose. I do not want the Bo-tree planted at my doorstep in place of my reverential oak The Ephemeris of Nature 23 and flowering beech, even if it be the tree so sacred to Gautama. This oak and this beech are sacred to my hearth ; and that to me is worth ten thousand Buddhas. These oriental exotics will not flourish in our mental climate, and bear anything but sickly and unnatural fruit. As for our mental climate, why exchange that for a Hindu's, or an Icelander's, or an angel's even, if we flourish best in our own? It is crystallized into our marrows a thousand years back ; we demand it honored ; and so, must be the first to honor. We demand it respected : we must ourselves be the foremost of our respecters. Whosoever can vary the hymn of our commonplace days to a truer, godlier meaning, O Daemon, does he not fulfil the prophet's condition ? Whosoever can put a brighter, warmer, and more refined interpretation upon the sordid text of our monotonous ways, revealing in the work of our hands, the thoughts of our hearts, and in the passionate aspirations of our 24 Solitarius to his Dcemon lives a possibility to a higher and pro- founder excellence, and who, taking up the sombre wrecks of our honest failures, demonstrates that even in the least of these there lies a bright embryo of future success which shall one day prove itself, — of that rare and most gifted optimist has not the world most precious need? In such an one the thinker approaches the god in quality. In him is vested a birthright greater than that of old. He is a king among churls ; a seer among sophists ; a man of God among scoffing knaves whose populous hearth is Legion. That man may speak when all the world is dumb ; may act when the greater than he is halt ; may do while others content them with the mere dream of doing ; may stand the brunt of presuming vice when the purple-robed and vested stand staring with a mere coward's passivity. To what noble and exalted use may not the gods have put such an one ? — to what of mortality is he not superior? Truth has yoked him with a star ; his orbit is of heaven. To such as he the great, broad-paged Ephemeris of Nature lies The Ephemeris of Nature 25 broken of seal at his very hearthstone, — a majestic daily chronicle writ in the precious blood-drops of our heroisms, in the tears of our partings, in the censer- smokes of our religions, in the red flame of the pyres whereon the last vestiges of our faiths, sciences, arts and republics, are offered up in hostage to that absorb- ing deity of change and mutation. To him is it privileged to knowingly read and interpret to men the scriptures of that boundless open book writ in a lan- guage of the gods, — that which but the poet and the prophet interpret — written in the star-dusts of worlds made and worlds to be ; with the fire of suns and the lover's passion ; with ocean and for- est ; with things seen and unseen, mys- tery on mystery, miracle infinite, of which the heart of man is the throbbing centre, his ever-present God the boundless cir- cumference. It is written to the proof that with all subtile diversities of nature, time and removal each from each — the prophet of the Euphrates from the seer of Concord ; the poet of the Tiber from 26 Solitarius to his Damon the bard of Rydal ; the Persian Firdusi from the era of Hiawatha ; the Arab as- tronomer from the epoch of the spectra- scope — we are of one element, world-over, century over : of one certain, inspired, reigning, God-elect principle. With all our warring and demanding creeds, O Daemon, with all our jealous arts and defying sciences, men, with mountains parting brothers — mountains of inherited hatred, disaffinity of dogma, season and environment — as they travel in the direc- tion whither all true thought proceeds, they are surprised to find that the dis- tance between them narrows, until at the last, friend and enemy, hater, lover, the truth-seeker, the truth-finder, the faith- taking and the faith-denying — even they who at the base of the mountain suffered that mountain to lie between them — now stand on the narrow apex at the summit, hand-clasped, co-thoughted, co-hearted — one. The daily record of this universal unit is Nature's Ephemeris. It has no past, it recognizes no future ; the all-vital and all-encompassing present is its only die- The Ephe7?ieris of Nature 27 tator. To-day is its only clay. And even now, O marvelling Daemon, does it lie open wider on the outstretched palms of this shrunken, starving era than ever before, despite the world's indifference and the scholar's apathy, — the very same profound volume that lay outspread be- neath the sacred Bo-tree of Gautama's India, in the silent Confucian groves, in solemn vales of Engaddi, under the por- ticos of the Athenian temple of Wisdom, by the Nile's pale bed and the darkling Tiber's side, by the Russian prophet's couch and the still hearth of the night- bound Icelander,for everywhere the heart of man is faithful, there Truth is. A single line of the pure undiluted philosophy as it is here manifest, may it not be worthy, O Daemon, the noblest life- task of an intelletual giant? May it not absorb a whole art, a whole science, a whole system in its compassing grasp ? But alas for that searchful one who but contemplates this one line to the ex- clusion of all that lies beyond it. The mo- 28 Solitarius to his Damon ment he sees nothing but this one line, — forgets indeed that it is but a hundredth of a page, a ten thousandth part of the whole volume — the moment he thinks truth revolves about one law and that law it has become his province to interpret to men, blind to the equal faith of others in their several capacities — he has yet to become enlightened and enlarged. A drop of water would be an ocean to some, whereon they might sail for ages, so small is the soul ; a universe is fit province for another, so magnanimous is the heart. Science his creed, Nature his formulary, — his observance, the God be- neath and beyond all, his religion : this is the trinity of Progression. Herschel sees all things by parallax and meridian ; to Harvey the great globe itself is but a drop of blood coursing through the veins of the infinite organism ; to Archimedes and Newton all things take centrifugal values and gravitating forces ; to Raph- ael and Michael Angelo all appears as if the beholder's eyes were prisms clothing the naked nature of our commonplace days with warm rainbows of radiance im- The Ephemeris of Nature 29 perishable ; to Hippocrates and Galen the universe is all anatomy and analysis ; to Draper and Proctor, all spectra and parallel. Each feels that the vitalizing fluid of progress flows from his own heart through the universal frame, giving it life and quality, and back again to the well-spring whence it proceeded. To him whose life is embodied in one divine Idea, the world and its series becomes trans- parent through it ; and he contains it by being contained by it. Whatsoever oath the severely earnest man has sworn upon him, all nature takes its coloring, be it the oath of prophet, entomologist, pre- late or astronomer. Soul is the only true currency of the soul. Eternity will not be bribed off with half labor, half absorp- tion. Full faith, full purpose, full assim- ilation : this is a demand, not a mere alms- asking. Who dreams Nature a beggar ? She cries to the individual heart : I give thee one talent in thyself and ten talents in nature at thy ready command ; to what purpose shall it prove ? 30 Solitarius to his Damon The material mind is the first datum of negation. It is the mapping of a warm God-given truth upon a heart of stone. It is the unlike springing from like, — the anomaly born of the normal and reg- ular in nature's processes. It is an equa- tion the solemn solution of which exacts research and concentration, leading but to disenchantment and pessimism, — her- ald of death and dissolution. What sus- tains not life, kills it : what refines not, coarsens ; what edifies not, crushes ; what believes not, cannot be believed. 1 Life is a divine To be,' is the philoso- phy of youth ; 'life is a divine To day,' is the logic of the man. Has materiality now indeed reached its noon, and shall we indeed yet find automatons that shall bear out crosses, to do our labor, our thinking, our duties as men and our priv- ileges as poets, as prophets ? Must then the specific and individual give over to the fool's Catholicism, — this drag-net gathering of forces from shallow waters — and the man at last disappeared and sunk- en in men ? Is this then the great level- The Ephemeris of Nature 31 ling age ? God forbid ! Has the age of heroes, — these lower gods lost in a multi- plicity of cowards — those major types of manhood who live so truly in and for their several arts, sciences and philoso- phies that it has become an austere re- ligious rite to perform their duties, and so dear to the heart that the man would lay down his life that his ]abor might live, — has the age of these then passed away and left us so precious to ourselves ? Mind and money are at unending, ignoble war ; and like all religious war, it is bitter and to purposes the deadliest. This is the capricious era of impulse and bill-posting. Superficiality is our meat and drink ; and this light diet of airy nothings makes an intellectual spindling of that republican virtue which could, by wholesome discipline, work most worthy wonders. We speed our mad chariots down the highways of this progressive era of materialism, reading the signs on the fences and flattering that into a lib- eral education. This is the era of medi- 32 Solitarius to his Dcemon ocrity that follows the fleshy epoch of cold theosophies and of iconoclasm run mad; of sham and Schopenhauer, Bud- dhism and belittlement All dignifying presences of the sublime and the beauti- ful are calloused over by an age of the conventionally wise, the artificially in- spired. This divine afflatus of heaven which is the gift of sovereignty, is tinct and polluted by the muddy effluvium of cant. We demand books to think for us rather than to force our own thought ; music, art, religion that absolve us, work: ing our penance and praying for us rather than these same enduing our own spir- itualities, forcing that native fountain- source within us that we be ennobled from the heart outward. We read a page and think a line, rather than reading a line and thinking a page. All tends to popular depolarization, — to the centrifu- gal current of affairs; the individual an intrusion, the non-conforming the bar- barian. We stand upon the nether bor- ders of an intellectual plateau — a level- ling season of passivity — to the crushing The Ephemeris of Nature 2>Z of the more refining and spiritual by in- difference, drawing into this mad mael- strom the God-gifted one who must of exact necessity stand alone and apart to be inspired and capable. The western is a hemisphere of doubt. At every enlightening of the man and the race, our implicit legends, our awed supernaturalisms by which we prop our temples, our systems, creeds and philoso- phies, all must sweat the harder to main- tain. As the intellect advances in the vulgar mould, man turns iconoclast ; and well. The fault in the law, however, is in the abuse ; for in overturning heathen temples and sophist's sanctuaries he not unoften, quite unawares, overthrows the true with the false, the regenerate with the corrupt, the holy together with the profane. Charity we know not, — that charity which bears a profounder signif- icance than the mere unbinding of cof- fers that the indigent be fed. Charity must stand before men as a sacred his- tory of the soul,— an attribute of quality beyond the possibility of abuse. We will 34 Solitarius to his Damon not trust the failure even when it looks upward toward success ; yet the man of no failures will prove the man of insignifi- cant achievement, as a rule, as the man of no weaknesses generally proves a man of few virtues. Who would see his interest- bearing principal raturned with usury to- morrow instead of a year from to-morrow we would call a fool and a vision-builder ; yet with a talent, what returns not imme- diate equivalent in compound proportion on the third day instead of the thirti- eth year, we discharge as worthless and trivial. This forcing of business laws upon our arts, our ethics, our religions, must take responsibility for the super- ficiality of the times. With us, law makes lawyers ; medicine, physicians ; music, composers ; but do they make men ? God help the man that is not greater than his creed. Machine thought, machine ethics, machine religion, is the spoliation of our native intuitions and refinements. That man is to be feared whose soul but de- scribes the circumference of a cog-wheel. A machine may move mountains in lieu of The Ephemeris of Nature 35 a larger faith ; but when it begins to do our thinking for us, that which was esti- mable becomes a curse and a libel. A machine may lift an ocean from its slimy- bed ; but what machine can lift the aban- doned, sensual man out of his forgetful self into a grander, nobler personality? Steam, petroleum, electricity, — these are noble serfs ; they are hard masters. They may build our temples ; but they must not build our religions. They may fur- ther our arts ; but they must not inspire nor subvert them. Looms may serve our material ends ; but they must not weave our intellectual fabrics, nor write our books. These are all toys to the climax of a great mind. These but babble when a great soul speaks. Animals and machines demand soci- ety ; the nearer we aproach these in our social retrogressions, the greater our ha- tred of solitude. Alone the man is a unit; in society, but one of many, — an arc merely of the soul's proper circumference made manifest, even though dissembled 36 Solitarius to his Dazmon by courtesy and obscured by cant. In our downward flight to the crowd we leave our nobler adjuncts, — our superior portions which will ever stand aloof in spite of us — in the clouds, in the forest, in the closet. 'What !' said an astronomer to me; 'think you that I star-gaze the whole night ? Why, I can take observa- tions in ten minutes that may require ten days of after-labor and meditation.' The soul's theory, this. The cities of stars to the astronomer : the cities of men to the thinker. But neither Thales, nor Pythagoras, nor Phocion knew machine powers as we ; yet each lived to do for mankind and the up-waging generation to this day what the best of us with all our engine- ries of material presumption cannot hope. Machines are noble auxiliaries ; but the thinker and the man despise them when as mere machines they presume beyond their province. Strange indeed is the paradox that the more machines we have the less thinking we do. To-day our The Ephemeris of Nature 37 hands are horny and callous with toil ; to-morrow a machine does our labor and we sit in idleness. So much more time to improve the mind, we doubtless argue ; but it is the merest sophism. With the softening of the laborer's hands comes the softening of his brains. Toil begets toil : the manual the intellectual ; and idleness begets idleness ; crime, crime, perdition and death. We are essentially a nation of whims. A conventional manner-worship, — an ap- proved fetichism, an inherent respect for person and place — becomes our social scripture. No philosophy can touch a whim. Impulse disdains law or logic. We must have the broad world's intel- lectual treasures translated into the prim- er language of society-children and doled out at our door-step like the fish-monger's wares and the pedler's. One may argue his case wholesomely, but the creature of use comes back inevitably : 'You think so ; but make me think so, if you can.' All the philosophies cannot beard one 38 Solitarins to his Damon stubborn humor. Worship or the hatred that was once worship, transcends disdain- fully the weightiest reason. 'Conform !' is the sensual cry; 'Perform!' is the spiritual. Men have thought profoundly before us and put their fine utterances into our mouths : why think ? This is the sophist's scripture. Why is not ' Men have eaten before us : why eat ? — as laud- able logic? Intellectual cravings must be satisfied, and from within, with fresh and seasonable truth. Blest indeed is he then that has brought his whole spirit to a focus upon one line of Nature's vast Ephemeris ; and whether he has learned it by the warm noontide of prosperity, by the twilight of hard circumstance, or by the midnight lamp of privation and pain, has learned it faithfully. Let him be a man first and a doer afterward. Let him live, act and be manhood before he pre- sumes to called philosopher, poet, painter, or sage. When the season befits the ge- nius, the manhood will out. Like truth, it cannot be withheld when it has found its medium — its interpreter, even by the very The Ephemeris of Nature 39 breast that shelters and nurtures it, any- more than a meteor burst from the bosom of the sun. Despite wars, cupidities or the retrogression of races, the poet in the man, the thinker in the man, the God in the man, will out and so maintain. Agassiz could name the genus of a fish from a single scale or fin. How a single word on the lips of Napoleon, a single thought from the heart of Plato, a single line from Hamlet or Hyperion, stands as an arc showing the curve of a vast cir- cumference ! It is as a single window making visible and clear the depth of a beautiful soul. We do not require the whole deed to point the poet's triumph, any more than we demand the history of a war to know the secret of the deci- sive battle, or to measure from star to star with a foot-rule in order to determine with accuracy their magnitudes and in- tervals. The crowning gun of the battle, the polar-sentiment of the book, the cen- tral law of the system, the fulcrum-point of the political or social leverage, the resonant pitch of the symphony, the high 40 Solitarius to his Dcemon lights of the picture, and the grand cli- materic of human life, announces the laurel, and proclaims the Master and his vantage. The thinker is the dual, quadruple, in- finite factor of the universal series, mul- tiplying himself into every known quan- tity, — every fact throughout his province, and the result interpreting to men. Gen- ius multiplied into a fact gives a law, a theorem, or a truth. The dead stone be- comes a living sermon ; the running brook, a sacred scripture ; the merest commonplace, a divine comedy. Now is he a Delphian, with his religion Night and Water. Now is he Ionian, with his refined and radiant altars set upon the intangible /Ether and Erebus. And now has he become in turn, a sombre Thalian ; a demanding Pythagorean ; a luxurious Anaximanian, with his ' very earth float- ing like a broad leaf upon the ocean of the eternal ; but still, beyond all and su- perior to all, he is the thinker and the man. Greater than Platonian, Epicurian, Megarian, or Stoic, he is himself. Light, light ! — this is the inspired alpha and the The Ephemeris of Nature 41 resigned omega of the thinker's synthesis Nothing greets his penetrating eyes but bears a spiritual shadow ; nothing so base and corruption-bred but bears somewhat of a superior credential which is a pass- port into a company of divine things, be they living thoughts, living actions, or living men. Every truth looks up. The thinker then is not the creator ; he is merely the preserver of things sa- cred to truth, to thought, to ascendency, — merely the mediating quality, O Daemon, between the finite entrusted through him with most sovereign truths from an infin- ite source, even as thou betwixt the gods and this humble couch whereon I so appealingly discourse to you. The think- er is the revealing Vishnu, — that preserv- ing co-eternity with Brahma, the creator ; he is merely the second of the series, the medial factor of the divine trilogy — the treasurer and withholding conservatist. The broad Ephemeris of Nature with its daily chronicle of progressions and ret- rogressions, of revolutions for the over- throw of tyranny, and revolutions that 4? Solitarius to his Damon but hurl impediment in the path of social progress, — all making themselves a scrip- ture for the thinker's reading, a temple for the thinker's worship. Nature is re- fracted momently into ten thousand hues by this prism of the thinker's mind. He is at best but a God-gifted prism-holder before Nature for the betterment of men and his art therein edified, — a recorder and a centurian at a high and exalted post of honor. Are not, then, O Daemon, the lower airs of heaven and the upper airs of earth identical? — is not the superior mortal and the immortal, one ? Is it indeed such an illimitable chasm that parts the superior manhood and the lesser godhood ? May not the refined spirit by a devout enthu- siasm and soberest consecration to the exalted art of his choice, live so firmly united with the divinity of little things that the man himself becomes divine ? As we proceed onward, upward through the refined ether of an exalted purpose, O Daemon, does not the chasm of death appear narrower and still narrower, till to the man standing at the vital verge, it The Ephemeris of Nature 43 shrinks to the breadth of a hair, becom- ing imperceptible to the soul as it pro- ceeds from element to element, blending like a transformed ray of divine light into those border-realms without a jar? Labor, concentration, solitude, emancipa- tion from the profane, the trivial and the unpurposed, and at the climax of the as- cendant soul, death a nothingness and a name : is not this then the province of the thinker and the man ? The paramount glory of Buddha is that he lived Buddhism ; of Muhommet, that he lived Islamism ; of Plato, Platon- ism. Each outlived and deified his doc- trine by being greater than his creed, — by being ever superior to and transcend- ing his best moments by the presence of a living, inspired and inspiring personal- ity. But Buddhism at our doorstep is at best a colossal skeleton clothed in a mag- nificent raiment of most sombre and an- cient cut and most rigorous formality. To flay this grotesque and gorgeous phan- tom and reclothe it with the glaring and 44 Solitarius to his Damon vulgar habiliments of modern interpreta- tion, is infamy ; thrice dishonoring the dead but unsepulcred teacher by record- ing in a magnifying light his gravest atrocities with a presumption he himself would have blushed to behold in so mis- construing a light. The written tenets of any prophet will not stand the brazen glare of detail upon their vulnerable parts. Even Nature in her most perfect mood is not ever flawless. It seems to be the will of the all-reasonable Mind that to merely symbolize this truth, sink that beneath some rugged exterior, leav- ing but a meagre hint to point a third grand certitude of faith, still left to the reasoner all he needed to assure him of his high and certain possibility. Surely if only the God's truth would remain up- on the page while all else melted away into its fit oblivion, how would our libra- ries become shrunken, the pages nar- rowed, the lines shortened, and indeed how simple would grow our language — how few and well-chosen our words ! Nature is ever undergoing a process of crystallization, — a passing from the gas- The Bphemeris of Nature 45 eous to the liquid and from the liquid to the solid state. A common interest man to man at last bridges the span betwixt peoples and countries, assimilating lan- guage, manners, laws, religions, — truth undergoing the solidifying process from epoch to epoch. Facts that are native with the true have diffusive powers that can but multiply themselves over repub- lic and kingdom, over era and season when the conditions are matured. A new temple to the omniscient rises with every new departure in art or science stamp- ing a people's individuality upon all that follows in its wide wake, — a new sanctuary of which the man is priest and prelate. With truth at the right hand, no longer is anything incomplete or impos- sible with the hero. An epoch in science is announced here, another in art there, and still a third in music beyond ; and the eras grow shorter with the times, till the very heart of things seems not so very far off when we can so distinctly feel the pulse of nature through every member of the universal frame. The mediocre of 46 Solitarius to his Dcemon to-day would have been something praise- worthy even a century ago. The wake the most lauded genius of the times may leave plowed in the current of affairs, at best but survives the generation fol- lowing. We grow in the nature of that we feed on ; like producing like from most unlike material. Small Kantians, small Johnsons, small Boccaccios, rise up in the wake of their several masters, and proclaim themselves ; and though the in- fluence of the teacher stands brazenly ev- ident, if the man stands superior to his art, he soon casts aside the assumed garb, and the imitator becomes creator. This marks the thinker : to utilize all material within his wide reach, think everybody's thoughts and respect all earnest opinions — the saint's and the knave's ; for though all thoughts are old thoughts, with its ad- vent at the heard of a new man, it be- comes a new thought. Need we be told that what we utter in our most efficient moods is but an echo of the Chian The- ocritus, the Theban Pindar, the Boeotian Plutarch, or the Arab Avicenna? Within every true sentiment there is a spark of The Ephemeris of Nature 47 humanity, and humanity is a common factor ; it is one with all, one with God, and cannot be hoarded nor plagiarized. The refined arts and sciences have each chosen a star ; and only he that has a star for a pulpit, for a workshop, for a studio or a groove — who pedestals his great broad soul on a planet ere he dare speak and be heard — only he can dis- course the wisdom that maintains. If he cannot do this, he must remain a mere detailist — an absorber ; he cannot be a soul among souls : he must remain a mere atom among atom-kind. Humanism of the head sinks ; it is dead letter to the living spirit. Dream not the beatitudes : live them. You seek the world over for a religion, and every man shakes his head ; yet Truth goes not so far to discover it for you. Truth finds your religion in your own heart ; and greater religion is it than was ever penned or preached. Was the Garden of Eden in Ceylon as the Buddhist prophet ar- gues, or in the land of the Chaldean ? — 48 Solitarius to his D&mon what cares the devout thinker ? Has he not a very Eden in his own living heart, the grandeur and boundaries of which he has never explored, nor can through all eternity ? What cares he for the written scripture when the unwritten speaks ? — for the dead letter when the living spirit outreaches the most eloquent word with a revealing silence, the most awed relic with a more exalting conviction ? What cares he for holy sepulchres and vaunting relics, w T hose soul is a priceless jewel he well respects and honors ? What cares the larger faith whether the miracles are or are not fictions ? — whether the elder prophets were men of God, or mere gifted conjurers ? — whether Sodom fell, or Solo- mon ruled ? Verily, O Daemon, to him who bears the living Christ on a heroes heart, prate not of the dead one. A sorry soul is that which for its exalted trust depends upon arcs, altar-shrines, formu- laries and upon the barbarities of ancient ritual, — whether Adam was or was not, whether physical laws combined to per- form the attributed wonders of the past, The Ephemeris of Nature 49 or whether the result of supernatural in- tervention ? A great soul respects all, honors all , but finds a living religion in a living heart rather than in a dead and dust-encumbered fact which appeals but to the crouching and servile, rather than the erect and godlike, man. Our relig- ions, following the compelling channels of these enlarging times, become cos- mopolized ; become republicanized ; be- liberated of all over-weighing auxiliaries that awe, but inspire not ; exact, but con- form not ; crush, but repair not. Man is a walking introspection. All thought-compelling experiances bear to all other of the same series such indis- putable analogy, that the Greek values in a given truth find their way from the unconscious heart of a Saracen, and then become metamorphosed into a. thing that claims righteous lineage from the four quarters of the globe. When we are very young, O Daemon, with what rich and refined enthusiasms do our intuitions vaunt themselves! With what original 5° Solitarius to his Damon verve and flower do our entrancing, ap- plauding dreams crystallize themselves ! Yet by keeping his nose to the classics for a little season, the scholar is amazed to find his most exclusive thought now masquerading before the profane world in a Roman toga ; a little further back, regaled with a set of Mahometan whis- kers ; still further, twanging a Lydian harp, or swinging a Spartan battle-axe ; and now it has said its prayers to Baal in the valley of the Kedron ; now chewing betel-nut under the Bo-tree of Buddha ; and still again, girded most tropically in a Singhalese camboy ; or perhaps accom- panying with pathetic quiver the Japan- ese samosen at the base of the then fire- breathing Fuji. Verily, O Daemon, a sentiment is a spark of humanity ; and humanity is sacred not to one, but to all, nations and eras. A thought is a frag- men of the Rock of Ages ; come to light where it will, not to the inspired mouth that speaks it, but to the Rock whence the wild waters of eternity have struck it, does the heart of man compel his prayerful eyes to turn in gratitude, and his man- The Ephemeris of Nature 51 hood to swear upon him a nobler purpose, a purer charity and a surer faith, to the betterment of men and the dignifying of their labors. What we dreamt brought forth from the deeps of an individual heart upon this passionate and fevering mo- ment, even so dreamt the priest of Isis gazing with rapturous eyes upon the ris- ing Nile ; and the Mesopotamian hermit, in his Northern groves — each, even as we, thinking himself the first interpreter of a wise and radiant thought. We have during our youthful seeking after the truths and capacities that lie dormant in our own hearts, to creep through a most formidable mauvais pas of self-scepticism — an interregnum period when the scholar half fears to make use of the ripe and moulten thought or the apt and dignify- ing expression that brims up sparkling to the applauding lip, lest he be branded a pilferer. Then follows that gloriously regardless autumn season of maturity and indulgence when the man realizes him- self greater than his own or any man's thoughts ; what he has put himself in, 52 Solitarius to his Damon that is no longer any man's : it is he. Then has come that time when oppor- tunities are realized and honored ; when the scholar pursues conquest over all beaten and unbeaten tracks, sponge-like absorbing, assimilating, digesting, and growing ever greater in charity and pro- founder in thought in these refining in- fluences, all the while thanking the pre- siding deities that he had a Frenchman to steal from ; that Frenchman, an Arab ; that Arab, a Jew ; that Jew, a Hindu ; the Hindu, a Chinaman, — each no more culpable in his assimilation and uncon- scious repetition of the ideas of those before him, than in the unconscious rep- etition of himself. We discover a new phase of nature, and immediately brand it with a name. In our flattering tri- umphs the sign-painter's imprint obscures the - name of Nature, and the thought goes begging while its presuming dis- coverer rides his chariot. O Daemon, with what perspiring assiduity are the Ethics of Plagiarism studied by many a divine young exclusionist from whom a snail would not steal his pace. The Ephemeris of Nature 53 We look into the faces of men : are they after all the windows of the soul? Do the green, composure-speaking fields and the luxuriating forests make more manifest, or rather conceal, the hell at the heart of material nature ? That face wears the glad guise of Morning, making radiant the eyes of all beholders: what know we of the midnight of sorrow and shattered faith that condemns the heart to throb out this bitter inch-long span of eternity in confounding darkness ? That face all sparkling comedy, who dreams but cloaks down a hundred tragedies en- acted in the secret recesses of a human heart where rant the regrets of a criminal error, the remorse of some misdirected, fallen ambition, or the shame of a cruel and undevout love, sporting like taunt- ing fiends with the holiest moments of the regenerate soul ? This feature wears a triumph of heaven in its warm, com- placent look ; yet what know we of the hell smothered down in the deeps of the bosom that must feed, yet bely it ? Surely, O Daemon, the human countenance, like 54 Solitarius to his Dczmon language, is vouchsafed us to conceal, rather than to reveal, the heart. We shadow forth our faith or our doubt by a single idea, or we conceal it by another. We reveal a whole catalogue of virtues by a single act, or we conceal the only one we may possess by another. We deem this one placid, amiable, stupid even, it may be ; but suddenly some fired indignation, some high, noble and God- revealing purpose, some holy believing or profound passion, stirs the feature with an inspired mood, and forthwith those bloodless lips become purple oracles that speak with the voice of a prophet, those eyes grow prophetic, the brow austere and commanding. A moment gone we esteemed him not ; now we behold a roused and ready Titan that had slept all this time castled up in a brave man's heart, and so give honor. All things on the earth's surface may be said to be equi-distant from the sun ; so every condition of human frailty, suf- ferance, supremacy and power is virtually equi-distant from the heaven. If we recognize many above us, and at the The Ephemeris of Nature 55 same time flatter ourselves above many in the scale of man's authority and of worldly importance, we have but to con- sider the boasts and triumphs of the whole human race as they might appear to the beholding sun, and how infinitesi- mal becomes the circumference of an empire, a republic, a state, say nothing of the presuming boast of one purse, one intellect, one leverage upon the thoughts, principles and conditions of men ! Ah, good Daemon, the great man's pompous deed for the plaudits of the world, and the child's little act of spontaneous nobil- ity to the joying of one weary, grateful heart — these travel Godward side by side. The greater may despise the lesser on their journey thither; but anon the pur- ple and scarlet of the one grow heavy and are cast aside, the meagre rags of the of the other become transcendently white and beautiful, and at last the great and small pass the threshold of heaven hand- clasped, co-equal — one. O Daemon ! who shall presume precedence in this exalted tribute-bearing before Truth ! Who by 56 Solitarius to his Dcemon any vantage of condition — mental, mate- rial, temporal — shall presume in the face of a duty done ? The tribute proves the spirit ; the God whom it glorifies is no respecter of the circumstance, the person, or the condition that bears it. ' Do thou thy duty, and thou shalt in nowise be forgotten.' This is the assurance of the hero. The past is ever beholden to the man in the guise of a canonized saint. Like the shade of Socrates, it walks the earth scourged with the half-just reputa- tion of an ubiquitous visionist and a pre- suming bore that has had the good for- tune to be martyred at the climax of its useful reforms. If we poets, theorists, reformers could only be privileged to die for the cause we espouse, — just at the happiest pass of our divided popularity, at the apex of our crescendo enthusiasm, at the maturest point of vantage that skirts the border brink of decline, fall martyr to the virtue we defend ! Do we not lose half our chances of deification by living in an enlightened age ? Civil- The Ephemeris of Nature 57 ization marks the rise of the politician and the fall of the saint. Time was when if the one must have immortality at any cost, and could not write a good epic, the next best thing was to write a bad one and get killed for it. But the times have changed, O Daemon ; the poet walks abroad without shield or helmet, excit- ing no envy, inspiring no worship. Man is what man demands ; not pretence. La- bor ; not martyrdom. The nobility of the deed done ; not the servility to a promise which the coward was not man enough to fulfil, so plunges into peril and dies to save him from the curse of mediocrity. But past still in the popular eye enjoys that exalted privilege of the saint and sage of old — that of being burned at the stake and apotheosized with distinction certainly commensurate with its due. A fact becomes a gospel ; a fiction a sacred, God-witnessed truth. To-day's trifles prove gods to the future ; even as these gods in the memory were perhaps mere trifles in the eye of the past. We cherish memories with a fidelity little short of 58 Solitarius to his Daemon veneration. Anything disentangled from the poison ivy of the present sensual cir- cumstance, immediately assumes divine proportions, and so becomes a power be- neath power — a growing certitude with the years. The Ephemerides of Nature as they are written upon the broad hearts of ma- terial things, are an index to light when approached by the believing man ; an in- dex to darkness when approached by the sensual man. In her scriptures, man is a great truth ; but truth is the greater man; that is, the man fulfilling a law by stand- ing paramount to it. Obscure great- ness of spirit, like latent truth, cannot be long hidden when the tongue worthy to give it comprehending utterance has risen. Obscured and smothered Shakes- peares and Dantes and Correggios are not to be found in Missouri and Kamtchatka as might primitively have been supposed. The essential oils of heaven are too pre- cious indeed to be poured out upon the flat arras and left to enrich nothing but a handful of dry dust that renders no thanks, instead of filling to the brim the The Ephemeris of Nature 59 altar-lamp of some high sanctuary of the beautiful and true, dispelling darkness and lighting up the holy face of Nature that the beholding world can but believe. The great golden Ephemeris is always open by day and by night — the blood- writ chronicles of God, the illuminated log-book of Progress with its text of gold purer and purer as the times pro- ceed. There it lies with hugest arms out- stretched and silent eloquence surpassing beautiful, willing, entreating, beseeching the simple and confiding heart to read, ponder and be made glad. Nature is ever and forever yours. In- to the forest direct your studious steps, be a poet and a man, and she is yours. In the laboratory by midnight seek her, and she is yours again in another attitude and feature, priestess at a new altar-place to her God, and the one of yesterday is already obsolete. Nature says, Learn thou an art ; when men have taught thee all they can impart, come then to me. Learn thou a science ; and when the ways and means of commonplace fact 60 Solitarius to his Damon have blest thee material wisdom, come thou to me and learn that which tran- scends it. But if thou canst not learn thy particular duty well — canst not rise superior to mere circumstance and condi- tion, thou canst not behold me in my true presence. I shall remain forever a mere titular under-value which stands for a block of ore, a grain of wheat, a mote of dust ; but Nature to you as beholden to the prophet, I can never be. To seek me and find me as I am, thou shouldst be a man, in spirit huge as the Colossus of Rhodes at the port of Truth, with the material arts and sciences of little men and little circumstance passing out into ' the broad world beneath thee. The thinker burns all bridges be- hind him in his ascent from star to star, from truth to truth ; and those following wonder if there ever could have been a bridge at all. He was the first freedman ; and being free, was the only prophet whose nobility could rise and free others, whose republican right arm could estab- The Mphemeris of JStature 61 lish a republic in its own birthright. A thinker was the first Buddha, — the first interpreter of the 'Wheel of the Law,' the universe his temple, its God his God, the praying peaks and crouching plains his altar-place, pulpit and laboratory. The sun by noon, the stars by night give him fit alb and vestments, self-reliance his tiera of state, the clouds his incense, and a giant Thought at the heart working re- generation and accruing magnanimity and power, proving him fit for the super- most regency and voice. The thinker is a temple to the charities, where the blind and palsied of spirit may receive the complement of their incomplete natures, and where those whose lives are frag- ments may be made whole. His is that elect condition of the heart which con- strues all for the best. As there can be no light that contains not an element of darkness — since there is no light but may be outshone by a brighter ray — so to the mortal vision there can be no embodying purity without a trace of sensual taint. But, O Daemon, is it after all the power 62 Solitartus to his D anion of discerning and magnifying to eyes of others the Devil's finger-marks on the forehead of things holy that proves the presence of greatness ? Is it not rather the manly ignoring and the generous for- getting of them ? — the standing so supe- rior to, and removed from, the carnalities of the times, the taint is forgotten in the glory of the man ? Has not this last phrase become almost a self-quotation with me ? May not one with genial pro- priety while in one of his lesser moods quote the spontaneities of one of his bet- ter—one of his super-moods, as it were ? You remember our noble-natured Winah, who, for some inherited curse of his fam- ily, was condemned to wear a mark of shame on his forehead — a sort of Scarlet Letter which proclaimed him unclean to his uncommiserating world ? How did the horrified natives augur disaster and defeat in my face when I chose the des- pised but grateful Winah to pilot our elephants through the wild jungles of Ceylon ; and yet how faithful proved he to our every trust ! And remember, too, The Ephemeris of Nature 63 how at the base of Mihintali he rescued a little child from the mouth of a cheetah, but even that act of transcendent heroism washed not away the ugly scarlet stroke of the priest of the Destinies, — aye, even struck it deeper and more galling, since the child thus rescued from the gods was henceforth a thing unclean even in the eyes of its bewailing mother] But I re- warded him — bear witness, O Daemon, how reverently ! — not alone with gold and patronage, but with my love and re- spect for the solemn lesson so rudely but indelibly imparted, and even this hour, if my faithful servant lives, does he bear clinging about his swarthy neck like a ministration of good cheer in his outcast world, the little leathern case containing a piece of yellow parchment made of the glossy skin of a cobra's belly, whereon I wrote in the blood of that tiger he had slain with a single blow of a javalin, the words, which, though he never read, he certainly comprehended by the merest devotional instinct : — 64 Solitarius to his Damon I saw a tiny spot On the forehead of the sun; It was like the curse of Cain On the forehead of the sun; But the taint was soon forgot In the glory of the sun. I saw a tiny spot On the forehead of a man; It was like the curse of Cain On the forehead of the man ; But the taint was soon forgot In the glory of the man. Why persist we, O Daemon, in taking upon ourselves the sombre guise and habit of pessimism so unworthy the man and times, when the warmer, thrice more dignified and refined vestment of God- speed and good cheer — the 'hope on, hope ever' philosophy of the hero's heart and purpose — becomes so nobly the least of mortal circumstance ? We stand in relation to this resurrected and rehabilitated Buddhism as Pencecola the swimmer whose achievements have long since passed into classics, bears to the bottomless pool of Charybdis. He dove to its depths once, and quite satisfied of its horrors, could not be persuaded to repeat The Ephemeris of Nature 65 the perilous feat until the king tossed a golden cup into the black pool to tempt him : the swimmer dove, but was never seen again. Let but some mock prophet toss a glittering prize into the stagnant pools of pessimism, and with what eagerness a whole generation of young presumers leap in after it ! Bud- dhism has ruined many a good Buddhist, as theology, many a good Christian. It is so easy to be a good Christian, so difficult to be a good man. As for all the sol- vents of the problems of death and its kindred mysteries, no man was ever so enamoured of them but that sooner or later his inordinate passion was to the vital utmost realized. Yet, who can say that we solve that wonder-problem of death by dying, any more that we can solve the mysteries of life by living. But, O Daemon, I do not believe in the gloat- ing of thoughts that prematurely whiten the hairs and rib the brows of youth with furrows that speak abandonment and en- nui through the most cultured gallantries 66 Solitarius to his .D anion where the heart is not. Pessimism spiced and be-sauced to the nicest demand of the modern palate is a most delicious plaything ; but meat, drink and vitality to the starving soul, it is not. A dead lion in the lap of the great, wide-hearted To-day is at best an encumbrance when it has ceased to be a mere object-lesson for our genial superficialities. Any hon- est man's creed is worthy a honest man's respect just so far as he lives within it. When he prates of one while living up to another, he is a mere presumer, and has not the generous soul's respect for the greater soul that espouses courageously a noble but unpopular cause in the sol- emn and soldierly fulfilment of a duty. Metaphysics may analyze a religion ; but, O Daemon, it cannot found one in the arras of a dead clime, or in the heart of of the savage or the scoffer. Pessimisn may tear down a wise man's faith ; but it cannot upbuild a temple of content in the heart of a fool. Faith will probe a wound, snatching out the core of a cank- erous grief ; but pessimism would cover The Ephemeris of Nature 67 it over with dead herbs and concealing bandages, and let the smouldering fires of hell burn on an eternal curse upon the soul. Addison persists that facts are plain spoken ; tropes and figures their aversion. But are not the surest of facts but tropes and figures made manifest ? Was not Nature idea before an actuality. Facts may speak for themselves ; but it is a lying fact that withholds the name of its mother. Every fact must bear two dial-hands ; one pointing to the maternal Idea whence it proceeded, the other to that superior one of the series whither it ascends. Facts prove hypocrites in the sanctuary of the heart : profaners of holy sympathies by demanding reason where even reason is doubt in most malignant guise. Molecules of sodium have an in- tense affinity with molecules of oxygen. A flame of bright light denotes the chem- ical change. Thought reaches out into the Unseen toward the truth : a flame of light — a beacon of liberty — a star of Beth- lehem, denotes the authority of the man 68 Solitarius to his Dcetnon over all things temporal, and a promise of the superior by virtue of the result on the moment. Light ever perceives the possibility of being cast into shadow by a brighter ray ; wisdom ever perceives an ultra-wisdom just beyond and above it, — a wisdom ruling an empire which the be- holding one shall soon take in heritage. The possession of one certitude in science is but a prophet forecasting a universal possibility beyond. Being without doing is death before birth ; for ever gener- ous action is the birthplace of a new excellence of character, and in character alone are we great of heart. Whosoever waits for the temporal command to do that duty which the spirit has made im- perative, is a moral coward ; and the truth shall deny him when the hour is at hand. Nature was the first great pastoral-epic of God ; man the first drama. Each bor- rows from the other a spirit transcending the letter. The one symbolizes and re- flects the other — the material, the spirit- ual — Truth casting a radiance upon each The Ephemeris of Nature 69 which is beholden and interpreted by the other. The windows at the heart of man Nature uses to perceive her God ; and with like simplicity and trust the devout thinker through the radiating prisms of Nature — in the solemn, prophet-written Ephemeris — perceives that shadow of the eternal things which lie beyond the mere scholar's province, and therein does man's Deity in turn become assuringly manifest to him. How beautiful in all its auster- ity then has become the thinker's privi- lege to trace through all the multiplying highways of the rich and strange this republican sovereignty of Truth, and there find each waking day of progress that Omnipotence has just pressed the sods we touch with a boundless rever- ence, and has left a flaming footprint to direct our steps ere he passed on whither we plod into the doubt-misted Unknown, with eagerest eyes and a courageous trust that leaves a whole glittering world behind in its madness to overtake the divine — to encompass a single mystery 7© Solitarius to his .Damon of the hidden, the unprofaned, the tran- scendent, man — this mortality so con- sciously immortal. Even in the eye of a fly, O Daemon, is not there a footprint of Omnipotence ? Even to the least with the best of all men of all times is the ex- alted festival open. With the hermits of Engaddi, with the Magi of old, with the wranglers of the Serapion, with the gownsmen of Pergamus, with the victors of the Prytaneum, with the rugged seers of Amsterdam, — with these and many more sit we at feast, O Daemon, and growing familiar with our exalted host- ess, become so mutual each to each that tithes of worldly import avail not to part or estrange us. We need the probation of the soul beneath our dry utilities. Use becomes abuse if Nature be defiled. The seusual man shrinks from the didactic ; and yet, O patient Daemon, is is not Nature in her happiest moods, like all truth however felicitously yielding to our languid caprices and kindly appro- bations, didactic in reality though liberal in spirit ? Throughout her wide Ephem- The Ephemeris of Nature 71 eris with all the gentle amenities, that, while joying our feast, commands our esteem, is not Nature ever gowned, and cowled, and vested, and crowned, — all to the proof that the warm, angelic hand may grip a Titan into submission, or lash a scourging thunderbolt upon the refrac- tory neck of kings and subjects? All things in nature turn to light and edifi- cation through most rigorous and whole- some discipline. Every spiritual unit that combines with the material fact to make up the sublime whole of the elect man, founds a separate religion for its own, where but one mind may act as priest and laity, one thought the scrip- ture, one experiance the prophesy. Every material rite has a two-fold value when thus performed on the befitting and rev^ erential moment. 'Here is sand and an alkali : make thou a lense and snatch down Jupiter to your threshold, teaching men their insignificance ! ' ' Here is iron and a law of induction : whisper your state secrets under seas, through solid mountains and over wide plains, teaching 72 Solitarius to his Dcemon men their grandeur ! ' ' Here too is metal and a law of affinity : light your homes, transfer your powers, print your books, make slaves of your lightnings ! ' ' Com- bine — produce ; combine — produce ! ' this is the never-ceasing command. This is the dynamic law throughout the infinite series. Nature asks not ' What shall I do ? ' She simply does. She well knows that there are ten abusers to every re- specting and thankful user of all that turns to edification — to wisdom and truth by a consecrating and devout enthusiasm and a believing purpose. She knows that the logic of the mass maintains. That ten fools may make ten failures; but that ten failures may, in turn, make one fool wise. That it is not the capacity for applying successes to good uses that is difficult ; but rather the capacity for building a temple of success out of the thousand failures. That one profound, dignified and devout failure may be of more sterling worth to the world than ten thousand flattered and pompous suc- cesses. That thus between an honest fail- The Ephemeris of Nature 73 ure and real success there lies but an in- visible line which only the fool presumes to point out to an uncharitable world. That that man has ever a claim upon the eternal who does the noble deed for the nobility in the doing, leaving to mere triflers the reward of that which the vul- gar esteem success. Of that nobility no man can rob the hero ; even the failures of such an one are divine. And Nature knows, too, O Daemon, that the same mouth that puts forth the profound question, must answer it: an- swer it with a profound action. That it takes no great talent to ask the questions of a genius, but that a very god could not answer the simple question of a child without an evasion. Our very birth im- plies privilege. Eternity, we well know, O Daemon, must somewhere be rendered an equivalent for the infinite forces ex- pended in that great Somewhere in the bringing of each individual organism to life and intelligence to action, and so sus- taining them. The obligation implied in our very being — is it not then an austere 74 Solitarius to his Dcetnon and transcendent one ? Must it not be fulfilled to the exactest letter of the law ! Pretension shall not, nor shall the await- ing of the man for the coming of the cir- cumstance, compensate the eternal for the authority of our days. In nature, O Daemon, nothing seems done as long as there is left anything to complete the thing accomplished ; the last mile of the earth's circumference proves it a circle, even as the last stroke of hammer at the forge validates the first, and justifies the action. Without the circle of our lives be complete, these several arcs, quad- rants and fractions only proclaim the bungler and the coward. It is not that one, O Daemon, the circle of whose life is largest, that stands most worthy be- fore the tribunal of Truth ; but rather that one the circle of whose refined and heroic days is fullest and completest in all the sure and exact proportions that proclaim the master. With all our boast of mediums, the ancients read this log-book of Nature the The Ephemeris of Nature 75 truest, even if they did so by the light of a glow-worm instead of a blazing meteor as is our latter-day lamp. They drew their eyes down to the prophetic page so closely that not a significant value escaped them. They read with exactness, as if there might lie a hero's death-warrant between the vJtal lines. We hold the minutely-written Ephemeris at a calm distance, bringing superior side-lights and artificial mediums upon the solid oracle ; but though we read a page when they read but a single line, their's was learned by heart — lived within, and found to be a whole philosophy in a word. To them misreading and misinterpretation meant death ; to us it means nothing but incon- venience. Their one solitary line they could repeat forward, backward, scan- ning it with a poet's fervor, or laying down a law of values over every word. We can read twenty pages of this script- ure of ages daily ; but the prophetism ly- ing beneath the vital letter escapes us. The living spirit, like a fine ether pro- ceeding from the heart that lies buried 76 Solitarius to his Damon in the written word, escapes our plung- ing, feelingless senses, and we uncon- sciously rob ourselves of half the joy of the sustained humor. Human thought, as Humboldt main- tains, elaborates itself with the progress of intelligence. Elaboration into trivial- ity marks the ebb tide of all our onward- moving series of progress. One may bring a gnat so close to the eye that it takes the proportion of a behemoth to the awed beholder. A tear on the eyelid may look like an ocean to the illusioned won- derer behind it. A mote of dust may ob- scure the light of day ; a fragment, the grand whole ; a doubt, a religion to him of so small, so purblind a soul that he must needs bring the mote to the pupil to behold with even such uncertain ac- curacy. The thinker dares not take an infinitesimal part, and forgetting the grand whole, consider it as Nature's first and last. God cannot be seen through the eye of a needle. Yet how often do we meet with elders and casuists whom we dare not but respect, who gaze upon The Ephemeris of Nature 77 the visual world and judge men's ways therein as if they saw but through a long tube which magnifies not, belittles not — only deludes the beholder with the illu- sion that what he contemplates is a com- plete whole instead of an infinitely small portion of that whole. Only a large and exact mind can take a fragment and de- scribe the estimated perfection there- from : may see Homer in a single heroic line ; may behold Marco Bruno in a sin- gle portion of nature animate ; may de- fine Tintoretto in a single mellow shade of master depth ; Leif, in a map of the sea ; Rembrandt in a single etched curve ; Franklin in a single homely apothegm. Can any but a trained observer recog- nize and render due homage to divinity whenever and wherever met : in the tri- umph of a battle hero, in the deed of moral courage at the heart of a child ? Only the larger mind, O Daemon con- templates the the deed done, perceiving the heroism at the heart of it. Contem- plates the mere thought, and yet per- ceives the whole philosophy that lies 78 Solitarius to his Damon beyond it. Contemplates the beatitude, perceiving the religion that warms in its calm and revealing embrace. Only the man perceives ; the presumer, the slave, the unthinking iconoclast merely sees. One becomes enlightened ; the other, merely learned. The Ephemeris must not be read in syllables to the exclusion or the forgetting of the whole grand epic. The whole must be ever kept in mind in the contemplation of the merest detail. Truth may take up a resplendent throne upon a single mote that flies impercept- ibly in the air ; let the sunshine of a broad mind enter there, and instantly the mote and its sovereign truth become per- ceptible ; but ah, Daemon, who but a fool would flatter that mote as the one elect and solemn dwelling place of the divinity whose shadow lies upon it ? The era of over-earnestness in our utilitarianisms, — of whirlwind ethics and grinding practicalities, of madness to ends regardless of the maturing and dis- ciplining of means, of haste, waste and The Ephemeris of Nature 79 the ignoring of any philosophy of repose, — ah, good Daemon, marks this not the twilight of that wide-hearted, progressive, thought-compelling and ascendant day wherein the man is greater than his mere posseesion ? Man is the only object from which we withhold our esteem for what he is, rather than what he has. Even our dogs call forth our respect for what they are, when even our neighbors are damned for that they have not. Our honor and shame but from condition rise : most cruel turning of the poet's scripture to the dog's commonplace. Mediocrity, the meat and drink of the levelling age, is the death-warrant of the soul. It is that conventionally straight line that runs along the perilous brink of stagnation and the helpless coalescence of forces, to the crushing down of the individual man. The day that is not a constant series of hourly triumphs — a constant birth and upbuilding through the tempo- ral toward the eternal — a life not one brave, on-waging repetend of conquest, with every day a laurel for a heroism as- sured—these are the living, mal-auguring 80 Solitarhis to his Damon symbols of retrogression and death. It is — and sorely to our shame, O Daemon, — a straight line, that broad, conventional highway through the plateaus of this lat- itudinal age, that we pray to follow on with such slavish exactness of detail throughout eternity ; yet it is a straight line from success to failure — from heaven to hell. Our epochs are angles ; our distances to other angles, eras. No life has a right to proclaim itself a straight line. If the thinker's highway from the cradle to the grave were such, we should know no sciences, no arts, no spiritual economies to stimulate and freshen the more revealing man, and for these and our unforced and unforcing discipline there- in, be the less men. There is true beauty and nobility in every curve, a problem for a great soul's laboring out in every angle of our tragic condition, — a problem worthy a most cautious skill and coura- geous resolves. Man is born supple to any curve or angle the existing circum- stance may exact. Gautama's, nor So- lon's, nor Galileo's, nor John Howard's The Ephemeris of Nature 81 splendid highway to that perfection to- ward which they so devoutly labored to exalt mankind, was, or could be by the very nature of their broad achievements, a straight line. By the very brokenness of their paths were they directed and self-proven, and thus in turn became the disciplinarians of centuries. Fact as mere fact is a straight-line datum; and as such finds no record in the Ephemeris that abhors the mere titular convenience ; for only the soul that encompasses the given fact can distroy this presuming peerage of the material. 'T is said that the right- eous way is the straight and narrow one ; but presumably all corridors are straight, though the pathway to the outer port leads through many an Asian mystery and Hyrcanian wood. To live out the symbol of a straight-line absolutism at heart, is to stand dogged in the highways of better men, a passive, passionless im- potence of conformity, — a brazen crypt of too familiar usage — an extrinsic cy- pher standing for naught in itself, though but one spiritual unit before it magnifies 82 Solitarius to his Dcetnon into a ten-fold value that which before was nothing. It is only the hero that ventures from the coward's straight-line highway, seeking his courageous footing on the solid darkness, finding and assur- ing to the heart of man, that which hath not entered his mind ere this quiet, sub- duing prophet arose and proclaimed it. Who then is the elect by the oneness of his aim, by the surveillance of his op- portunities and the consecration of his days to the vitality of truth within him, to be one with the gods and one with men ? Who then bears the ' open sesame' of an angel and the language of a peas- ant ? — the soul of a saint with the lips of a child ? What limitations canst thou set upon the thinker's province, O pre- sumptuous usurer, or what duty that such an one shall not ultimately encom- pass a hundred fold ? And still think not that a great spirit must necessarily stand removed from the sufferance and sympathies of men. The power that can bind up a wound in nature, can bind up The Ephemeris of Nature 83 a little sorrow in the heart of a child ; and at every believing with things divine, is become more understanding^ one with men. Inspiration begins with humility. Arrogance and assumption have no part in the drama of truth ; they are at vari- ance with the gods, even as they are with themselves. Humility is the first degree of godship. A thousand minds are at the philos- opher's pen-point. He but remantles de- cayed kingdoms and effete monarchies of ideas with habiliments of modern vogue, regaling these skeleton prophets of de- cling systems with new temples, and ceasing to talk of wisdom as if it had not heralded the very sun and stars. The brightest truth is but the shadow of a bright soul, even as the brightest noon is called the shadow of God. Every heart is a valley of darkness which has never yet known the refulgent light of day, — never yet known more than a sort of uncertain twilight to the exploring eye of man. The lamp of perfect seeing has never reached the deeps of the man 84 Solitarius to his Damon mortal any more than of the man immor- tal. They are like the vast ravines in the Alps, the depths of which the sun never reaches. Men that are quite impervious to heat and cold, are much the same to everything else ; so closely are allied the physical and mental conditions. If noth- ing makes us suffer, nothing rouses us to very exalted action. The keenly sen- sitive organism is the one treasury of our arts and philosophies as of our pessi- misms and distrust ; it is the god in the man drawn so close to the surface that commonplace joys and griefs become magnified, and the man becomes an ex- tremist for good or for evil, as heredity and education throw the balance of pow- er. This extreme sensitiveness is alike capable of exquisite suffering and the most spiritualizing joy. Sensitive to ef- fects of certain causes, the philosopher — the eminently sensitive man — becomes equally sensitive to the causes them- selves. He experiences a period of phil- osophic gestation with every contact with a new fact bearing a principle, — contact The Ephemeris of Nature 85 which common qualities perceive not, nor can be influenced by. These thou- sand minds at the verge of every utter- ance are collaborators with him at the eternal forge, whether of to-day or of a thousand years gone. Whatever their source and lineage, they have become contemporaneous with the man with the issue of the thought, surviving all gener- ations of material record. Only then is the philosopher wholesomely indepen- dent of, and dares unrestrictedly to ig- nore with content, all abstract relations of time and place. Who but such an one dares flourish the wand of the Lydian melodist over the hills of New England ; or the rod of Hypatia over the Missouri ; or turn the Wisconsin dells into Athenian porticos ; or Idaho plains into Brahmin solitudes, — all by force of individual will ? We stand indifferent to that which no greater genius before us has made a liv- ing and inspiring influence ; but how full of awe are we before that which seems to have all eyes and mouths, inspiriting and speaking with prophet-tongues the history S6 Solitarius to his .Dcemon of one or of a nation which the centuries have honored ! Ben Lomon joys us ; Chamounix awes us ; Waterloo fires us; Corinth makes us grave ; Hebron, devo- tional ; Benares, contemplative ; Dam- bool with its solemn cave temples and tropical setting, reserved, questioning and estranged. Yet wherefore this most strained and unfructile reading of Art's enlightening by Nature? Have we not now the same Nature and the identical arts to be enlightened and enthused by the breath of the inspired man, and so in turn made histories of ? But all in vain. It is a fool's reason, and yet, O Daemon, seemingly not a most adequate one? — that Nature at my doorstep is almost wholly voiceless, while her becomingly tender and warm-hearted speech just be- yond and obscured from my own com- monplace demesne, thrills as with ten thousand tongues of richest enchantment. The truth there visible before us is the composite of many truths behind it. The Roman poet's frensy, so spontaneous to every thoughtful mind on the Tiber's The Ephemeris of Nature 87 side, will not be counterfeited on the Ohio banks. The breath of Gautama that pervades the Bo-tree of Ceylon will not exhale from the cedars of Lebenon, nor the Conqueror's oak of Windsor, nor the giant firs of the Yosemite. The voice of Paul on Mars hill, or of John on the sea-girt ledge of Patmos, will not grow articulate to the conscious heart on the Birkshire hills, or the Isle of Man. A new spirit and even a profounder per- sonality than any of these must rise and of the very sods of prairies and the arid steeps ot our uninspired commonplaces make shrines and altar-places where men may kneel and proclaim the very foot- prints of such an one a source of devout enthusiasm. A new and a great inter- preting genius must stand between man and his revered Nature, else is he blind and reluctant to the truths that are his by worthiest inheritance. Nothing has that indefinable but most certain realiz- ing power nor a language for us, that has not found a mutual tongue, — something of a reciprocal factor serving as a con- 88 Solitarius to his Dcemon necting link between the seen and the unseen, — between the tangible and the intangible — the unassuring fact and its spiritual adjunct. Forever following the inherited predilection — this spice of hero- worship which we ignore in others, yet will not argue out of our own precon- ceiving minds — we glance over the heads of the intervening epochs, contemplating the man, the nation, the divinity that illumines the horizon bounding it. And we demand, too, O Daemon, to have the triumphs of even the seventh- heaven gods brought down to human in- terest. They must be made tangible al- most to the sensuous touch to instruct our regard. To be humanity, — to breathe, ex- hale, and live humanity — all must be made human. Even the sublimest of sceneries must become personalized, the most estranged of philosophies, the most wizard-struck strain, the most star-inwov- en sonnet, the most Titan-ranting trag- edy — all are 'as sounding brass or a tink- ling cymbal ' if they receive not the pro- bation of the flesh and enter the house- The Ephemeris of Nature 89 hold of the man rather than his worship. What has Zoroaster become, translated from the Persian groves to the Massachu- setts coast ? — a mere exile estranged and imwondered. What is Buddhism on the Potomac to Buddhism under the very Delada at Kandy ? — merely a symbol that withholds its truest oracle for want of an adequate receptacle. What is Plato un- der the willow of the St. Croix to Plato under the very eaves of the Temple of the Winds? St. Paul on the plains of Utah to St. Paul on the heights of Corinth ? — and yet, O Daemon, wherefore ? Should not thought be thought — the greater rul- ing the lesser the wide world over, dis- tinguishable, definable, exact? Only om- nipotence, even in this least preternat- ural light, has the power of transporting whole empires at will, bearing on these broad shoulders over continents and seas the shrines, sanctuaries and legislatures of every age and zone, and setting them up as household gods about the hearth- stone of the extreme Occident. Such an one not only can, but must, speak : there 90 Solitarius to his Damon is no midway alternative. Talent may, or may not, be withheld, and in turn, may or may not withhold ; the mission of such an one is of secondary import in this larger current of affairs, — a second mes- sage from a source that has known a forerunner infinitely greater than he. But genius has a primal message — a di- rect proclaiming from the gods which will not be contained in the mere hollow of mortality. Such an one must and will speak, whether his audience blesses, ig- nores, honors or damns him. Talent ca- ters, and hence covets applause of those it would amuse or instruct ; genius, quite contrariwise, rarely prospers basking lion- like in this parhelion-light — this mock- sunbeam of society approval. Genius becomes, at last, a sort of never-ceasing, God-enthused monologue of passions, secret triumph and secret questionings — a splendid drama of the restless, error- haunted heart of man, merely the faint- est echoes of which break through the rugged walls that part the world from that infinite audience and player in one The Ephemeris of Nature 91 castled up in that throbbing, flaming, tragic prison-stage of a human breast. Genius loves to be heard and revered of men, even for so small a portion of its diviner evidences as finds ready medium in the labors of its hand ; but it demands no audience, if it be of the truest qual- ity, and indeed thrives best without one, unless, perchance, stern hisses com- mingle the plaudits. O Daemon, has not applause corrupted more genius than ever adversity crushed? Truth smiles equal content in the face of applauding angels and the deriding armies of the damned. What ! Daemon ; would you put a god to rout with a quill ? What! would you proffer him pap who banquets with Plato ? Socrates, Shelley, Bruno, Balzac, Wes- ley, Wordsworth, — how many perceiving, realizing, furthering respecters had these ? — how many exalting, coefficient spirits with hallowed, faith-taking love, was each privileged ? But, O Daemon, spake they not all the bolder for the very indiffer- 92 Solitarius to his Dczmon ence of the world, for the hate of parti- san, for the snarl of bigot, and the coast as conspicuously clear of adorers as of radical antagonists, the former often more disastrous to ascendant genius than the latter. A great spirit, like the overflow- ing Nile, follows into fulfilment a law be- yond all material question. It cannot be prayed down, nor cursed down, nor fought down, nor scorned down. It flows steadily on, inundating here, despoiling there the properties of a score, while en- riching yonder the soils of the ten thou- sand, ameliorating and assuring to godlier ends the adversities of a whole republic. But the heart is ever generous ; only the mind kisses conceit. The heart of man is ever true ; it is only when its pure and God-native outpourings pass through the mind and become polluted with the sen- sual thought that what bears the creden- tials of the heart works such ineffectual ends, achieving but the coward's tri- umph. The heart is ever charitable, believing, large-eyed, magnanimous ; only the organs of egotism turn carper. Man The Ephemeris of Nature 93 is all egoist till the soul is stirred ; then he becomes universalized, humanitized; a moment gone, passive, unapproachably inert, unresolved ; now, all daring to new purpose ; all nobility, valiance, manhood. The thought has become metamorphosed into an action ; the mortality into a god- likeat symbol of power and worth. Man, till the heart is stirred, is a walking whim. Now he swears he sees ; now he thinks he sees ; and now, as the processes of logic put down the mutinous whims, he thinks it quite doubtful ; and thus through all the enlightening phases nurses his disquieting self-skepticism, and finally resolving that he does not, and never did see. Ah, Daemon, what havoc will not a little reason play at the heart of a big presumption ? The mind of man is an implacable, leaping headlong contra- diction till the heart overthrows this un- worthy autocracy of a whim ; then phil- osophy gives over to faith ; arrogance, to humility ; storm, to quiet, tact, discretion and progress. 94 Solitarius to his Damon The fountain-heads of great things are magnificently small. They jet forth truth like a fine ether diffusing and col- oring all eternity to its resplendent tint. The soul, thank God, is beyond the Dev- il's fingermarks. The spirit is the mor- tal's trust fund ; it can never sink or be bankrupt. The mouth of every river of feeling is a delta. As the effluent soul proceeds from heart to mouth, is widens and catholicizes, till a single word spoken in the midnight solitude of the hermit's closet may diffuse itself over all enlight- ened areas of ages and zones, tinting all eternity with its refined and earnest quality. Buddha spoke a single word, and all the deep-mOst areas of the Kapi- lavastu were inundated. Every atom of dust, every drop of wa- ter, every native molecule of materiality is a microcosm standing as a symbol of completeness. The unit of the material universe is found in the minutest inte- gral datum ; the unit of the spiritual is in the one moment's thought, deed or word to the proving of divinity behind it. The Ephemeris of Nature 95 The eternal may lie in the latent folds of one solitary, humble, God-appealing dream of a child ; the infinite may lie like a sleeping god in the great heart- throb of one despised and crushed of men. Nothing passes the borders of of the heart that is not weighed with ex- actest beneficence and given its proper- est place and values. Every idea is a symbol of the universal Idea — the per- fection of all ideas. Geology proves granite, lime and sandstone to be the cin- ders of a vast primeval fire. Nature gives us a cubic inch of chalk, demonstrating to us a moral truth in the fact that it contains the skeletons of forty millions of once living, breathing animalculae. Ev- ery thing in nature must 4 suffer a sea- change* into a new moral idea, becoming a prophet over a certain futurity ; like the mummy of Rameses II. risen to de- liver a golden homily to the thinking age after a sea-change of three thousand years. The feeling principle is the me- diator between the varied extremes of the mind's antitheses ; the harmonizer of g6 Solitarius to his Dcemon the mind's discord ; the liberator of the subjugated thought, proving it worthy of the honor of men. It intensifies what- ever it touches ; a cubing power wholly its own making a thing of radiance of that which otherwise bears the stamp of mere commonplace. Only earnestness is thought. The province of the thinker it the all-catholicized. It is the generic formula representing the root and essen- tiality of things, the ego of all assured personality, the moving power that knows no law of statics. The first law of the ascendant series is resignation. This is the first word of the first chapter of Nature's gospel Ephemeris ; the first enlightened reading of the phases of truth which so mystify us oftentimes in the apparent transpar- ency of the moment. Resignation was the first Philosopher's stone turning all things to gold that it touched, and so proclaimed the man. Resignation was the first seed of the forbidden apple plucked in the Garden by the 'mother of all our woe.' Shift your cross upon an- The Ephemeris of Nature 97 other's shoulder : it will come back upon you when less able to bear it. Cast it to earth : you will stumble over it in the dark. Cast it into hell : it will drag you down with it. Bear it, and it will in turn bear you. There is a universal law that respects not the individual insubordina- tion — the obdurate one. Jupiter will not halt in its high orbit to answer your questions. Death, the unknown, the in- evitable — these grant no ears to argu- ment. The Pythian oracles were false. The true oracles are the unworded : the stars, the ocean, the forest, firmament, gravitation and the grave, with the great believing heart of man throbbing audibly through all and every portion of all, — these speak with a silence surpassing eloquence, answering all our praying, demanding, beseeching, defying, hoping, abandoned prayers for the light with a single word — resignation. The spark of godship in the human heart cannot be hid. Be it heaped with all corruptions of flesh and forgetfulness 98 Solitarius to his Dozmon of spirit that low-born condition is un- willing heir to, it is a portion of the God in life-trust to the heart of man, and can- not be crushed out. Choke it, smother it, heap upon it the carrion crimes or faith in false deities that mark the de- scendent race, it shall remain, and some day shall pierce this eclipsing corruption and shine forth an immortality that shall not be mistaken of its Creator. Truth has written the names of her dead lovers — Ferdusi, Alhazen, Knox, Howard, — on the very hearthstones of our mod- ern ideas. She shatters the rock and shows us one of her offerings of a thou- sand years gone, to prove that truth is imperishable. She tears down an ice- berg and shows us a mastodon, or some relic to the proof that when the poles were tropics and long before, she was there. On the white Alpine glaciers she strews the dust of other planets till the druid peaks look like scarlet-tinted beds of Paradise, — all to the solemn proof that even there Truth is, and that before all, Truth was. The Ephemeris of Nature 99 Only inaction hangs over our un- helmeted heads the curse of the prophets pendent as by a single hair. Decay as a datum of progress is the study of the true believer. Nature in decay is qualified with a sovereign interpretation when that decay has its index finger pointing toward a super-excellence. Death with all its magnified conventionalities of hor- ror, bears in the shrunken palm a creden- tial that points to the perfect man. With Nature as bounty-giver, what may not the thinking heart expect or demand ? — with Nature as interpreter, what script- ure too profound. To ask with the cry of a bat, and be answered with a thunder- bolt. To ask with the present spirit, and be answered with the prophetism of ages. To question in the demanding roar of a behemoth, to be answered with the soft breath of summer. To ask alms with a religion of rebellion, and receive a lash ; with a devout resignation, and receive a heart's-ease that shall not falter. To ask with idea, receiving a stone ; with a faith, receiving a kingdom. How majestic then Solitarius to his Damon are all these several adjustments of the Nature spiritual, O Daemon, and how true each to each and to their Sovereign ! Surely the lamp of God in a worthy pur- pose cannot be extinguished. We respect and put a hundred fold de- pendence in him who bids us ignore his support, — who proves that within our- selves lie the chiefer incentives to activ- ity — that we are our own stimulants on to authority. Church, state, politics, so- ciety — these would forever encumber the upright man with props, supports, crutch- es, balancing-poles, as if he were a crip- ple or a tight-rope walker instead of a reliant, thinking intuition. The small philosopher would put the human race to bed — make children and invalids of strong sinews and steel-firm nerves — would snatch a man from his splendid republican eminence and cradle him in puny pessimisms and flattering material- ities that commiserate his state and con- done his weaknesses, as if virtue consisted in cursing the Destinies for our vices. But the thinker is the erect temple of all The Ephemeris of Nature 101 our trust ; it is he who snatches us from these cribs of abject circumstance, and commands us to walk the craven dusts like a reasoner and a god. The progress- ive times have no tolerance for, nor mild- ness of nature in the presence of, the thou-art-nothing preacher. He holds a clammy hand of stagnation upon all these throbbing young upward-arrowed forces of the times ; he is an abomination in the face of honest absolutism and the dignity of labor. What right have I to cast a shadow in your pathway that shall frighten you into the belief that what is here merely an illusion is a mountain of adversities, a very pit of plagues, and the hell of failure lies beyond it ? What right has the most dogmatic iconoclast to put a yoke upon my neck because other men indulge him thus ? — to prop me up be- cause other men cannot stand alone ? Who calls young Endeavor a failure, calls him a traitor. Endeavor was never born to failure ; it cannot fail. The triumph of the deed is in the doing ; the triumph of life is the infinite Now. Solitarius to his Damon Nature in the very wholesome light of her eyes bears a sweet word of encour- agement for even the least of her subject lovers. Whosoever bears a humble yet all-reliant heart, a great good thought he would to enlarge into a creation, a spirit all enthusiasm, all humanity, — whosoever in this God-appealing mood lifts a calm libation to Nature, swearing her signal offices upon him, has seen her wide eyes glisten as the noon, her pulse quickened to receive and confide in him, and heard her answering word : The less than thou have done deeds of great manhood to the honor of mankind and to the glory of mankind's God. Nature holds out but a hand of charity to any consecrate effort for the betterment of condition ; all char- ity for charity — the oracle beyond price for the mere asking. Truth tries the man and loves beyond all to find him not wanting. She thrives on the Archimedes principle : weighing the crowns of king and churl, determining the corrupting, hardening alloys of each, estimating the qualities of the man by the amount of The Ephemeris of Nature 103 eternity he displaces. In every highway of the honest endeavor, noon or mid- night, tropic or pole, she is there, whis- pering assurance and applause. She bids the young heart steal out of the solitary bosom, making homes in a thousand ten- der breasts less warm, mayhap, less pure, less beautiful, and throb like a star in the abandoned deeps of that estranged and soundless nature till the dead and pas- passionless trunk be thrilled with self- realizations and self-reverence that marks the advent of a risen purpose over the darkness of a doubting and coward heart. She bids man forswear his sordid temples to the false gods, disdain the petty fore- ground, and school the refined senses upon the distance which the common eye beholds but interprets not, bringing the sharp outlines down into an active lever- age upon the immediate and the contem- porary. Truth would behold her God through the heart of man. She damns detail that would be a god, — the part that would assume the prerogatives of com- pleteness — the churl that parades in the 104 Solitarius to his Dcemon habit of a king. Truth holds religions, philosophies, systems, arts, saints, seers, dynasties, republics, — all at a rigid arm's length, dealing with them in magnificent circumferences. She beholds the whole and each individual part as a unit : one star, one beatitude, one purpose, one faith, one God. But mistake not that the true thinker kills his own reverence for the divine in the little. God is the God of the true and the beautiful wherever it is manifest. Truth is no more a respecter of dimen- sions than of persons. In a minute inte- gral portion of a grand whole may lie a large, latent truth, a complete and firmly established law, an individual identity. The thinker being no worshipper of ab- stract immensities, seeks feeling wherev- er it may be found most genuine ; truth wherever it be most natively embodied. No insect nor plant, no tint nor fossil, no melody nor couplet, but may further a great revolutionizing maintenance in the heart of the man, and so in the heart of the nation ; but all these as mere in- The Ephemeris of Nature 105 sect, mere plant, mere fossil, mere mel- ody, mere animal and vegetable repre- sentatives of the same, he casts behind him with proper indifference. They hold out for him no tempting fertilities ; no furtherances to this austere and solemn argument of life which is the thinker's province. These little substantives for completeness that weave not a new virtue into the tense fabric of our days, start not a great globe of thought on a wide and worthy orbit, or preserve a maternal truth from profane hands, cannot be as- similated to the thinker's spirit, nor be brought into focus in this synthesis of the heart. True genius is but a childlike nature- seeker from the least toward the highest — from the within outward. It is but a progressive power of assimilation in the empire of the true. Where this faculty of assimilation is natively great, there is greatness ; but where it is not, there the man counts merely as a cup-bearer of the gods, but not one with them, — a price- 106 Solitarius to his .Dcemon less coffer of sacred oils distilled from the flowers of all material creation ; but use- less indeed save to cater to the sensual. He is not that flower-producing, star- building, love-working, thought-compell- ing spirit of ascendency which the chosen one may be. The eye must contemplate all things not as created, but as creating. The genius of Humboldt, or Obermann, or Shakespeare, or Keats, passed beyond the climax of material use, and no longer beheld the visual world merely as a crea- tion but as creating, — each minute inte- gral portion of the composite whole as a multiplier of that same — an index to one of a higher spiritual value. The star, the mountain, the tree, the twilight, the fact, the passion, the fancy, — aye, the mean- est object that has an enlarging force and helps to circle out this infinite measure of things put to beneficent uses — these appeared to them as divine suggestions of something higher and infinite capable of an ethical interpretation. The thing of commonplace has become a living la- conism ; the* vulgar negative has become The Ephemeris of Nature 107 a most proper positive ; the indolent phrase, a pointed aphorism ; the silent thought, a worded prophet ; the simple babe, a profound oracle. The wings of a thousand years may fold over the eyes of such a spirit, and still it is as noonday within. The roughening contentions and the sordid animalisms of affairs of worldly retrogression may clog the deli- cate hearing and dull the exquisite pal- ate ; but still that nature within and that nature without keep up these calm and constant mutualities, and a world be- comes enlightened in the reflection of that divine flash caused by the meeting of truth and truth — the eternal with the mortal — on a realizing plane of action and influence. And, O Daemon, there is no medium of that truth which lies within and the truth that is without that can long remain hidden or obscured. The most hardened inveteracy comes soon into a condition of self-seeing which the man, but not the world, can do naught but recognize, — a position of self-knowing most wise. Truth proceeds from the with- 108 Solitarius to his Damon in outward, striking, as it were, an infin- ite series of radii from the heart of man through the circumference of the mere mortality to the heart of every living unit of the visual world. The thinker becomes, as it were, an acting and qualified nerve- centre — a most impressionable sensory ganglion — which gathers truth moment- ly from multiplied sources throughout the universal frame, combining and pro- ducing, and finding the ultimate factor therein. Truth rolls away the stone from the sepulchre of the fact, and lo ! the spirit is free. Diamonds are not found companion- ing sapphires, rubies and emeralds ; but ever alone and by nature estranged in some far-off corner of the planet. The diamond-hearted man crystallizes into lustre and worth only by slow and pa- tient process in the most estranged and retired tranquility, even ignorant of his own worth, it may be, undiscovered even to himself, till he is brought forth into the full noonday light of eras. Time to The Ephemeris of Nature 109 the diamond-hearted man is not a thing which suggests sun-dial and hour-glasses, monthly moons and natal days ; but in his ears it sounds the voice of eternity of which one moment is as good as another, so it be filled with the profits of honesty and purpose. There is no sun-dial of the gods ; man is the only pendulum of eter- nity. Time is recorded only by the do- ings of men ; there is no time to the soul ; from eternity it was, and to eternity re- mains ; the soul is eternity. To us, shall it be proven that the past and future are like friends parted on earth and re-united in the seventh circle. The honest Effort's hour is as good as any other's hour, — any man's or angel's hour. The great soul walks the earth no matter when : before, or contemporaneous with Christ, Epicte- tus, Socrates, Solon or John of Ghent, or a thousand years after the birth of this republic : what matters this ? This little span is but a hair's breadth in the chron- ology of God ; but a stroke of the pen in the history of a soul. Solitarius to his Damon Great circles demand a contact with great circles in order that each may esti- mate, and be estimated by, the other with proper recognition of the mutual quality. Only a large act is a worthy companion to a large act ; and only superior contact insures superior thinking, superior mind- values, superior refining qualities. The broader the mind, the less diffusing be- comes that concentrative power of analy- sis that we esteem intellect. The science of trivialities is forgotten in the science of the heart, — of the intuitions which are too profound to deal with aught save the principles that enclose whole empires of the merely trivial. What thinker but despises this entomology of the soul, — this pompous straining at the infinitesi- mal livers of a gnat, while the very es- tates of era on era, of world on world, of possibility on possibility, are bent down for the thinker and the man to place his foot of sovereignty upon ? The thought-atoms, soul-atoms, god-atoms, — these of the mere intellectualist become The Ephemeris of Nature transcendent under the thinker's purify- ing touch ; become thought-worlds, soul- worlds, god-worlds, — infinite, life-giving, truth-giving. O Daemon ! there are mil- lions to court the million ; but one to be the man. The whole drama of a nation, of an era, of a system, revolves about one part. The centre of any circle, however boundless, is only a point, — a throne but large enough for a single mind — for a single personality. Do thou the gods' work : let slaves do theirs. Your labor, whatsoever it be, if the heart is there, has become the god's labor. Only the slave despises the labor of his hand ; so is it but half done, the heart being ab- sent, the mind estranged, the art con- founded, the man degraded. True dig- nity loves the labor of its hand, however menial and seemingly unworthy of the moment its beginnings be. That man is king who has done his best ; the smallest deed accomplished has become in the heart of such an one, a disciplinarian to a greater virtue than is manifest in the unwilling beneficence of a prince, or the Solitarius to his Dcemon pompous charities of a churl. Only the power that performs has the true power of belief in the performed. The thirst for the infinite through all the latitudes of the finite — this is the prime and finality of the reasoner's gos- pel of affinities. The soul's very proper unrest in the exigency of the present is the very credential of progress— the very passport into the place of triumph. We all thirst for that which bears the flavor of the gods — which, melting upon our dry palates, proves the nectar of rare and ancient distillation. It is most willing and vital intoxication. Man's thirst for the divine is the prime proof of his divin- ity : higher truth seeking the highest. By this thirst are we taught that in the universality of law, nothing is fortuitous or arbitrary of God or mankind ; nothing rewardless or crownless that not so de- serves ; nothing that thinks can long re- main enslaven to common trivial cyphers, and in the calm assurance of these alone is the scrutiny of intellect in all things justified. The Ephemeris of Nature 113 To the eyes of a reasoner on this most high and native place of worship, the horizon appears denned and undissem- bled. To the mere dreamer, all is a maze and an outline : ridges, pinnacles, obelisks and cones swallowed up in the inexact glamour of a phantasy — the real presuming to wear the habit of a phan- tasm and a fiction. The dreamer sees faces and forms in clouds, on jagged- edged cliffs and intangible glooms, mis- taking them for actualities, as St. Simeon mistook for facts the merest fictions of his religious frensies. But only the clear- visioned, crystal-thinking reasoner can penetrate masses, put the ill-definable distances into character, and disclose to even idolizing worshippers the interior element of exterior illusion. These ex- tremes of the dreamer draw out the fine ductile thread of the intellect till it will not sustain its own weight, to say nothing of the divinity imposed upon it. Only a fool would attempt to ride a gossamer to battle. The thinker is but a solitary searcher ii4 Solitarius to his Dcztnon for the good and the true through this all-prevailing midnight of the mind — this twilight-land of circumstance and peril where even the most God-endued prophet sees but darkly. What though he be as one famished at times with long searching and futile endeavor, and with dulled and leaden sense, unconsciously turns marauder in the helpless abandon- ment of the hour ? What though he run down a princely thought, strips it of its jewels which he mistook in the darkness, and clothing that one in rags who wore a prince's cloak, so bring it to light ? How soon discovers he his mistake, and how willingly makes restitution a thou- sand fold ! It is none the less prince for its rags. But what if here or there in this uncertain maze of fact and philosophy, I grope into an unexplored province and there stumble upon a solitary, uncrowned but most worthy King-thought shivering in a beggar's habit — a veritable Titan wandering world-wide in nakedness and want ? — may I not be privileged to en- mantle him in purple and ermine as The Ephemeris of Nature 115 befits his state, and set him godwise upon his throne? Nothing stimulates the man as to find a sovereign thought in rags, and be privileged to befriend it as becomes him with all due reverence and respect, vaunting to himself no vantage nor hon- or save that of a duty done. What glory will not that sovereign in turn bestow upon his recognizer, his liberator, his benefactor ? The line betwixt assimila- tion and that which, for lack of an apter term, we call originality, is often too fine even for the most conscientious and re- fined perception. Indeed, good Daemon, what thought can we name that is not the amalgamation of a score of others behind it, — the product of a whole series of heroic circumstances and conditions. The line that divides assimilation and originality is beyond the placing of the exactest critic ; as on a peak of the Alps one might sit astride the apex with one foot in France, the other in Switzerland, and no man that can point the line with exactness. In truth, O Daemon, does not every n6 Solitarius to his Damon man's uttered thought lawfully become every thinker's principal without usury? Whosoever that would hold his ideas in monopoly must let them die with him unworded. Yet be assured of two things, O presuming Thinker! First, if you ever discover a truth worth the world's know- ing, or evolve a thought worth the world's thinking, the world will have it in spite of you. You can no more contain it than you can stop the constant beating of your own heart at will. You can copy- right the manner, but you cannot copy- right the man. Truth and a profound manhood behind it are one with all men and of all ages. Second, your discovered truth renounces its parental authority with the utterance. It wears your name and a semblance to your feature for a time, but soon the world forgets you in contem- plating your offspring, and the indepen- dence of the thought is forever estab- lished. Man delights in the thoughts of supe- rior men — thoughts constantly in the van of yesterday's thoughts — in advance of to- The Ephemeris of Nature 117 day's doings. In these contemplations the heart never grows old. Beauty and love keep parallel paths with this refined epi- curean of high thoughts — him whose love for the rare and delicate tracings of an incisive mind upon rare and delicate fabrics, becomes his intellectual meat, drink and rule of action. And yester- day's thought in to-day's heart becomes to-day's thought — becomes a new tri- umph and a new thought. With every new thought — every refilling of the gold- en cup of our days with a new truth — there is a new man at the flagon's brim to drink it ; and, more than that, he is a new man at heart each day he indulges his humor. The past serves a purpose ; but no man that can help it will live in the whited sepulcher of a dead day. Now is the only utterance of the heart that reaches the lips of the brave. Halt ! Retreat ! — these are the commands of the dead days and of living cowards. These are the hieroglyphics of the age of helots that gave way to the republican — the true n8 Solitarius to his Damon golden age. To waver is downfall ; the insignia of the hesitating arm is 'Death.' Ideas are refined and certain leverages upon ideas — those of thinkers dead upon those of thinkers living — but the best idea is only the shadow of a large mind. It is at best but a dead thought sepul- chered on the white parchment or in the folds of the shut and shelved classic. If you would make these dead your liv- ing thoughts, roll away the stone from this shelved sepulcher, breathe the breath of a human soul into the lifeless trunks, and they are yours to love, honor and companion you forever. So that the profoundest thinker but casts a large shadow upon your path, bid- ding you reanimate with an individual spirit that which he proffers you. It is the power of proving to us what lies in our own hearts that makes Shakespeare great. We are dead to ourselves till a spirit siezes us, pointing to us wonders that we dreamed not of — pointing to the wonders that lie in our own hearts hith- erto undiscovered. It is by proving us The Ephemeris of Nature 119 so great that men are esteemed for their greatness. Whosoever shall snatch a bright blazing meteor out of the stub- born depths of my soul, that man has be- come my benefactor — my king. I shall honor that man with a devotion sure and simple as it is pure and exalted ; I shall follow that spirit through all eternity to do him service. He has taught me the solemnity of an oath, the dignity of a purpose, — taught me that truth is not a thing abstract and removed, too much of divinity to be one with the heart of man ; but a living, compelling, surmounting god whose province is the hero's own soul, whose seal of sovereignty is his own oath to high purpose, whose words are his oracles, whose sorrow is his sorrow, whose triumph, his triumph. The great- est truth, O Daemon, is that which proves man that truth. Nature as Socrates saw it will not suf- fice me for nature as it is beholden in my eyes. It is a mere phantom — an illu- sion in the sight of this great throbbing- hearted To-day. What ! Daemon ; can Solitarius to his Damon Nature then be bound up in the parch- ment coffers of a relegated age for two thousand solemn and unlettered years? The living Ephemeris is the unwritten gospel. Nature will not consent to lie down in the damp of tombs with her most trusted and reverenced lover, inter- preter and king. She exalts him, com- forts him, honors him ; but she survives him, and setting up a fit shrine in the midst of applauding men, gives him a parting blessing, and seeks another. Now a poet, now a painter, now an astrono- mer, now an anatomist, — each in his turn her best beloved, for whom she bares the secrets of her bosom as if he were the chosen one of all her eternity of prophet- searching, and for whom she flatters the beholding world she mourns when the hour of parting is come. She hails the birth of her prophet with ten thousand trumpets, signalizes her esteem with an eloquent exordium, and follows with the most humbled the train of sackcloth and ashes when the great spirit ascends. Nature bids us learn the methods of all The Ephemeris of Nature 121 men in their approaching the truth, con- struct our own methods therefrom, and and then fortified by a reserve efficiency and emboldened by a conscious realiza- tion of the supremacy of will over every authoritative condition, seek the true for its own sake with a distinct and individ- ual heart. She would not that we seek the dead truth for its mere revivifying in the risen man — that truth which some searcher before us has left stumbling in our highway ; but a living, companion- ing, interfulgent truth shining between the darkened steeps of error-bound mor- tality — a truth that respects the man for the dignity of his approach and the inter- cipient resolve that will not be crushed of men's indifference or hate — truth that beholds the man and denies him not be- fore gods or men. Wisdom, as set forth in the gospel Ephemeris, is the power of believing so truly in the divine adjustment of things temporal that this assuring faith would conceal and ignore, rather than parade and magnify, any taint or deflection, till Solitarius to his Dcemon the object contemplated stands pure and regenerate in that the eyes of the believ- er are pure. The inscrutable faith of the man in the fidelity of a virtue should sur- vive all apparitions of evil behind it. A thought that demands the adjunct of a dead fact to prop it up in the eyes of the beholding, is unworthy the condition it aspires to. Enthusiasm which appeals to the true through any perfectible me- dium should fold the heart so completely within its own exalted sense that in the refulgent noonday of its own lamp it can- not conceive of darkness nor of any deed confederate with it. The moral nature will not lay bare like a wanton caprice the secrets of its holy ministry, nor to profane eyes become an evidence of the perfection or retrogression of a race or of an era. The deeps of a human heart cannot be sounded with a yard-stick ; the will, O Daemon, is not to be narrowed in its prerogatives by the mean possibilites of a whole nation of the merely active to to selfish ends. Who, O Daemon, would with the thin thread of our three score The Ephemeris of Nature 123 and ten proscribed and prejudged years to measure eternity ? We cannot look into the thinker's eyes and behold eter- nity, or see nature robbed of formalities — stripped of all courtly and distancing ambiguities : nay, Daemon, rather must we stand on the other side of the eyes. We must renounce our servile allegiance to our betters, taking to heart some an- cient spirit with an individual grace, and minting it into some acceptable currency. To this native intuition nothing is a sealed book which any genius before the advent of this has opened, or any extra- neous force of nature has given an age to consider or race to respect, and the man behind this intuition shrinks not to be beholden to them all. The intuitions alone are safe. The intuitions find the heart of man ever in a state of resilient conception — of being born again and again as the spirit of change and growth widen and catholicize the judgment, and as concentrate the principles that govern human action. The intuitions assume man to be the direct attribute of all that 124 Solitarius to his Dcemon prompts a spiritual resource within him, and it is from that world of feeling em- bodied as it may be perhaps in a single flower, a star, a hope, a beatitude on the lips of a child, or a lifting of ignorance from its dead and buried self — from that world all passion to holy achievement, all prophecy, single-mindedness and faith, he commands his images, and from the reflected fulness of a great spirit dares speak. Circumstances, by a law of negative necessity, are subjective to the achieve- ments of men. Man makes republics and states, establishes autocracies of sci- ence and arts, of conquest and wealth, or on the westward hurry of things progress- ive, lifts temples to new temporal gods through every enlightened season. Men make playthings for revolution ; tempt the laws of downfall and disaster, found- ing schools for the discipline of the low- born ; but there their dominion ends. All advancement beyond that line means the subversion of all before it. Circum- The Ephemeris of Nature 125 stances are the afterlings of great deeds, and do not herald them. Socrates and Hafiz, Martial, St. Beuve, were creators in the common acceptation of that sup- ple term ; but they were only creators of certain schools of circumstance which in turn became a leverage upon current af- fairs. But as creators of anything new under the sun, even these were not. We should place an aureole of living opti- mism about the forehead of every man that is daring for the good of men what the greater than he in worldly preroga- tive dares not. Hero that he is, he is more ; prophet that he is, he is more ; poet that he is, he is more : he is Man. Our religions fall ; our creeds, sciences and uncatalogued arts, give way to pro- gress till the sworn faiths of yesterday are obsolete by a thousand years ; but still beyond, beneath and superior to all, the man remains. Out of the province of words, into the realm of inspired silence ; out of the province of thought, into the realm of sympathy ; out of the province of reason, into the realm of faith 126 Solitarius to his Damon and devotion to the art that is his inter- preter : so proceeds the Godward, super- natant and believing man. Only a faith creates ; all other absolutism, all powers, and qualities that would exact such rig- orous penalties of Nature by force, as if she were a felon instead of a triumphant bounty-giver, in order that she answer the presuming cry of the sceptic and the prayer of the rational believer with one answering, — these at best combine, as- similate and combine again, on into in- finitude. Labor alone, no matter how severely concentrative, how vigorously exact or courageously sacrificing, never did an inspired deed. Genius alone, with- out this giant's aptitude for labor coupled with an integrity of purpose which will not count failure as defeat, much less. Both, however, even with the soui an atom it comparison with the physical efficiency, — labor with one giant Idea to contain and edify the man, and lo ! the bejewelled secrets of which Nature is so proudly sparing, pour into the fervent, outstretched palms of the believer in an- The Ephemeris of Nature 127 swer to his pleading. Nature flies to the threshold of the heart when the cry of the great emancipated spirit is heard through the solid darkness, — flies thither, and then most calmly enters. The trees and flowers, the seas and firmament, the deed prompted of a brave thought, and the consciousness of the presence of truth in our very commonplace midst — aye, Daemon, have these not tongues where sit the oracles discoursing beatitude long after the richest words have died on the philosopher's lips or the poet's passion ? Does not Truth take up her greatest em- pire in the wake of great words, — in the after-peal of Jove's thunders — in the aftermath of the battle-field whereon were enacted dramas audienced of ap- plauding centuries ? Nature grows most eloquent when the lips of wailing and of plaudits are stilled; when the paeans are drowned down in the hum of resumed in- dustries ; when the mourning chaunt has died on the darkness and calm that fol- lows hard in the footsteps of death. Truth heralds the achievements and re- 128 Sotitarius to his Daemon nown of the great soul, then follows king- wise in the wake of them with her high- est ministrations, her choicest apothegms, her most constant fidelities. Some minds resemble the prairies : vast levels without rise or fall, only bisected here and there by a sluggish stream, perhaps, but withal fertile, bread- giving, blood-giving, bone-giving — a na- ture all vitality of use. Another soul like the great mid-Alpine convulsions of Nature : of vast heights, unfathomable depths, wild, gorgeous, chaotic, sublime. No bread grows there ; but there is that which feeds the heart of man and of angels with a life-giving, soul-building, thought-compelling manna. It is in the crucible of nature that men are tried and found wanting or worthy. Is consciousness then the only criterian of proof to the fact that we live ? Can- not we die and still exist — burn out like the dead volcanoes on the moon, expired but still beholden to a race of beings be- yond us ? Why live out the pessimist's The Ephemeris of Nature 129 creed with all these heart-enduing days Fridays instead of warm, God-breathing Sabbaths full of sweet consecrations and brave labors in spheres which know no middle distances ? For a million anarch- ists, there is but one lifting, edifying, emancipating Soul. The world can well spare the million to save this one. Only to that one are the chimes of life not all out of melody, and the sacredest and worthiest institutions of this wholesome era of progress not all failure and shame. To the brave soul alone has the coin of our days the ring of genuineness and the stamp of republican sovereignty. To the brave soul there is a Momus window in the bosom of all things that confront him — a window into the deeps of the second being, that under-current so sub- limely removed from the profane touch of men — and there finds a nobility worth his respect and love. He is great, not for his doubt, but for his brave believing. He is wise ; but his wisdom is the wis- dom of progress by liberalizing and tol- erance. He is gifted ; but his talents are 130 Solitarius to his Dazmon the emancipating and the respecting. He shrinks from men only to endue them ; stands in awe of even his brother lest he be misinterpreted of him, — an ignobler misfortune than which, cannot befall him. His is the philosophy of peace ; not fire, and feud, and battling for the sheerest animal supremacy. He holds a divine confidence in the ultimate perfection of the refining arts which it is his challeng- ing province to defend. Only such a spirit lives ; all others bide by the strict- ures of merest existence. He alone may say with that virtual assurance of a god, 'I am!' — all that others can avail is to name their prophet and proclaim through him, ' We have ! ' What a man is, cannot be taken away from him : what he has, may be. The soul is beyond the finger-marks of evil, the impure, the destroying. Death may reach out toward it, but it is like the man straining to take the sun in his puny arms, so safe is the soul beyond the pro- fane. The soul, O Daemon, is a frag- The Ephemeris of Nature 131 ment of that Soul whence it emanated ; it shall not pass away. True enthusiasm acquires a growing appetite from that it feeds on. Its proper- est food i- never satiating, yet ever com- pensating in the highest. The seeker after the true in this infinite Ephemeris, who by these successive practices of the unformulated rites becomes a portion of the directest attributes of the infinite, so stands a living argument that man is but Nature to a surer purpose. If we had perfect vision, O Daemon, could we not see through eternity ? Can- not the perfect touch feel the undulating pulse of the very God that sits throned upon the bosom of the meanest subject of this commonplace condition wherein a profound duty has proven itself with honor ? Cannot the perfect ear intelli- gibly interpret these ' unheard melodies' that pierce not the sensual man — this nature-reading of the Ephemeris of the true and the beautiful whose language is the language of transfusion, — the Ian- 132 Solitarius to his Doemon guage of silence, of piety and prophet- ism ? Will not the higher man know a perfect interpreting medium soul to soul — a somewhat of perfect speech and ex- actest logic, with perfection in the bal- ance of forces and unison of temper? Not as now shall he be — one of an in- finite family of suns, satellites and peri- helions that cluster nightly about the wide Hearth of heaven seemingly so near one another and apparently mutual in thought and in spirit, yet in reality, part- ed as the stars, great fathomless abysms lying fate-wise betwixt heart and heart — the nearest and the dearest. Yet there is a privilege left us for which we cease not to be grateful : though we under- stand not ourselves, much less those about us, the God in all things wherever seen, heard or felt, is ours to honor, to cherish and make glad the hearts of men in our own gladness. If we see with but one eye, let it be with the eye of a god. If we speak but one tongue, let it be the language of the poet, the thinker, the prophet. If we edify but one talent, let The Ephemeris of Nature 133 it be disciplined to that refined perfection that they with ten talents shall marvel at our vast leverage upon nature and our dominion over things of great price. The world has precious need of the one developed talent, though it scorns the pre- suming genius who boasts the unschooled ten. Let the ten talents rust in the cow- ard's dead soul ; thy tried and trusted one shall rule the world. So litude There lives a tongueless God in all that feels— A silent Christ in every deed of good : A beauty but of angels understood, And him who valiantly and singly steals Upon the hearth of Nature, as reveals The cycles of her seasons. Ah, I would That through meek Midnight's sunless widowhood, Through maiden Morn and gowned Noon, as kneels The Persian to the sun, 'twere mine to swear Before the watch-fires of my solitude, That oath of oaths which only brave men dare — The oath of trust, self-faith and fortitude ; And with that vow upon me deep and dear, So follow on through death the star that I revere. Solitude 137 SECOND PAPER &0liinbs. Solitarius affirms «r_ , , , t . , that he has found Who would that he were in solitude the true 1 ■, A , ^, Philosopher's stone brave enough to read the that changes to pre- cious ore all within the Thinker's domin- ions. cryptograph of a human heart? — those mysterious pencilings in hot blood-drops, the history of lost days and these after-sunsets of joy and ambition writ upon the inmost soul, beyond the reach of profaning hand or prying eyes. There is a tragedy in the smile of every man that has passed the border-lands of a disproven love, a fallen faith, or a misdirected ambition, — a se- cret archive where may lie smothered up and smouldering in the deepmost soul, strange stage-plots and unworded dramas 138 Solitarius to his Damon fit for demigods to act and archangels to audience. O good Daemon, who would that he were brave enough to steal upon these solemn footsteps of Nature through all her darkling highways that lead down- ward through the city of the soul ? Aye, Daemon, there are hearts that know no sweet and holy Sabbaths — no fond love's holiday which betokens the truth that a warm beatitude lives and rules within; but which burn, nevertheless, a bright in- cense in their laughter and tenderest eye-glance which but conceals for a time the hideous skeleton behind the emblaz- oned altar. Ah, Daemon, what a pathetic rite is this ! — what a solemn and mysteri- ous ordinance ! Every act should have a purifying influence upon every other act ; even as the lowliest deed may often become the holiest by an inspired manner. The labor or sentiment that is not worth embodying a portion of our very religion within had better remain unconceived. It will never do more than pretend. There is a child Solitude 139 of greatness in every honest effort — a prophecy of success in every brave man's failure. Let me be lifted to-day by the devout assurances in the honesty of yes- terday's failure. A great, good endeavor is truer scripture than a thousand little deeds which, not serving as stepping- stones to a lofty principle, lie flat in the dust. Every thoughtful moment is a prophet over some hundreds to come ; every seeking for the Light is an added drop of sacred oil into our dead lamps which, when the flame at last descends, shall burn like a sun, life-giving through all eternity. The buy and sell portion of the man attains its majority at twenty one ; the mind portion rarely before forty. The soul remains in virtual infancy, — that is, cannot reach its meridian — its full noon while yet earth contains it. It must at- tain its majority somewhere on the march through the vast Beyond. It is the soul of a god in habit of a man, and only in the empire of divine things sees its full 140 Solitarius to his Damon circle of possibility. True, Chatterton at seventeen, Keats at twenty, Alexander at twenty four, Burns at twenty six, Cy- prian at twenty seven and Schiller at twenty nine were full-measured powers ; but each had attained his intellectual ma- jority rather than the spiritual one. The deeds of these were but the fragmentary chips fallen to men in the hewing of su- perior ideals — as monuments not of a la- bor done, but of the sufficiency to that which shall be unveiled beyond. The great spirit is a thermometer of the gods which the ordinary heat of adu- lation and the ordinary chill of men's contempt upon things which they under- stand not, affects not. Only the warmth of heaven, the tenderest gradations of love, the self-hatred in unfulfilled duty and influences universal have any power upon this magic mercury ; and as it rises and falls, a Truth is gladdened or a Truth is saddened. We admire and honor great intellectual resource for what it can give; we reverence a great soul not for what it Solitude 141 can give, but for what it is and cannot give. The soul and intellect often play at 'prince and peasant.' The prince, by reason of his superior prerogative, has a heavier office exacted of him than the peasant ; but the peasant's soul often puts his foot on the prince's neck. Every one that would attain a passport into the province of superior things, must, like the Truth-devoted Gautama, seek his solitary Bo-tree, and leave it not till the sublime adeptship be baptised upon him. He must turn his waking eyes to the ris- ing sun and take oath with the solemn abandonment of the man to the religion of his art that gave character to the pri- meval Brahmin in his Rohiikand jun- gle solitudes, — aye, this must he do, and well ; or the gods will seal close those truth-capable lips with the curse of eter- nal silence. Who would be created a true nobleman of Nature must stand be- fore her as one of a privileged race of non-conformists, communioning with her in a language beyond tongues, keeping up holiest vigils amid the arts beyond all 142 Solitarius to his Dcemon color, music beyond all sound, the sci- ences beyond all synthesis, — that silence oracular with which Nature is wont to discipline into godmost excellence that gifted one whose sacrifices have proven him of the most reputable quality. He must, above and beyond all abject ser- vices in the attainment of wisdom, bear a soldierly purpose religiously true to that self-faith inviolable by the bitterest condition. He must become genius, — transfused of that supreme quality of the gods, spiritually vitalized till the thought becomes emancipated from the necessi- ties of its material medium — unbound of words, unfettered of the flesh, a self- knowing, God-knowing, elective revela- tion. Feeling is that natively virgin ore rarely brought to the surface unalloyed with policy or prudery. The trained dip- lomat crushes his sympathies as too dan- gerously forbearing ; the prude would dissemble them lest she be mistaken for what she is. The hearts of most feeling persons are strata of tragic gold no Eurip- ides can mine and beat out into thin Solitude 143 leaves of poetical enchantment to qualify the million, nor any profaner genius to mint into a commoner coinage for the hoarding of coffers or the abuse of usage. One heart-throb of sorrow, O Daemon, or one fire-light of joy, — may it not steal up to heaven and point the hiding-place of a most mysterious wealth beneath the mountainous heart, that but the very al- chemy of eternity — Death, with all his dissolving mediums — discloses, qualifies, and transmutes into a truth fully intelli- gible to mankind ? The moulten gold on the heart which now and then at rarest intervals oozes a precious drop or two into the eloquent speech or more eloquent deed, — this the man himself has not the power to cool or run into such unworthy moulds that the quality be changed. It is our chief province to search out the most worthy moulds into which to run the moulten spirit of which the brave heart brims, there to cool into solid and tangible forms, — a golden deed, a golden word, a golden homily in the meanest surviving evidence of a duty 144 Solitarius to his Daemon done where the hero's heart is. Nature is constantly putting forth ques- tions for our individual answering ; we must reply, not with merely a glittering collation of substantives and open facts, but with nature again as it is within each individual possibility, and in so great a measure as it is contained by the man, and as the man, in turn, is contained by na- ture. We dare not be Hegelians in the presence of Nature ; we must be think- ers. Not mere Platonists ; but reasoners. When Nature puts the query, the answer must be nature. Another man's answer, — even a prophet's or a king's in my mouth, will not suffice. The humblest painter's native effort is a better answer to his Nature's questionings than a most skilful pseudo-Raphael. We dare not be Buddha's second-thought, nor Mozart's second-hearing in this exalted presence ; we dare not merely answer question with question : we must answer it with man. Nature ever demands of us to be nature ; then easy indeed becomes it to think na- ture, act nature and talk nature, — and be Solitude 145 esteemed poet, prophet, philosopher as worthily proves the mood. For Who would play well the painter's part, Must be — thought, act and feeling — Art. Be poet, prophet, king, who can; Be manhood first: then be the man. Every soul is a concave mirror to every other soul, — a sort of reflecting telescope most refined and exact, by which may be brought nearer earth for man's edification, the truths of the God in whose image he is. We determine with exactness the orbit of our own souls by looking into other men's eyes and ways, and we wear the record of retrogression or advance upon our open brows where It may be neither mistaken or gainsaid. We approach our own selves in reality more than another when we confess for the sweet sake of confession some ambi- tion, doubt, or faith, thus lighting our- selves out of the darkness by lighting others. By exhorting are we ourselves most exhorted ; by teaching, taught ; and by pouring a warm libation of reliance and faith into some stranger heart are our own right arms stimulated and our scepticisms overthrown. 146 Solitarius to his Damon Every man seeks that nature from which his own in coming in contact will rebound with the strongest resilience. Likes rebound upon dislikes ; positive upon negative ; the affinity upon its most radical opposite. Action equals reaction in a contrary direction, — a law of spirit- uality as well as of physics. There must first be a datum of interest, perhaps, but this soon becomes sympathy, and these opposite temperaments then find in each other a wholesome rebounding place. Poets in geometricians, composers in logicians, find fast friends when once the respect is mutual. Power realizes itself only by coming in contact with opposites. A lymphatic temperament may with a simple touch of the hand, quiet a fever in an exquisite, reed-like predominence. Love proves itself by crushing hatred ; and the good is never so good as face to face with evil and a world at stake in the balance behind them. In your life-work you serve an ap- prenticeship of four years and are then Solitude 147 accounted an adept. You can box a compass, or set nonpareil, or determine ohms resistence, or swing a sythe ; but think you the apprenticeships of all men are as yours ? Not so. Here is one whose three score and ten of labor and rigorous self-denial is as a single year of your apprenticeship, and even this is all Truth exacted of him. He shall not attain his adeptship here and he knows it well. Are there not other knowledges beyond those wondered of men ? — other disciplinarians than those of mere want and will? — other spheres of power into which some poor aspirant of to-day shall lift himself after an apprecticeship of some thousand years? 'Who was he?' is the universal demand. 'The doer of a little benefaction ; the writer of a par- lor epic ; the preacher of a country flock where sufferance is the only homily that avails.' 'It is well!' cries Convention. 1 But who then was this one, to whom all men were as strangers ? — to whom the most august setting of the temporal man — the most propitious robing of our con- dition of sorrow with the glamor of sov- 148 Solitarius to his Damon ereignty — was as a fetter and a snare ? — who then was he ? ' ' Ah, we knew him not;' comes the reply. 'That man, tho* one among us, was not one with us. We knew his ways, his haunts, his home, his properties ; but as for the man, we knew him not. He held his face against the stars and listened. He questioned the forests and the flowers, and even they an- swered him. He touched the sea and it shuddered. He communed with the dead and the yet unborn ; and they called him Brother. He dwelt in the ashes of dead em- pires, and made playthings of republics yet to be. In what the world esteems living, his life was a gigantic failure ; yet, in- terpreted aright, it was one wide-waging inspired and godlikest revelation. These three score and ten were as an inch-long span in the eternity of that man's labor. A hundred years are but the apprentice- ship of such a soul, so incomparably vast is the circumference of its truth. He was too honest in the pursuance of a godlike task to be accounted a success according to the standards by which men adjudge Solitude 149 men in the superficial arts. What ! would you put him to grinding at the Gizan mill whose faith and fortitude could remove mountains ? Gone then indeed is that wide spirit, leaving no finished la- bor? — no tangible trace upon the con- temporary times that shall conquer man's unbelief in man in aught save the deed done ? A life lost ? — the God mocked ? — a triumph dethroned ? But what know you of him then, being so ignorant of his very thought ? How call you any man's mission save your own, a failure or suc- cess ? The soul will not be compelled in- to foreign channels : it compels. It chooses not : it has but one choice. It is its own profession, vocation, avocation, and creed. It is its own sanctuary, work- shop, altar, and forge. The soul is truth discovering itself. Such an one then is willing indeed to be accounted a failure among men ; yes, even an undoer rather than a doer of the deeds esteemed of mortals. But he labors nobly on, believing in this labor of his solitary days, trusting, confiding, faithful 150 Solitarius to his Dcemon to the end. Who dares say such a faith shall not be rewarded, and that for the labor of so much watching his star shall not appear? A religion of expansion, a life all consecrate to effort, a reliance in the right arm of self — with these serves he his bond-slave's probation-time, and then — death. What! is this the end of a great endeavor ? But the calm answer comes over the threshold of heaven : Men, I have not lifted you as I endeavored, but I shall yet lift angels. My failure of earth shall prove a prophecy of my suc- cess of heaven. I have done duty to a far nobler law than yours. You call me ' fool :' the gods shall yet call me ' Brother.' Our exact nearness or remove from the great sun of Truth, the absolute cir- cumference of our meridian, and the pos- itive and negative values of our celestial movements, we determine, in a measure, by regarding men and their respect for our achievements. The world's eyes are telescopes by which we may bring our own souls into understanding reach. The Solitude 151 elixir we brew in our bosoms to intoxi- cate others, first intoxicates ourselves; and in edifying men, we are thrice edi- fied. Our honest moments are produc- tive of deeds which have a tremendous resilience. They come back after a time like carrier-pigeons, bearing good cheer and blessed tidings from afar. The soul, like a vast amphitheatre of passions, powers, sacrifices and the ex- tremes of feeling, has many entrances ; it has but one exit. An idea, a person, a beatitude, a trope, — anything indeed of fancy or of fact — these may enter solus or in companies ; for a season they perform their several roles — tragic, comic, pas- toral — but there is but a single exit for them all. We live out yearly more epics of love and heroism than Ovid or Ariosto could put to adequate eloquence in a century. Our very commonplace days are heroic poems in which some love, some hope, some daring to be brave and beautiful within hath challenged the whole history of heaven to overawe. We 152 Solitarius to his Dcsmon are living, God-struck harps, the uncon- scious music of which often startles our- selves and proves our worthiness. Men in their spiritual attitude are a hundred removes from men though but one re- move from God. The paradox of mere season and temperament is irrelevant in the truer argument of nature. Some of us at birth are plunged into cold oil or water, so to speak, and are tempered so hard that the smart blow of a common circumstance would shatter the brittle, unyielding mettle. John Keats and Kirk White were of this exquisite fragility ; they were only half annealed. Zeno, Ly- curgus and Schopenhauer, cooled into rugged maturity by slow process ; but malleable iron will not do for watch- springs. We rise like the Cyprian god- dess from the sea of eternity, like unto like, power unto power, man unto men ; uniformity ends there, and the individu- al ascends assuming his prerogative, and for the first becomes truth before the province he enters, Solitude 153 Every generation produces men with a sort of acutely critical instinct toward superior things, who collate great factors and gather the leading data of some uni- versal law, forming a series the unknown quantity of which they cannot solve. This unknown quantity is the elect prov- ince of genius. The former are mere mind-readers, fact-readers, nation-read- ers ; the letter, mind-makers, fact-makers, nation-makers. Both live lives of dual personality, one on the surface of his own and other minds, the other deep in the heart of hearts in the man and nation oi men. The intellect has therein but the second right to speak ; for in nature the soul is king, and in this formal court all should be silence when the sovereign speaks. Truth like the goddesses of the upper Thessalian groves, is not to be enchanted into a crowd. The Philosopher's stone is hers, and by it all is turned to virgin gold that she touches and dignifies. We are the subjects and yielders, masters be- neath mastery, living, breathing truisms 154 Solitarius to his Daemon which have so prime an exercise in the fulfilment of her law. This solitude performs ; all else deforms. The philos- ophy of severe detail is our yoke. The pessimisms of the trivial usurping the sacredest of soils and making birth worth, undoing our profoundest dogmas or oblit- erating our formalest beliefs, — these are the results of an intemperate herding propensity. Truth would redeem us from all this, — would drive us into seclu- sion, requiring us to think instead of com- pelling others to do our thinking for us. How shrinks the thinker from the pic- ture, the sonnet, the melody, the man, that seems to think for him rather than com- pelling thought ! When a book does my thinking, — when it ceases to demand of me to read between the lines for the tru- est truth, it is cast aside. The best of books are valuable merely for their im- mense suggestiveness. Only to a poet is true poetry intelligible. The thinker speaks only to thinkers ; the philosopher has no audience save those whom nature has endowed with that same spirit in a Solitude 155 greater or less degree. There should stand an invisible yet evident prophet of divinity between every written couplet ; else what purports to be truth is trivial and unworthy. But nothing is rarer than the soli- tary non-conformist, as nothing indeed is so rare — considering that w T e cannot for a moment cease thinking — as pure, re- fined and direct thought. The thinker is a sovereign anomaly. He must stand without the circle, a unit one and apart, and be no book's, no creed's, no system's, parasite. These cannot contain him ; he contains them and more, or the truth is forever denied him. If a god offered to do his thinking for him, he would shun him when the time came. He with- in whom truth abides, will not exchange his humble moments for an angel's. His thoughts are his own, his labor distinct, his influences individual, his duty ful- filled : his heaven. Though they may be but the thoughts of a child compared With a god's, they are wholly his ; and 156 Solitarius to his .Dcemon from thence he aspires upward. Nature esteems the thinker. His quest is an- swered in solitude where that still, small voice of inspiration is magnified like a watchman's far cry at midnight. The world without is deaf, dead, and so re- wardless. By solitude Creation first gave oath. By divine laws of removal alone the clouds hold their lightnings and the stars their orbits. The cry of the intellect to- day is ten fold bitterer than in that sunk- en era of Erasmus and Chrysostom : — ' More Light ! more time ! ' — for this is a century of absorption in the dismembered details of all arts and religions, — the wrenching of vast units into their infin- ite factors, making a deity of each defin- itive molecule or atom. The larger faith's prayer is no longer heard, — that prayer to be delivered from this Philistine yoke of the superficial, — from this slavery to the extrinsic little ; the prayer for soli- tude with its wide, non-adjacent circum- ferences and nobler theorems for the Solitude 157 man's solution ; the prayer to be delivered from these distracting loadstones of the trivial which gather such huge bulks of refuse fact and relegated superstition in the upward highways of the constant soul. Alhazen discovered the terrestrial law of gravitation. Newton discovered this law to be a celestial one, — an appli- cation profounder than the discovery. He applied a large law to a larger use. Such was the tendency and fruit of the solitary age. We would have applied that Arab's law to the heart of a spider rather than a planet. Such is the ten- dency of the social age ; such is the mood of the critical, the statistical, the levelling, and the essentially material era. And, too, O Daemon, believ'st not that there is many a soul of profound and sterling resource withering away in a garret, whom God's honest sunshine bronzing his pale brows would soon prove a veritable god in the ragged habit of a mendicant? The soul cannot see by candle-light ; the great summer noonday sun is barely lamp enough. The social 158 Solitarius to his Damon scriptures as written on the forehead of the contemporary times is lighted up by galvanic flash-lights, artificial glamors, and flattering aureolas, hot, passionful, fleshy. But by these, O Daemon, has yet one solitary soul been lighted out of the darkness of his own perturbing igno- rance and folly ? Light thy lamp in the forest, in the vales, on the mountain tops, and here return to give light. The cities with their crowds and turmoils, — these know no days ; they are at best but neb- ular daybreaks melting into solemn twi- lights without a noon. The zenith is ob- scured, the sun in the sackcloth and ashes of a seemingly universal penance-time, the heart of man estranged, his footstep bold in its suffering uncertainty. The real noon by which Nature and the throb- bing heart of man lay bare their holiest oracles, — Truth beholden to her truer self, and the man at last proven superior to all mortality — this divine, thought- ripening, faith-ripening, soul-ripening, noontide is to be found only in the re- poseful fields and patriarchal woods, un- Solitude 159 der the unclouded, quiet, God-blessed skies. Only in the dream-maturing soli- tudes does the great sun bear a mother's warmth in the confiding embrace of its radiance and peace. Everywhere else, good Doemon, it serves as mere commer- cial food and marketable convenience, to be bought and sold, and held in bondage or monopoly. It is by keeping their eyes perpetu- ally upon the ground that makes men crawl. There have been but a few in chains that have kept their eyes on the full, free heavens ; but even these were martyred for the courage. Were we not lifted off four legs and set upon two that we might look the clear, blue heav- ens squarer in the face ? Only the brute's head hangs coward from the trunk ; the man's surmounts it. Nature's first law is rotation. She revolves, but the centre ever remains the same. She casts aside whatever impedes her pro- gress, even as a great spirit the nice dis- tinctions of the small casuist, remedies 160 Solitarius to his D anion all her diseases of stagnation with a sweeping arm of conquest, and proceeds without a halt. Greater questions of right and wrong are answered by the ad- vancing deeds of great and nobly-pur- posed men than by the winnowing sub- tilties of the exact casuist. Mankind has ever been entranced by the spell of a great action. The man of deeds does not expound nor theorize upon the nature of evil : he crushes it. 'Can you solve this problem?' demands the casuist. 'No; but while you have been vainly striving toward an impossible point, I have ac- complished ten good deeds for the better- ing of men.' Who cannot expound the metaphysics of right and wrong may still be able to purge and purify a whole devils' household. He may pry apart the ribs of a fallacy and let the light of heav- en into the deeps of hell till a thousand fiends are vanquished. Tell me? hast done one good deed amid all thy thun- derings through the darkness for the light which dawns not ? Solitude 161 The ancients found the venerable woods and patriarchal mountains enjoy- ing a perpetual youth. No manifesta- tion of the unseen God in the beautiful and true could seem to them antiquated scripture. It was essentially of to-day. No truth was old, even if the oracle had waited ten thousand years for its inter- preter. Cannot they of prophet's know- ing behold an ocean in a rain-drop ? see in the babe's clear eyes a God ? ' Mission' is the watchword of the soul. It is writ- ten in blood-drops on the forehead of the man. The religion that teaches it not, the philosophy that implies it not, the science that commands it not, is dross and corruption. No man with his mission unperformed has a right to seek content. For with mind comes power ; with power, care ; with care, virility. But death with the mission implied in our birth well performed, is far better than life for the living's sake. Men compute life upon their fingers. They say such and such a candle will burn out in so many days or years, con- 162 Solitarius to his Dcemon ceiving not that from time incomputable it has been lighted, and to time incom- putable it shall so remain. The soul is a torch lighted at the beginning ; it shall not cease. It passes through dark and uncertain passage-ways, strange and illim- table chambers of eternity, one of which we please to call 'life,' but it passes out again, and lights up another dark avenue of the great Beyond. Here then have we entered merely an obscure portico of the temple of divine things. We advance through the darkness toward the superior. Man is but a portal-way to the higher man ; death but the threshold into an- other chamber where the God in ail things of beauty and of truth is more manifest and assured. Then let us hold our torches high ; for it is the province and duty of every soul to cast a radiant and enlarging influence upon its contem- poraries and so be proved worthy. How mere mortality shrinks back to its handful of dust at the naming of its God ! How the span of our imperious three score shrivels to a mote, the eulo- Solitude 1 6$ giums of a million dead to a tear-drop, and the deeds of the least and best as if recorded on the inner walls of a mustard seed when the name of Truth is let fall from the mouth of universal space, and all is silence. Arise ! arise ! and prove your birthright true. This then is the voice of the eternal. We want no depth of abstract knowledge, no vast experi- ances, no bizarre formulas, nor need we pose as heroes of a hundred wars, nor princes of a hundred empires of fact or of fortune, to know our honest duty. Only duty dares ; all else dreams about it. The undevout and witted utilitarian, all sensuality, all egoism, at best is but a harper upon that inefficient, devil's doc- trine of use. The man of duty is a crier down of abuse and is the larger man. Use is the watchword of Nature's hus- bandry, and all her constituents serve a vast and multitudinous office ; but Na- ture was feeling before she was fact ; first sympathy, then synthesis ; a revela- tion before a concrete factor. The soul shall not be eclipsed by the presumption 164 Solitarius to his Damon of temporal things, nor shall it be hid be- neath the silver circumference of a dollar or its purchase. It shall not be disenti- tled by monetary nor factional presum- ing. Arise ! young soul, or be forever fallen. Every man has a mountain pinnacle over his very heart, upon which at cer- tain exalted intervals and by proving himself worthy, it is his divine privilege to ascend and to survey whatever the best of the present or past have beheld and for man's edification interpreted. There alone may he cry his 'open sesame' to the closed portals of the infinite, and see the gates where have entered seers and patriarchs before him, parted to hi- desire. He may there perfect for him- self a complete individual microcosm of which he is soul and centre, and may ad- just all distances to his own spiritual fo- cus. No man sees the same rainbow that his brother at his side sees. There is an individual rainbow for every eye that beholds and respects it, The truths Solitude 165 that found in Socrates a new interpreter, find that same in you. Your rainbow is as full of the godlike as the Magian's. With the advent of every man there is a new nature, new universe, new God. Who dares say that Plato's rainbow out- shone yours ? If you cannot behold his, neither can he yours. Thoughts under- go a continual metamorphosis from climate to climate, from plain to plain and age to age. The oriental proverb finds its way into the heart and out of the rugged mouth of the Nevada miner. The Icelander's metaphors traverse the trop- ics, having exchanged its garb of ice for a garland of flowers. I own a grand debt to Alhazan ; but he in turn owes it to Euripides ; and he to Zoroaster ; and this Persian to She-king ; and this Chi- naman to another perhaps. We must go back to the Pleistocene age to render thanks for some of our thoughts. But by its birth in your heart and my heart every ennobling impulse become new, and the embodied God whence it pro- ceeds becomes a new and a personal deity 1 66 Solitarius to his Damon for the quickening of the dead and corrupt- ible flesh. So is it that for my thoughts I owe no man a greater debt than he owes some one else, and the last mind of the infinite series must pay it back to Nature with all the accumulated usury. Every good is prolific of that same. Truth cannot remain sterile, for what- ever attitude or assumption it may take it is ever and forever a repetend of that same throughout eternity. There is no hybrid truth in God's ethics. From the seed beatitude comes forth the tree beat- itude, whether reared in the social circle or in the hermit's solitude, so long as it is over the cradle of some righteous en- deavor. A single word may herald an army of ideas ; a single deed a multitude of reforms ; a thought a hundred data ; a datum a philosophy. Everything of action is the centre of a tremendous in- tellectual and spiritual area. From each portion of nature active, radii extend in- finitely through every other throughout the series ; the circumference is God, its Solitude 167 centre is the true. As a good is procrea- tive so is it worthy, and only so. Even the gods prove themselves by constant con- quest. And there are a few questions which, by whatsoever lamp of reason or ignis fatuus of blind presumption we read the history of the human heart, present them- selves for our individual solving, and from which there is no trapway of escape nor brother's shoulder at hand whereon they may be shifted. Whether w T e will or not, problems which unbody the spirit and embody a portion of the eternal, questions of the aye and nay of the fu- ture, of soul and idea, thrust themselves upon us, which shall either on this or the other brim of that disillusioning cup, be answered once and forever. The lapses of the indolent, the lost days, the unre- plenished years swallowed up in the soph, ist's empiricism and sufficiency — these are the devil's sabbaths — the dabbler's holi- days. Every ignoble thought displaces a hundred noble ones. With the advent, too, of every virtue on the darkened 1 68 Solitarius to his Damon heart, a hundred fiends are vanquished. Truths are compact ; a hundred may- crowd down in one corner of the heart where a single lie will displace it. The false must need inflate itself ; a single unworthy ambition will distend itself till it fills with corruption the space of many a godly, sober aspiration. Every poor article like every poor thought, crowds down a worthy one. A bad painting unfit for the altars of Baal, crowds down a noble work of art worthy the shrine of Vesta. The curse of honest art, honest science, honest religion, is dilettanteism — this pastime art, this pas- time writing of books, pastime besmat- tering of dignified music, pastime relig- ion and the forcing insincerities — all of which raises the dusts of damnation in the eyes of that brave believer who lays down his life that the purpose of his heart and the labor of his hand may live to honor and edify mankind. The dab- bler must be suppressed ; the trifler must cease. There is but one true inspiration to true and exalted labor ; duty toward Solitude 169 others. The gratification of a vanity, de- sire to awe, the time-killing quality, — these can but babble ; the exercise of these marks the decay of the sublime. But the sublime shall not die so long as the heart of man is moved to nobler things by the power of pen, or brush, or harpstring, — stirred more profoundly to braver action than by the influence of purse or the brutalities of sword and violence. There are unmistakable evi- dences of sincerity in the crudest prod- ucts of the honest heart. They cannot be mistaken nor gainsaid. But the disen- titled harlequin, — the usurping trifler who presumes upon the birthright of worthier men, who steals into the arena masked in illusion and armed with a trumpet to capture by fright the lion he dare not face with a bare bosom and a sword — this one shall not maintain. 'Who then shall we encourage?' is the common query. The sincere man and only him. Whatever the failures of the sincere man, he should be devoutly encouraged, and for his valiance hon- 170 Solitarius to his Dcemon ored. He has not his eyes upon the achievement of to-day ; it is the deed that it heralds — the deed of twenty years hence, toward which this one serves as a meek stepping-stone. If he be faith- ful to his purpose, constant to the God of that enthusiasm which proves him chosen to the fulfilment of that devout ideal, whatever his errors, whatever his failures, he is a rare man ; for selfishness is not in him, and such an one is a giant factor for the good in this era of doubt and duplicity that maintains with the heathen gods: 'Self is the God of self.' He alone is master, republican, king ; and what is greater than saint, seer, or sovereign — a man. When that one of large and exact ideals shall have passed the climax of his art, then and then only shall he covet and seek the judgments of men. Then will the opinions of critics appear of true gravity ; then will it be fatal to know and realize one's life-labor lost. Now while he is but a child in his art and the man's strong heart as yet only lisps and mur- Solitude 171 murs, all the strictures and carping of Christendom shall sound but as malicious prattle in his ears. They only prod him on who damn him. They only wrap him closer within himself, only prove solitude more worthy him, his faith more assured, his purpose more consecrate. But one day shall this child wield the sword of a man, preach the art of a man, dream the dreams of a man, and do the deeds of a man. Then shall the honest critic's words sound like oracles and serve as dial-hands pointing to the truth, fixing his place among heroes and so exalting him, or proving upon his helpless, aban- doned soul the hell of a labor lost. The greater the reach and circumfer- ence of the soul, the longer it requires to discover, and in its full province, real- ize itself. Men are ever judged at their best. Mediocrity is the callous grown like a devil's armor round the heart, impene- trable to any lifting enthusiasms. It is the smoked glass before the inner, surer sight — the ball and chain which would 172 Solitarius to his Damon keep the unit within the multiplicity, the smothering of the divine spark in the ashes of other's failure and other's con- tempt. Mediocrity is the warmth of the great sun swollowed up in the universal chill; the divine union — that pearl of great price — dropped into the diluting liquor of society and thus can be poured from place to place, receptacle to recep- tacle, nationality to nationality as pleases the. giant hybrid of convention. Why will we not labor on with God and duty in the foreground and men in the dis- tance, instead of men in the foreground, God set aside in the farthermost, and selfism the lamp of our progress ? Why demand we to feel the breath and touch of something tangible upon our cheeks ere we believe ? We are dilutions, not concentrations ; we are fractions, not integers ; we are mere automatons, not men. What then is the final recompense? Self-ostracism from the city of our spirit- ual birth ; a hatred of our own thought ; a fear of solitude and abandonment to this acute malady which springs from Solitude 173 over-consociality ; a chimera eclipsing a certitude, and a hanging upon the lips of the profane oracle though we hang by the neck and perish. Who then is brave enough to inter- pret the divine apothegm of Truth as it is writ on the foreheads of man and nature in this era of wit-worship, super- ficiality, irreverence and caprice ? Who will stand forth and emancipate the heart from its bonded restringency ? — pay off the soul's debt with a soul and let hu- manity pay God with humanity? That man shall be the first freedman of the era. He shall herald a new faith in things un- seen ; a monitor of the feeling and the felt rather than a demander of analysis and mere fact-values ; a philosopher of the heart rather than the mind, — the first re- posing place of all our whirlwind ethics in this mad reign of flesh and material- ity. He will speak and be heard when all others shall remain silent. The world and its lovers cannot crush nor conceal such an one ; he will stand up and do. 174 Solitarius to his Damon The silent man is a parenthetical clause in the histories of men and action. He is a relic of a forgotten, gainless era, — the phantom of a dead and buried race. He is a mere automaton of digestion which does not produce vitality, blood, sinew and thought. He dips his pen in the dews and his little oracle fades away when the sun rises. The silent man — and by him is meant the cow 7 ard tongue- less of deed or word — is not a forcer of the tide of affairs, but is headlong afloat upon it like a carrion hulk, — a piece of human driftwood cast from the eminence it Was found so unworthy to maintain ; when he ceases, the tide flows on without him. The curse of curses is : to be for- gotten ; but only the coward is forgotten. He forgot others while he lived ; they forgot him when the grave stands be- tween. And this is just ; this is compen- satory. Would the man who had done the dog's labor demand more than the dog's price ? What dog would ask a man's? — and yet cowards there are who Solitude 175 demand the reward of a god for the work of a fool. Then who ascends not, descends ; who aspires not, retires ; and better so. Let him not clog the narrow ways, rais- ing dust in the eyes of honester, soberer men, and so adding crime to cowardice. The heart of man to-day so free of action and purpose, to-morrow will be smoth- ered up by the narrowness of its prison- house. Evolution and progression there- in are the end of a beginning ; but silence and mediocrity, the beginning of the end. We are permitted to stand in rela- tion to nature even on the footholds of angels, though their radii overlap ours a thousand fold. Even so we may to- day mount the Rostra Julia, though our Rome be not Cicero's Rome, nor our el- oquence Cicero's eloquence. We may walk the porticos of Athens, or discourse logic from the steps of the Parthenon, even though our wit match not Aris- 176 Solitarius to his Damon totle's, nor our rhapsody challenge that of ^Eschylus. The Cumsean oracle, the court of Hypatia, the hearthstone of Lati- mer, the lamp and tower of Galileo, the cloak of John Knox, — these are emi- nences where we may gather a world as audience still, even though our words be not their words ; for the spirit remains, and the habit and sceptre of their state descend in heritage awaiting the worthy one. We may stand on the identical centre of the circles of the greatest and least, though the common eye looks in vain into the dim distance to descry a star, and seine all its little eternity for a new law or principle. The centre is ours though our horizons be as the sailor's at sea — only nineteen miles — while theirs is incommensurable. Mere mind has but the preserving power ; not the spontaneous, not the dif- fusing. Only the soul when a noble qual- ity has proceeded from it, may feel as felt the Christ when he perceived that a virtue had passed forth from him with Solitude 177 the touch of a woman's hand at the hem of his garment. Every good must feel something of a maternal love ere it has half fulfilled its mission, — must see a whole household of its own clustered confidingly about it, the grateful offspring of its nature — its own flesh, blood, and nobility. To the realizing eye the whole commandant heavens are tapestried like a Parsee temple, in the solemn nave of which stands the font of eternal fire — that calm beacon of Truth imperishable — and around it cluster all the priests and laymen of nature in attitudes of rev- erence and silent, unutterable prayer. Every heart, O Daemon, like the old Puritan churches, has a door at the North end marked, "For Devils Only!" The bright sun never shines there, nor over its threshold does ever a pure thought presume to trespass. Ah, what a tragic and solemn little portal is this, in many a heart sealed and barred forever, and in many a heart kept swinging to and fro, in response to many exits and many en- 178 Solitarius to his Damon trances, — aye, mayhap barely hanging by the worn and rusty hinges, soon to fall to the ground and rot, leaving an ugly black gap on the heart where the now familiar fiends may pass confidently in and out without even the formality of a knock. And, O Daemon, do not they that enter at that hidden door often bring the costliest offerings to the altar-place of Truth, singing the loudest paeans, pro- claiming their wrongs and suffrages in the most eloquent prayers, aweing the prostrate world, though that calm and imperturbable goddess interprets well ? Truth knows tha bribe of plumed pre- sumption from the holy mite of the calm, heroic, God-appealing endeavor. Poor old Miles Coverdale maintained with a vigor deliciously redolent with the spirit of those credent times, that men who die with their faces to the North, shall rise in darkness ; while those that die facing the South shall rise in light. Poor heavens at best are those that man would reward his fellow-elect in recompense for the ache and moil of his faithful years. But Solitude 179 man's North may yet prove to be Nature's South : the curst of men, the elect of the gods. Who can point the North as it appears from heaven ? Who pre- sumes to take upon him the task of pointing out in the million, the man ? Fool is he that would judge any honest and obedient purpose. May not the de- spised of men, O Daemon, yet prove him- self the one chosen of Truth ? May not this negative rise and proclaim itself a positive ? — this denial, an approval ? — this repudiation of mankind, a pred- ication of angels ? He whose confident heart brims with humanity, O Daemon, are not his merest intuitions profounder far than creed, sect, or philosophy ? The world's darkness may be nature's noon, even though the heart of man be es- tranged beyond the obedient and supple present ; even as the night to me may be the light to him that comes forth from deeper darkness. But neither nature, nor any of her true-born and loyal disciples, can be taught by any medium of dispassioning 180 Solitarius to his Damon or disillusioning logic that whatever is, is darkness — that whatever is, is wrong. Truth comes forth from the farthermost estrangements pointing out to men those vast libraries and modern archives re- plete and bounteous with the beautiful and true, and shrinks not to meet the man on his own little plane of introspec- tion and sentiment. These vast libraries with shelf upon shelf from nadir to the zenith are beyond the touch of triflers : these ten thousand stare at the titles and many colored backs, wondering what profundity lies embalmed within each imperishable chronicle ; only one of all these vast armies who but contemplate the radiant exteriors, ventures to put forth his hand and make the oracle of a single secret of Nature his own. But one of all these ten thousand makes brave to open, invoke, learn, love, honor, and abide within the ripening spirit of one written aphorism of Nature, and there lay down his life trustfully, believingly. So is it that men often misinterpret and condemn that which, though they know Solitude 181 it not, is one of a wide brotherhood of power and perfectible motive for the betterment of ill-sacrificed condition, and the lifting of human perversity from its vile habitude of error and crime. Whenever a new departure in an art or science is noted, there seems always to arise a complementing personality with it, to whom, and to whom only, that cherished quality must first have confided with all the faith of a scripture in its interpreter. A new and abundant force in nature, like the Assyrian maiden, must wait year after year until he whose worth and gallantries, with loadstone at the heart and eloquence at the lips, can find favor and see the doors parted as to a bridegroom and his magnificent train. No mere strategist or profane adventurer can approach the silent, listening, hope- ing spirit without he first be purified and made worthy to be admitted to the refined and sovereign presence of one so exalted. But one of all these armies of the ambi- tious toward the same perfection can rise 1 82 Solitarius to his D anion up and say, ' I am he with whom thou wert connatal, O divine art ! O perfect Law! O wisest of Sciences; — I am he God-chosen as thy first interpreter. I am thy prophet : believe thou me ?' To this art, or law, or science, all things now polarize and become newly affili- ated. The man has held a prism up be- fore Truth, and that which was seeming void is found latent with rainbows. Thales would thus stand with the ocean as primary datum ; Pythagoras, with a number ; Aristarchus, with a sun-dial»; Timochares, with a gathering, formative vapor. These great processes never halt. Like the sun they know no Sabbaths, since every day's duty done is every day's Sabbath. The great soul's life is one great prayer and one greater fulfilment of that prayer. The great soul's solitude is its Sabbath. We are living, demanding protests against the present and the past, — against the deed done and the conquest gained ; most constant believers in the yet undone, — the yet to be. Man perfect Solitude 183 in his own sufficiency has become useless. The perfect poems are ruinously extrinsic — flat. It is his incompleteness and utterest imperfection that stirs man to surer things for himself and others. What though it be proven us by some effective process of reasoning that man and his ship of state are illusions ; and that as Theodorus was wont to leap about his galley on the poised oars of his slaves, so man learns his dexterous mis- sion only to find it a mere plaything. All this but alters the exigency ; it does not do away with it. To prove our pov- erties does not lift them from us, nor re- quite the fallen days cast down in hostage to so ignoble a deity. The gap of error must be bridged ; not analyzed. The cup of our errors that plays upon some nerves like a wild intoxicant, upon others as a poison hemlock, and upon others still as a opiate, — this must be spared us : not measured up and synthetized with the exactness of a hardened casuist. How easy to define, yet difficult to eschew evil ! A handful of dust — no 184 Solitarius to his D anion more; it has no specific nobleness — no manifest splendor ; yet let the enlight- ened one prove to you that upon this plastic clod lies the footprint of the Christ, how silent has become your rev- erence, how shrinking all your scepti- cisms. The pessimist and the prophet alike would cavil the human race by proclaiming man dust that shall to dust return ; yet the footprint of God lies there. How intrinsic has become this hitherto invalid quality ! This clay has changed into a mark of majesty set upon the forehead of eternal things. What it was, the fools despise to name ; since fools shrank not to trod upon and pollute it. If you chanced to meet Socrates in the Athenian market-place, or the "fish- ers of men " upon the Galilean shores, think you that you would know them ? You would pass them by in silence till a greater voice than yours points them a place, even as in nature the pageant is forgotten till enlightened by the glory of a manly personality that pervades and interprets it. Only like understands like, Solitude 185 and then only by the passport of a deed of depth and virility. The first and final study of mankind is the God in whose image man is : God in the least, God in the greatest, God in the all and every portion of the all. Man cannot study man as man without an inevitable despair at the finis. The channels of the carnal seeking are plowed deep through the dusts of presumption and downfall. Manhood is not there, and only manhood — that supremest type which it is our privilege to know and redeem, — is worthy our honor and our faith. Mere animality as a study for man, is dust to dust ; the footprint of the eternal that lies upon it, is forgotten in the sensual demand. It is the finesse of art that proves quality. Stratagem has taken cities and whole empires of fact by storm, though never a law or philosophy. Nature is ever on the alert ; you cannot steal upon her unawares, nor unnoted tamper with her treasuries. Newton's first nucleus of 1 86 Solitarius to his Damon the Principia, Galileo's first step over the threshold of Time in the Florentine nave, Archimedes first glimpse of the Quad- ratura Paraboles, and Gautama's first solving of the planetary chain of Dhyan Choans under the Bo-tree, — these may be called strategies, — triumphs of finesse over Nature while she was asleep. But who presumes to calculate to what fine point the adamantine lance of the spirit of each of these was disciplined in order to insert it and pry open the door into this court of laws each finally entered, and over which took sovereignty ? An Indian mother will close the mouth of her sleeping babe if it chance to be open. There is here a whole catechism in a bar- barian's prudence. The wild Veddahs of Ceylon have a language of five words. The enlightened language of the soul has but one, — sympathy. All the rest is contact and assimilation. There are two balancing qualities in all capable things, — the nature of feeling and the nature of use. What thoughtful man that is not moved by the simplest Solitude 187 studied industries of the animaicular world ? The tiny red spider and the con- stellation Orion are linked each to each by an insoluble truth. The astronomer calls for the finest line, — the nearest tan- gible answering to the geometrician's de- mand that a straight line have but one dimension — and gold, platinum, iridium, silver, — all respond but in vain. Only the little red spider finds favor, and he weaves his minute thread over the transit lense, and by its aid yonder star of the twelfth magnitude writes us a history of its orbit and function in space illimitable. The full-souled complete man is a solar system in miniture, of which he is soul and centre. All angles and protuber- ances, all depressions and plains are open secrets to every planet and satellite re- volving about him. We see a huge spot upon his very bosom if we are telescopic in our look, and we predict that he will cease to bear light in so and so long ; but the warm glow ceases not, and unto Time remains the same, — a beacon, a creator, a bounty of truth forever. We Solitarius to his Dcemon speculate concerning him, our theories all at variance ; but he is as removed as ever ; and too, like the sun, if we tres- pass too near, or bring him down too close to earth by our presuming lenses, he will burn to ashes everything beneath his direct ray. In his sunshine the dusts of humanity become visible. In the ra- vines and calm vales, on the glaciered pinnacles and by the shadowy wayside he is there, and his glory is the lamp by which we aspire on. Surely the great soul cannot be hidden or crushed. The circle of capacity of a great spirit is commensurable only by divine calcu- lus : the geometry of the gods ; and only gods are they who can circumscribe cir- les of sight about our highest finite see- ing. The centre of every circle in law, ethics, or the philosophy of natural effect is as much yours and mine as it was Plau- tus' or Varro's ; and we, standing upon the same apex, may describe a horizon as great and even greater. The circle that Plato, Euclid, and Pliny described about them may be described again. An as- Solitude 189 tronomer takes great credit upon himself for having been rewarded in discovering a new star ; but who thinks of louding him for having created a new planet. He was the first discoverer, utilizer and in- terpreter of an established something which before him was nameless and un- catalogued. The thinker presumes not to be called a creator ; he is simply a find- er, a preserver, a statistician of superior ideas. He cannot hope always to out- think the Greek, nor out-dream the Arab, nor out-wit the Attican, nor out-chant the Lydian. The least and best of these are his to assimilate and command of him. Mere analytics and mind-values all sooner or later swim into the Sargossas sea of stagnation. Their currents are centripetal, beginning at the circumfer- ence and ending at the dead centre. The forces of God alone — the soul-values — are centrifugal, representing the diastole of the heart of nature. Truth interpreted by faith or philosophy needs no incanta- tions, nor magic mirrors, no sieves, nor 190 Solitarius to his Dce?7ion sapphires to proclaim it. Even Hypatia descended to these, as did the Magi in the dynasty of the Sassanidae, and so be- came unworthy of her prestige. Truth is ever manifest through many openings downward ; the sun will not shine from under our feet, despite our prayers and protestations. It will never illumine the face of him who considers but the dust; for only dust and dust-presumption pro- ceed therefrom. When faith cries for the tangible, give it a coffin ; it is dead. Conventionality is the first parent of the artificial. It is the first abandon- ment of the man to the fever of temporal repute. It is the devil's passport into me- diocrity and its after-growth into pessi- mism and doubt. The listening ear of heaven bends closer the closet than the temple, — closer the sacred seclusion of the Mount of Olives than the swarming synagogue. God help him who is bad company with himself. If you are not a good symposiarch with the living and the dead great about your table, each lifting to his host a warm incense in his eye- Solitude 191 look and sweet word and performing no- ble rites with every action, then is the problem of your days unanswered, and whatever your boast — your prestige or presumption — you are but half a being, half a controlled possession ; the subtiler, nobler portion yet unconceived, unborn. This holy inheritance which is your rea-r sonable birth-right, you are wantonly self-denied, and its reposeful scripture you know not. Solitude is a mortal's love-feast with the immortals, — a banquet with angels where even the disembodied man is one with the gods. Remove the human race to the solitude of the forest, isolating man from man with a single great thought to companion him, and four-fifths would die madmen, the one-fifth coming forth oracles. Men hate their own images as reflected upon their own solitary con- sciences. Dependence is our social dis- ease. Only labor in the divine presence of the ideal proving a very god in action, has the ring of sovereignty and the as- surances of truth enfolded in its very en- 192 Solitarius to his Dfemon thusiasms, and carries the sure embryon of the deed done in the deed's doing, — half a triumph in the earnest aspiration. Let the soul speak, or be the mouth for- ever dumb. Let the truth within seek the truth without as Nature seeks her own, and as all element seeks its balance. In the creed of true moral affection there is no self — no ego. Only that which is resignation and a symbol of sacrifice can nurture in the heart the faith that re- moves mountains. Love is the first jus- tified attitude of knowledge. We become enlightened only through the affections. Where the soul enters not, God with- holds himself ; so false a temple is unfit to bear the footprints of the truer man. Love men as greater than men, and na- ture as greater than nature, if you would all things to appear as they are in their more superior moments. Then with eyes believingly fixed upon the perfect type, the mere proportions of the flesh will be lost in the nobility of the soul wherein are visible the sure outlines of omnipo- tence and power. The Poet" s Province My spirit holds a festival of dreams — A banquet reverie with gods on high; And life to-day to me is all it seems, And love to-day my simple rosary Whereon I count the warm beads prayerfully — Truth's blood-drops they, turned Godwise into stone, Necklaced upon the breast of the young Morn ; And I beneath her smile all, all alone, Kneel and receive this boon, and thence am torn From earth into her own empyrean rest, Pillowed upon her heaven there manifest. Lo ! with the midnight seers was I awake, Swearing Faith's logic: 'All, all's for the best;' And now as Nature's child, I labor for her sake. The Poefs Province 195 THIRD PAPER. <&h* lfiott'# tyv&viintt* Solitaries now gir- _» , , dies Parnassus in a rOETRY IS a Consecrated devout theory, ,. - , , founds poetry on reading of nature by the faith, and demon- , ., , -. r ,. strates that with most vital of feeling tem- the decline of faith _ , T i . , our poets turn pes- peraments. The poet, by sirnists and ration. ^^ Qf ^ intrinsic qua j_ ity of his invention, proves himself to be only an intense believer. To him there is nothing that bears not a direct ap- proachable relation with a superior one of the same or a higher series. To him all things are naturally affiliated — balanced with perfect exactness in one another's motive — given exponents in every other of the same throughout the universe. The star and the spider ; the 196 Solitarius to his Dcemon north pole mammal and the tropic insec" tivera ; the lowest parasite of animal con- dition and the highest perfection of hu- man intellect, — these to the poet's mind have interchangable affinities, a direct line of analogy from the remotest of any sunken era to the supermost of the en- lightened present. !he poet's is emi- nently an objective quality ; the subjec- tive sinking beyond the immediate at his touch of faith. All that claims identity has become force in his eyes, — not mere matter, mere animality — but a force in the upbuilding nature of things common- place, casting influences over its content poraneous quality wherever met and recognized — an influence to a nobler and surer use. The stars, the sunset, morning and autumn, the perpetuity of Wisdom and all sublime approvals of character, — these the poet respects and enshrines his tremendous believing, re- alizing power within, not for themselves alone , but rather for their direct influences wherever realized. They are so much creation as they have creating power in The Poefs Province 197 turn ; so much God as in good. The poet's mind thus personalizing the con- templated thing, quickens it with a spiritual force till it redeems itself, as it were, rises from the embryon of mere matter and becomes force ; from mere animality and becomes manhood. Every such mind, by virtue of its intrinsic be- lief and realizing power, becomes as a prophet over a certain chaos from which at that inspired touch a creation must rise forth and proclaim the man. The limitations of expression, as Lam- artine has maintained, stand without the poetical value of that expression ; in other words, poetry stands within, but the poetical issue in the idea stands with- out the bounds of necessary limitation. Poetry, a universal spirit ; an abstract quality standing one and apart ; poesy, a confined, resilient and concrete idea. So Moffet holds, too, with Coleridge. There are epics and heorics of the highest intrinsic excellence in our very common- place ways and means which no mere laws of sound, harmony and deflection 198 Solitarius to his Damon can encircle and command. As, accord- ing to Sainte-Beuve, there is a dead poet in most men, so O Daemon, there is to the poet's eye a kindred poet in all ma- terial things. Where there is a material datum to the physicist, there is a dual value in the same to the poet. " More powerful than Sesostris is a great poet, and more formidable than Phalaris is a wicked one," observed the piquant and genial Landor. The law of contrasts affiliates with every known law of progression. Contrast has the power of proving by an intensity of motive that few can escape who contemplate. Art without shadows, music without discord, logic without negatives to throw their complementing affirmatives in torelief, — these proclaim a philosophy of details, stagnation, and reversion. Attraction and repulsion, zenith and nadir, noon and night, must all concentrate upon the will of the poet, — must all exercise a creating power that shall be measured by the rapidity and intensity of these con- trasting changes. These find them in him The Poet's Province 199 outlets in expressions of power, taste and exactness. As a thinker the poet must avail himself of every credential of art, science, or religions, that by the passport of a universal respect he may enter the court of their several provinces and be esteemed worthy as interpretei and confidant. Poetry as absolute idea is a universal evidence of God. It stands on isolated ground, bearing distinct, un- utterable values which know no other language than that of pure passion. Plato exerted this sovereignty over the uni- versal factor, even though he did exclude the poet from his Republic, since he affirms that poetry comes nearer the vital truth than all history. Poetry is the prod- uct of the intuitions ; and only the intui- tions are to be trusted. Educated honor, educated integrity, educated refinements of feeling, require rites, formulas and priestly apothegms to prove them up in the regard of the mind. The soul is all instinct, and stands alone and apart. Its refined intuitions are worth a thousand curriculums. Feeling and sympathy are Solitarius to his Damon mettled of that thoroughly spontaneous virtue which cannot be willed into life by any extraneous force of art or artifice. Poetry being a personalized passion — a truth intuitive with the man now a very god in action and the sublimity of his purpose — it becomes the soul's first cre- dential, and the first mutual interpreter to every other soul. Such a spirit can but multiply itself into every known qual- ity forever: go on rejecting analysis that dignifies not the subject, proclaiming the divine values hidden in the meshes and sordid crevices of the commonplace, and otherwise proving that the profoundest truths have built solid temples even at our very doorstep, even though we as fact-deifying worshippers enter them not, unknowing of our privilege. Poetry would prove to us that in every contact of our conscious life there is a somewhat that seeks the man in every homely rela- tion, though the tender knock escapes our apathetic ears, and we lie dormant with enriching but invisible actions going on about us. The Poefs Province The true poet then, O Daemon, is not merely a builder of Parthenons, but a builder of humanity. He is not merely a temple-architect, but a founder of the very creed in whose honor it is raised. He is not a mere maker of means, but a maker of men. As Joubert has said, lie is not merely the Daedalus and the Phidias, but the very god-like Prometheus. He comes as a prophet over a certain pro- found and unrestricted province wherein Beauty is first freeman. He has herein become a reasoner beyond all reason ; a logician trancending logic, the establisher of a surer, profounder faith. The disorganizing genius is the lowest birth into condition ; the creating, pre- serving and the upbuilding, the rarest. The progressive, sustaining mind seems to break forth like the providential issue of some anomaly, — some stained, irreg- ular condition of the times. We may with a single blow destroy the labor of love of some divine mind, — some holy reaching out for the truth — some devout thing of beauty and bravery so fervently Solitarius to his Damon believed in by the faith that brought it forth, and both the man and the deed are fallen. We may heap words upon the back of an idea, not knowing that its very charm is delicacy, and so crush it back into eternity. We may strike a her- ald of the truth a disenchanting blow with a single word, and he will recover not, sinking back into the gulf whence he rose with the morning. Man is car- nally the dissolving element, seeking the higher only that he may consume it in the test crucible of materialities by his damnable alchemy. But it is neither a great evidence of power nor a manifest attribute of progress that subverts our honest sciences, and by levelling the su- perior, so exalt itself. It is rather that all-encouraging, all-doing virtue which bores to the heart of things, not to fill it with dynamite and dissolution, but with strength and respect. Man is ever a gravitating organism when left to his own caprice. He would ever plunge downward, bearing all within his reach to the darkness whither he proceeds. He The Poefs Province 203 is one huge datum of voltaism — a down- ward, dynamic engine which few have the skill to reverse. We love power, but we love it as Commodus loved it : to kill rather than to defend the innocent. The orientals are almost wholly with- out a pictorial art. History runs to rhyme, not to color. Mere decoration is their ultimatum, refined and distin- guished as it is. Music and verse are the outlets of all their passion ; in the former they are restricted but earnest ; in the latter, superior and skilful. The Bed- ouins about their camp-fires at Jericho and the Japanese worshipper before Di- butzu have an identical idea to make manifest in their music ; but in their po- etical qualities each is grandly individual and both something higher than mere minstrels. The true thought even in the heart of the rudely refined oriental is a tangible universal unit, and is never lost sight of. They see in every fact a pre- diction pointing to a certitude, a law, a scripture. Everything has a name not as concrete particular, but as representing 204 Solitarius to his Dcemon 2l condition or a spiritual aspect. Thus a camel in motion is known by one name ; at rest, by another ; drinking, by a third; bearing a burden, by a fourth. It is es- * sentially the poet's language, regardless of trite forms and phraseology. It finds and interprets the super- values in the thing given. The oriental worships force. Force spiritual, not material ; force that arms capacity, and, like the king, can never die. A fact in a certain light has a signified value and claims devotion ; in another light the same fact receives anew devotion. The old worship is left be- hind, the new worship born ever upon the moment. Thus the oriental epic is one never-ending prayer : at once a thanksgiving and a prophecy. They are true poets who behold all things in a sort of apotheosis, — a deification of the fact beyond itself, representing a figure of higher worth and a new, unique trans- parency of idea. Poetry then is the transfusion of the spirituality of God into the common- The Poefs Province 205 place. It is the ultra-evidence of the thing given which the soul alone has the power to interpret. Poesy should be the expression of the poetry of the circum- stance. It should be what it is not through the real, but through the revelation of the real, which revelation is in turn a prophet over another circumstance still higher and ever in the same ratio thronghout the em- pire of the heart. One in five thousand of the people of Attica was a man of gen- ius according to Galen, and the average ability of the Greeks was much higher than the modern average. They were self-knowing ; and, if the fundamental syllogisms of Lao-Tze. the wise and gifted herald of Confucius, be honored with credence, he that knows others is wise ; but he that knows himself is en- lightened : that is, in the oriental mood, he is inspired. Pure genius that, where- ever it moves and with whatever it deals, imparts somewhat " inventive and crea- tive," as Blair quotes from the Greek, — this quality is rarer indeed now than ever. Yet, be it thankfully maintained 206 Solitarius to his Dcemon that though we know no sovereign mas- ter of such supreme power as they in the infancy of Greek induction, yet we are inflicted with no Spartan or Median helot. The mass is enlightened though at the expense of the sinking of the individual. All poetry is the accumulation of vast and varied experiences which have be- come crystallized in the transition from reality into realism. Every throb of joy is a recalled record of many joys behind it, every figure or trope, the history of many minds. We have heard of toads leaping from the heart of stones when shattered by the miner's mallet. Men have been bound up hand and foot, pris- oned and concealed in some hidden crevice of human sufferance, — stony sepulchers of ignorance and error with the very holy light of heaven shut out from their solitary homes. And they, O Daemon, — they have learned their silent missions well, all their little world now become quite familiar ; but without and beyond this belittling con- I The Poet's Province 207 templation, there lies a forest, an ocean, a star, a universe, of which the bound-up mortal knows nothing. But let some disclosing blow from a solemn circum- stance — some blow direct from heav- en — shatter that stone environment, and lo ! the man leaps forth, a thinker, a freeman — a poet. 1 he gospel of our day is the breaking of chains. The glory of our sun is that it shines upon all. Traditions, prestiges, chiefdoms, fall ; the man is risen. The publican becomes the republican ; and higher still than the re- publican man, he becomes man the re- public. Around this intense globe of our social state there girds an equatorial belt of pure truth. Once that belt was imperceptible — like a find thread of gold stretched into intangible fineness ; but with the development of the races this belt widens, waging toward the poles, triumphing over ignorance, purifying every province of vice, ever proving and furthering man in his ascendency, and warming with tropic sunshine these bar- ren areas of animalism and want. 208 Solitarius to his Dcemon But with all this success, severe detail seems still in a measure to remain our modern point of climax. Principles are swallowed up in their members ; laws become expositors of the fact instead of these detailed members pointing as an index to a new authority. Great action is rare because of the rarity of great thinking; and great thinking is rare be- cause the mind will crouch. Mortality will ever exert itself to crush down the immortal; the senses, to refute the spirit- ual evidence. It still remains easier to hang the head than to look up and wage heroically onward. No hanging head ever did anything but the coward's work ; no hanging head ever thought. The philosophy of detail should be the end of a great beginning ; not the beginning of an end ; for the thought that leads to no higher, is not thought : it is whim. If the biped will not think, let his arms be- come fore -legs again ; his fingers, claws ; his language limited to barks and hay- ings ; and let him crawl as was his primeval wont. The Poefs Province 209 True silence is the concentration of intellect upon things as whole ; not as fragments and integral parts. Petty nici- ties, refuse details challenging their prin- cipals to no issue, pert scepticisms and the confounding of types, — these small inlets into sub-inlets and forth into nega- tion, create not ; they but encumber. Mere facts stand only as hands on the dial ; they point toward completeness, but they are not concrete principles any more than the dial-hands are Time. As Milton has said, knowledge is the mind's food, and may be taken with as extreme intemperance as food and drink for the body. Excess is suicide, even of religions and arts as of animal stimulants ; even of facts and hyper-detail to the exclusion of principles, as of the stomach to the neglect of the mind. The intellect cries, ' Balance ! ' If there is not immediate response, somewhere there is a sufferer. Excess of the best and least, leads only to madness. Seneca says Nature has given us the Solitarius to his Damon seeds of knowledge, and not knowledge itself. Even so has God given us the seeds of religion rather than religion it- self. These seeds must be sown to-day and reaped to-morrow. What cares the thinker for the seeds sown centuries ago in other climes and in other hearts ? Are these fruits diviner indeed than ours ? Let them stand for symbols ; they have their certain use. The history of the pres- ent is a scripture that out-voices the ar- chaic hymns and obsolete rituals of all the sacred past. The present alone is sacred ; and that in so much as it is unprofaned by triviality and exercised to the fulfil- ment of a superior truth. The thinker believes nothing impossible ; yet, at the very moment, is devoutly indisposed to believe that anything extraordinary or supernatural has been done. He be- comes a creature of infinite hope and of sure and undisturbed faith through all the vicissitudes natural to the sensitive temperament. He will not deify the past ; he will not hold up a relegated tradition and call it divine ; he will not set up The Poefs Province Baal at his doorstep to batter down thrice a day merely as an instructive lesson for youth, neither set up in the sacred pre- cincts of his home a household Hestia, nor a counterfeit avatar, nor the lares et penates of any Jew, or Persian, or Mede that ever swore by any religion than that of pure thought, any God than that of love. The thinker cannot be ensnared into a worship of what is past. The brave man's Now is, in his justified sight, the only divine moment worthy a living worship. To him, O Daemon, the God of his fathers was never nearer earth than to-day. In his eyes the times ameliorate — grow prof ounder in wisdom and purity, grow surer of perception and ideals. The true was never truer, the just never more just, the good was never better, nor beauty more beautiful than in the infinite, God-encompassed Now. To be sure, the philosophical era gives way to the me- chanical ; the idealist's to the realist's ; the century of inductive syllogism to the century of inductive shoe-making and bridge-building and mountain-tunneling. Solitarius to his Dcemon But the good survives — the fittest and worthiest of any age survives the radical reaction, and serves as a prop to the com- ing revival some years and centuries be- yond. To the thinker the heart of man was never more inspired ; to him the God who came in thunders, throned upon pillars of fire and manifest supernatural- isms which challenge our wonder, now comes in the ministering guise of social melioration ; is manifest in this quiet, studied advancement toward the enlight- ened, superior man ; is interpreted ever and ever more profoundly in each brave on- waging stroke of progress. The God that is goodness cannot be withheld in the merest archives of a bound book or enrolled parchment, nor be shelved up with the extinguished brazen candlesticks of a fallen orthodoxy or relegated creed. The God of to-day is he interpreted in every proving of the ascendency of man- hood toward godhood ; the supplanting of wars and bloodshed with peace and tolerance ; tyrannies with freedom ; ser vility with equality ; and heathen immo The Poet's Province 213 lations, rites and barbarities with the diviner arts that lift, dignify and prove the man a surer, truer image of his sover- eign God. Who dares say. O Daemon, that the times are not inspired ? The poet demands! Why force thy faith back thirty centuries to find the only time when God walked hand in hand with man ? Are there not prophets to- day as truly inspired as any that you may name in the dead past ? Receive we not our revelations, O Daemon, from as as- sured a source as they of old? The poet would not pull down the shrines of the dead saints; he would lift the living ones co-equal. Not less faith in the dead great, but a firmer faith in the living, is the poet's creed. He finds more God in the living man than in the dead saint. He believes that we are saint-making, prophet-making, hero-making as truly to-day as ever in the world's history. The true religion of the heart is the religion of the divine present, — the living, breath- ing, assuring, acting, aspiring faith that leans upon no dead yesterday for support 214 Solitarius to his Dcemon and maintenance. The religion with which thought has to deal is the religion of the almighty Now. It can no more be com- pared with the religion of Solomon than a poem to a star ; they are both evidences of God in just so much as is good ; but beyond this, are wholly incomparable each with the other. We swear by that which lies on the upper shelf covered with dust. We point our fingers at this one and that, calling them harsh names, while that which we consider divinity it- self lies relegated to the attic. This wor- ship of the dead prophets and a sneer at the living ones is the ruling pietism of the day. If you cannot read Hyperion, nor listen to the Fifth Symphony, nor take to heart the refined harmonies of color in the works of the modern master, even as if they were all grand good gospel ■ — scriptural enlightenments to this unre- alizing age, worthy our respect as visita- tions of the unseen God to the better shaping of the rude heart of man — they have lost their keen and refined signifi- cance in wedging their way into the deeps The Poet's Province of so repellent and reluctant a nature The voices of the living endeavor and the deeds of living conscience that stir the contemporary mind to braver doing, — these must sound like Sabbath-day cho- ruses and take the habit of divinity to the perceiving heart, or lost will be the living voice of their Creator, as fresh and as- sured a revelation to-day as it was three thousand years ago, and will be three thousand years hence. And this is just and reasonable truly. To-day the tears of sympathy and applause stand burning on our lids when beholding the beautiful act of some beautiful mind, even the deed of a little child that is stirred to disinter- ested action in a good cause, and to-mor- row we go to sleep hearing about Joshua and the plains of Ajalon. The former we call heroism, the latter, religion. But why persist we in looking to dead days and deeds to summon our worship ? Has the world really stopped scripture-mak- ing ? Are there not then daily miracles at our very door-step ? Why is not the God as near earth in that simple deed of 2i6 Solitarius to his D anion a child's heroism — that simple proving of the divinity of manhood — as ever upon the plains of Ajalon ? Whatever stirs the heart of man to the noblest activity, — this, O Daemon, is the best, the truest relig- ion. The gospel that compels us to think, to act, breathe, better things, — seems it not truer to Nature's God than the gos- pel we go to sleep over? Divinity with a confiding realism in every encourage- ment, lies on our right hand and our left. We think it, exhale it, talk it, act it ; and still, O Daemon, we comprehend it not. Why persist we in perceiving the divine only through the damp of tombs and the vapors of death ? Is our God become a dead God ? — our Creator and Preserver merely a stone diety and an illusory phan- tasm for our cringing kiss and sacrificial prayer ? Must men suffer martyrdom to merit respect of their co-equals. The ages of crucifixions for the righteous, of hemlock for the defenders of truth, of im- paling and imprisonment for the seekers of the God in science, of Inquistions for readers of scriptures written on the broad The Poet's Province 217 brows of planets and satellites, of blaz- ing faggots for the searcher of divinity in the forest, and in the wide wilderness of the passionful heart of man rather than in the court and sacristy, of torture for reformers and whipping posts for in- nocents branded as enchanters and sor- cerers — the ages of these, thank God, has passed away ; but has our respect and reverence for the heroism of the honest heart, O Daemon, passed away with them, and left us churlish, belittled and cunning doubters naked of all our native magnan- imity ? We must rid ourselves of this bloat- ing tyranny of convention, and behold the God in the living rather than the dead deed — the living rather than the dead manhood. To give direction to the prog- ress of thought, to channel the uninvad- ed wilderness with a devout seeking, to bridle a superstition and check it back into its primary stage of devotion — these are the prerogatives of poets and thinkers in the mart or in the mosque, in 218 Solitarius to his Dcemon the counting-room as in the court, in the forest as in the closet. To let the in- spired countenance of man beam forth the gladness of a God ; to contemplate his noble deed as aGod's deed ; his devout and zealous striving toward higher ideals in character and worth be as a revelation pure and fresh from the well-springs of heaven — these are the privileges — aye, duties, of the imperial mind. Ah, how small is that faith, O Daemon, that main- tains the Book of Revelations to be the last book of the Bible. Are there not thousands and tens of thousands of last books ? Not a day but one is written — on the bold front of our social institu- tions, on the domes of every capitol of west-waging, God-waging progress, on the throbbing bosoms of our arts, on the sanctified palms of our charities — every- where the heart of man is lifted, and the sordid flesh yields to the ascendant life- proving spirit. The great world is daily Bible-making, scripture-revealing, saint- proving. These scriptures shall not be encompassed with the mere formulas of The Poet's Province 219 the material didactics, with the mere bab- bling of the reasonless bigot, with the shallow sophistries and vaunting blasphe- mies of the trifler and reversionist. Truth died not with Christ, nor Socrates, nor Bruno, nor Copernicus, nor Spinoza ; the truth lives. What belittling conceptions of Truth crucified, Truth martyrized, Truth scourged, is that which believes that it lives not still in every bettering act, in every honest striving toward puri- ty and manliness, in every casting out of the devils of sensualism and rancor from the heart, and every devout outreaching through the solid darkness for the light ! Every grand work of art that stirs the heart of man with the like ennobling whence it sprung, every great battle that throws the tide of sovereignty over the meridian that divides barbarism from civilization, every melody that refines the appetite for higher classicism, is gospel revealed and consecrate, all worthy our veneration and confidence. These are arts of the apostles which are not to be bound up in regal parchment and gilded Solitarius to his .Daemon of edge to invite inspection and reverence : they command them — compel them. They are the living scriptures unchronicledand unworded ; yet of a moving grace un- quenchable and staid. Like all true re- ligion, they are unwritten, unspeakable; deeds, sympathies and the refinements of feeling are their only mediums man to man. Now is the true apocalypse. Then is but a dead formula for our safer seeing ; it is but a dead religion to the living soul. The poet would not that mankind bear a less faith in the Christ, but a greater faith in men ; not indeed honor the Christ as God with less fidelity, but as man with more. He would not unprop any man's creed or temple ; he would only see the man stand forth a free and noble image of his Creator above all creeds, superior to all temples. He would not tear down any trusted idol ; he would simply lift the spirit into that exalted self-seeing so enlightened and sure, that the regenerate man shall tear it down himself. The Poefs Province No genuine truth was ever discovered and smothered in obscurity. The gen- uine, the earnest, the firm, however un- availing may seem the issue on the mo- ment, will maintain even in the face of more brilliant diplomacy, more brazen policy and exacter science. The honest thought is the only thought ; all else thinks, writes, paints, constructs and rea- sons, the merest sophism. Truth no soon- er discovers itself, — that is, discovers its man able to interpret it to the utmost — than it becomes sovereign. Nature has es- tablished a law of outlet and inlet for every receptive and creative organism. There was never a truly great idea — a truly in- spired revealment of heaven — that died with the man. Why should Nature be so prodigal of gifts manifestly rare, and which, be assured, cost a divine some- thing somewhere a great throe to bring into being, that they may die in obscu- rity ? As Johnson demonstrates, pleasure passes from the eye to the ear as knowl- edge advances ; but as it declines, returns to the eye again. We become creatures Solitarius to his Damon of keener sensations and fewer words as man ascends the scale of intellectual and spiritual excellence ; thought and sensation tearing away the barriers be- tween them when the soul speaks. Alas, O Daemon, that words may never hope to stand for more than the merest symbols of the thought, the virtue, the quickened spirit ; that passion has but one language — passion; that the soul is its best and only interpreter. The language of lips is only a provincial dialect of the heart. The real language of spirit to spirit is spirit ; the truest medium heart to heart if feel- ing, — wordless, tongueless, yet in its very poverties disdainful, in its very sovereign- ty humble yet austere. Extremes of grief, joy, love, aspiration, have in their su- premer moments stepped from the land of language to the land of no words. Lan- guage may impart knowledge ; it cannot impart love. Who loves and knows not, is nearer Truth than is he who knows and loves not. Nature is a greater feeling than philosophy ; and who would best know her, must first love her. Truth and The Poets Province 223 the heart of man will listen to love long after reason has proven itself unworthy, long after thought, induction and policy have calloused the heart impenitent in its own embittering corruption. The greatest poet is not he who knows the most nor the surest ; it is he that makes the divinest use of material things, completing in the heart of man the full circle of which he is but an arc, a segment of completeness, at his birth. He is the greatest poet, whatever the out- let of his genius, that has a whole man- kind bound up as within the walls of a mustard seed, and laid down in the mid- most holy of holies of his great good heart. He believes with Gautama, that he is the greatest warrior who has con- quered himself, and so proves this truth daily. He finds philosophy in men's ways, art in men's deeds, music in men's words, and divinity in men's souls beyond all written scripture. In every child be- holds he the infant Christ ; in every good doer of deeds, Christ the miracle-worker ; 224 Solitarius to his Damon in every speaker of kindly, heart-nurtur- ing words, Christ on the mount ; in every servant faithful to his trust, Christ the carpenter ; in every honest effort fallen, the Christ crucified and the Christ as- cended. This is then the poet's creed ; superior to all things, yet reverencing all things as .superiors. He can bear the sun's noon upon his foreherd in his youth ; time will come when he will want a forest to thatch his bowed heart. He walks forth a new, an inspired, and an universal believer. We may preach, but only religion believes. We may be poets, but only poets understand. Like assim- ilates like ; like believes like. The poet's processes sound very like mysticism ; yet what takes not the habit of mystery to the finite man ? Our commonest pro- cesses of thought, our meagrest theol- ogies, our easiest satisfied desires, escape not the charge of mysticism. Philoso- phies demonstrate the evolution of fac- tors, of man, of will and the intuitions ; but what demonstrates the evolution of evolution. The soul in its ascendency The Poets Province 225 from the material has erased all foot- prints ; there might have been a time when light was knowable to the finite mind, but it has long passed into the un- knowable — the religion of mere conject- ure and theory — and we talk by mere symbols and substantives which stand for things which at best we can but imper- fectly conceive. In Mammoth Cave was found the skeleton of an explorer who had made fast a thread at the entrance of that vast pit of mystery, and, torch in hand, had wandered down into the bow- els of the earth some miles, dealing out the precious cord to the end. But in re- tracing, the torch gave out, the thread broke, and both the man and his labor were lost. In truth, O Daemon, the mind cannot weave a thread that shall carry us down through the solid darkness of the mysterious Unknown beyond an arm's length. The materialist inevitably re- traces, or its irretrievably lost. In both cases the finis is despair. We proceed from wisdom to enlight- 226 Solitarius to his Damon enment, according to the seers of the East. Thoroughly oriental is this word 'enlightenment;' it is almost the whole doctrine of Buddha in a nutshell. To be enlightened, in the oriental sense, is to experience a revelation. Who would know, need but to collate ; who would become enlightened, must seek the di- vine Unseen through the ever-present seen, and labor on through the unknown with a faith to an exalted end. Progress is a law not to be confounded with mere motion. Progress to a purpose : motion merely to an end. Progress shall never cease ; it lies beyond and superior to any law of dynamics ; but mere motion shall resume its primary state, and sleep at length in the stagnation of primitive chaos. The higher music, too, like the higher poetry, is a sort of religious mysticism. We cannot take it to absolute reason, for like all things so essentially spiritual, while solving to no issue nor dignifying the central truth, reason bears down but clumsy analysis upon it ; and no harp- The Poet's Province 227 string of Zion or Bayreuth will stand the thump of a trip-hammer. This mysticism, as the poor inveterate flesh chooses to call it, is the mysticism of the Christ when he said, 'I am one with the Father: ye shall be one with me,' — mysticism which the heart understands, though the lips are halt to make manifest the truth as the heart has taken it to confidence, Before such truth all language shrinks, and silence takes up the thread of inter- pretation, giving the truth that unworded significance which surpasses all written scripture. Music, too, is most fortunate by virtue of its sovereign independence. It de- mands of no sister science nor art a help- mate ; of no contemporary does it ask alms ; of no superior, a vantage. It does not even beseech a hearing, so content is it, edifying its principal. As its own prov- idence it stands one and apart ; beyond the merest technicalities, it asks nothing of the intellect ; being a pure product of the soul, it appeals but to the soul. Law it transcends, being superior to it ; defi- 228 Solitarius to his Damon nitions, abstracts, theories, it disdains, ever risen above these encumbrances. It is solitary and cumulative, — nature un- spoken, unwritten, unharassed, untram- melled : hence, nature ever in its truest aspect. Enemies meet over an old tune, and forthwith forget their feuds. The barbarian and the scholar suddenly be- come mutual ; suddenly become mani- festly seized of the fact that each soul balances the other, though the scholar's intellect over-reaches the barbarian's by a whole system. But they trust each other now, having become cognizant of a certain affinity. Music is a liquid di- vinity which in the heart crystallizes and solidifies, becoming character most re- fined, nature most natural. We are living laws ; moving maxims ; personalized inspirations ; the spiritual within the spiritualizing while of the earth earthy. We are, even while the carnality of race and member runs slug- gish in our veins, perpetual altars of Vesta with a holy incense in our eye- The Foefs Province 229 look, — the aureola which the soul casts over all material things till they be in- fused of our own splendid element. We are all greater or lesser prophets by a birthright wholly our own, and antici- pate the era from the conscious epoch on the heart. Thought being ever the herald and sequel of action, the primary doing is a container of deeds ever beyond itself and superior to it, and thus a power beneath power. We carry parts of other's selves within us, — an incomplete affec- tion which at the recalling moment is complete and for a season. We are all concrete analogies, — parts of other's selves. The sun rises and sets in our habits ; they are the tender harp-strings upon which we momently play, be the resultant sound a discord or a harmony. Music is the soul's outlet which shall not serve two masters. Either it is music of the head, or music of the heart. In the former, it descends to the merest mechanism ; in the latter, not to be con- fined in the narrow parallels of intellect- 230 Solitarins to his Dcemon ual approval. Music can embody nearer a whole idea without doing it an injus^ tice than any other medium soul to soul. Music is our especial delight in that it compels us to think , to paint with an in- dividual grace our own landscapes and fix our own images. What finds not within us a creative response rather than a created one, — a moving power rather than a power moved — finds not the secret of our delight. We love that which com- pels our love ; admire that which com- pels our admiration rather than merely inviting it ; and we respect that which forces us to be superior to ourselves in its refined presence. It is not he who merely loves his art who shall succeed ; it is rather he who is utterly miserable without its holy influences. Music that impels these inductive currents of spon- taneity we become entranced by, even as by the stroke of an Egyptian sorceress, words, images, sweet excesses that refine our charities and endue our sordid mo- ments with a respect for sentiment, — all rushing like tempest from the regenerate The Poets Province 231 heart, and proving our barren souls fer- tile and life-giving throughout eternity. Nature endows all actions with in- visible eyes and ears, tongues and voices. They see and proclaim what the language of lips are halt to avow, — the motive be- hind the deed. But the soul is of more value in the sight of heaven than any other truth. God will not exchange a soul for any other evident divinity the universe over. We must stand and be judged as containers of divine things, even though we never liberated or in- terpreted one by our deed or word. The moment the soul speaks, the peerage of fact as fact is broken ; and all straight- line mediocrity which is our radical ab- horrence, has disclosed itself. The spirit lies like a fine stratum of divinity be- tween every couplet of written truth. It is not poetry written, but the poetry un- written that the finer nature exults in, and takes to the Cor cordium. But truth is the currency only of very near friends and very distant enemies. 232 Solitarius to his Daemon Like a sun-glass, it will not focus itself upon any middle distance without setting fire to everything it would illuminate. Therefore, in the society of more than one and one, the nature is more or less denaturalized, — more or less false to its own principle. Truth, easy and mutual between one and one, becomes diffused and halt with the advent of the third and fourth ; then commences the devil's spar- ring, the carom of conventional nothings upon one another's surface-wit, and Truth becomes transformed, distorted, hooded now like a pious monk, now like an insid- ious devil, and dare not lift its head for fear of ridicule or of contamination with the unclean. Only when one and one have met upon the apex of some divine outlook, is the breath of brotherhood in things godlike and removed felt upon the mutual cheek. The yoke of carnality and affectation is thrown aside, the man- hood laid bare to the mutual respect, and that great-hearted, noble, severe image of the God beholden to the finite seeing. The sensual man to the sensual man is The Poet's Province 233 dust to dust ; and as such, passes current coin in this general mart of man-slaves. Only two grand spirits with that divine, innate, centralizing respect which the Creator holds for us, pass in each other's eyes as currency of the gods, — that dust fallen to earth in the hewing of one of the pillars of the seventh heaven. Though all thinkers are contemplated of men as one and inseparable, like the double stars which appear a unit, by the dissolving aid of an exact science they are found to be some millions of miles apart. Two men of genius meet : why is there not a mutual persuasibility at once established ? They are as solitary planets each casting an influence over the other perhaps, but they cannot come together in a single day when it would require light itself some thousand years to span the distance. God does not suffer the great planets ever to come in contact in reality, however assuring the appear- ances. Their orbits are fixed and they must abide. Eternity lies between the 234 Solitarius to his Damon soul and every other soul , men cannot be so mutually understood as is common- ly believed. In the face of such a thinker as has this command upon nature, prate not of fame : he shuns it. Prate not of philosophy : he transcends it. Prate not of religion : he heralds it. Prate not of eternity : he contains, encircles and illu- mines it. Who listens the babbling mass shall never hear himself think. If you would to thoroughly understand a certain phase of nature, put your own big heart into it, then bend down and listen its throbbing. A whole history, a biography, a drama, a religion, lies in one's own heart-throb if we will but listen and interpret it. Where art halts, nature begins ; where ideas halt, feeling takes up sovereignty ; where man halts, the God proceeds. Always is the intuitive mood an index to something superior. We know men and would to know ourselves ; but we cannot choose, and so are obliged to contemplate our- selves in others. The ego of the man The Poets Province 235 lies imaged in the mass. The Persians believed that a pearl was a rain-drop fal- len from heaven into the mouth of an oyster, crystallized into a jewel. There are descending constantly into the open heart of man the bounties from heaven which crystallize into things of tangible beauty and power. All things embody pearls to the eyes of a great spirit ; and he is worthiest who not only sees great pearls in another's heart, but greater ones than any other man sees. Whatever is of the devil's master-craft walks the earth a doubter of the jewels at the bottom of every honest heart, — the God-dropped union in every resolute cup of life. If it be a false pearl, it can but proclaim it- self. If it be worthy, it if already self- proclaimed fit for the diadem of angels. King Arthur in the solitary glen of Lyonnesse discovered two brothers in mortal combat over a crown of gold. Both being slain in the unbrotherly feud, the sordid prize which was the cause of dif- ference, the king made his own. The 236 Solitarius to his Dcemon poet is king. He finds all materialities, — all unbrotherly worldliness, creed with creed, sect with sect, opinion with opin- ion — at mortal, ignoble combat ; but they all sooner or later fall, while he calmly makes the crown his own. It is the re- served man, — the man whose powers, masterly as they are, only proclaim a ready power beyond them — this calm- minded third of the series, the withhold- ing, beholding man, — this is he that gathers to himself the surest certitudes, the exactest truth. Men as mere symbols of ideas, dollars, capacities, — as mere walking, fate-challenging substantives, — as synonymes of that which they should be but are not, descend to meet on equal footing with their co-equals. Why is it necessary to step down and out of the temple of our truer selves when hailing an equal over our commonplace mo- ments ? The gods commune with us only on high places ; who cannot lift himself, cannot lift others. Hydrogen would con- sume us ; nitrogen, choke us ; oxygen, madden ; and carbonic acid gas would The Poefs Province 237 poison us if it predominated in excess. Together they are vitality and thought- resource, mind-resource; separately — dissolution. But some of these may be taken in double quantities without harm. Optimism thrice administered in a god's bounty ; of pessimism a single quantity is not unoften fatal. It is the abuse of God's licence that makes madmen. The abuse of republicanism means anarchy. The dervish — ' good easy man ' — howled in his high trance of ecstacy till a pillar of the temple fell and crushed him ; pray what had Allah to do with that ? ®49 v o. "b O x : %$ .**' ^ ** y % V - (• ^ "^ v* ^ -TV \0 °^ ^ ■'< ' %