HoUinger Corp. 
 pH8.5 
 
ADDEESS 
 
 DELIVERED AT 
 
 HAVERFORD COLLEGE, 
 
 BEFORE THE 
 
 ALUMNI ASSOCIATION, 
 
 AT THEIR ANNUAL MEETING, OCTOBER 24, 1868, 
 
 BY 
 
 LLOYD P. SMITH 
 
 LIBKAEIAN OF THE PHT'OADELPHIA LIBRARY. 
 
 
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 ♦♦nt»^*^' 
 
 ■^i 
 
 Yet I doubt not through the ages one unceasing purpose runs; 
 And the thoughts of men are widened by the process of the suns. 
 
 TEiNNYSON. 
 
 PHILADELPHIA: 
 J. B. LIPPINGOTT & CO 
 
 18 69. 
 
■hi' 
 
ADDEESS. 
 
 PB0FS3SCES OF BLkVEKFORD COLLEGE, FeLLOW GbADUATES, 
 
 AXD Fkiexds: 
 
 It is now just thirtj-one years since the Class of which it was 
 my lot to be a member was graduated from yonder now time- 
 honored walls. 
 
 The first thought which arises in the minds of all of os — old 
 Haverford scholars — when we revisit these academic shades, has 
 reference to the changes wrought by Time since we were students 
 here. It would be natural that I should speak to yon of the 
 changes in the Institution itself, in my contemporaries here, in our 
 beloved country, in the world. But these themes have been so 
 often and so well treated by those who have preceded me at these 
 yearly gatherings of the Alumni, that I shall not touch upon 
 them, but shall ask your attention for a brief period to changes 
 of another kind, and such as are, perhaps, not unsuitable for 
 discussion by those whose privilege it is to have enjoyed a liberal 
 education. I speak of the remarkable advance in human know- 
 ledge which has taken place since we bade adieu to Alma Mater. 
 Time would not permit (even if I had the ability) to take up 
 the various sciences in order and to recall the progress which 
 has been made in each since 1837. The points rather to which I 
 shall invite your attention are the general tendency of modern 
 science, and the analogy which exists between the history of the 
 universe as thereby disclosed, and that of literature — the one 
 being the expression of the thought of the Creator, and the other 
 that of His creature. Man. If it shall appear that there is any 
 resemblance between the two. it will but add one more to the 
 analogies and the harmonies which pervade Creation. 
 
 If we take a cursorv olance at those branches of knowledcre 
 
4 
 
 wliicli have to do witli the material universe, we shall find that 
 the grand discoveries made in our time all tend in one direc- 
 tion, viz, : to prove that the laws which govern the Creation are 
 the laws of Continuity, Development and Progress. 
 
 Take Astronomy, for example. By the use of that wonderful 
 method, the spectrum analysis, the light coming from the sun and 
 the stars has been made to reveal the elements of which those 
 bodies are composed ; so that it is no exaggeration to say that the 
 past ten years have taught us more of the physical constitution 
 of the universe than was found out in all previous ages put 
 together. We now know not only that the sun is an intensely 
 heated solid or liquid body enveloped in the flames of burning 
 gases, but that iron, calcium (the base of lime), magnesium, 
 sodium, chromium, and other elements of our earth, are present 
 in the solar atmosphere. The fixed stars, by the use of the spectro- 
 scope, exhibit bright and dark lines across the spectrum, many 
 of which are the same as those brought out by the simple sub- 
 stances which make up this planet; those lines indicate the presence, 
 among other elements, of hydrogen (one of the constituents of 
 water), sodium (the base of common salt), magnesium and iron. 
 But the farther we penetrate into space, the more unlike to those 
 we are acquainted with become the objects of our examination. 
 When we proceed to the appearances of the more distant nebulae, 
 we get but one or two known lines, and we are met by one or 
 two new bands not yet identified with any produced by substances 
 on this globe. Moreover, it is made certain that the brightest 
 at least of the so-called fixed stars are, like our sun, burning 
 bodies, surrounded with gaseous flames ; so that whatever life 
 exists in the universe is probably confined to their satellites and 
 to the planets of our own system. Finally, recent astronomical 
 discoveries have proved that some at least of what are called 
 fixed stars have an independent motion of their own. Sirius, for 
 example, the brighest of them, travels at the rate of a thousand 
 million miles a year. The constellations scattered apparently at 
 random over the vault of heaven will probably be forced sooner 
 or later to give up their secrets, and the time may come when we 
 shall discover the laws of organization which bind them into a 
 system. 
 
Look, how the floor of heaven ' 
 Is thick inh^id with patines of bright gold ; 
 There's not the smallest orb which thou beholdest 
 But in his motion like an angel sings, 
 Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubim ; 
 Such harmony is in immortal souls ; 
 But, while this muddy vesture of decay 
 Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it. 
 
 We cannot indeed hear the music of the spheres with our bodily 
 ears, but in these most interesting discoveries our minds discern 
 the divine laws of harmonious, continuous life, obtaining on the 
 most august scale possible to our comprehension. It is perhaps 
 too soon to assert that the changes now going on among the stars 
 mean progress, but the analogy of nature makes it probable that 
 development characterizes the entire universe. Meantime, the 
 mere discovery of hydrogen in the fixed stars — nitrogen being 
 present in the nebulae — proves the substantial unity and conti- 
 nuity of Creation. 
 
 This continuous unity in variety is even more strikingly ex- 
 hibited in our solar system. The clouds, snows, continents and 
 seas of Mars make it almost certain that that planet is inhabited, 
 though the conditions of life are slightly modified as compared 
 wnth those on our earth. As we proceed in imagination toward 
 the more remote planets of our system, those conditions are 
 gradually changed ; and corresponding modifications in the living 
 beings who may inhabit our fellow-satellites must be taken for 
 granted. Among the innumerable combinations of matter and 
 incarnations of force which are going on within the bounds of the 
 universe, we know those only which are confined to our little globe, 
 but it may be that there are forms of existence as far transcending 
 humanity as humanity itself transcends the sea-weed. However 
 this may be, modern science proves that our sun audits attendant 
 planets form one system, the subordinate parts of which are in 
 vital connection with one another and with their progenitor, the 
 Sun. The nebular hypothesis of Laplace which has recently 
 received some valuable corrections and modifications from Pian- 
 cini, finds more and more acceptance with men of science; and it is 
 universally felt that this theory, or some other analogous to it, must 
 be received as explaining the past history of our solar system. 
 
6 
 
 Indeed, an analysis of the light from the nebulas has pretty nearly 
 demonstrated the truth of Laplace's and Herschel's theory, and 
 has made it almost certain that the condensation of gaseous 
 matter into suns with their attendant planets is even now going 
 on in the regions of space. Here again we have a magnificent 
 example of the known universal law of continuity, and of the 
 probably universal law of progress from the simple to the complex. 
 
 Narrowing our gaze to the little ball on which we live, we find 
 that, following the lead of Sir Charles Lyell, nearly all whose 
 studies warrant them in expressing an opinion on the subject 
 are agreed in holding that the present state of our globe, as far as 
 we can penetrate its surface, is to be accounted for by the action 
 of the same forces which we see at work to day; forces which 
 have been operating gradually and continuously — without haste, 
 but without rest — in the past. According to this theory, geological 
 revolutions are the regular and necessary effects of great and 
 general causes, rather than the result of a series of convulsions 
 and catastrophes, regulated by no laws and reducible to no fixed 
 principles — the changes of climate on the earth's surface, for 
 example, as evidenced by geological phenomena, being founded 
 on the changes of eccentricity in the earth's orbit. Here we find 
 that the law of continuity and gradual change is sufficient to 
 account for all the appearances presented by inorganic nature. 
 
 But this is not all. Geologists with one voice bear witness to 
 the continued development and progress of organic life on the 
 surface of our planet, from the earliest period to the present day. 
 Various theories have been proposed, from that of Lamarck of 
 the action of circumstances to that of Darwin of the survival of 
 the fittest, to account for this continuous advance. None of these 
 theories, however true, seems sufficient to explain all the facts. But 
 the reality of Progress is unquestionable, and, under whatever 
 law it has proceeded, we may be well assured that it has not taken 
 place by chance, but by the unceasing action of a superintending 
 Providence. He in whom we ourselves live and move and have 
 our being has directed the movement in conformity with His own 
 wise plans, and toward a definite end of which we are now per- 
 mitted to have some glimpses. 
 
 We see that during the inconceivable ages of the past all things 
 
have tended to prepare the way for the coming ot Man. To my 
 thinking, the discoveries of the last thirty years are in no respect 
 more startling than in the light which they shed upon the primeval 
 history of our race. I well recollect the impression produced 
 on my mind in 1849 by the perusal of Boucher de Perthes' 
 Antiquiies Oeltkines et Antediluviennes, then just published ; and 
 I have lived to see the incredulity with which that work was 
 received by the learned give place to a unanimous acceptance of 
 the amazing facts which he was the first to give to the world. 
 To-day it is established that the original inhabitants of Europe 
 were cannibals, waging a precarious warfare with the cave-lion, 
 the cave-bear, the hyena, and the rhinoceros. Possessed of stone 
 weapons only, and destitute of flocks and herds, they were 
 savages, probably not unlike the most barbarous tribes of our 
 North American Indians. The discovery, recently described by 
 Professor Whitney, of a fossil skull in California at the depth of 
 one hundred and thirty feet, in a bed which was deposited when 
 the volcanoes of the Sierra Nevada were still in vigorous action, 
 previous to the glacial epoch of those mountains and before the 
 period of the mastodon and elephant, seems to show that the 
 antiquity of man is as great in the New World as in the Old. It 
 is evident that the infancy of our race, which in some parts of 
 the globe is not yet finished, was prolonged through an immense 
 period of time. The apparition of man was far anterior to the 
 historic age ; he was present at climatic and geological revolutions 
 which preceded the present condition of our globe. Among the 
 few human skulls found in the oldest deposits, some have been 
 recovered which are almost bestial in their shape — less developed 
 indeed than those of the present natives of Australia. 
 
 These discoveries have raised a curious question. Were those 
 rude savages whose chipped flint instruments have been dug 
 up in various parts of Europe the ancestors of the present 
 Englishmen, Frenchmen, Spaniards and Italians? Where was 
 then the civilized and civilizing Caucasian ? The use of metals, 
 an early step in civilization, was evidently unknown to the men 
 of the drift period, and the knowledge of bronze and iron as 
 evidently at length came from the East, whose people, long 
 after the disappearance of the now extinct mammalia, advancing 
 
toward tlie West, gradually drove its savages into the corners 
 of Europe. As regards the Mongols and the Negroes, there is 
 nothing to indicate that the lands they now inhabit were 
 . ever tenanted by other peoples : but as regards the Aryans or 
 true white men, there is abundant evidence that they were 
 originally one clan or family in the south of Asia ; that they 
 emigrated thence ; that they encountered and subdued tribes 
 of a darker skin in the lands to which they wandered ; and 
 further, that while they have ever since been spreading, their 
 civilization has been constantly increasing. What ground is 
 there for supposing that while one branch of this family went the 
 ways we know they did and became at last what they are, 
 another branch poured into Central Asia and became men of the 
 Mongolian type, while a third went into Africa and became 
 Negroes ? In other words, what is there to show that while one 
 branch of the Aryan race became the subject of never-ceasing 
 improvement, another has suffered never-ceasing degradation ? 
 Such a theory is absolutely without foundation. No tradition 
 even remains of an antique people from whose degeneracy result- 
 ed the yellow and black skinned races of men; the evidence of 
 science is that the earth was already overspread with the inferior 
 races when the Aryan appeared. The "dark complexion, flat 
 nose and small eyes" attributed some forty centuries ago in the 
 oldest hymns of the Eig-Veda to the godless Dasyas, are still visi- 
 ble in their descendants, the naked savages known as the Santhals, 
 who linger in the woods and mountains of Bengal. Moreover, 
 and this is important, the tendency of the Caucasian family (in 
 which I include the Semitic race) is to conquer and extinguish — to 
 supplant the other families of man, as in the case of our North 
 American Indians. This tendency has always shown itself in 
 history, until to-day it may be said that the white man rules the 
 world ; mind ever tending to subdue matter. Here again we have 
 in the various gradations in human races — from those which are 
 but little above the brute up to those which are but little below the 
 angel, and which tend to survive the others — another instance of 
 that progress which seems to characterize the universe. 
 
 Eestricting our gaze once more to the great Aryan family, 
 that white race to which it is our privilege to belong — 
 
9 
 
 a privilege bringing witli it its peculiar duties, the due per- 
 formance of which we shall have to answer for — we shall find, I 
 think, that the same law obtains. Of the character, religion and 
 manners of the Aryan race in its original seat at the foot of the 
 Hindoo-Koosh Mountains, but little until recently was known. The 
 researches of Sanskrit scholars, however, have brought to light 
 certain facts which prove the Aryans to have been from the first 
 a noble breed of men, possessed of a brain of enormous capacity 
 as compared with that of the tribes around them. It was they 
 who tamed the animals of the forest, who cultivated wild 
 plants into the varieties useful to man, discovered the means of 
 extracting metals from their ores, and invented machinery. As 
 the geologist is justified in inferring the cannibalism of the men of 
 the drift period from the discovery of human bones split to extract 
 the marrow, so the philologist, who finds that the word, which in 
 Sanskrit corresponds to our word daughter, Ovydttjp, means milker 
 or milkmaid, and that father in Sanskrit is synonymous with 
 pastor, is justified in inferring that at the time when some of their 
 commonest and most necessary words were coined the Aryan 
 race owned herds of cattle and used them for domestic purposes — 
 a manifest commencement of civilization. Their religion was 
 the worship of the sun and the storm, the natural religion of 
 observing minds destitute of the light of revelation ; and out of 
 this primitive faith have grown all the uninspired theologies of 
 civilized man. Back, however, of their worship of the radiant 
 orbs of heaven, of the sacred aether, the central thought of the 
 Aryan family of man is the belief that Grod is in the world and 
 the world in God. The idolatry into which the race in the lapse of 
 time and through intercourse with inferior types fell, is a perversion 
 and a degradation. For while man himself progresses, the natural 
 tendency of all religions is to decline from spirituality to formal- 
 ism ; like rivers flowing from a clear spring, they lose in purity 
 what they gain in volume. This was eminently the case with the 
 religion of the Yedas, It needed the purifying influence of a 
 monotheistic race, and the revelations made from time to time to 
 prophets, martyrs and reformers — above all, the teachings of our 
 Lord — before it issued in the wholesome, life-giving stream of 
 Christianity. 
 
10 
 
 Conquering its way, at a very early period, a branch of the 
 splendid race of men whose career I strive to trace, occupied 
 Egypt, their conquest of the dark-skinned natives being noted in 
 the Egyptian annals as the commencement of the dynasties of the 
 gods. Here their genius developed itself in the direction of 
 religion, architecture, and various arts and sciences, including the 
 invention of hieroglyphical writing. In Phoenicia, it took the 
 coarse of commerce, navigation and the invention of alphabetical 
 writing. In adopting Gobineau's theory that the Semites and 
 Copts were the first offshoots of the Aryan stock, I am aware that 
 it is an hypothesis only; the argument for progress would be unaf- 
 fected by assigning to the ruling caste of Egypt, to the Hebrews, the 
 Phoenicians, the Berbers and the Arabs, a separate origin as the 
 flower of the dark-skinned autochthons of the Levant. To the 
 Jews, who were, possibly, a branch of the same Aryan race (the 
 Egyptian tongue being a link between the Indo-Germanic and 
 Semitic languages) — to the Hebrews were committed the oracles of 
 God. To them was revealed the unity of God — "Hear ! Israel, 
 Jehovah thy God, Jehovah One" — to a full apprehension of which 
 truth, however, they attained only by degrees. It was still a long 
 time before they, and through them the other races of men, were 
 vouchsafed the revelation of "Him in whom was life; and the 
 life was the light of men." For "the law was given by Moses, but 
 grace and truth came by Jesus Christ" — whose name be blessed 
 for evermore ! Thus even in theology there is a progressive as well 
 as a permanent element, and the anthropomorphism of Moses 
 must be interpreted by the spirituality of David and the univer- 
 sality of Paul. 
 
 Another branch of the same white or Aryan race settled in 
 Greece; and there was the commencement of literature and 
 the fine arts properly so called. Bunsen calls the Greeks "that 
 nation of Aryan antiquity which was the most humane, the most 
 instinct with the divine element, and which has exercised the most 
 powerful agency in moulding the actual world." In their twin 
 prophets. Homer and Hesiod, and especially the latter, we find, 
 I'or perhaps the first time, the grand idea of Progress, the belief 
 in a beneficent Power which disposes of the affairs of men. 
 
 In Eome originated Civil and Municipal Law, wonderful pro- 
 
11 
 
 ducts of the human mind, to which we are mainly indebted for 
 our own system of jurisprudence. 
 
 Still pushing westward, along the coast of the Mediterranean, 
 the Atlantic Ocean formed a barrier which, in the Middle Ages, 
 could not be passed. Hence that returning wave to the Levant 
 which we call the Crusades. Up to this time civilization may be 
 said to have been limited to the basin of the Mediterranean Sea, 
 around whose borders it coursed for three thousand years. At 
 last the fulness of time arrived, and from the western extremity 
 of the Mediterranean proceeded the expedition of Columbus, des- 
 tined to discover this New World. Then followed the rise of 
 England as a great and colonizing nation, endowed with daring 
 and persistent energy; and the seat of civilization was transferred 
 from the Mediterranean Sea to the Atlantic Ocean, around whose 
 shores are situated the Great Powers which to-day march in the 
 van of progress. The time will come, in the westward course of 
 empire, when the Pacific Ocean will play the part now allotted to 
 the Atlantic ; its borders will be the seat of that civilization of the 
 future of which all other civilizations have been but the forerun- 
 ners. In the world that is to be, America will occupy the position 
 held in the ancient world by Italy, having on each side oceans, 
 but oceans as much larger than the Mediterranean Sea as the des- 
 tiny of America is grander than was that of Rome. 
 
 The striking fact in all this wonderful career is, that while in 
 the various ways in which the genius of the bearded man developed 
 itself, there was that continuity which consisted in the possession 
 of a language essentially the same, common traditions, the know- 
 ledge of agriculture, and the use of the metals — in a word, that 
 while the Caucasian race, whether in Babylon, Egypt, Phoenicia. 
 Greece, Rome, England, or the United States, possessed a civiliza- 
 tion radically the same — there was also progress from the simple 
 to the complex. That progress is shown in the acquisition of as- 
 tronomical knowledge in Egypt, the invention of letters in Phoe- 
 nicia, the creation of a literature in Greece, the development of 
 the science of government in Rome, the establishment of Habeas 
 Corpus and the trial by jury in England (the securities of indi- 
 vidual freedom), and finally in that inventive, mechanical genius, 
 and that capacity for voluntary organization which constitute the 
 
12 
 
 distinguishing features of the American mind. What new devel- 
 opment is in store must be looked for on the Pacific slope, and 
 possibly in Australia, it being as true now as it was when the first 
 Aryans took up their march, that only the most energetic and 
 vigorous have enterprise enough to leave their homes. 
 
 It would be interesting to examine, in turn, each of these out- 
 growths of civilization, and mark its separate development; but 
 time will not permit, and on this occasion I shall confine myself to 
 one. Let us then now take up the question originally proposed. 
 Does the same law of continuity and progress which we have seen 
 to hold good in astronomy, in geology, in vegetable and animal 
 life, in the history of man in general, and of the white race in par- 
 ticular — does this same law obtain in the history of literature? 
 
 Before examining this question, however, let us glance for a 
 single moment at the history and development of Language, the 
 body of which Literature is the soul. In the science of language, 
 the researches of our time are laying bare the most suggestive and 
 unlooked-for facts: no less than that all known languages may be 
 stratified in the order of their development, from the monosyllabic 
 or rudimentary, of which the Chinese is a surviving monument, 
 through the agglutinative or Turanian, of which the Mongolian 
 tongues are specimens, up to the inflected or those having affixes 
 and sufl&xes, of which all the Indo-European dialects, including our 
 own, are examples. By the study of the Sanskrit, every step in this 
 development may be traced, and the progress of linguistic re- 
 search makes it now not improbable that when they were in their 
 monosyllabic stage, the "Semitic tongues — that is, the Hebrew, 
 Arabic, etc. — were identical with the primitive form of the Indo- 
 European languages themselves. In a word, it results from the 
 researches of Bopp and the modern school, that language tends 
 to undergo, and in the case of the Indo-Germanic languages, that 
 it has undergone, a regular and natural development, every step 
 of which may be traced. It is much the same with the numerals. 
 We can follow them to their source, and prove that the Arabic ' 
 figures 1, 2, 3, &c., the corresponding Eoman numerals I, II, 
 III, &c., and those of all other nations, have been invented by the 
 wit of man. 
 
13 
 
 So much for tlie sliell, the envelope ; let us now return to the 
 substance of Literature, which in its largest sense means the written 
 expression of the thoughts of man. There are other expressions 
 of human thought, such as Architecture, Painting, Music and 
 Sculpture, all of which are subjected to the law of continuity, de- 
 velopment and progress, though in the case of sculpture there has 
 been little or no progress since the age of Pericles. But this by 
 the way. Let us return to Literature. All the books that ever 
 were written (except catalogues and other bibliographical works) 
 may be divided into five classes: Theology, Jurisprudence, 
 Sciences and Arts, Belles-Lettres and History. But on the present 
 occasion I shall pass by Theology, Jurisprudence, Sciences and 
 Arts, and History, and speak of Literature proper or Belles-Let- 
 tres, of which Poetry is the highest type. The question is. Does 
 the history of pure Literature or Belles-Lettres show continuity, 
 progress and development ? 
 
 There are not wanting those who deny this; admitting the con- 
 tinuity, they deny the progress. They tell you that the difference 
 between the literature of ancient Greece, for example, and that of 
 modern nations, is that the one is original and the other merely 
 imitative. It cannot be denied that there is a grain of truth in 
 this assertion, but in the sweeping and unqualified way in which 
 it is made by Muir and other writers on Greek literature, it is 
 entirely false. 
 
 In the first place, it must not be supposed that the earliest 
 Greek writers whose works have come down to us were the first 
 in the field. Nature does nothing by great leaps. There were 
 brave men before Agamemnon, and before Homer there were 
 other Greek poets ; a catalogue of their names and their works has 
 come down to us. The poems of both Homer and Hesiod rest on 
 an older groundwork; and there was more than one national litera- 
 ture before that of Greece. Solomon's Song is perfect in its way, 
 and the papyri found in Egyptian tombs contain novels as well as 
 fragments of the Book of the Dead. iEschylus confesses his obli- 
 gation to a Libyan legend in the famous passage: — 
 
 An eagle once — so Libyan legends say — 
 Struck to the heart, on earth expiring lay. 
 And gazing on the shaft that winged the blow. 
 Thus spake: "Whilst others' ills from others flow, 
 To my own plumes, alas ! my fate I owe." 
 
14 
 
 This fable, bj the way, has been borrowed by La Fontaine; and 
 Waller, and after him Byron, have repeated it without acknow- 
 ledgment. If we knew all, the claims of the Greeks themselves 
 to perfect originality might be seriously impaired. Still, so far , 
 as the Greeks were the first to describe the phenomena of external 
 nature, the actions and passions of men, they were, to a great 
 extent, original. The Greek poets appear to have written down 
 whatever struck them as just and impressive, without fear of being 
 accused of stealing from a predecessor ; and if we speak of the 
 same things, we must needs in some sort, follow them, that is, if 
 we describe truly. It is the same with criticism, of which Aris- 
 totle's Art of Poetry is the best-esteemed piece among the ancients. 
 How .came he to excel Horace, and Boileau, and Pope, who were 
 better poets, and who had also the advantage of studying him 
 before they wrote ? Because they only copied him, but he had 
 copied nature. 
 
 Homer, telling of the march of an army, says: " The firm earth 
 groaned beneath the steeds and armed men." Napier, in his 
 Peninsular War — doubtless unconsciously — says the same thing 
 in almost the same words; it is the natural thing to say. Still 
 the poet who follows Homer, and who must often describe the 
 same things as Homer describes, may place an idea in a clearer 
 light and present it in a neater form of expression than his pre- 
 decessors ; and this has often been done. For example, Homer 
 says : 
 
 Aurora now was rising up the steep 
 Of high Olympus, to the immortal gods 
 Pure' light diffusing. 
 
 This is a simple personification of the dawn. Compare with it 
 
 Shakespeare's more exquisite description of a sunrise: • 
 
 Look ! love, what envious streaks 
 Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east ; 
 Night's candles are burnt out; and jocund Day 
 Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain top. 
 
 I may remark in passing that this charming picture of the gen- 
 tle and gradual dawning of natural light is a true illustration of 
 the historical development of the light of knowledge. 
 
 What more natural dissuasive from suicide to be addressed to a 
 martial people than that quoted by Cicero from a Greek writer?— 
 
15 
 
 Yetatque Pythagoras, injussu im/peratoris, id est Dei, de prsesidio 
 et statione vitse discedere. That is to say, "Pythagoras forbids us 
 to quit our post or station of life without the orders of the com- 
 mander (that is God) who gave it us." But Spenser, in the Faery 
 Queen, has placed the same thought in a more striking light: — 
 
 For he who doth appoint the sentinel his roome 
 Will license him depart at sound of morning droome. 
 
 Here the words "sentinel" and "at sound of morning drum" 
 bring before the mind the picture of the guard wearily pacing his 
 round and longing for the relief which will certainly come with 
 the dawn. 
 
 I do not wisb to detract from the exquisite beauty of many 
 of Homer's comparisons and generally of his descriptions of ex- 
 ternal things — in these he has seldom been surpassed save by 
 Dante and Shakespeare — but in his delineation of the emotions of 
 the soul, Homer is inferior to hundreds of poets who have suc- 
 ceeded him. Grand as are the ring and majesty of rhythm in the 
 7^ia(/,and noble as are the largeness and naturalnessof expression- 
 things that are characteristic of a growmg people, it must be con- 
 fessed — ^with all deference to the English critics with whom, for 
 one hundred and fifty years, it has been the fashion to extol 
 Homer as the greatest poet the world has ever produced, it must 
 be confessed that there is a certain barbarism which reflects the 
 times in which the poems attributed to Homer were collected. 
 The poetry is mainly the poetry of martial life : it sings of clash- 
 ing shields, of wounds and gore — of the artificial gods of a gifted 
 but baby nation. You look in vain in the Iliad and the Odyssey 
 for any of that apprehension of the puzzling problems of life 
 which, five hundred years later, characterized to some extent the 
 tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides, and which lends such 
 solemn interest to the book of Job — for any expression of the 
 inner thought of the age, such as in our time breathes through 
 the verses of Tennyson. Accordingly the advice of Sir William 
 Temple must be taken with some grains of allowance. He says : 
 
 Read Homer once and you can read no more ; 
 For all books else appear so mean, so poor, 
 Verse will seem prose; but still persist to read, 
 And Homer will be all the books you need. 
 
16 
 
 For my part, I want a few more, such as the Bible, Dante, 
 Shakespeare, and Pilgrim's Progress, to saj nothing of the Satur- 
 day Review and Lippincott'' s Magazine. 
 
 The fact is, there was no reach of thought nor fineness of sensibil- 
 ity among the early Greeks, because reflection had not yet wakened 
 the deeper sympathies of their nature ; and we are perpetually 
 shocked with the imperfections of their morality and the coarse- 
 ness of their affections, because society had not yet subsisted 
 long enough in peace and security to develop those finer sources 
 of emotion. The extreme grossness and ribaldry of Aristophanes 
 are apt to excite our wonder when we first consider him as the 
 contemporary of Euripides, Socrates, and Plato ; but the truth 
 is, that the Athenians, after all, were but a rude populace as to 
 moral delicacy and social refinement. 
 
 And even in their philosophy, which it is the correct thing to 
 praise, one must search through bushels of chaff' to get one grain 
 of wheat. Plato has some beautiful and a few sublime thoughts, 
 but he abounds in trifling disquisitions and foolish notions ; and 
 many of his propositions are so absurd that a schoolboy can see 
 their worthlessness. Plato tells us, for example, in the Timseus, 
 that all things are made out of the four elements — earth, air, fire 
 and water, and moreover that three of these elements are composed 
 of scalene triangles and the fourth of isosceles triangles. The 
 originality of Plato has been exaggerated; and Gladisch has 
 recently shown that his mind was but the intellectual stomach in 
 which was imperfectly digested the crude mental food coming 
 from the Persian, the Indian, the Chinese, the Egyptian and the 
 Jewish schools of thougTit. This, however, may be said in favor 
 of Greek philosophy, that it carried the a priori method of investi- 
 gation as far as it was possible to carry it. Modern metaphysical 
 writers merely reproduce the ideas of Plato, Aristotle, Porphyry, 
 Plotinus, and the rest. What we have found out, however, is a 
 novum organum, a new and fruitful Method — that of induction. 
 It was by pursuing the unscientific method of the ancients, and re- 
 ferring everything to final causes, that one Greek philosopher 
 arrived at the notable conclusion that the shape of the soul is spher- 
 ical, because a sphere is the most perfect shape ; and another added 
 
three planets to the seven wTiicIi had already been discovered, 
 because ten is the perfect number. 
 
 The exaggerated praise which has been given to Greek litera- 
 ture by English pedants, who naturally exalt that to the study of 
 which their lives have been devoted, is out of place in this country, 
 where we dare think for ourselves, where a new and productive 
 land, free institutions, an energetic race (the flower of the Old 
 World), together with grand industrial and political achievements, 
 conspire to make Americans believe in Progress — in the present 
 and the future rather than in the past. A man is not considered 
 educated here whose knowledge consists alone of 
 
 The languages, especially the dead ; 
 The sciences, especially the abstruse ; 
 
 The arts — at least all such as can be said 
 To be the most i-emote from common use. 
 
 On the other hand, a total neglect of the classics is equally to be 
 avoided if American scholarship is to be worth anything. The 
 knowledge of Grreek and Latin is the very foundation of all 
 culture, and is essential for every one who wishes to use his own 
 language with precision ; while the study of the Greek poets is 
 the shortest road to enlarged and liberal thought. 
 
 Most true it is that Greek literature laid the foundation ; but 
 it is no less certain that Latin, Italian, French, German, and, above 
 all, English literature (the noblest of them all), have built upon 
 that foundation. The seventeenth century saw the birth of an 
 epic as much grander than the Iliad as the loss of Paradise is 
 superior in importance to the fall of Troy. 
 
 Of Peleus' son, Achilles, sing, Muse, 
 The vengeance deep and deadly ; whence to Greece 
 Unnumbered ills arose ; which many a soul 
 Of mighty warriors to the viewless shades 
 Untimely sent ; they on the battle-plain 
 Unburied lay, a prey to ravening dogs 
 And carrion birds. 
 
 Such is Homer's subject. Turn now to Milton's : 
 
 Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit 
 Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste 
 Brought death into the world and all our woe, 
 With loss of Eden, till one greater Man 
 2 
 
18 
 
 Restore us, and regaia the blissful seat, 
 Sing heavenly muse ! 
 
 What in me is dark 
 Illumine, what is low raise and support; 
 That to the height of this great argument 
 I may assert eternal Providence 
 And justify the ways of God to man. 
 
 In the narrow field open to Homer's view, he put forth an 
 effort of creative power whicli is perfect of its kind; but it does 
 not satisfy the modern mind, accustomed to a wider horizon, aud 
 content with nothing less than the epic of the universe. 
 
 Again, Hamlet is a nobler tragedy than Prometheus Bounds 
 and the School for Scandal a more exquisite as well as a more 
 moral comedy than the Thesmophoriazusse of Aristophanes. In 
 the Medea of Euripides, the sorceress is a fury who murders her 
 children without apparent provocation ; in those of Legouve and 
 Grillparzer this artistic defect is supplied, and the latter contains 
 one scene — that in which Creusa teaches Medea a song, and the 
 husband refuses to listen — more touching than any in the Greek 
 tragedy. Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War is no 
 more to be compared with Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman 
 Empire than Aristotle's Historia Ajiimalium is to Cuvier's R^gne 
 Animal. 
 
 Having combated what I consider the false idea continually 
 thrown out by Oxford and Cambridge scholars, that all modern 
 literature is but a mere imitation of that of the Greeks, let us take 
 a cursory glance at the subsequent course of that expression of 
 human thought which we find in books. 
 
 Latin literature is notoriously an outgrowth from that of Greece^ 
 It is a curious fact that, with all their organizing ability, their 
 legislative capacity and their genius for arms, the Romans pos- 
 sessed nothing but a meagre ballad literature until they imported 
 the humanities from Greece. With the exception of so much as 
 relates to the art of government the Roman authors from first to 
 last were essentially imitative. But their literature was marked 
 by a real development. In the first place — and this is very 
 remarkable — the Romans, contrary to the custom of all other 
 nations, began their career of letters with philosophy. But 
 while they borrowed their philosophy from the Greeks, they 
 
19 
 
 made much more use of it than their masters. The philosophical 
 writings of Cicero, for example, though occasionally incumbered 
 with the subtleties of his Athenian preceptors, contain a much 
 more complete code of morality than is to be found in all the 
 volumes of the Grreeks. It is only necessary, however, to compare 
 Tully's Offices with Dymond's Principles of Morality to see the 
 advance in the science of ethics which time and. Christianity have 
 since brought about. 
 
 The usurpation of Augustus gave quite a different character 
 to the literary genius of Rome, and brought it back to those 
 poetical studies with which most other nations have begun. The 
 poetry of the Eomans, however, derived this advantage from the 
 lateness of its origin — that it was enriched by all that knowledge 
 of the human heart and those habits of reflection which had been 
 generated by the previous study of philosophy. 
 
 The atrocious tyranny which darkened the earlier ages of 
 the Empire gave rise to the third school of Roman literature. 
 Much more profound views of human nature and a far greater 
 moral sensibility characterize this age; and show that even the 
 unspeakable degradation to which the abuse of power had then 
 sunk the mistress of the world could not arrest altogether that 
 intellectual progress which gathers its treasures from all the va- 
 rieties of human fortune. Seneca, Tacitus, Bpictetus, Quintilian 
 and the two Plinys afford evidence of this progress, for they are, 
 and especially the three latter, in point of thought, accuracy, 
 and profound sense, conspicuously superior to any writers upon 
 similar subjects in the days of Augustus. 
 
 Hitherto we have had to do only with Pagan literature. In 
 Dante and the Italian school we recognize the influence of 
 Christianity, and also the refining effect of that chivalrous respect 
 for woman for which Southern Europe was mainly indebted to 
 its conquest by the Germanic tribes. Christianity, by infusing 
 what had never before been felt — a serious and solemn conviction 
 of the immortality of the soul and of a future state of retribution — 
 turned men's thoughts away from those earthly glories which had 
 called forth the enthusiasm of the Greeks. The respectful and 
 romantic feeling toward woman which characterized the so-called 
 Northern barbarians, and which they inherited with their pure 
 
20 
 
 Aryan blood, had two effeicts upon the Italian mind. In the baser 
 sort it helped to bring about the worship of the Blessed Virgin, 
 while in those in whose blood was more largely infused the healthy 
 Germanic element, it gave to the passion of love a tender and 
 delicate expression, which, as it shows itself in the poets, 
 was unprecedented in literature. In the works of Dante both these 
 influences are strikingly manifest; the legitimate dread of future 
 punishment which Christianity inspires showing itself in an exag- 
 gerated and terrible but still glorious form in the Divina Com- 
 tneclia, while the inspiring influences of a pure and romantic love 
 disclose themselves in the Vita Nuova. As reo'ards the latter, 
 what can be more unlike the coarse pagan love of Homer, or the 
 joyful, thoughtless, sensual love of Tibullus and Anacreon, than 
 the delicate, tender, mournful, troubled passion of Dante for 
 Beatrice? Look at her picture as her poet-lover drew it: 
 
 ^ So kind, so full of gentle courtesy 
 
 My lady's greeting is, that every tongue 
 To silence thrills, and eyes that on her hung 
 
 With mute observance dare no more to see. 
 
 Onward she moves, clothed with humility — 
 
 Hearing with look benign, her praises rung : 
 A being seeming sent from heaven among 
 
 Mankind, to show what heavenly wonders be. 
 
 In all she does such courtly gentleness — 
 
 None can recall her worth without a sigh 
 
 Of love, oppressed with that sweet memory. 
 
 Dante's passion expands his soul into boundless love. "When- 
 ever and wherevei'," he says, "Beatrice appeared to me I no longer 
 felt that I had an enemy in the world — such a flame of charity 
 was kindled in my heart, causing me to forgive every one who 
 had offended me." Mazzini has well said, that "in his love for 
 the beautiful, in his strivings after inward purity, Beatrice was 
 the muse of his understanding, the angel of his soul, the consoling 
 spirit which sustained him in exile, poverty and despair." 
 
 Dante is the poet of sorrow and suffering. The acuteness with 
 which he felt the ingratitude of his countrymen betrays itself in 
 the anecdote of him which the German poet Geibel has repeated 
 in verses recently translated by a townswoman of our own : 
 
21 
 
 Through the streets of fair Verona once alone great Dante went, 
 When the bard of Florence wandered from his land in banishment : 
 And it chanced a little maiden, as he passed, the poet spied ; 
 And she spake thus to her sister who was sitting by her side : 
 
 " Sister, look, there goes that Dante who descended into hell : 
 On his dusky brow are written gloom and horror — mark him well ! 
 In that city of the torments he has seen such anguish sore 
 That an inward terror holds him, and he smileth nevermore." 
 Dante heard and turned toward her — from his lips these accents fell : 
 
 " To forget the trick of smiling I need no descent to hell. 
 All the suffering I depicted — every torment, every wound — 
 Here upon this earth already, ay, in Florence I have found." 
 
 It is in the Divina Commedla that Ave find the touching lines 
 which inspired Arj Scheflfer and other artists, and which Ten- 
 nyson refers to when he says — 
 
 . . . . This is truth the poet sings. 
 
 That a sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things. 
 
 Xessun raaggior doloi'e 
 Che ricordarsi del tempo felice 
 Nella miseria. 
 
 It is only of late years that the genius of Dante, always recoo-- 
 nized by the Italians, has been properly appreciated by the Grer- 
 mans and the English. It is now dawning upon our minds that 
 this sombre, awful and fierce embodiment of the Middle Ages is 
 also the greatest of all poets, Shakespeare alone excepted. He 
 built upon the foundations laid by Greece and Eome, expressly 
 acknowledging his debt to Yirgil ; but the superstructure was the 
 work of his own consummate genius, which, like genius at all 
 periods, was fully alive to the influences of his age. 
 
 We have not time to do more than refer to the services ren- 
 dered to literature by those other great Italians — Petrarch, Boc- 
 caccio, Ariosto, and Tasso; and passing over also the French 
 poets, who were mostly close imitators of the models of Grreece 
 and Eorae, the next great name in pure literature is that of 
 Shakespeare, whose works form a striking proof that the law of 
 continuity, development and progress includes Letters within its 
 scope. Shakespeare followed the literarj- traditions in this — that 
 his plays were based upon plots made ready to his hand by the 
 romances curi'ent in his day, and especially Bandello's Novels, or 
 
22 
 
 upon tlie facts of history as he found them in such books as 
 Plutarch's Lives and Hollinshed's Chronicles. From the latter 
 he copied whole speeches, with a slight improvement of the form 
 of expression. He made good use of his "small Latin and less 
 Greek," and the original ideas of many of his most beautiful 
 passages have been traced to the Latin and Italian poets. But 
 he touched nothing that he did not adorn; and if he sometimes 
 imitated others he was himself inimitable. It is said, for exam- 
 ple, that in Shakespeare's time there was inscribed in large letters 
 over the Globe Theatre in London this phrase of Petrouius : 
 Quod fere totus munclus exerceat histrionem — Ail the world acts 
 the player's part. This was the germ : for ages it had enjoyed, 
 as it w^ere, only an inferior and rudimentary life, until its devel- 
 opment in the matchless soil of Shakespeare's mind : — 
 
 All the world 's a stage, 
 And all the men and women merely players. 
 They have their exits and their entrances ; 
 And one man in his time plays many parts, 
 His acts being seven ages ; 
 
 and so on with the celebrated description, familiar to every one 
 who hears me. 
 
 Take another example: Yirgil, in curious accordance with 
 rabbinical ideas, which Dante and Milton also followed, speaking 
 of the infernal regions, says: 
 
 And some are hung to bleach upon the wind, 
 
 Some plunged in waters, others purged in fires, 
 
 Till all the dregs are drained and all the rust expires. 
 
 And see what the idea' becomes when the master artist puts his 
 hand to the work : 
 
 Ay ; but to die and go we know not where ; 
 To lie in cold obstruction and to rot ; 
 This sensible, warm motion to become 
 A kneaded clod ; and the delighted spirit 
 To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside 
 In thrilling regions of thick-ribbfed ice ; 
 To be imprisoned in the viewless winds, 
 And blown with restless violence about 
 The pendent world. 
 
 But although Shakespeare served himself all he could by read- 
 
23 
 
 ing, so that in his own time he was called an upstart crow beau- 
 tified Avith the feathers of his neighbors, his works abound with 
 original illustrations drawn at first hand from nature ; as when 
 he says : 
 
 A mole cinque-spotted, like the crimson drops 
 In the bottom of a cowslip. 
 
 His greater conceptions were drawn directly from his own feel- 
 ings and observation. He has contributed to our stock of 
 household words three times as many phrases as any other au- 
 thor; and in a recent collection of familiar quotations one-fourth 
 of the volume is occupied by passages from his works. He was 
 by no means one of those bankers so common in literature, who 
 are rich with the aggregated fortunes of individuals, and who 
 would be ruined if they were too heavily drawn on. 
 
 One of the many excellences of the myriad-minded Shake- 
 speare's genius was his unrivalled command of language. Unlike 
 Johnson, who always used a long word when a short one would 
 do as well; or the translators of the Bible, who never used a 
 word from the Latin or Greek when they could get hold of as 
 good a one from the Anglo-Saxon, Shakespeare always used the 
 word which best expressed his meaning, long or short. For in- 
 stance, his phrase "the multitudinous seas incarnadine" is Latin, 
 and the sound answers to the sense, as in the rto%v^'hoi,i(3ovo Qdxasarii 
 of Homer; but, he takes care to add in the vernacular — " making 
 the green one red." In the address of Suffolk to Queen Margaret 
 note how in the following lines almost every word is Saxon until 
 we come to the last : 
 
 For where thou art, there is the world itself, 
 "With every several pleasure in the world, 
 And where thou art not, desolation. 
 
 Eichard Grant White has thrown out the idea that there is no 
 good reason why we should not have, at any time when there is 
 a favorable conjuncture of circumstances, another poet even 
 greater than Shakespeare. And certainly the wonderful advance 
 of science in our day, our national progress, and the exaltation 
 of mind caused by our late civil war, make the United States of 
 our time not unlike the England of Queen Elizabeth and her 
 immediate successors; whose age was that of Shakespeare and 
 
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 
 
 029 895 731 
 
 24 
 
 Bacon and Milton. AVlio knows bat that some subtilo atmos- 
 pheric influence was concerned in the successive appearance 
 of the clusters of great writers who illustrated the age of Pericles, 
 that of Augustus, and that of Elizabeth ? And who can tell when 
 the cycle may not come round again? 
 
 Of the last great literary age, next in the roll of deathless 
 poets after that of Shakespeare himself, comes the great name of 
 Milton ; but I believe that America is yet destined, and perhaps 
 ere long, to give to the world an epic as much grander than Mil- 
 ton's as our insight into the plans of the Creator is greater than 
 was his. The machinery of the Paradise Lost was constructed 
 of a lie: its scenery represented the thing that was not — a solid 
 heaven, a flat-expanded earth, and" under all a hell peopled with 
 intellectual demons, where — 
 
 Higb on a throne of royal state, wliicli far 
 Outshone the wealth of Ormus or of Ind, 
 • Or where the gorgeous East with richest hand 
 
 Showers on her kings barbaric pearl and gold, 
 Satan exalted sat. 
 
 The coming man will tell us of the great soul-satisfying reve- 
 lations made by Science of the real history of the universe — he 
 will tell of the majestic progress of ideas — and in prophetic 
 vision, standing on the shoulders of the generations of the past, 
 he will see and point us to the Promised Land. He will sing 
 that the Creation is not yel^ finished; that as the ammonite and 
 trilobite have given place to' man, so man himself shall be suc- 
 ceeded by other forms more beautiful, other souls more elevated, 
 other beings more. and yet more like God. 
 
 IliY 27, ICT.