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To live to a good old age such as the ancients reached, serene and contented, dignifying the life of man, leading a simple, epic country life in these days of confusion and turmoil,---that is what Wordsworth has done. 408 Retaining the tastes and the innocence of his youth. There is more wonderful talent, but nothing so cheering and world-famous as this.
The life of man would seem to be going all to wrack and pieces, and no instance of permanence and the ancient natural health, notwithstanding Burns, and Coleridge, and Carlyle. It will not do for men to die young; the greatest genius does not die young. Whom the gods love most do indeed die young, but not till their life is matured, and their years are like those of the oak, for they are the products half of nature and half of God. What should nature do without old men, not children but men?
The life of men, not to become a mockery and a jest, should last a respectable term of years. We cannot spare the age of those old Greek Philosophers. They live long who do not live for a near end, who still forever look to the immeasurable future for their manhood.
All dramas have but one scene. There is but one stage for the peasant and for the actor, and both on the farm and in the theatre the curtain rises to reveal the same majestic scenery. The globe of earth is poised in space for his stage under the foundations of the theatre, and the cope of heaven, out of reach of the scene-shifter, overarches it. It is always to be remembered by the critic that all actions are to be regarded at last as performed from a distance upon some rood of earth and amid the operations of nature.
Rabelais, too, inhabited the soil of France in sunshine and shade in those years; and his life was no "farce" after all. 409
I seek the present time,
No other clime,
Life in to-day,---
Not to sail another way,---
To Paris or to Rome,
Or farther still from home.
That man, whoe'er he is,
Lives but a moral death
Whose life is not coeval
With his breath.
My feet forever stand
On Concord fields,
And I must live the life
Which their soil yields.
What are deeds done
Away from home?
What the best essay
On the Ruins of Rome?
The love of the new,
The unfathomed blue,
The wind in the wood,
All future good,
The sunlit tree,
The small chickadee,
The dusty highways,
What Scripture says,
This pleasant weather,
And all else together,
The river's meander,
All things, in short,
Forbid me to wander 410
In deed or in thought.
In cold or in drouth,
Not seek the sunny South,
But make my whole tour
In the sunny present hour.
For here if thou fail,
Where can'st thou prevail?
If you love not
Your own land most,
You'll find nothing lovely
On a distant coast.
If you love not
The latest sunset,
What is there in pictures
Or old gems set?
If no man should travel
Till he had the means,
There'd be little travelling
For kings or for queens.
The means, what are they?
They are the wherewithal
Great expenses to pay,
Life got, and some to spare,
Great works on hand,
And freedom from care,
Plenty of time well spent
To use,
Clothes paid for and no rent
In your shoes,
Something to eat 411
And something to burn,
And above all no need to return.
Then they who come back,
Say, have they not failed,
Wherever they've ridden,
Or steamed it, or sailed?
All your grass hay'd,
All your debts paid,
All your wills made;
Then you might as well have stay'd,
For are you not dead,
Only not buried?
The way unto "to-day,"
The railroad to "here,"
They never'll grade that way
Nor shorten it, I fear.
There are plenty of depots
All the world o'er,
But not a single station
At a man's door.
If he would get near
To the secret of things,
He'll not have to hear
When the engine bell rings.
Exaggeration! was ever any virtue attributed to a man without exaggeration? was ever any vice, without infinite exaggeration? Do we not exaggerate ourselves to ourselves, or do we often recognize ourselves for the 412 actual men we are? The lightning is an exaggeration of light. We live by exaggeration. Exaggerated history is poetry, and is truth referred to a new standard. To a small man every greater one is an exaggeration. No truth was ever expressed but with this sort of emphasis, so that for the time there was no other truth. The value of what is really valuable can never be exaggerated. You must speak loud to those who are hard of hearing; so you acquire a habit of speaking loud to those who are not. In order to appreciate any, even the humblest, man, you must not only understand, but you must first love him; and there never was such an exaggerator as love. Who are we? Are we not all of us great men? And yet what [are] we actually? Nothing, certainly, to speak of. By an immense exaggeration we appreciate our Greek poetry and philosophy, Egyptian ruins, our Shakespeares and Miltons, our liberty and Christianity. We give importance to this hour over all other hours. We do not live by justice, but [by grace.][445]
Love never perjures itself, nor is it mistaken.
He is not the great writer, who is afraid to let the world know that he ever committed an impropriety. Does it not know that all men are mortal?
Carlyle told R. W. E. that he first discovered that he was not a jackass on reading "Tristram Shandy" and Rousseau's "Confessions," especially the last. His first essay is an article in Fraser's Magazine on two boys quarrelling. 413
Youth wants something to look up to, to look forward to; as the little boy who inquired of me the other day, "How long do those old-agers live?" and expressed the intention of compassing two hundred summers at least. The old man who cobbles shoes without glasses at a hundred, and cuts a handsome swath at a hundred and five, is indispensable to give dignity and respectability to our life.
From all points of the compass, from the earth beneath and the heavens above, have come these inspirations and been entered duly in the order of their arrival in the journal. Thereafter, when the time arrived, they were winnowed into lectures, and again, in due time, from lectures into essays. And at last they stand, like the cubes of Pythagoras, firmly on either basis; like statues on their pedestals, but the statues rarely take hold of hands. There is only such connection and series as is attainable in the galleries. And this affects their immediate practical and popular influence.
Carlyle, we should say, more conspicuously than any other, though with little enough expressed or even conscious sympathy, represents the Reformer class. In him the universal plaint is most settled and serious. Until the thousand named and nameless grievances are righted, there will be no repose for him in the lap of Nature or the seclusion of science and literature. And all the more for not being the visible acknowledged leader of any class.[446] 414
