A HERO AND SOME OTHER FOLKS

by

WILLIAM A. QUAYLE

Author of "The Poet's Poet and Other Essays"

Cincinnati: Jennings & PyeNew York: Eaton & MainsCopyright, 1900, byThe Western Methodist Book Concern

_To think some one will care to listen to us, and to believe we do notspeak to vacant air but to listening hearts, is always sweet. Thatfriends have listened to this author's spoken and written words withapparent gladness emboldens him to believe they will give him hearingonce again. _

_May some one's eyes be lightened, some one's burden be lifted from hisshoulders for an hour of rest, some one's landscape grow larger, fairer, and more fruitful, because these essays have been written. _

WILLIAM A. QUAYLE. 

Contents

 I. JEAN VALJEAN II. SOME WORDS ON LOVING SHAKESPEARE III. CALIBAN IV. WILLIAM THE SILENT V. THE ROMANCE OF AMERICAN GEOGRAPHY VI. ICONOCLASM IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE VII. TENNYSON THE DREAMER VIII. THE AMERICAN HISTORIANS IX. KING ARTHUR X. THE STORY OF THE PICTURES XI. THE GENTLEMAN IN LITERATURE XII. THE DRAMA OF JOB

A Hero and Some Other Folks

I

Jean Valjean

The hero is not a luxury, but a necessity. We can no more do withouthim than we can do without the sky. Every best man and woman is atheart a hero-worshiper. Emerson acutely remarks that all men admireNapoleon because he was themselves in possibility. They were inminiature what he was developed. For a like though nobler reason, allmen love heroes. They are ourselves grown tall, puissant, victorious, and sprung into nobility, worth, service. The hero electrifies theworld; he is the lightning of the soul, illuminating our sky, clarifying the air, making it thereby salubrious and delightful. Whatany elect spirit did, inures to the credit of us all. A fragment ofLowell's clarion verse may stand for the biography of heroism:

 "When a deed is done for Freedom, through the broad earth's aching breast Runs a thrill of joy prophetic, trembling on from east to west; And the slave, where'er he cowers, feels the soul within him climb To the awful verge of manhood, as the energy sublime Of a century bursts full-blossomed on the thorny stem of Time;"

such being the undeniable result and history of any heroic service. 

But the world's hero has changed. The old hero was Ulysses, orAchilles, or Aeneas. The hero of Greek literature is Ulysses, asAeneas is in Latin literature. But to our modern thought these heroesmiss of being heroic. We have outgrown them as we have outgrown dollsand marbles. To be frank, we do not admire Aeneas nor Ulysses. Aeneaswept too often and too copiously. He impresses us as a big cry-baby. Of this trinity of classic heroes--Ulysses, Aeneas, andAchilles--Ulysses is least obnoxious. This statement is cold andunsatisfactory, and apparently unappreciative, but it is candid andjust. Lodge, in his "Some Accepted Heroes, " has done service inrubbing the gilding from Achilles, and showing that he was gaudy andcheap. We thought the image was gold, which was, in fact, thin gilt. Achilles sulks in his tent, while Greek armies are thrown back defeatedfrom the Trojan gates. In nothing is he admirable save that, when hispouting fit is over and when he rushes into the battle, he has might, and overbears the force opposing him as a wave does some pettyobstacle. But no higher quality shines in his conquest. He is vain, brutal, and impervious to high motive. In Aeneas one can find littleattractive save his filial regard. He bears Anchises on his shouldersfrom toppling Troy; but his wanderings constitute an Odyssey ofcommonplaces, or chance, or meanness. No one can doubt Virgil meant tocreate a hero of commanding proportions, though we, looking at him fromthis far remove, find him uninteresting, unheroic, and vulgar; and whythe goddess should put herself out to allay tempests in his behalf, orwhy hostile deities should be disturbed to tumble seas into turbulencefor such a voyager, is a query. He merits neither their wrath northeir courtesy. I confess to liking heroes of the old Norse mythologybetter. They, at least, did not cry nor grow voluble with words whenobstacles obstructed the march. They possess the merit of tremendousaction. Aeneas, in this regard, is the inferior of Achilles. Excuseus from hero worship, if Aeneas be hero. In this old company ofheroes, Ulysses is easy superior. Yet the catalogue of his virtues isan easy task. Achilles was a huge body, associated with little brain, and had no symptom of sagacity. In this regard, Ulysses outranks him, and commands our respect. He has diplomacy and finesse. He is notsimply a huge frame, wrestling men down because his bulk surpassestheirs. He has a thrifty mind. He is the man for councils of war, fitted to direct with easy mastery of superior acumen. Hisfellow-warriors called him "crafty, " because he was brainy. He wasschooled in stratagem, by which he became author of Ilium's overthrow. Ulysses was shrewd, brave, balanced--possibly, though not conclusively, patriotic--a sort of Louis XI, so far as we may form an estimate, butno more. He was selfish, immoral, barren of finer instincts, who wasloved by his dog and by Penelope, though for no reason we can discover. Ten years he fought before Troy, and ten years he tasted the irony ofthe seas--in these episodes displaying bravery and fortitude, but nohomesick love for Penelope, who waited at the tower of Ithaca for him, a picture of constancy sweet enough to hang on the palace walls of allthese centuries. We do not think to love Ulysses, nor can we workourselves up to the point of admiration; and he is the best heroclassic Rome and Greece can offer. No! Register, as the modern senseof the classic hero, we do not like him. 

He is not admirable, yet is not totally lacking in power to commandattention. What is his quality of appeal to us? This: He is action;and action thrills us. The old hero was, in general, brave andbrilliant. He had the tornado's movement. His onset redeems him. Heblustered, was spectacular, heartless, and did not guess the meaning ofpurity; but he was warrior, and the world enjoys soldiers. And thismotley hero has been attempted in our own days. He was archaic, butcertain have attempted to make him modern. Byron's Don Juan is the oldhero, only lost to the old hero's courage. He is a villain, with notsense enough to understand he is unattractive. He is a libertine atlarge, who thinks himself a gentleman. Don Juan is as immoral, impervious to honor, and as villainous as the Greek gods. TheD'Artagnan romances have attempted the old hero's resuscitation. Themovement of the "Three Musketeers" is mechanical rather than human. D'Artagnan's honor is limited to his fealty to his king. He has nomore sense of delicacy toward women, or honor for them as women, thanAchilles had. Some of his doings are too defamatory to be thought of, much less mentioned. No! Excuse me from D'Artagnan and the rest ofDumas' heroes. They may be French, but they are not heroic. AboutDumas' romances there is a gallop which, with the unwary, passes foraction and art. But he has not, of his own motion, conceived a singlewoman who was not seduced or seducible, nor a single man who was not alibertine; for "The Son of Porthros" [Transcriber's note: Porthos?] andhis bride are not of Dumas' creation. He is not open to the charge ofhaving drawn the picture of one pure man or woman. Zola is the naturalgoal of Dumas; and we enjoy neither the route nor the terminus. LouisXIV, Charles II, and George IV are modeled after the old licentiouspretense at manhood, but we may all rejoice that they deceive nobodynow. Our civilization has outgrown them, and will not, even in secondchildhood, take to such playthings. 

But what was the old hero's chief failure? The answer is, He lackedconscience. Duty had no part in his scheme of action, nor in hisvocabulary of word or thought. Our word "virtue" is the bodilyimportation of the old Roman word "virtus, " but so changed in meaningthat the Romans could no more comprehend it than they could theCopernican theory of astronomy. With them, "virtus" meantstrength--that only--a battle term. The solitary application was tofortitude in conflict. With us, virtue is shot through and throughwith moral quality, as a gem is shot through with light, andmonopolizes the term as light monopolizes the gem. This change isradical and astonishing, but discloses a change which hasrevolutionized the world. The old hero was conscienceless--acharacteristic apparent in Greek civilization. What Greek patriot, whether Themistocles or Demosthenes, applied conscience to patriotism?They were as devoid of practical conscience as a Metope of theParthenon was devoid of life. Patriotism was a transient sentiment. Demosthenes could become dumb in the presence of Philip's gold; and ina fit of pique over mistreatment at the hands of his brother-citizens, Themistocles became a traitor, and, expatriated, dwelt a guest at thePersian court. Strangely enough--and it is passing strange--the mostheroic personality in Homer's Iliad, the Greek's "Bible of heroisms, "was not the Atridae, whether Agamemnon or Menelaus; not Ajax norAchilles, nor yet Ulysses; but was Hector, the Trojan, who appears togreater advantage as hero than all the Grecian host. And Homer was aGreek! This is strange and unaccountable irony. Say once more, theold hero's lack was conscience. He, like his gods and goddesses, whowere deified infamies, was a studied impurity. Jean Valjean is a hero, but a hero of a new type. 

Literature is a sure index of a civilization. Who cares to settle inhis mind whether the world grows better, may do so by comparingcontemporaneous literature with the reading of other days. "TheHeptameron, " of Margaret of Navarre, is a book so filthy as to benauseating. That people could read it from inclination is unthinkable;and to believe that a woman could read it, much less write it, taxestoo sorely our credulity. In truth, this work did not, in the days ofits origin, shock the people's sensibilities. A woman wrote it, andshe a sister of Francis I of France, and herself Queen of Navarre, anda pure woman. And her contemporaries, both men and women, read it withdelight, because they had parted company with blushes and modesty. Zola is less voluptuous and filthy than these old tales. Some thingseven Zola curtains. Margaret of Navarre tears the garments from thebodies of men and women, and looks at their nude sensuality smilingly. Of Boccaccio's "Decameron, " the same general observations hold; savethat they are less filthy, though no less sensual. In the eraproducing these tales, witness this fact: The stories are representedas told by a company of gentlemen and ladies, the reciter beingsometimes a man, sometimes a woman; the place, a country villa, whitherthey had fled to escape a plague then raging in Florence. The people, so solacing themselves in retreat from a plague they should havestriven to alleviate by their presence and ministries, were thegentility of those days, representing the better order of society, andtold stories which would now be venal if told by vulgar men in sometavern of ill-repute. That Boccaccio should have reported these talesas emanating from such a company is proof positive of the immodesty ofthose days, whose story is rehearsed in the "Decameron. " Rousseau's"Confessions" is another book showing the absence of current moralityin his age. Notwithstanding George Eliot's panegyric, these memoirsare the production of unlimited conceit, of a practical absence of anymoral sensitiveness; and while Rousseau could not be accused of beingsensual, nor amorous and heartless as Goethe, he yet shows so crude amoral state as to render him unwholesome to any person of ordinarymorals in the present day. His "Confessions, " instead of being naive, strike me as being distinctly and continuously coarse. A man and womanwho could give their children deliberately to be farmed out, desertingthem as an animal would not, and this with no sense of loss orcompunction, nor even with a sense of the inhumanity of suchprocedure--such a man and woman tell us how free-love can degrade anatively virtuous mind. Such was Rousseau; and his "Confessions" arelike himself, unblushing, because shameless. These books reflect theirrespective ages, and are happily obsolete now. Such memoirs andfictions in our day are unthinkable as emanating from respectablesources; and if written would be located in vile haunts in the purlieusof civilization. Gauged by such a test, the world is seen to bebetter, and immensely better. We have sailed out of sight of the oldcontinent of coarse thinking, and are sailing a sea where purity ofthought and expression impregnate the air like odors. The old hero, with his lewdness and rhodomontade, is excused from the stage. We havehad enough of him. Even Cyrano de Bergerac is so out of keeping withthe new notion of the heroic, that the translator of the drama mustapologize for his hero's swagger. We love his worth, though despisinghis theatrical air and acts. We are done with the actor, and want theman. And this new hero is proof of a new life in the soul, and, therefore, more welcome than the glad surprise of the firstmeadow-lark's song upon the brown meadows of the early spring. 

A reader need not be profound, but may be superficial, and yet discoverthat Jean Valjean is fashioned after the likeness of Jesus. MichaelAngelo did not more certainly model the dome of St. Peter's afterBrunelleschi's dome of the Duomo than Hugo has modeled his Valjeanafter Christ. We are not necessarily aware of ourselves, nor of ourera, until something discovers both to us, as we do not certainly knowsea air when we feel it. I doubt if most men would recognize the tonicof sea air if they did not know the sea was neighbor to them. We sightthe ocean, and then know the air is flooded with a health as ample asthe seas from which it blows. So we can not know our intellectual airis saturated with Christ, because we can not go back. We lackcontemporaneous material for contrast. We are, ourselves, a part ofthe age, as of a moving ship, and can not see its motion. We can notrealize the world's yesterdays. We know them, but do not comprehendthem, since between apprehending and comprehending an epoch lie suchwide spaces. "Quo Vadis" has done good in that it has popularized arealization of that turpitude of condition into which Christianitystepped at the morning of its career; for no lazar-house is so vile asthe Roman civilization when Christianity began--God's angel--to troublethat cursed pool. Christ has come into this world's affairsunheralded, as the morning does not come; for who watches the easternlattices can see the morning star, and know the dawn is near. Christhas slipped upon the world as a tide slips up the shores, unnoted, inthe night; and because we did not see him come, did not hear hisadvent, his presence is not apparent. Nothing is so big with joy toChristian thought as the absolute omnipresence of the Christ in theworld's life. Stars light their torches in the sky; and the sky iswider and higher than the stars. Christ is such a sky to moderncivilization. 

Plainly, Jean Valjean is meant for a hero. Victor Hugo loves heroes, and has skill and inclination to create them. His books arebiographies of heroism of one type or another. No book of his isheroless. In this attitude he differs entirely from Thackeray andHawthorne, neither of whom is particularly enamored of heroes. Hawthorne's romances have not, in the accepted sense, a single hero. He does not attempt building a character of central worth. He iswriting a drama, not constructing a hero. In a less degree, this istrue of Thackeray. He truly loves the heroic, and on occasion depictsit. Henry Esmond and Colonel Newcome are mighty men of worth, but areexceptions to Thackeray's method. He pokes fun at them even. "VanityFair" he terms a novel without a hero. He photographs a procession. "The Virginians" contains no character which can aspire to centrality, much less might. He, loving heroes, attempts concealing his passion, and, if accused of it, denies the accusation. After reading all hiswritings, no one could for a moment claim that Thackeray was thebiographer of heroes. He is a biographer of meanness, and times, andsham aristocracy and folks, and can, when he cares to do so, portrayheroism lofty as tallest mountains. With Hugo all is different. Hewill do nothing else than dream and depict heroism and heroes. 

He loves them with a passion fervent as desert heats. His pages areablaze with them. Somebody lifting up the face, and facing God in somemood or moment of briefer or longer duration--this is Hugo's method. In "Toilers of the Sea, " Galliatt, by almost superhuman effort, andphysical endurance and fortitude and fertility in resource, defeatsoctopus and winds and rocks and seas, and in lonely triumph pilots thewreck home--and all of this struggle and conquest for love! He is asomber hero, but a hero still, with strength like the strength of ten, since his love is as the love of a legion. The power to do is his, andthe nobility to surrender the woman of his love; and there his nobilitydarkens into stoicism, and he waits for the rising tide, watching theoutgoing ship that bears his heart away unreservedly--waits, only eagerthat the tide ingulf him. 

In "Ninety-Three, " the mother of the children in the burning tower isheroine. In "By Order of the King, " Dea is heroic, and spotless as"Elaine, the lily maid of Astolat;" and Ursus, a vagabond, isfatherhood in its sweet nobleness; and Gwynplaine, disfigured anddeserted--a little lad set ashore upon a night of hurricane and snow, who, finding in his wanderings a babe on her dead mother's breast, rescues this bit of winter storm-drift, plodding on through untrackedsnows, freezing, but no more thinking to drop his burden than themother thought to desert it--Gwynplaine is a hero for whose deed anepic is fitting. Quasimodo, the hunchback of Notre Dame, found, afterlong years, holding in his skeleton arms a bit of woman's drapery and awoman's skeleton--Quasimodo, hideous, herculean, hungry-hearted, tender, a hunchback, yet a lover and a man--who denies to Quasimodo ahero's laurels? In "Les Miserables" are heroes not a few. Gavroche, that green leaf blown about Paris streets; Fantine, the mother;Eponine, the lover; Bishop Bienvenu, the Christian; Jean Valjean, theman, --all are heroic folk. Our hearts throb as we look at them. Gavroche, the lad, dances by as though blown past by the gale. Fantine, shorn of her locks of gold; Fantine, with her bloody lips, because her teeth have been sold to purchase medicine for her sickchild--her child, yet a child of shame; Fantine, her mother's loveomnipotent, lying white, wasted, dying, expectantly looking toward thedoor, with her heart beating like a wild bird, beating with its wingsagainst cage-bars, anxious for escape; Fantine, watching for her childCossette, watching in vain, but watching; Fantine, dying, glad becauseMonsieur Madeleine has promised he will care for Cossette as if thebabe were his; Fantine, dead, with her face turned toward the door, looking in death for the coming of her child, --Fantine affects us liketears and sobbing set to music. Look at her; for a heroine is dead. And Eponine, with the gray dawn of death whitening her cheeks andgasping, "If--when--if when, " now silent, for she is choked by the rushof blood and stayed from speech by fierce stabs of pain, butcontinuing, "When I am dead--a favor--a favor, Monsieur Marius [silenceonce again to wrestle with the throes of death]--a favor--a favor whenI am dead [now her speech runs like frightened feet], if you will kissme; for indeed, Monsieur Marius, I think I loved you a little--I--Ishall feel--your kiss--in death. " Lie quiet in the darkening night, Eponine! Would you might have a queen's funeral, since you have shownanew the moving miracle of woman's love!

Bishop Bienvenu is Hugo's hero as saint; and we can not deny him beautysuch as those "enskied and sainted" wear. This is the romancist'stribute to a minister of God; and sweet the tribute is. With not afew, the bishop is chief hero, next to Jean Valjean. He is redemptive, like the purchase money of a slave. He is quixotic; he is not balancedalways, nor always wise; but he falls on the side of Christianity andtenderness and goodness and love--a good way to fall, if one is to fallat all. We love the bishop, and can not help it. He was good to thepoor, tender to the unerring, illuminative to those who were in themoral dark, and came over people like a sunrise; crept into theirhearts for good, as a child creeps up into its father's arms, andnestles there like a bird. Surely we love the bishop. He is a herosaint. To be near him was to be neighborly with heaven. He was everminding people of God. Is there any such office in earth or heaven?To look at this bishop always puts our heart in the mood of prayer, andwhat helps us to prayer is a celestial benefit. The pertinent fact inhim is, that he is not greatness, but goodness. We do not think ofgreatness when we see him or hear him, but we think with our heartswhen he is before our eyes. Goodness is more marketable thangreatness, and more necessary. Goodness, greatness! Brilliancy is acheap commodity when put on the counter beside goodness; and BishopBienvenu is a romancer's apotheosis of goodness, and we bless him forthis deification. 

The bishop was merchantman, freighting ships. His wharves are wide, his fleet is great, his cargoes are many. Only he is freighting shipsfor heaven. No bales of merchandise nor ingots of iron, but souls forwhom Christ died, --these are his cargoes; and had you asked him, "Whatwork to-day?" a smile had flooded sunlight along his face while he, said, "Freighting souls with God to-day, and lading cargoes for theskies. " This is royal merchandise. The Doge of Venice annually flunga ring into the sea as sign of Venice's nuptials with the Adriatic; butBishop Bienvenu each day wedded himself and the world to heaven, and hecomes

 "O'er my ear like the sweet south, That breathes upon a bank of violets, Stealing and giving odor. "

Hugo paints with sunset tints and with lightning's lurid light; hiscontrasts are fierce, his backgrounds are often as black as arain-cloud. He paints with the mad rush of a Turner. He is fierce inhates and loves. He does nothing by moderation. Calmness does notbelong to him. He is tempestuous always; but tempests are magnificentand purifying to the air. Hugo is painting, and painting heroes, andhis hero of heroes is Valjean. Jean Valjean is conscience. InMacbeth, conscience is warring and retributive. In Richard III, conscience, stifled in waking, speaks in dreams, and is menace, like asword swung by a maniac's hands. In Arthur Dimmesdale, conscience islacerative. In Jean Valjean, conscience is regulative, creative, constructive. Jean Valjean is conscience, and conscience is king. What the classic heroes lacked, Jean Valjean possesses. 

The setting of this character is entirely modern. "Les Miserables" isa story of the city and of poverty, and can not be dissociated fromthem by any wrench of thought, however violent. Not that urban life orpoverty are new elements in the school of suffering. They are not new, as pain is not new. This is the difference. In the old ages, the cityand poverty were taken as matters of course. Comfort was not a classicconsideration. The being alive to conditions, sensitive to suffering, eager for diminution of the world's woes, is a modern thought, a Christthought. Sociology is an application of Christ's teaching. He foundedthis science. Rome was the monster city of the empire, and possiblythe monster city of ancient geography, and contained approximately, atits most populous period, two and one half millions of inhabitants. Man is gregarious as the flocks; he seems to fear solitude, and fleeswhat he fears. Certain we are that in America, one hundred years ago, less than one-thirtieth of the population was in cities; now, aboutone-third is in city communities; and European cities are outgrowingAmerican cities. In other words, at the present time, cities aregrowing in a ratio totally disproportionate to the growth ofpopulation; and this, not in the New World simply, but in the Old. London has nearly as many citizens as England had in the time of thePuritan Revolution. Men are nucleating in a fashion foreboding, butcertain. A symptom of the city life is, that he who is city bred knowsno life apart from his city. He belongs to it as essentially as theVenetian belonged to Venice. The community is a veritable part of theman's self. Note this in Jean Valjean. It never occurs to him toleave Paris. Had he been a tree rooted in the soil along the Seine, hehad not been more stationary. Men live, suffer, die, and hug theirugly tenements as parasites of these dilapidations, and draw theirlife-saps from such a decayed trunk. This human instinct forassociation is mighty in its impulsion. Not a few, but multitudes, prefer to be hungry and cold and live in a city to living withabundance of food and raiment in the country. Any one can see this athis alley or in his neighboring street. It is one of the latentinsanities of the soul. The city is a live wire, and will not let goof him who grasps it. There is a stream of life pouring into cities, but no stream flowing into the country. The tide runs up the shore andback into the deep seas; not so these human tides. They pour into theDead Sea basin of the urban community. Jean Valjean was a completemodern in his indissoluble identification with the city. As a matterof course, his was the criminal instinct, superadded to the gregariousinstinct, which hides in a city labyrinth rather than the forests ofthe Amazon. Yet, taken all in all, he evidently is a thorough modernin his urban instinct. The world was big, and he had gold for passageacross seas; and there he had, in reason, found entire safety; but sucha thought never entered his mind. Paris was the only sea he knew; herehis plans for escape and plans for life clung tenaciously as a deadman's hand. 

The second element of background for Jean Valjean is poverty. Thepeople of this drama are named "the miserable ones. " And poverty ismodern and a modern question. All socialists, anarchists, andcommunists talk of poverty; this is their one theme. Superficialsocial reformers make poverty responsible for the total turpitude ofmen. Men are poor, hence criminal. Jean Valjean is poor--miserablypoor; sees his sister's children hungry, and commits crime, is a thief;becomes a galley slave as punitive result. Ergo, poverty was the causeof crime, and poverty, and not Valjean, must be indicted; so runs theargument. This conclusion we deny. Let us consider. Poverty is notunwholesome. The bulk of men are poor, and always have been. Povertyis no new condition. Man's history is not one of affluence, but one ofindigence. This is a patent fact. But a state of lack is notunwholesome, but on the contrary does great good. Poverty has suppliedthe world with most of the kings it boasts of. Palaces have notcradled the kings of thought, service, and achievement. What greatestpoet had luxury for a father? Name one. Poverty is the mother ofkings. Who censures poverty censures the home from whose doors havepassed the most illustrious of the sons of men. Christ's was a povertyso keen and so parsimonious that Occidentals can not picture it. More, current social reformers assume that the poor are unhappy; though ifsuch reformers would cease dreaming, and learn seeing, they wouldreverse their creed. Riches do not command joy; for joy is not aspring rising from the depths where gold is found and gems gathered. Most men are poor, and most men are happy, or, if they are not, theymay trace their sadness to sources other than lack of wealth. The bestriches are the gifts of God, and can not be shut off by any sluicing;the choicest riches of the soul, such as knowledge and usefulness andlove and God, are not subject to the tariff of gold. Poverty, weconclude, is not in itself grievous. Indeed, there are in povertyblessings which many of us know, and from which we would not beseparated without keen regret. But penury is hard. When povertypinches like winter's night, when fuel fails, and hunger is ourcompany, then poverty becomes harsh and unpalatable, and not to beboasted of; though even penury has spurred many a sluggish life toconquering moods. When a man lies with his face to the wall, paralytic, helpless, useless, a burden to himself and others, and hearsthe rub of his wife washing for a livelihood--and he loves her so; tookher to his home in her fair girlhood, when her beauty bloomed like agarden of roses, and promised to keep her, and now she works for himall day and into the dark night, and loves to; but he turns his face tothe wall, puts his one movable hand against his face, sobs so that histears wash through his fingers and wet his pillow as with drivingrain, --then poverty is pitiful. Or, when one sees his children hungry, tattered, with lean faces and eyes staring as with constant fear; seesthem huddling under rags or cowering at a flicker meant forflame, --then poverty is hard; and then, "The poor always ye have withyou, " said our Christ, which remember and be pitiful!

But such penury, even, does not require crime. Valjean became acriminal from poverty; but himself felt now, as the days slipped fromhis life-store, that crime was not necessary. Theft is bad economics. The criminals on the dockets are not those pinched with poverty, as onemay assure himself if he gives heed to criminal dockets. People prefercrime as a method of livelihood. These are criminals. The "artfuldodger, " in "Oliver Twist, " is a picture of the average criminal. Honest poverty need not steal. In the writer's own city, the otherday, a man accused of theft pleaded his children's poverty aspalliative of his crime; but in that city was abundant help for worthypoverty. That man lacked an absolute honesty. He and his could havebeen fed and clothed, and himself maintained his manly dignity anduncorrupted honesty. To blame society with criminality is a currentmethod, but untrue and unwise; for thus we will multiply, not decimate, criminals. The honest man may be in penury; but he will have help, andneed not shelter in a jail. Thus, then, these two items of modernitypaint background for Jean Valjean's portrait; and in Jean Valjean, To-day has found a voice. 

This man is a criminal and a galley slave, with yellow passport--hisname, Jean Valjean. Hear his story. An orphan; a half-sullen lad, reared by his sister; sees her husband dead on a bed of rags, withseven orphans clinging in sobs to the dead hands. Jean Valjean laborsto feed this motley company; denies himself bread, so that he may slipfood into their hands; has moods of stalwart heroism; and never havinghad a sweetheart--pity him!--toils on, hopeless, under a sky robbed ofblue and stars; leading a life plainly, wholly exceptional, and out ofwork in a winter when he was a trifle past twenty-six; hears hissister's children crying, "Bread, bread, give bread;" rises in sullenacerbity; smites his huge fist through a baker's window, and steals aloaf; is arrested, convicted, sent to the galleys, and herded withgalley slaves; attempts repeated escapes, is retaken, and at the age offorty-six shambles out of his galley slavery with a yellow passport, certifying this is "a very dangerous man;" and with a heart on whichbrooding has written with its biting stylus the story of what hebelieves to be his wrongs, Jean Valjean, bitter as gall againstsociety, has his hands ready, aye, eager, to strike, no matter whom. Looked at askance, turned from the hostel, denied courtesy, food, andshelter, the criminal in him rushes to the ascendant, and he thruststhe door of the bishop's house open. Listen, he is speaking now, lookat him! The bishop deals with him tenderly, as a Christian ought;sentimentally, but scarcely wisely. He has sentimentality rather thansentiment in his kindness; he puts a premium on Jean Valjean becoming acriminal again. To assume everybody to be good, as somephilanthropists do, is folly, being so transparently false. The goodbishop--bless him for his goodness!--who prays God daily not to leadhim into temptation, why does he lead this sullen criminal intotemptation? Reformatory methods should be sane. The bishop's methodswere not sane. He meant well, but did not quite do well. JeanValjean, sleeping in a bed of comfort, grows restless, wakens, rises, steals what is accessible, flees, is arrested, brought back, isexonerated by the bishop's tenderness, goes out free; steals from thelittle Savoyard, cries after the retreating lad to restore him hiscoin, tails to bring him back; fights with self, and with God's goodhelp rises in the deep dark of night from the bishop's steps; walks outinto a day of soul, trudges into the city of M----, to which he findsadmission, not by showing the criminal's yellow passport, but by thepassport of heroism, having on entrance rescued a child from a burningbuilding; becomes a citizen, invents a process of manufacturing jet, accumulates a fortune, spends it lavishly in the bettering of the citywhere his riches were acquired; is benefactor to employee and city, andis called "Monsieur;" and after repeated refusals, becomes "Monsieurthe Mayor;" gives himself up as a criminal to save a man unjustlyaccused, is returned to the galleys for the theft of the littleSavoyard's forty-sous coin; by a heroic leap from the yardarm, escapes;seeks and finds Cossette, devotes his life to sheltering and lovingher; runs his gauntlet of repeated perils with Javert, grows steadilyin heroism, and sturdy, invigorating manhood; dies a hero and a saint, and an honor to human kind, --such is Jean Valjean's biography in meageroutline. But the moon, on a summer's evening, "a silver crescentgleaming 'mid the stars, " appears hung on a silver cord of the fullmoon's rim; and, as the crescent moon is not the burnished silver ofthe complete circle, so no outline can include the white, bewilderinglight of this heroic soul. Jean Valjean is the biography of a redeemedlife. The worst life contains the elements of redemption, as wordscontain the possibility of poetry. He was a fallen, vicious, desperateman; and from so low a level, he and God conspired to lift him to thelevels where the angels live, than which a resurrection from the deadis no more potent and blinding miracle. Instead of giving this bookthe caption, "Jean Valjean, " it might be termed the "History of theRedemption of a Soul;" and such a theme is worthy the study of thiswide world of women and of men. 

Initial in this redemptive work was the good bishop, whose words, "JeanValjean, my brother, you belong no longer to evil, but to good, " neverlost their music or might to Valjean's spirit. Some man or womanstands on everybody's road to God. And Jean Valjean, with the bishop'swords sounding in his ears--voices that will not silence--goes out withhis candlesticks, goes trembling out, and starts on his anabasis to anew life; wandered all day in the fields, inhaled the odors of a fewlate flowers, his childhood being thus recalled; and when the sun wasthrowing mountain shadows behind hillocks and pebbles, as Jean Valjeansat and pondered in a dumb way, a Savoyard came singing on his way, tossing his bits of money in his hands; drops a forty-sous piece nearJean Valjean, who, in a mood of inexplicable evil, places his huge footupon it, nor listened to the child's entreaty, "My piece, monsieur;"and eager and more eager grows a child whose little riches wereinvaded, "My piece, my white piece, my silver;" and in his voice aretears--and what can be more touching than a child's voice touched withtears? "My silver;" and the lad shook the giant by the collar of hisblouse--"I want my silver, my forty-sous piece"--and began to cry. Alittle lad a-sobbing! Jean Valjean, you who for so many years "havetalked but little and never laughed;" Jean Valjean, pity the child;give him his coin. You were bought of the bishop for good. But interrible voice he shouts: "Who is there? You here yet? You had bettertake care of yourself;" and the little lad runs, breathless andsobbing. Jean Valjean hears his sobbing, but made no move forrestitution until the little Savoyard has passed from sight andhearing, when, waking as from some stupor, he rises, cries wildlythrough the night, "Petit Gervais! Petit Gervais!" and listened, and--no answer. Then he ran, ran toward restitution. Too late! toolate! "Petit Gervais! Petit Gervais! Petit Gervais!" and, to apriest passing, "Monsieur, have you seen a child go by--a littlefellow--Petit Gervais is his name?" And he calls him again through theempty night; and the lad hears him not. There is no response, and forthe first time since he passed to the galleys, Jean Valjean's heartswells, and he bursts into tears; for he was horrified at himself. Hishardness had mastered him, even when the bishop's tenderness had thawedhis winter heart. Jean Valjean was now afraid of himself, which iswhere moral strength has genesis. He goes back--back where? Nomatter, wait. He sees in his thought--in his thought he sees thebishop, and wept, shed hot tears, wept bitterly, with more weaknessthan a woman, with more terror than a child, and his life seemedhorrible; and he walks--whither? No matter. But, past midnight, thestage-driver saw, as he passed, a man in the attitude of prayer, kneeling upon the pavement in the shadow before the bishop's door; andshould you have spoken, "Jean Valjean!" he would not have answered you. He would not have heard. He is starting on a pilgrimage of manhoodtoward God. He saw the bishop; now he sees God, and here is hope; forso is God the secret of all good and worth, a thing to be set down asthe axiom of religion and life. A conscience long dormant is nowbecome regnant. Jean Valjean is a man again!

Goodness begets goodness. He climbed; and the mountain air and azureand fountains of clear waters, spouting from cliffs of snow and the faraltitudes, fed his spirit. God and he kept company, and, as is meet, goodness seemed native to him as lily blooms to lily stems. God washis secret, as God is the secret of us all. To scan his process ofrecovery is worth while. The bishop reminded him of God. Goodness andlove in man are wings to help us soar to where we see that service, love, and goodness are in God--see that God is good and God is love. Seeing God, Jean Valjean does good. Philanthropy is native to him;gentleness seems his birthright; his voice is low and sweet; hisface--the helpless look to it for help; his eyes are dreamy, like apoet's; he loves books; he looks not manufacturer so much as he lookspoet; he passes good on as if it were coin to be handled; he suffersnor complains; his silence is wide, like that of the still night; hefrequently walks alone and in the country; he becomes a god to Fantine, for she had spit upon him, and he had not resented; he adopts means forthe rescue of Cossette. In him, goodness moves finger from the lips, breaks silence, and becomes articulate. Jean Valjean is brave, magnanimous, of sensitive conscience, hungry-hearted, is possessed ofthe instincts of motherhood, bears being misjudged without complaint, is totally forgetful of himself, and is absolute in his loyalty toGod--qualities which lift him into the elect life of manhood. 

Jean Valjean was brave. He and fear never met. The solitary fear heknew was fear of himself, and lest he might not live for good as thebishop had bidden him; but fear from without had never crossed hispath. His was the bravery of conscience. His strength was prodigious, and he scrupled not to use it. Self-sparing was no trait of hischaracter. Like another hero we have read of, he would "gladly spendand be spent" for others, and bankrupt himself, if thereby he mightmake others rich. There is a physical courage, brilliant as a shock ofarmies, which feels the conflict and leaps to it as the storm-wavesleap upon the sword edges of the cliffs--a courage which counts noodds. There is another courage, moral rather than physical. Valjeanpossessed both, with moral courage in ascendency. He has the agilityand strength sometimes found in criminals. He is now in the galleysfor life. One day, while engaged in furling sail, a sailor has toppledfrom the yard; but in falling caught a rope, but hangs, swingingviolently, like some mad pendulum. The height is dizzying. Deathseems certain, when a convict, clad in red, and with a green cap, runsup for rescue, lets himself down alongside of the swaying sailor, nowin the last extremity of weakness, and ready to drop like a winterleaf. Valjean (for it is he) oscillates violently to and fro while thethrong below watch breathlessly. His peril is incredible, but his is abravery which does not falter, and a skill which equals bravery. Valjean is swayed in the wind as the swaying sailor, until he catcheshim in his arm, makes him fast to the rope, clambers up, reaches theyard, hauls up the sailor, and carries him to a place of safety. Andthe throng below, breathless till now, applauded and cried, "This manmust be pardoned. " Then it is that he, free once more, leapsdown--falls from the dizzying height, the multitude thinks--leaps downinto the seas, and wins liberty. Jean Valjean is heroic. His moralcourage, which is courage at its noon, is discovered best in his rescueof Fauchelevent, old, and enemy--an enmity engendered by Madeleine'sprosperity--to Monsieur Madeleine. The old man has fallen under hiscart, and is being surely crushed to death. The mayor joins the crowdgathered about the unfortunate car-man; offers a rising price for onewho will go under the cart and rescue the old man. Javert isthere--keen of eye and nostril as a vulture--and Jean Valjean is hisprey. He believes the mayor to be Jean Valjean, and, as the mayorurges some one to rescue the perishing man, says, with speech cold asbreath from a glacier, "I have known but one man who was equal to thistask, and he was a convict and in the galleys. " The old man moans, "How it crushes me!" and, hearing that cry, under the cart the mayorcrawls; and while those beside hold their breath, he, lying flat underthe weight, lifts twice, ineffectually, and, with one herculean effort, lifts again, and the cart slowly rises, and many willing hands helpingfrom without, the old man is saved; and Monsieur Madeleine arises, pale, dripping with sweat, garments muddy and torn, while the old manwhom he has rescued kisses his knees and calls him the good God. Andthe mayor looks at Javert with tranquil eye, though knowing full wellthat this act of generous courage in the rescue of an enemy has doomedhimself. This is moral courage of celestial order. 

His magnanimity is certainly apparent, --in the rescue of his enemy, Fauchelevent; in his release of his arch-enemy, Javert; in his presencewithin the barricade to protect Marius, who had, as a lover, robbed himof the one blossom that had bloomed in the garden of his heart, saveonly the passing bishop and the abiding God. No pettiness is in him. He loves and serves after a fashion learned of Christ. If compelled toadmire his courage, we are no less compelled to pay homage to hismagnanimity. 

His was a hungry heart. Love he had never known; he had never had asweetheart. And now all pent-up love of a long life empties itsprecious ointment on the head of Cossette. He was all the mother sheever knew or needed to know. Heaven made her rich in such maternity ashis. Mother instinct is in all good lives, and belongs to man. Maternity and paternity are met in the best manhood. The tenderness ofmotherhood must soften a man's touch to daintiness, like an eveningwind's caress, before fatherhood is perfect. All his youthhood, whichknew not any woman's lips to kiss; all his manhood, which had nevershared a hearth with wife or child, --all this unused tenderness nowadministers to the wants of this orphan, Cossette. His rescue of herfrom the Thenardiers is poetry itself. He had the instincts of agentleman. The doll he brought her for her first Christmas gift wasforerunner of a thousand gifts of courtesy and love. See, too, themourning garments he brought and laid beside her bed the first morninghe brought her to his garret, and watched her slumber as if he had beenappointed by God to be her guardian angel. To him life henceforthmeant Cossette. He was her servant always. For her he fought for hislife as if it had been an unutterable good. He lost himself, which isthe very crown of motherhood's devotion. He was himself supplanted inher affections by her lover, Marius, and his heart was stabbed as if bypoisoned daggers; for was not Cossette wife, daughter, sister, brother, mother, father, friend--all? But if his heart was breaking, she neverguessed it. He hid his hurt, though dying of heartbreak. 

Then, too, Jean Valjean is misjudged, and by those who should havetrusted him as they trusted God. We find it hard to be patient withMarius, and are not patient with Cossette. Her selfishness is not tobe condoned. Her contrition and her tears come too late. ThoughValjean forgives her, we do not forgive her. She deserves noforgiveness. Marius's honor was of the amateur order, lacking depthand breadth. He was superficial, judging by hearing rather than byeyes and heart. We have not patience to linger with his wife and him, but push past them to the hero spirit, whom they have not eyes to seenor hearts to understand. Jean Valjean misjudged, and by Marius andCossette! Impossible! Javert may do that; Fantine, not knowing him, may do that, but once knowing him she had as lief distrusted day tobring the light as to have distrusted him. Misjudged, and by those heloved most, suffered for, more than died for! Poor Valjean! Thiswakes our pity and our tears. Before, we have watched him, and havefelt the tug of battle on him; now the mists fall, and we put our handsbefore our eyes and weep. This saint of God misjudged by those forwhom he lives! Yet this is no solitary pathos. Were all hearts'history known, we should know how many died misjudged. All JeanValjean does has been misinterpreted. We distrust more and morecircumstantial evidence. It is hideous. No jury ought to convict aman on evidence of circumstances. Too many tragedies have been enactedbecause of such. Marius thought he was discerning and of a sensitivehonor. He thought it evident that Jean Valjean had slain Javert, andhad slain Monsieur Madeleine, whose fortune he has offered asCossette's marriage portion. Poor Jean Valjean! You a murderer, amarauder--you! Marius acts with frigid honor. Valjean will not livewith Marius and Cossette, being too sensitive therefor, perceivinghimself distrusted by Marius, but comes to warm his hands and heart atthe hearth of Cossette's presence; and he is stung when he sees no firein the reception-room. The omission he can not misinterpret. He goesagain, and the chairs are removed. Marius may have honor, but hishonor is cruel, like an inquisitor with rack and thumbscrew; and thenJean Valjean goes no more, but day by day suns his heart by going farenough to look at the house where Cossette is--no more; then his eyesare feverish to catch sight of her habitation as parched lips drink atdesert springs. Misjudged! O, that is harder to bear than all hishurts!

Then we will not say of Valjean, "He has conscience, " but rather, wewill say, "He is conscience. " Valjean's struggle with conscience isone of the majestic chapters of the world's literature, presenting, asit does, the worthiest and profoundest study of Christian consciencegiven by any dramatist since Christ opened a new chapter for consciencein the soul. Monsieur Madeleine, the mayor, is rich, respected, honored, is a savior of society, sought out by the king for politicalpreferment. One shadow tracks him like a nightmare. Javert is on histrack, instinct serving him for reason. At last, Javert himself thinksJean Valjean has been found; for a man has been arrested, is to betried, will doubtless be convicted, seeing evidence is damning. Now, Monsieur Madeleine, mayor of M----, your fear is all but ended. Ananodyne will be administered to your pain. Jean Valjean has known manya struggle. He thought his fiercest battles fought; but all hisyesterdays of conflict are as play contests and sham battles matchedwith this. Honor, usefulness, long years of service, love, guardianship of Cossette, and fealty to a promise given a dyingmother--all beckon to him. He is theirs; and has he not sufferedenough? More than enough. Let this man alone, that is all. Let himalone! He sees it. Joy shouts in his heart, "Javert will leave me inquiet. " "Let us not interfere with God, " and his resolution is formed. But conscience looks into his face. Ha! the bishop, too, is besidehim. Conscience speaks, and is saying, "Let the real Valjean go anddeclare himself. " This is duty. Conscience speaks, and his words areterrible, "Go, declare thyself. " Jean Valjean's sin is following him. That evening he had robbed Petit Gervais; therefore he is imperiled. Sin finds man out. But the fight thickens, and Valjean thinks todestroy the mementos of his past, and looks fearfully toward the door, bolted as it is, and gathers from a secret closet his old blue blouse, an old pair of trousers, an old haversack, and a great thorn stick, andincontinently flings them into the flames. Then, noticing the silvercandlesticks, the bishop's gifts, "These, too, must be destroyed, " hesays, and takes them in his hands, and stirs the fire with one of thecandlesticks, when he hears a voice clamoring, "Jean Valjean! JeanValjean! Jean Valjean!" Conscience and a battle, but the battle wasnot lost; for you see him in the prisoners' dock, declaring, "I am JeanValjean;" and those of the court dissenting, he persisted, declared hisrecognition of some galley prisoners, urging still, "I am Jean Valjean;you see clearly that I am Jean Valjean;" and those who saw and heardhim were dazed; and he said: "All who are here think me worthy of pity, do you not? Do you not? Great God! When I think of what I was on thepoint of doing, I think myself worthy of envy;" and he was gone. Andnext, Javert is seizing him fiercely, brutally, imperiously, as acriminal for whom there is no regard. With this struggle of conscienceand its consequent victory, "The Charge of the Light Brigade" becomestawdry and garish. The sight moves us as the majestic minstrelsy ofseas in tempest. No wonder that they who looked at Valjean, as hestood declaring himself to be the real Valjean, were blinded with agreat light. 

And his heart is so hungry, and his loyalty to God so urgent and soconquering. Jean Valjean has suffered much. Ulysses, buffeted by warsand stormy seas, has had a life of calm as compared with this new hero. Ulysses' battles were from without; Valjean's battles were from within. But if he has suffered greatly, he has also been greatly blessed. Struggle for goodness against sin is its own reward. We do not giveall and get nothing. There are compensations. Recompense of rewardpursues goodness as foam a vessel's track. If Jean Valjean lovedCossette with a passion such as the angels know; if she was his sun, and made the spring, there was a sense in which Cossette helpedValjean. There was response, not so much in the return of love as inthat he loved her; and his love for her helped him in his dark hours, helped him when he needed help the most, helped him on with God. Heneeds her to love, as our eyes need the fair flowers and the blue sky. His life was not empty, and God had not left himself without witness inJean Valjean's life; for he had had his love for Cossette. 

But he is bereft. Old age springs on him suddenly, as Javert had donein other days. He has, apparently without provocation, passed fromstrength to decrepitude. Since he sees Cossette no more, he has growngray, stooped, decrepit. There is no morning now, since he does notsee Cossette. You have seen him walking to the corner to catch sightof her house. How feeble he is! Another day, walking her way, but notso far; and the next, and the next, walking; but the last day he goesscarce beyond his own threshold. And now he can not go down thestairs; now he is in his own lonely room, alone. He sees death campingin his silent chamber, but feels no fright. No, no! rather, "Death, like a friend's voice from a distant field Approaching, called. * * * * * * For sure no gladlier does the stranded wreck See, through the gray skirts of a lifting squall, The boat that bears the hope of life approach To save the life despaired of, than he saw Death dawning on him, and the close of all. "

But Cossette, Cossette! To see her once. Just once, only once! Totouch her hand--O that were heaven! But he says to his heart, "I shallnot touch her hand, and I shall not see her face--no more, no more!"And the little garments he brought her when he took her from herslavery with the Thenardiers, there they are upon his bed, where he cantouch them, as if they were black tresses of the woman he had loved andlost. The bishop's candlesticks are lit. He is about to die, andwrites in his poor, sprawling fashion to Cossette--writes to her. Hefronts her always, as the hills front the dawn. He ceases, and sobslike a breaking heart. O! "She is a smile that has passed over me. Ishall never see her again!" And the door dashes open; Marius andCossette are come. Joy, joy to the old heart! Jean Valjean thinks itis heaven's morning. Marius has discovered that Jean Valjean is nothis murderer, but his savior; that he has, at imminent peril of hislife, through the long, oozy quagmire of the sewer, with his giantstrength, borne him across the city, saved him; and now, too late, Marius began to see in Jean Valjean "a strangely lofty and saddenedform, " and has come to take this great heart home. But God will dothat himself. Jean Valjean is dying. He looks at Cossette as if hewould take a look which would endure through eternity, kisses a fold ofher garment, and half articulates, "It--is--nothing to die;" thensuddenly rises, walks to the wall, brings back a crucifix, lays it nearhis hand. "The Great Martyr, " he says; fondles Marius and Cossette;sobs to Cossette, "Not to see you broke my heart;" croons to himself, "You love me;" puts his hands upon their heads in a caress, saying, "Ido not see clearly now. " Later he half whispered, "I see a light!"And a man and woman are raining kisses on a dead man's hands. And onthat blank stone, over a nameless grave in the cemetery of Pere laChaise, let some angel sculptor chisel, "Here lies Jean Valjean, Hero. "

II

Some Words on Loving Shakespeare

What a soul wants is to feel itself of service. Life's chances seemdrunk up like the dews from morning flowers in burning summer times. To risk literary adventure after these centuries of thinking and saying(and such thinking and such saying!), requires the audacity of asimpleton or the boldness of the old discoverers. Every patch ofliterary ground seems occupied, as those fertile valleys lifting fromsea-levels along a shining stream to the far hills and fair. So muchhas been said on Shakespeare, and he has stung men to such profound andfertile sayings, that to speak of him seems an impertinence. I havenever seen an essay on Shakespeare I have not run to read. Whoeverholds the cup, I will drain it dry, if filled with wine from this rarevintage. Practically all our great writers have dreamed of him, andtold their dreams; and many a writer who makes no claim to greatnesshas done the same. Some people you can not keep your eyes off of; andof these Shakespeare is one. Who has n't talked of him? When AlfredTennyson lay dying in the white moonlight, his son tells how he heldthe play of Cymbeline in his dying hands, as was fitting, seeing he hadheld it in his living hands through many golden years. Than this dyingtribute, Shakespeare never had more gracious compliment paid hisgenius. Who passes Shakespeare in his library without a caress of eyeor hand? I would apologize if I were guilty of such a breach ofliterary etiquette. Boswell's Johnson edited Shakespeare; and CharlesLamb and Goethe and DeQuincey and Coleridge and Taine and Lowell andCarlyle and Emerson have written of him, some of them greatly. Iwonder Macaulay kept hands from him, but probably because he was thehistorian of action rather than letters; and after reading what thesehave said, how can one be but silenced?

But it has seemed to me that, while there was a wilderness of writingabout Shakespeare as a genius and as a whole, there was co-operativedearth of writings on the individual dramas. Authors contentthemselves with writing on the dramatist, and neglect to write upon thedramas. If this be true, may there not be an unoccupied plot of groundwhere a late-comer may pitch tent, as under the hemlocks by somebabbling water, and feel himself in some real way proprietary? I havediscovered a growing feeling in my thought that enough has not beensaid, and can not be said, about the Macbeths and Tempests and Learsand Hamlets. 

Shakespeare is too massive to be discussed in an hour. One essay willnot suffice for him. He is as a mountain, whose majesty andmultitudinous beauty, meaning, and magnitude and impress, must begotten by slow processes in journeying about it through many days. Whosits under its pines at noon, lies beside its streams for rest, walksunder its lengthening shadows as under a cloud, and has listened to thevoices of its waterfalls, thrilling the night and calling to thespacious firmament as if with intent to be heard "very far off, " hasthus learned the mountain, vast of girth, kingly in altitude, perpetualin sovereignty. We study a world's circumference by segments; nor letus suppose we can do other by this cosmopolitan Shakespeare. He, sofar as touches our earth horizon, is ubiquitous. Looking at himsum-totally, we _feel_ his mass, and say we have looked upon majesty. But as a mountain is, in circumference and altitude, always beckoningus on, as if saying, "My summit is not far away, but near, " and sospurring our laggard steps to espouse the ascent, and toiling on, on, still on, a little further--only a little further--till heart and fleshall but fail and faint, but for the might of will, we fall to riseagain, and try once more, till we fall upon the summit, and lie onthresholds leading to the stars. The mountain understated itsmagnitude to us--not of intent, but in simple modesty. I think it didnot itself know its mass. Greatness has a subtle self-depreciation;and we shall come to know our huge Shakespeare only by approaching himon foot. He must be studied in fragments. His plays, if I may bepardoned for coining a word, need not an omnigraph, but monographs. Let Shakespeare be, and give eye and ear to his history, comedy, tragedy; and when we have done with them, one by one, we shall discoverhow the aggregated mass climbs taller than highest mountains. Thismethod, in tentative fashion, I propose to apply in some studies inthis volume, or other volumes, believing that the company of those wholove Shakespeare can never be large enough for his merits, and thatmany are kept away from the witchery of him because they do not wellknow the fine art of approaching him. I would, therefore, be adoorkeeper, and throw some doors wide open, that men and women mayunhindered enter. This essay aims to stand as a porter at the gate. We shall never overestimate Shakespeare, because we can not. Some menand things lie beyond the danger of hyperbole. No exaggeration ispossible concerning them, seeing they transcend all dreams. Space cannot be conceived by the most luxuriant imagination, holding, as itdoes, all worlds, and capable of holding another universe besides, andwith room to spare. Clearly, we can not overestimate space. Thoughtand vocabulary become bankrupt when they attempt this bewildering deed. Genius is as immeasurable as space. Shakespeare can not be measured. We can not go about him, since life fails, leaving the journey notquite well begun. Yet may we attempt what can not be performed, because each attempt makes us worthy, and we are measured, not by whatwe achieve, but by what we attempt, as Lowell writes:

 "Grandly begin! Though thou have time But for one line, be that sublime: Not failure, but low aim, is crime. "

The eaglet's failure in attempted flight teaches him to outsoar clouds. We are not so greatly concerned that we find the sources of the Nile asthat we search for them. In this lie our triumph and reward. 

Besides all this, may there not be a place for more of what may benamed inspirational literature? Henry Van Dyke has coined a happyphrase in giving title to his delightful volume on "The Poetry ofTennyson, " calling his papers "Essays in Vital Criticism. " I like thethought. Literature is life, always that, in so far as literature isgreat; for literature tells our human story. Essayist, novelist, poet, are all doing one thing, as are sculptor, painter, architect. Ofdetail criticism ("dry-as-dust" criticism, to use Carlyle's term) thereis much, though none too much, which work requires scholarship andpainstaking, and is necessary. Malone is a requirement ofShakespearean study. But, candidly, is verbal, textual criticism thelargest, truest criticism? Dust is not man, though man is dust. Nogeologist's biography of the marble from Carrara, nor a biographer'ssketch of the sculptor, will explain the statue, nor do justice to theartist's conception. I, for one, want to feel the poet's pulse-beat, brain-beat, heart-beat. What does he mean? Let us catch thisspeaker's words. What was that he said? Let me feel sure I have hismeaning. We may break a poem up into bits, like pieces of branchespicked up in a woodland path; but is this what the poet would havedesired? He takes lexicons and changes them into literatures, beginswith words, ends with poems. His art was synthetic. He was not acrab, to move backward, but a man, to move forward; and his poetry isnot débris, like the broken branch, but is exquisite grace and movingmusic. Tears come to us naturally, like rain to summer clouds, when wehave read his words. Much criticism is dry as desiccated foods, thoughwe can not believe this is the nobler criticism, since God's growingfruit is his best fruit. A tree with climbing saps and tossingbranches, fertile in shade and sweet with music, is surely fairer andtruer than a dead, uprooted, prostrate, decaying trunk. This, then, would I aspire humbly to do with Shakespeare or another, to help men tohis secret; for to admit men to any poet's provinces is nothing otherthan to introduce them

 "To the island valley of Avilion, Where falls not hail nor rain nor any snow, Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies Deep-meadowed, happy, fair with orchard lawns, And bowery hollows crowned with summer seas. "

There is no trace of exaggeration in saying: Many people frequenttheaters ostensibly for the purpose of understanding the greatdramatists, and, leading thereto, seeing noted tragedians act Lear, Richard III, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, and at the end of years ofattendance have no conception of these dramas as a whole. They hadheard one voice among the many; but when the many voices blended, whatall meant they can not begin to guess. What playgoer will give a validanalysis of King Lear? Ask him, and his ideas will be chaotic asclouds on a stormy night. Not even the elder Kean is the bestinterpreter of Shakespeare; for the dramatist reserves that function tohimself--Shakespeare is his own best interpreter. Dream over his playsby moonlit nights; pore over his pages till chilly skies grow gray withdawn; read a play without rising from the ingratiating task, and you, not a tragedian, will have a conception of the play. I will ratherrisk getting at an understanding of beautiful, bewitching Rosalind byreading and rereading "As You Like It, " than by all theaters andstage-scenes and players. A dramatist is his own best interpreter. The most discerning critics of the great dramas are not theater-goers. The theater runs to eyes; study runs to thought. In a theater theactor thinks for us; in a study we think for ourselves. Forcontemporaries of "The Letters of Junius" to attempt guessing whoJunius was, was plainly exhilarating as a walk at morning along acountry lane. To attempt the interpretation of a Shakespeare's tragedyfor yourself is no less so. Believe in your own capabilities, and testyour own powers. Conceive of Shakespeare's folk, not as dead and past, but as living. These men and women, among whom we move, are thoseamong whom Shakespeare moved. Ages change customs and costumes, butnot characters. Bring Shakespeare down to now, and see how rationalhis men and women become; and we, as central to his movement, may beginto reckon on the periodicity of souls as of comets. I would havepeople inherit Shakespeare as they inherit Newton's discoveries orColumbus's new world. 

And as we know, we shall learn to trust, Shakespeare. He is uniformlytruthful. He may sin against geographical veracity, as when he namesBohemia a maritime province; or he may give Christian reasonings toancient heathen; but these are _errata_, not falsehoods; and besides, these are mistakes of a colorist, or in background of figure-painting, and do not touch the real province of the dramatist, whose office isnot to paint landscapes, but figures--and figures not of physique, butof soul--the delineation of character being the dramatist's business. Here is Shakespeare always accurate. To argue with him savors ofpetulancy or childish ignorance or egotism. Some people ourselves havemet had no sense of character, as some have no sense of color. They donot perceive logical continuity here, as in reasoning, but approacheach person as an isolated fact, whereas souls are a series--menrepeating men, women repeating women, in large measure, as a childsteps in his father's tracks across a field of snow in winter. Otherpeople seem intuitively to read character, being able to shut theireyes and see more than others with eyes open, having a faculty forpractical psychology, which is little less than miracle, as inTennyson, who was not a man among men--being shy as a whip-poor-will, seclusive as flowers which haunt the woodland shadows--yet thosereading him must know how accurately he reads the human heart; and hischaracterization of Guinevere, Pelleas, Bedivere, Enid, the lover inMaud, ŕ Becket, the Princess, Philip, Enoch Arden, and Dora, are, inaccuracy, as

 "Perfect music unto noble words. "

Some people are born to this profound insight as storm-petrels for theseas, needing not to be tutored, and are as men and women to whom wetell our secrets, scarce knowing why we do. But Shakespeare knows whatthe sphinx thinks, if anybody does. His genius is penetrative as coldmidwinter entering every room, and making warmth shiver in ague fits. I think Shakespeare never errs in his logical sequence in character. He surprises us, seems unnatural to us, but because we have beensuperficial observers; while genius will disclose those truths to whichwe are blind. Recur to Ophelia, whom Goethe has discussed with suchinsight. Ophelia is, to our eyes and ears, pure as air. We find nofault in her. Certainly, from any standpoint, her conduct isirreproachable; yet, surprisingly enough, when she becomes insane, shesings tainted songs, and salacious suggestions are on her lips, whichin sane hours never uttered a syllable of such a sort. And Shakespeareis wrong? No; follow him. Thoughts are like rooms when shutters areclosed and blinds down, and can not, therefore, be seen. We tell ourthoughts, or conceal them, according to our desire or secretiveness, and speech may or may not be a full index to thought; and Shakespearewould indicate that fair Ophelia, love-lorn and neglected; fairOphelia, whose words and conduct were unexceptional, even to the sharpeyes of a precisian--fair Ophelia cherished thoughts not meet formaidenhood, and in her heart toyed with voluptuousness. I know nothingmore accurate; and the penetration of this poet seems, for the moment, something more than human. After a single example, such as adduced, would not he be guilty of temerity who would question Shakespeare'saccuracy in character delineation? The sum of what has been said onthis point is, distrust yourself rather than Shakespeare; and when yournotions and his are not coincident, or when, more strongly stated, youfeel sure that here for once he is inaccurate, reckon that he isprofounder than you, and do you begin to seek for a hidden path as onelost in a wilderness, when, in all probability, you will discover thatwhat you deemed inexact was in reality a profounder truth than had comeunder your observation. Nor would a discussion of Shakespeare'struthfulness be rounded out should his value as historian be omitted. He is profoundest of philosophical historians, compelling the motivesin historic personages to disclose themselves, while, in the main, hishistorical data are correct as understood in his day. He has notjuggled with facts, though in instances where he has taken liberty withevents he has, by such change in historic setting, made the main issuesmore apparent. Some one has said that simply as historian of EnglandShakespeare has done nobly by his country, which remark I, for one, think accurate. Beginning with King John, he keeps the main channelsof English history to the birth of Elizabeth, where, in a spirit ofsubtle courtesy, he makes the destination of his historical studies. If the purpose of noble history be to make us understand men and, consequently, measures, then is Shakespeare still the greatest Englishhistorian. Richard III never becomes so understandable as in thedrama; and Henry IV is a figure clearly seen, as if he stood in thesunlight before our eyes, so that any one conversant with thesehistory-plays is fortified against all stress in solid knowledge andprofound insight into turbulent eras of Anglo-Saxon history; forShakespeare has given us history carved in relief, as are the metopesof the Parthenon. For knowledge psychologically and historicallyaccurate commend me to William Shakespeare, historian. 

The lover is Shakespeare's main thesis; and his lovers--men andwomen--never violate the proprieties of love. What his lovers do hasbeen done and will be done. Helena, in "All's Well that Ends Well, " isa true phase of womanhood; and in those days of the more generalinfidelity and lordship of man, more common than now--though now thispicture is truthful--woman has a power of self-sacrifice and rigorousself-denial when in love, which, as it is totally unconscious on herpart, is as totally inexplicable on our part. Life is not a conditioneasily explained. The heart of simplest man or woman is a mystery, compared with which the sphinx is an open secret. The vagaries of lovein life are the vagaries of love in Shakespeare. Life was his book, which he knew by heart. Rosalind, in "As You Like It, " is a portraitboth fair and accurate. We have seen Rosalind, and the sight of herwas good for the eyes. To read Shakespeare is to be told what weourselves have seen, we not recognizing the people we had met until hewhispers in our ears, "You have seen her and him;" whereat we answer, "Yes, truly, so we have, though we did not know it till you told us. "

Shakespeare is philosopher of both sexes, though this is not the rule, as we will readily agree, thinking over the great portrait painters ofcharacter. To state a single illustrative case: Hall Caine must beallowed to have framed some mighty men, tragic, or melodramaticsometimes, somber always, but men of bulk and character. Pete, in "TheManxman, " is a creation sufficient to make the artist conceiving himimmortal; and Red Jason is no less real, manly, mighty, self-mastering, self-surrendering. Caine's men are giants; but his women do notsatisfy and seldom interest us, with an exception in a few cases--aswith Naomi in "The Scape Goat, " and Greeba, wife of Michal Sunlocks;though Naomi is little more than a figure seen at a doorway, standingin the sun; for she has not forged a character up to the time when herlover puts arm about her, as she droops above her dying father, whenhis vast love would make him immortal for her sake. Glory Quayle isinteresting, but unsatisfactory. My belief is that Tolstoi has drawnno man approaching his astonishing Anna Karenina. Shakespeare isambidexter here. All things are seemingly native to him; for he isnever at a loss. Not words, thoughts, dreams, images, music, fail himfor a moment even. Who found him feeling for a word? Did we not findthem ready at his hand as Ariel was ready to serve Prospero? Lear, Prospero, Brutus, Cassius, Falstaff, Iago, Macbeth, Hamlet, are ascrowning creations as Cleopatra, Miranda, Lady Macbeth, Katharine theShrew, Imogen, or Cordelia. We know not which to choose, as one wholooks through a mountain vista to the sea, declaring each view fairerthan the last, yet knowing if he might choose any one for a perpetualpossession he could not make decision. We are incapable of choosingbetween Shakespeare's men and his women. 

Small volumes are best for reading Shakespeare, for this reason: Inlarge volumes the dramas get lost to your thought, as a nook of beautyis apt to get lost in the abundant beauty of summer hills, solelybecause there are so many; but when put into small volumes, each playbecomes individualized, made solitary, and stands out like a treegrowing in a wide field alone. Do not conceive of Shakespeare's playsas marble column, pediment, frieze, metope, built into a Parthenon, butconceive of each play as a Parthenon; for I think it certain each onemight have stood solitary on cape or hill, as those old Greeks builttemples to their tutelar deities. He wrote so much and so greatly asto bewilder us, just as night does with her multitudinous stars. Whomaps the astral globe will divide his heavens into sections, so he maychart his constellations. The like must be done with Shakespeare. Agreat painting is always at more of an advantage in a room of its ownthan in a gallery, since each picture is in a way a distraction, stealing a trifle of beauty from its fellow, though adding nothing toitself thereby. "Come, " we say to a dear friend from whom we have beenparted for a long time, "come, let me have you alone, " and you walkacross a field, and sit in the singing shadows of the pines--youappropriate your friend. Do the same with a poem; for in such awilderness of beauty send majesty as Shakespeare's plays this needbecomes imperative. Pursuant to this suggestion, I recur to a previousthought on Shakespearean criticism that, rich as it is, is defective inthis individualization--so much being written on the whole, so littlein comparison on the parts. Each drama fills our field of vision, andjustifies a dissertation. Each dialogue of Plato demands an essay byJowett. How well, then, may each dialogue of Shakespeare demand aseparate study! There is distinct gain in looking at a landscape froma window, sitting a little back from the window-sill, the view beingthus framed as a picture, and the superfluous horizon cut off; and therelevancies, as I may say, are included and the irrelevancies excluded;for in looking at too much we are losers, not gainers, the eye failingto catch the entirety of meaning. Here is the advantage of thelandscape painter, who seizes the view to which we should restrict oureyes, bringing into compass of canvas what we should have brought intocompass of sky and scene, but did not. So these window views ofShakespeare are what we greatly need now, and are what Hudson and Rolfeand Ulrici and the various editors of note have given. 

But after all, the best interpretation of a drama or any poem is to begained first hand, nothing being clearer than that every poemchallenges individual interpretation, as if saying, "What do you thinkI mean?" There is too much knowing productions by proxy, of beingconversant with what every sort of body thinks about Hamlet, butourselves being a void so far as distinctively individual opinion goes. A poem, like the Scriptures, is its own best interpreter; and there isalways scope for the personal equation in judging literature, becausecriticism is empiricism in any case, being opinion set against opinion. Different people think different things, and that is the end. Literarycriticism can never be an exact science, and everybody may have andshould have an opinion. Great productions have never had their meaningexhausted, since meanings are an infinite series. So, to get aninterpretation of Cymbeline, say, get into the midst of the drama, asif it were a stream and you a boatman in your boat. Commit you to thedrama's flood, omitting for a time what others have thought, and readas if the poem were a fresh manuscript found by you, and read with suchavidity as scholars of the Renaissance knew when a palimpsest ofTacitus or Theocritus was found. Let your imagination, as well as thepoet's, spread wings. Become creative yourself; for this is true: Noone can rightly conceive any work of imagination and be himselfunimaginative. Read and re-read, and at length, like the cliffs ofshore rising out of ocean mists, dim, but stable and increasinglypalpable, will come a scheme of meaning. Miss nothing. Let no beautyelude you. Odors must not waste; we, in a spirit of lofty economy, must inhale them. Watch the drift of verbal trifles; for Shakespeareuses no superfluities. His meaning dominates his method; hismodulations are prophetic. See, therefore, that he does not elude you, escaping at some path or shadow, but cling to his garments, howeverswiftly he runs. Such study will bear fruit of sure triumph in yourconceiving a hidden import of a great drama. This method ofself-assertiveness in reading is logical and invigorating. Think aswell as be thought for. 

Of all poets, Shakespeare is richest in the material of simile. Hethought in pictures, which is another way of saying he wooedcomparatives. Thought is inert; and he is greatest in expression whocan supply his thinking with ruddy blood, flush the pallid cheek, makethe dull eye bright, and make laughter run across the face like ripplesof sunshine across water touched by the wind. In Shakespeare's turn ofphrase and use of figure is a fertility of suggestion such as evenDante can not approximate. He is unusual, which is a merit; for thusis mind kept on the alert, like a sentinel fearing surprise. Of thisan essay might be filled with illustrations. He does not try to usefigures, but can not keep from using them. As stars flash into light, so he flashes into metaphor, metonymy, trope, personification, orsimile. Because he sees everything, is he fertile in suggestion, andhis comparisons are numerous as his thoughts. See how his figuresmultiply as you have seen foam-caps multiply on waves when the windrises on the sea!

 "We burn daylight. "

 "Nay, the world 's my oyster, Which I with sword shall open. "

 "I hold you as a thing enskied and sainted. "

 "My library Was dukedom large enough. "

 "Into the eye and prospect of his soul. "

 "Make a swan-like end, Fading in music. "

 "Those blessed candles of the night. "

 "The schoolboy, with his satchel And shining, morning face. "

 "Like an unseasonable stormy day, Which makes the silver rivers drown their shores. "

 "He fires the proud tops of the eastern pines. "

 "And must I ravel out My weaved-up follies?"

 "Give sorrow leave awhile to tutor me To this submission. "

 "The gaudy, babbling, and remorseless day Is crept into the bosom of the sea. "

 "There is some soul of goodness in things evil, Would men observingly distill it out. "

 "He hath a tear for pity, and a hand Open as day for melting charity. "

 "That daffed the world aside, And bid it pass. "

 "He is come to ope The purple testament of bleeding war. "

 "She sat, like patience on a monument, Smiling at grief. "

 "That strain again; it had a dying fall: O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet south, That breathes upon a bank of violets, Stealing and giving odor. "

 "For courage mounts with occasion. "

 "Here I and sorrows sit; Here is my throne; bid kings come bow to it. "

 "Death's dateless night. "

 "Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale, Vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man. "

 "The tongues of dying men Enforce attention like deep harmony. "

 "Falstaff sweats to death, And lards the lean earth as he walks along. "

 "I have set my life upon a cast, And I will stand the hazard of the die. "

 "'T is better to be lowly born, And range with humble livers in content, Than be perked up in glistering grief, And wear a golden sorrow. "

 "An old man broken with the storms of state. "

 "Care keeps his watch in every old man's eye. "

 "Night's candles are burnt out, and jocund day Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain-tops. "

 "Within the book and volume of my brain. "

 "One vial full of Edward's blood is cracked, And all the precious liquor spilt. "

In such quest as this, one is enticed as if he followed the windings ofa stream under the shadows of the trees. Past waterfall and banks offlowers and choiring of the birds, he goes on forever, except he forcehimself to pause. Shakespeare is always an enticement, whose turns ofpoetic thought and verbiage are a pure delight. Note this quality inthe quotations--a word naturally expresses a thought. Shakespeare'sfigures express a series of thoughts as varied landscapes seen inpictures; in consequence, to read him is to see resemblances in things, because we have sharpened vision and can not, after reading him, beblind as we were before, but feel the plethora of our world with thepoetic. After he has spoken for us and to us, the world's capacity isenlarged; we are, in truth, not so much as those who have read poetryas we are like those who have seen the world pass before our eyes. Wethought the world a stream run dry; but lo! the bed is full of waters, flooded from remote hills, where snowdrifts melt and make perpetualrivers. After hearing him, we expect things of our world; itsfertility seems so exhaustless. 

Shakespeare has no hint of invalidism about him, but is the person, notthe picture, of perfect health. Not an intimation of the hypochondriacnor of the convalescent do I find in him. He is healthy, and his voicerings out like a bell on a frosty night. Take his hand, and you feelshaking hands, not with Aesculapius, but with Health. To be ailingwhen Shakespeare is about is an impertinence for which you feelcompelled to offer apology. Does not this express our feeling aboutthis poet? He is well, always well, and laughs at the notion ofsickness. He starts a-walking, and unconsciously runs, as a schoolboyafter school. His smile breaks into ringing laughter; and he, not you, knows why he either smiles or laughs. He and sunlight seem close ofkin. A mountain is a challenge he never refuses, but scales it bybounds, like a deer when pursued by the hunter and the hound. He isnot tonic, but bracing air and perfect health and youth, which makeslabor a holiday and care a jest. Shakespeare is never morose. Danteis the picture of melancholy, Shakespeare the picture of resilient joy. Tennyson beheld "three spirits, mad with joy, dash down upon a waysideflower;" and our dramatist is like them. Life laughs on greeting him;the grave grows dim to sight when he is near, and you see the deep skyinstead, and across it wheel wild birds in happy motion. In Tennysonis perpetual melancholy--the mood and destiny of poetry, as Isuppose--but Shakespeare is not melancholy, nor does he know how to be. His face is never sad, I think, and he is fonder of Jack Falstaff thanwe are apt to suppose; for health riots in his blood. He weeps, smilesbreaking through his weeping, and he turns from the grave of tragedywith laughter leaning from his eyes. Aeschylus is a poet whose facewas never lit even with the candle-light of smiles; but Shakespeare, writer of tragedy, is our laughing poet. This plainly confounds ourphilosophy of poetry, since humor is not poetry; but he binds humor tohis car as Achilles, Hector, and laughs at our upset philosophies, crying: "This is my Lear, weep for him; this my Hamlet, break yourhearts for him; this my Desdemona, grow tender for her woe, --butenough: this is my Rosalind and my Miranda, my Helena and Hermione, myOrlando and Ferdinand, my Bassanio and Leontes; laugh with them"--andyou render swift obedience, saying, with Lord Boyet, in "Love's LaborLost, "

 "O, I am stabbed with laughter!"

He is court jester, at whose quips the generations make merry. You cannot be somber nor sober long with him, though he is deep as seas, andfathomless as air, and lonely as night, and sad betimes as autumn. Heis not frivolous, but is joyous. The bounding streams, the singingtrees, the leaping stags along the lake, the birds singing morningawake, --Shakespeare incorporates all these in himself. He is what maybe named, in a spiritual sense, this world's animal delight in life. There is a view of life sullen as November; and to be sympathetic withthis mood is to ruin life and put out all its lights. Shakespeare'sresiliency of spirit would teach us what a dispassionate study of ourown nature would have taught us, that to succumb to this gloom is notnatural; to feel the weight of burdens all the time would conduct toinsanity or death; therefore has God made bountiful provision againstsuch outcome in the lift of cloud and lightening of burden. We forgetsleep is God's rest-hour for spirit; and, besides, we read in God'sBook how, "at eventide, it shall be light, " an expression at once ofexquisite poetry and acute observation. Our lives are healthy whennatural. The crude Byronic misanthropy, even though assumed, finds nofavor in Shakespeare's eyes. 

Shakespeare is this world's poet--a truth hinted at before, but nowneeding amplifying a trifle. There is in him this-worldliness, but notother-worldliness, his characters not seeming to the full to have asense of the invisible world. He is love's poet. His lovers areimperishable because real. He is love's laureate. Yet are his lovesof this world. True, there are spurts of flight, as of an eagle withbroken wing, when, as in Hamlet, he faults this world and aspiresskyward, yet does not lose sight of the earth, and, like the woundedeagle in "Sohrab and Rustum, " lies at last

 "A heap of fluttering feathers. "

Plainly, Shakespeare was a voyager in this world, and a discoverer, sailing all seas and climbing tallest altitudes to their far summits;but flight was not native to him, as if he had said:

 "We have not wings, we can not soar; But we have feet to scale, and climb. "

I can not think him spiritual in the gracious sense. His contemporary, Edmund Spenser, was spiritual, as even Milton was not. This world madeappeal to this poet of the Avon on the radiant earthly side; the veryclouds flamed with a glory borrowed from the sun as he looked on them. His world was very fair. In more than a poetic sense was

 "All the world a stage. "

Life was a drama, hastening, shouting, exhilarating, turbulent, free, roistering, but as triumphant as Elizabeth's fleet and God's stormywaters were over Philip's great Armada. Hamlet was the terribly tragicconception in Shakespeare because he was hopeless. Can you conceiveShakespeare writing "In Memoriam?" Tennyson was pre-eminentlyspiritual, and "In Memoriam" is his breath dimming the window-pane onwhich he breathed. That was Tennyson's life, but was patently no bravepart of Shakespeare. He knew to shape tragedy, such as Romeo andJuliet; but how to send abroad a cry like Enoch Arden's prayer lay notin him. He compassed our world, but found no way to leave what proveda waterlogged ship; and how to pilot to

 "The undiscovered country, from whose bourne No traveler returns, "

puzzles Shakespeare's will as it had Hamlet's. 

So not even our great Shakespeare can monopolize life. Some landscapeshave not lain like a picture beneath his eyes; he did not exhaustpoetry nor life, and room is still left for

 "New men, strange faces, other minds, "

for whom, "Though much is taken, much abides; and though We are not that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are-- One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. "

III

Caliban

Your great poet is eminently sane. Not that this is the conceptioncurrent concerning him--the reverse being the common idea--that a poetis a being afflicted with some strange and unclassified rabies. He issupposed to be possessed, like the Norwegian Berserker, whose frenzyamounted to volcanic tumult. The genesis of misconceptions, however, is worth one's while to study; for in a majority of cases there is inthe misconception a sufficient flavoring of truth to make the erroneousnotion pass as true. At bottom, the human soul loves truth, norwillingly believes or receives a lie. Our intellectual sin issynecdoche, the putting a part truth for a whole truth. Generalizationis dangerous intellectual exercise. Our premise is insufficient, andour conclusion is self-sufficient, like some strutting scion of adecayed house. Trace the origin of this idea of a poet's non-sanity. He was not ordinary, as other men, but was extraordinary, and as suchbelonged to the upper rather than the lower world; for we must beconvinced how wholly the ancients kept the super-earthly in mind intheir logical processes--an attitude wise and in consonance with thewisest of this world's thinking. Heaven must not be left out of ourcomputations, just as the sun must not be omitted in writing thehistory of a rose or a spike of golden-rod. In harmony with thisexalted origin of the poet went the notion that he was under anafflatus. A breath from behind the world blew in his face; nay, more, a breath from behind the world blew noble ideas into his soul, and hespake as one inspired of the gods. This conception of a poet is highand worthy; nothing gross grimes it with common dust. Yet from sonoble a thought--because the thought was partial--grew the grossmisconception of the poet as beyond law, as not amenable to social andmoral customs, as one who might transgress the moral code withimpunity, and stand unreproved, even blameless. He was thought to behis own law--a man whose course should no more be reproved or hinderedthan the winds. The poet's supremacy brought us to a wrong conclusion. The philosopher we assumed to be balanced, the poet to be unbalanced. Shelley, and Poe, and Heine, and Byron, and Burns elucidate thiserroneous hypothesis of the poet. We pass lightly their misrule ofthemselves with a tacit assumption of their genius having shaken andshocked their moral faculties as in some giant perturbation. 

I now recur to the initial suggestion, that the great poet is sane. The poet is yet a man, and man is more than poet. Manhood is the regalfact to which all else must subordinate itself. Nothing must beallowed to disfranchise manhood; and he who manumits the poet fromsocial and ethical bonds is not logical, nor penetrative into the darkmystery of soul, nor is he the poet's friend. Nor is he a friend whoassumes that the poet, because a poet, moves in eccentric paths ratherthan in concentric circles. Hold with all tenacity to the poet'ssanity. He is superior, and lives where the eagles fly and stars runtheir far and splendid courses; but he is still man, though man growntall and sublime. To the truth of this view of the great poet bearwitness Aeschylus, and Dante, and Spenser, and Shakespeare, andTennyson, and Browning, in naming whom we are lighting on high summits, as clouds do, and leaving the main range of mountains untouched. Shakespeare is absolutely sane. Not Blondin, crossing Niagara on athread for a pathway, was so absolute in his balance as Shakespeare. He saw all the world. Nor is this all; for there are those who see anentire world, but see it distorted as an anamorphism. There is acartoon world, where everybody is apprehended as taking on other shapesthan his own, and is valued in proportion as he is susceptible ofcaricature. But plate-glass is better for looking through than is aprism. What men need is eyes which are neither far-sighted nornear-sighted, but right-sighted. Shakespeare was that. There is nohint of exaggeration in his characters. They are people we have met onjourneys, and some of whom we have known intimately. To be a poet itis not necessary to be a madman--a doctrine wholesome and encouraging. I lay down, then, as one of the canons for testing a poet's greatness, this, "Is he sane?" and purpose applying the canon to Robert Browning, giving results of such application rather than the _modus operandi_ ofsuch results. I assert that he bears the test. No saner man thanBrowning ever walked this world's streets. He was entirely human inhis love of life for its own sake, in his love of nature and friendsand wife and child. His voice, in both speech and laughter, had a ringand joyousness such as reminded us of Charles Dickens in his youth. His appreciation of life was intense and immense. This world and allworlds reported to him as if he were an officer to whom they all, assubalterns, must report. The pendulum in the clock on a lady'smantel-shelf is not more natural than the pendulum swung in a cathedraltower, though the swing of the one is a slight and the swing of theother a great arc. Browning is a pendulum whose vibrations touch thehorizons. He does business with fabulous capital and on a huge scale, and thinks, sees, serves, and loves after a colossal fashion, but is asnatural in his large life as a lesser man is in his meager life. "Caliban upon Setebos" is a hint of the man's immense movement of souland his serene rationality. 

Browning will be preacher; and as preachers do--and do wisely--he takesa text from the Scriptures, finding in a psalm a sentence embodying thethought he purposes elaborating, as a bud contains the flower. TheBible may safely be asserted to be the richest treasure-house ofsuggestive thought ever discovered to the soul. In my conviction, nota theme treated in the domain of investigation and reason whosechapters may not be headed from the Book Divine. In his "Cleon, "Browning has taken his text from the words of Paul; in "Caliban uponSetebos, " his text is found in Asaph's psalm, and the words are, "Thouthoughtest that I was altogether such a one as thyself. " A word willset a great brain on fire, as if the word were a torch and the brain apine-forest, and to thoughtful minds it must be deeply interesting toknow that this study in psychology, which stands distinctly alone inEnglish literature and in universal literature, was suggested by aphrase from the Book of God. 

To begin with, Caliban is one of Shakespeare's finest conceptions increative art. Caliban is as certain in our thoughts as Ferdinand, Miranda, or Prospero. He is become, by Shakespeare's grace, a personamong us who can not be ignored. Study his biography in "The Tempest, "and find how masterly the chief dramatist was in rendering visiblethose forms lying in the shadow-land of psychology. As Dowden hassuggested, doubtless Caliban's name is a poet's spelling, or anagram, of "cannibal;" and, beyond question, Setebos is a character indemonology, taken from the record of the chronicler of Magellan'svoyages, who pictures the Patagonians, when taken captive, as roaring, and "calling on their chief devil, Setebos. " So far the historicalsetting of Caliban and Sycorax and Setebos. In character, Caliban andJack Falstaff are related by ties closer than those of blood. Both arebestial, operating in different departments of society; but in theknight, as in the slave, only animal instincts dominate. Lust istyrant. Animality destroys all manhood, and lowers to the slush andooze of degradation every one given over to its control. A mandegraded to the gross level of a beast because he prefers the animal tothe spiritual--this is Caliban. His mind is atrophied, in part, because lust sins against reason. Caliban is Prospero's slave, but heis lust's slave more--a slavery grinding and ignominious as servitudeto Prospero can be. Prospero must always, in the widest sense, lord itover Caliban, with his diminished understanding and aggravatedappetites, who vegetates rather than lives. His days are narrow as thedays of browsing sheep and cattle; but his soul knows the lecherousintent, the petty hate, the cankerous envy, the evil discontents, indigenous only to the soul of man. Plainly, Caliban is man, notbeast; for his proclivities, while bestial, are still human. In abeast is a certain dignity, in that action is instinctive, irrevocable, and so far necessary. Caliban is not so. He might be other than heis. He is depraved, but yet a man, as Satan was an angel, thoughfallen. The most profligate man has earmarks of manhood on him that nobeast can duplicate. And Caliban (on whom Prospero exhausts hisvocabulary of epithets) attempting rape on Miranda; scowling inill-concealing hate in service; playing truant in his task when fromunder his master's eyes; traitor to Prospero, and, as a co-conspiratorwith villains like himself, planning his hurt; a compound of spleen, malignancy, and murderous intent; irritated under conditions; failingto seize moral and manly positions with such ascendency as grows out ofthem, yet full of bitter hate toward him who wears the supremacy won bymoral worth and mastery, --really, Caliban seems not so foreign to ourknowledge after all. Such is Shakespeare's Caliban. 

Him Browning lets us hear in a monologue. Whoever sets man or womantalking for us does us a service. To be a good listener is to beastute. When anybody talks in our hearing, we become readers of pagesin his soul. He thinks himself talking about things; while we, ifwise, know he is giving glimpses of individual memorabilia. Caliban istalking. He is talking to himself. He does not know anybody islistening; therefore will there be in him nothing theatrical, but hiswords will be sincere. He plays no part now, but speaks his soul. 

Browning is nothing if not bold. He attempts things audacious as thevoyages of Ulysses. Nothing he has attempted impresses me as morebold, if so bold, as this exploit of entering into the consciousness ofa besotted spirit, and stirring that spirit to frame a system oftheology. Nansen's tramp along the uncharted deserts of the Polarwinter was not more brilliant in inception and execution. Caliban is atheorist in natural theology. He is building a theological system ascertainly as Augustine or Calvin or Spinoza did. This poem presentsthat satire which constitutes Browning's humor. Conceive that he heresatirizes those omniscient rationalists who demolish, at a touch, allsupernatural systems of theology, and proceed to construct purelynatural systems in their place as devoid of vitality and inspiration asdead tree-trunks are of vital saps. So conceive this dramaticmonologue, and the baleful humor appears, and is captivating in itsbiting sarcasm and unanswerable argument. Caliban is, in his ownopinion, omniscient. He trusts himself absolutely. He is asinfallible as the Positivists, and as full of information as theAgnostics, absurd as such an attitude on their part must appear; for, as Romanes has shown in his "Thoughts on Religion, " the Agnostic mustsimply assert his inability to know, and must not dogmatize as to whatis or is not. So soon as he does, he has ceased to be a philosophicAgnostic. Caliban's theology, though grotesque, is not a whit more sothan much which soberly passes in our day for "advanced thinking" and"new theology. "

Some things are apparent in Caliban. He is a man, not a beast, in thatno beast has any commerce with the thought of God. Man is declaredman, not so much by thinking or by thinking's instrument--language--asby his moral nature. Man prays; and prayer is the imprimatur of man'smanhood. Camels kneel for the reception of their burdens, but neverkneel to God. Only man has a shrine and an altar. Such things, we aretold, are signs of an infantile state of civilization and superstition;but they may be boldly affirmed to be, in fact, infallible signs of thedivinity of the human soul. Caliban is thinking of his god, brutal, devilish; yet he thinks of a god, and that is a possibility as farabove the brute as stars are above the meadow-lands. He has adivinity. He is dogmatist, as ignorance is bound to be. He knows; anddistrust of himself or his conclusions is as foreign to him as to therationalists of our century and decade. Caliban makes a god. Theattempt would be humorous were it not pathetic. If his conclusions areabsurd, they are what might be anticipated when man engages in the taskof god-making. "Caliban upon Setebos" is the _reductio ad absurdum_ ofthe attempt of man to create God. God rises not from man to thefirmament, but falls from the firmament to man. God does not ascend asthe vapor, but descends as the light. This is the wide meaning of thisuncanny poem. It is the sanity of the leading poet of the nineteenthcentury, and the greatest poet since Shakespeare, who saw clearly theinanity of so-called scientific conclusions and godless theories of theevolution of mankind. Mankind can not create God. God createsmankind. All the man-made gods are fashioned after the similitude ofCaliban's Setebos. They are grotesque, carnal, devilish. Paganism wasbut an installment of Caliban's theory. God was a bigger man or woman, with aggravated human characteristics, as witness Jove and Venus andHercules and Mars. Greek mythology is a commentary on Caliban'smonologue. For man to evolve a god who shall be non-human, actuallydivine in character and conduct, is historically impossible. No mancould create Christ. The attempt to account for religion by evolutionis a piece of sorry sarcasm. Man has limitations. Here is one. Byevolution you can not explain language, much less religion. Such isthe lesson of "Caliban upon Setebos. " Shakespeare created a brutalizedman, a dull human slave, whom Prospero drove as he would have driven avicious steed. This only, Shakespeare performed. Browning proposed togive this man to thought, to surrender him to the widest theme the mindhas knowledge of--to let him reason on God. How colossal theconception! Not a man of our century would have cherished such aconception but Robert Browning. The design was unique, needful, valuable, stimulative. The originality, audacity, and brilliancy ofthe attempt are always a tonic to my brain and spiritual nature. Withgood reason has this poem been termed "extraordinary;" and that thinkerand critic, James Mudge, has named it "the finest illustration ofgrotesque art in the language. "

The picture of Caliban sprawling in the ooze, brute instincts regnant, is complete and admirable. Stealing time from service to be truant(seeing Prospero sleeps), he gives him over to pure animal enjoyment, when, on a sudden, from the cavern where he lies, "He looks out o'er yon sea which sunbeams cross And recross till they weave a spider web, Meshes of fire, And talks to his own self howe'er he please, Touching that other whom his dam called God;"

but talks of God, not as a promise of a better life, but purely of anevil mind, "Because to talk about Him vexes Prospero! And it is good to cheat the pair [Miranda and Prospero], and gibe, Letting the rank tongue blossom into speech. "

What a motive for thinking on the august God! He now addresses himselfto the conceiving of a divinity. He thrusts his mother's beliefs asiderudely, as a beast does the flags that stand along its way in makingjourney to the stream to slake its thirst. He is grosslyself-sufficient. He is boor and fool conjoined. Where wise men andangels would move with reverent tread and forehead bent to earth, hewalks erect, unhumbled; nay, without a sense of worship. How could heor another find God so? The mood of prayer is the mood of finding God. Who seeks Him must seek with thought aflame with love. Caliban'sreasoning ambles like a drunkard staggering home from late debauch. His grossness shames us. And yet were he only Caliban, and if he wereall alone, we could forget his maudlin speech--but he is more. He is avoice of our own era. His babblings are not more crude andirreverential than much that passes for profound thinking. Nay, Caliban is our contemporaneous shame. He asserts (he does notthink--he asserts, settles questions with a word) that Setebos creatednot all things--the world and sun--

 "But not the stars; the stars came otherwise;"

and this goodly frame of ocean and of sky and earth came of Setebos. 

 "Being ill at ease, He hated that he can not change his cold Nor cure its ache. "

His god is selfishness, operating on a huge scale. But more, he

 "Made all we see and us in spite: how else? But did in envy, listlessness, or sport Make what himself would fain in a manner be-- Weaker in most points, stronger in a few, Worthy, and yet mere playthings all the while. "

Made them to plague, as Caliban would have done. And caprice isSetebos's method. He does things wantonly. No noble master passionflames in him. No goodness blesses him. Such a god Caliban makes, sothat it is odds whether Caliban make God or God make Caliban. Be sure, a man-made god is like the man who made him. The sole explanation ofGod, "who dwelleth in light which no man can approach unto, " and who iswhiter than the light in which he dwells, is, he is not myth, man-made. God made man, and revealed to him the Maker. Thus only do we explainthe surpassing picture the prophets and the Christ and the evangelistshave left us of the mighty God. Caliban will persist in the beliefthat the visible system was created in Setebos's moment of being ill atease and in cruel sportiveness. Nature is a freak of a foul mind. ButCaliban's god is not solitary. How hideous were the Aztec gods! Theywere pictured horrors. Montezuma's gods were Caliban's. Caliban'sSetebos was another Moloch of the Canaanites, or a Hindoo Krishna. Andthe Greek and Norse gods were the infirm shadows of the men who dreamedthem. Who says, after familiarizing himself with the religions of theworld, that Caliban or his theology is myth? Setebos has no morals. He has might. But this was Jupiter. Read "Prometheus Bound, " and knowa Greek conception of Greek Zeus:

 "Such shows nor right nor wrong in him, Nor kind nor cruel: He is strong and Lord. Am strong myself compared to yonder crabs That march now from the mountain to the sea; Let twenty pass and stone the twenty-first, Loving not, hating not, just choosing so. "

How hideous this god, decrepit in all save power! But for argument, suppose

 "He is good i' the main, Placable if his mind and ways were guessed, But rougher than his handiwork, be sure. "

Caliban thinks Setebos is himself a creature, made by something hecalls "Quiet;" and what is this but the Gnostic notion of aeons andtheir subordination to the great, hid God? No, this brief dramaticlyric is far from being an imagination. Rather say it is a chaptertaken from the history of man's traffic in gods. Setebos is creative;lacks moral qualities in that he may be evil or good; acts from spleen, and by simple caprice; is loveless; to be feared, deceived, tricked, asCaliban tricks Prospero, --so run the crude theological speculations ofthis man. He gets no step nearer truth. He walks in circles. He isshut in by common human limitations. Man can not dream about the skyuntil he has seen a sky, nor can he dream out God till God has beenrevealed. Caliban is no more helpless here than other men. Hisfailure in theology is a picture of the failure of all men. God mustshow himself at Sinais and at Calvarys, at cross and grave andresurrection and ascension; must pass from the disclosure of his beingthe "I Am" to those climacteric moments of the world when he discoveredto us that he was the "I am Love" and the "I am the Resurrection andthe Life. " God is

 "Terrible: watch his feats in proof! One hurricane will spoil six good months' hope, He hath a spite against me, that I know, Just as He favors Prospero; who knows why? So it is all the same as well I find. . . . So much for spite. "

There is no after-life. 

 "He doth His worst in this our life, Giving just respite lest we die through pain, Saving last pain for worst--with which, an end. Meanwhile, the best way to escape His ire Is, not to seem too happy. "

Poor Caliban, not to have known that in the summer of man's joy our Godgrows glad! All he hopes is, "Since evils sometimes mend, Warts rub away and sores are cured with slime, That some strange day, will either the Quiet catch And conquer Setebos, or likelier he Decrepit may doze, doze, as good as die. "

This is tragic as few tragedies know how to be. Setebos is mean, revengeful, fitful, spiteful, everything but good and noble; and hisvotary will live to hope that he will either be conquered by a mightieror will slumber forever!

So Caliban creates a god, a cosmogony, a theology; gets no thought ofgoodness from God or for himself; gets no sign of reformation incharacter; rises not a cubit above the ground where he constructs hismonologue; puts into God only what is in Caliban; has no faint hint oflove toward him from God, or from him toward God, when suddenly

 "A curtain o'er the world at once! Crickets stop hissing; not a bird--or, yes, There scuds His raven that has told Him all! It was fool's play, this prattling! Ha! The wind Shoulders the pillared dust, death's house o' the move, And fast invading fires begin! White blaze-- A tree's head snaps--and there, there, there, there, there, His thunder follows! Fool to gibe at Him! Lo! 'Lieth flat and loveth Setebos!"

And there, like a groveling serpent in the ooze, there lies Caliban, abject in fear, with not a ray of love. Hopeless, loveless, see himlie--a spectacle so sad as to make the ragged crags of ocean weep!

So pitiful a theology, yet no more pitiful than theologies created inour own epoch. Men, not brutal but opinionated, assume to comprehendall things, God included. They destroy and create theologies with theflippant egotism of a French chevalier of the days of the GrandMonarch. They settle matters with a "Thus it is, and thus it is not. "Would not those men do well to read the parable, "Caliban uponSetebos?" Grant Allen and Huxley would be generously helped; for themore they would lose in dogmatism, so much the more would they gain inwisdom. And what is true of them is true of others of theirfraternity. This irony of Browning's is caustic, but very wholesome. Barren as Caliban's theology is, certain contemporary theologies arenot less so. A day to suffer and enjoy--and then the night, long, dark, dreamless, eternal!

How sane Browning was! What breadth of meaning is here disclosed!What preacher of this century has preached a more inspired sermon than"Caliban upon Setebos?" He saw the irrationality of rationalism. Heknew that knowledge of God came, as the new earth, "down from God outof heaven. " Men will do better to receive theologies from God than tocreate them. A life we may live, having the Pattern "showed us in themount. " Christ gives the lie to Caliban's estimate of Deity. Notspite, nor misused might, nor caprice, nor life surcharged with eitherindifference or spleen; but love and ministry and fertile thought andwide devotion to others' good, an oblation of Himself--this is God, ofwhom Caliban had no dream, and of whom the Christ was exegete. 

IV

William the Silent

Few illustrious characters are so little known as William the Silent. His face has faded from the sky of history as glory from a sunsetcloud; though, on attention, reasons why this is so may not bedifficult to find. Some of them are here catalogued: He did not liveto celebrate the triumph of his statesmanship. The nation whoseautonomy and independence he secured is no longer a Republic, and sohas, in a measure, ceased to bear the stamp of his genius. The narrowlimits of his theater of action; for the Belgic States were a triflingprovince of Philip Second's stupendous empire, stretching, as it did, from Italy to the farthest western promontory of the New World. Atheater is something. Throw a heroic career on a world theater, suchas Julius Caesar had, and men will look as they would on burningMoscow. The scene prevents obscuration. And last, Holland has, in ourdays, passed into comparative inconsequence, and presents few symptomsof that strength which once aspired to the rulership of the oceans. 

The Belgic provinces were borrowed from the ocean by an industry andaudacity which must have astonished the sea, and continues a glory tothose men who executed the task, and to all men everywhere as well, since deeds of prowess or genius, wrought by one man or race, inure tothe credit of all men and all races, achievement being, not local, butuniversal. These Netherlands, lying below sea-levels, became thegarden-spot of Europe, nurturing a thrifty, capable people, possessingpositive genius in industry, so that they not only grew in theirfertile soil food for nations, if need be, but became weavers offabrics for the clothing of aristocracies in remote nations; this, inturn, leading of necessity to a commerce which was, in its time, forthe Atlantic what that of Venice had been to the Mediterranean; for theNetherlanders were as aquatic as sea-birds, seeming to be more at homeon sea than on dry land. This is a brief survey of those causes whichmade Flanders, though insignificant in size, a principality any kingmight esteem riches. In the era of William the Silent the Netherlandshad reached an acme of relative wealth, influence, and commandingimportance, and supplied birthplace and cradle to the Emperor CharlesV, who, for thirty-seven years (reaching from 1519 to 1556) was thecontrolling force in European politics. This ruler was grandson ofFerdinand and Isabella, and thus of interest to Americans, whosethought must be riveted on any one connected, however remotely, withthe discovery of this New World, which supplies a stage for the latestand greatest experiment in civilization and liberty, religion, andindividual opportunity. Low as Spain has now fallen, we can not beoblivious to the fact how that, on a day, Columbus, rebuffed by everyruler and every court, found at the Spanish court a queen who listenedto his dream, and helped the dreamer, because the enthusiasm andeloquence of this arch-pleader lifted this sovereign, for a moment atleast, above herself toward the high level where Columbus himselfstood; and that she staked her jewels on the casting of this die mustalways glorify Queen Isabella, and shine some glory on the nation whosesovereign she was. For such reason we are predisposed in Charles V'sfavor. He is as a messenger from one we love, whom we love because ofwhence he comes. His mother, Joanna, died, crazed and of a brokenheart, from the indifference, perfidy, and neglect of her husband, Philip, Archduke of Austria. Her story reads like a novelist's plot, and reasonably too; for every fiction of woman's fidelity in love andboundlessness and blindness of affection is borrowed from livingwoman's conduct. Woman originates heroic episodes, her love survivingthe wildest winter of cruelty and neglect, as if a flower prevailedagainst an Arctic climate, despite the month-long night and severity offrosts, and still opened petals and dispensed odors as blossoming indaytime and sunlight of a far, fair country. 

The story of Joanna and Mary Tudor read surprisingly alike. In readingthese old chronicles, one would think woman's lot was melancholy as adreary day of uninterrupted rain. Doubtless her lot is ameliorated inthese better days, when she is not chattel but sovereign, and gives herhand where her heart has gone before. But Queen Mary, dying alone, longing for her Philip, who cared for her as much as a falcon forsinging-birds, turning her dying eyes southward where her Philip was, moaning, "On my heart, when I am dead, you will find Philip's namewritten!"--Mary Tudor was an echo of the pain and cry of Joanna, Philip's grandmother, a princess lacking in beauty of person and insprightliness and culture of mind. Indeed, her intellect was weak tothe verge of insanity; her love for her husband, the Archduke ofAustria, doting, and its exhibition extravagant; and her jealousy, forwhose exercise there was ample opportunity, insane and passionate. Onething she was, and that--a lover. Her husband was a sun; and the lesshe shined on her, the more did she pine for his light. Than this, thehistory of kingly conjugal relations has few sadder chapters. ArchdukePhilip was young, engaging, affable, fond of society, preferring theNetherlands to Spain, and anything to his wife's companionship. Joannaand Philip were prospective heirs to the crowns of Castile and Aragon, and, as was clearly wise, were urged by Queen Isabella to come toSpain, and be acknowledged as expectant sovereigns by the Cortes ofboth kingdoms. This was done. Here Duke Philip grew restless, eagerfor the Netherlands, and, despite the entreaties of Ferdinand, Isabella, and his wife, set out for the Low Countries three days beforeChristmas, leaving his wife alone to give birth to a son, than which amore heartless deed has not been credited even to the account of aking. But without him, Joanna sunk into a hopeless and irremediablemelancholy; and was sullenly restless without him till his return toBrussels in the succeeding year. Philip's coldness inflamed her ardor. Three months after Joanna and Philip had been enthroned sovereigns ofCastile, Philip sickened and died with his brief months of kingship. His death totally disordered an understanding already pitifully weak. Her grief was tearless and pitiful. To quote the words of Prescott:"Her grief was silent and settled. She continued to watch the deadbody with the same tenderness and attention as if it had been alive, and though at last she permitted it to be buried, she soon removed itfrom the tomb to her own apartment;" and she made it "her soleemployment to bewail the loss and pray for the soul of her husband. "Of such a weak though loyal and sorrowing mother was Charles V born atGhent, February 24, 1500, who, at the age of sixteen, was left by thewill of his godfather, Ferdinand, sole heir of his dominions; and atthe age of nineteen he was chosen Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. Fortune conspired to do him homage. Charles was little inclined to thestudy of the humanities, but fond of martial exercise, and, thoughneglecting general learning, studied, with avidity and success, historyand the theory and practice of government, and accustomed himself topractical management of affairs in the government of the Netherlands, as early as 1515 attending the deliberations of the Privy Council. Hewas, as a youth, a prince of whom a realm would naturally feel proud, though he scarcely displayed those qualities which were afterward hischief characteristics. In 1516, King Ferdinand, dying, left CardinalXimenes regent of Castile, thus bringing Charles into contact with oneof the foremost statesmen of Spanish history. Ximenes was rigorouslyascetic in his life, and absolutely irreproachable in his morals, in anage when the clergy were excessively corrupt. He doubled his fasts, wore a hair shirt, slept on the bare ground, scourged himself withassiduity and ardor; became the confessor of Queen Isabella, andtherefore of great political importance, inasmuch as she followed hiscounsel, not alone in things spiritual, but also in things temporal. Severe in his sanctity, he demanded the same of his brethren, andreformed the Franciscans, over whom he had been put despite franticopposition. In the face of his own disinclination and determinedrefusal to accept the office, he was impelled, by means of a secondpapal bull, to accept the episcopate of Toledo, the highestecclesiastical honor in Spain; but under his episcopal robes still worehis coarse monk's frock. The nobles of Castile were agreed to intrustthat kingdom's affairs in his hands at the death of Philip, and afterthe death of Ferdinand the regency devolved upon him; and in the midstof a turbulent nobility, he ruled as born to kingship. Charlescontinued him in power after he had assumed the kingdom, but made suchlawless demands on the Spanish people as to bring Ximenes into illfavor among those for whom he administered. At the last he tasted thatingratitude so characteristic of Charles, and was virtually supersededin his regency, but had lived long enough to disclose a mind and forcewhich entitle him to a high rank among the statesmen of the world. Atthe beginning of his reign, Charles had begun that series ofingratitudes and betrayals which ended only with his abdication. Charles V was a braggadocio, a tyrant, a sensualist, without honor, andwithout nobility. The surprise grows on us, perceiving such a mancourted, fęted, honored, and arbiter of the destinies of Europe forthirty-seven years. I do not find one virtue in him. In JuliusCaesar, a voluptuary and red with carnage, there were yet multitudinousvirtues. We do not wonder men loved him and were glad to die for him. He had a soul, and honor, and remembrance of friendship. He was agenius, superlative and bewildering. We can forget and forgive somethings in such a man; but for such a sovereign as Charles V, what canwe say, save that he was not so execrable as Philip II, his son?Charles, being Flemish in birth, both Flanders and himself consideredhim less Spaniard than Belgian. He was Emperor first and King of Spainafterward; and in Flanders he set the pageant of his abdication. 

In the court of Charles V, William the Silent was reared, being senthither of his father, at Charles's request, to be brought up in theemperor's household as a prospective public servant, and was dear tothe monarch, so far as any one could be dear to him; and the emperor, at his abdication, leaned on Orange, then a youth of but twenty-one. To what an extent he comprehended so humane a sentiment, Charles hadbeen tender with the Netherlands because of his life-long relation toits people. He looked a Netherlander rather than a Spaniard, and feltone, so that, so far as he showed favors, he showed them to thisopulent people. Charles, with his many faults, had yet a rudegeniality, which softened or seemed to soften his asperity toward thoseabout him. 

In Philip, his son, was not even this slight redemptive quality. OnOctober 25, 1555, at the age of fifty-five, worn out prematurely withlecherousness, gormandizing, lust of power, and recent defeats, CharlesV abdicated in favor of his son, Philip. As they two stand on the daisat this solemn ceremony, it were well to take a close look at fatherand son. They are contrasts, as pronounced as valley and mountain, andyet possess characteristics of evil in common. Charles was knittogether like an athlete, his shoulders were broad and his chest deep;his face was ugly to the measure of hideousness; his lower jawprotruded so as to make it impossible for his teeth to meet, and hisspeech was for that reason barely intelligible. A voracious eater, anincessant talker, adventurous, a born soldier, fond of tournament, spectacular in war and peace and abdication, now crippled in hands andlegs, he stands, a picture of decrepitude, ready to give away a crownhe can no longer wear. Philip, the son, is thin and fragile to lookupon, diminutive in stature; in face, resembling his father in "heavy, hanging lip, vast mouth, and monstrously protruding lower jaw. Hiscomplexion was fair, his hair light and thin, his beard yellow, short, and pointed. He had the aspect of a Fleming, but the loftiness of aSpaniard. His demeanor in public was silent, almost sepulchral. Helooked habitually on the ground when he conversed, was chary of speech, embarrassed, and even suffering in manner. " Such is the new king as wesee him; and Motley has put our observations into words for us. But ifin looks there were manifest resemblances and extreme divergencies, incharacter they were wide apart. Charles was soldier, first and always;Philip was a man for the cabinet, having neither inclination norability for generalship. To lead an army was Charles's pride anddelight--things Philip could not and would not attempt. Charles wasfor the open air, sky, continent; Philip was for the cloister, andspent his life immured as if he had been a monk. In Charles wasbravado, impudence, intolerable egotism, atrocious lack of honor, butthere was a dash about him as about Marshal Ney or Prince JoachinMurat; Philip was stolid, vindictive, incapable of enthusiasm orfriendship. Charles ruled Spain as a principality; Philip held theworld as a principality of Spain. As has been indicated, Charles wasSpanish in relationship and not in disposition; Philip was Spaniard tothe exclusion of all else. Charles, if he was anything, was brilliant;Philip was as lacking in color as a bank of winter clouds, no moreconceiving brilliancy than he conceived of greatness of soul or manlyhonor. 

In Spanish character were chivalrous qualities, mixed with ferocity andpitiless cruelty. Pizarro and Cortes were attractive; we like to lookat them a second time. Much we condemn, but much we admire. Theirsagacity, their prowess, their heroic spirit, take us captive despitetheir baser qualities. In them was duplicity, revenge, bigotry, heathenish cruelty; but these were not all the qualities the inventorydiscovered. In Philip, however, were all the Spanish villainieswithout the Spanish virtues. He is blessed with scarcely a redeemingquality. His excellencies were a stolid inability to believe himselfdefeated, which, had it been joined to patriotism and intelligentaction, had risen to the heroic; he was loyal to his convictions; andhe was painstakingly laborious, and worked in his cabinet like a paidclerk. In truth, his disposition for and ability to work are among themost marked instances in history. Not Julius Caesar himself workedwith more unflagging industry. But Philip had no illuminated moments. His toil was blind, like a mole's progress. He read and annotated allstate dispatches; wrote many long epistles with his own hand, eschewingsecretarial aid. He had a mind capacious for minutiae; was colossallyegotistical; was as little cast down by defeat as elevated by triumph, which is in itself a quality of heroic mold, but viewed narrowly turnsout to be imperturbable phlegmaticism and self-assurance, which simplyunderrated disasters, making himself oblivious to them as if they didnot exist. He was possessor of the greatest realm ever swayed by asingle scepter. He affected to be proprietor of the seas; he thoughtFlanders a garden to be tilled to supply his table, and its wealth, gold for him to squander on Armadas. Italian provinces were his, andSpain was his; and the Western Hemisphere, by his own daringassumption, and the generosity of the papal gift, and the toils ofPonce de Leon and de Soto and Coronado and Pizarro and Cortes, was his. Compared with the wide and bewildering extent of his kingdom, the RomanEmpire was a dukedom. His empire spurred him to world-dominion, and heused his patrimony and its fabulous wealth to attempted enforcement ofhis claim to the sovereignty of England and Western Europe. Hisambition was in nothing less than Alexander's, but his conception ofmeans adequate to campaigns was meager. A task he could see and akingdom he could desire, but adequacy of preparation for world-conquestnever crept into his thought. He was as niggardly in supplying hisgenerals and armies as Queen Elizabeth, and all but as voluble in abuseof his servants in the field or cabinet, and as thankless to those whohad wrought his will. Parma, and Requesens, and Don John, and Alva, hedrove almost frantic by his excessive demands and expectations, coupledwith his entire inadequacy in preparation and supplies. His soldierswere always on the point of mutiny for food, or clothing, or pay, orall together. However, this ought in fairness to be said, that theonly contemporary Government which did pay its soldiers promptly andfairly was the Netherlands, one reason worth weighing why, under PrinceMaurice in particular, Flemish armies made such vigorous head againstSpanish aggressions. 

Just two people Philip gave consideration to--himself and the pope. His narrow nature, while not capable of enthusiasm, was capable of atenacious and unflagging loyalty. What in a manly spirit or in amartyr would have bloomed into nobility, devotion, and self-sacrifice, in a man like Philip became a settled cruelty and bigotry which findsfew parallels in the annals of the world. He was a creature of theChurch, as he conceived all in his dominions were creatures to him. Free will and the right to conviction he did not claim for himself andwould not consider for others. The world was an autocracy, universal, necessary, the pope as chief tyrant and Philip under-lord--he must obeythe pope; the people must obey him. To Philip these conclusions wereaxiomatic, and therefore not subjects for debate. That all hissubjects did not readily concede to him the right to be the director oftheir conscience was looked upon as unreasoning stubbornness, to bepunished with block and rack, and prison and stake. 

Philip is anomalous. We can not get into a mind like his. Statesmanhe was not; for the nurture of national wealth, such as Cromwell andCaesar planned for, he was incapable of. His idea of statesmanship wasthat his kingdom was a cask, into which he should insert a spigot anddraw. This was government of an ideal order, Philip being judge. Thedivine right of kings was a foregone conclusion, antagonism to whichwas heresy. Here let us not blame Philip; for this was the temper ofhis era, and to have anticipated in him larger views than those of hiscontemporaries is not just. To this notion was his whole nature keyed. He commanded the Netherlands to be faithful Catholics. What more wasneeded? Let this be the end. So reasoned the Spanish autocrat; andfealty to religious convictions on his subjects' part seemed to himnothing but settled obstinacy, to be burned out with martyrs' fires orcut out with swords swung by Alva's cruel hands. 

Philip was the ideal bigot. How far bigotry is native to the soul maywell be a question for grave discussion, demanding possibly moreattention than has been accorded it hitherto. And how far is bigotryto be looked on as a vice? Though this question will be laughed down, as if to ask it were to stultify the asker; but not so fast, sincebigotry is not all bad. To hold an opinion is considered a virtue. Tohold an opinion of righteousness against all odds for conscience' sake, we rightly account heroism. Is not a lover or a patriot a bigot? Orif not, where does he miss of being? We are to hold opinion and notbecome opinionated, a thing discovered to be difficult in an extremedegree. 

Bigotry is an excess of a virtue, and to pass from conscientiousness tobigotry is not a long nor difficult journey. All views are not equallytrue. This every sane mind holds as self-evident. There is aliberalism at this point which would run, if let go its logical course, to the sophist fallacy that truth did not exist, and therefore one viewwas as just as another--an attitude repugnant to all fine ethicalnatures. Now, conceiving we have the truth, we must, in reason and inconscience, be in so far intolerant to those who antagonize the truth. The theist is intolerant toward the atheist; truth is intolerant towardfalsehood; good is intolerant toward evil; God intolerant toward sin. Righteousness is always intolerant; and any one advocating unlimitedintellectual tolerance is breaking down the primary distinctionsbetween falsehood and truth. Some things are true and their oppositesfalse. Jesus put the case in an immortal phrase: "Ye can not serve Godand Mammon. " The query, then, is, Where does this intolerance of truthpass into bigotry? For I think it easy to see that this passage is buta step, nor is the dividing line so easy to discover as we might wish. Ask this question, to illustrate our dilemma, "What is the differencebetween legitimate competition and monopoly?" An answer rises to thelip instanter, but is no sooner given than perceived to be invalid. Alike closeness of relation exists between the virtue of intolerance andthe vice of intolerance, a synonym of which is bigotry. Virtue isintolerant of vice, and there are great verities in the kingdom of Godto be held if life must pay the price of their retention. This is theexplanation of martyrs, whose office is to witness to truth by crossand sword and fagot. The Reformation stands for the right of freejudgment in things appertaining to religion, thought, and politics. Luther was liberator of Europe, and through Europe of the world, in thethree departments where life lives its thrilling story. A tolerantintolerance holds with strong hand to truth, but demands for otherswhat it demands for itself; namely, the right to interpret and followtruth so far as such procedure does not interfere with the rights ofanother. Tolerance of this sort does not destroy, nor yet surrender, conviction. Bigotry demands the enforcement of its opinions upon all, and is a reign of compulsion. Applying this argument to Philip, anoteworthy bigot, we see how it was his right to be a Roman Catholicand to be a zealous propagandist, since kingship does not hinder a kingfrom being a man, with a man's religious rights and duties. Philip'sfault lay in his not allowing to others the right of religious freedomhimself possessed. He stands, to this hour, a perfect specimen ofintolerance. 

Under sovereignty such as this was William the Silent citizen. William, Prince of Orange, was born in Nassau, April 23, 1533, and wasassassinated at the convent of St. Agatha, in Delft, July 10, 1584, when a trifle over fifty-one years of age. Let us get ourchronological bearings accurately: Luther died in 1546; Lepanto wasfought in 1571; the Massacre of St. Bartholomew occurred in 1572; theInvincible Armada was destroyed in 1588; Philip was crowned king inOctober of 1555, and died at the Escurial in 1598; the SpanishInquisition was established in 1480 by Ferdinand and Isabella; theEdict of Nantes was promulgated in 1598; Queen Elizabeth Tudor ascendedher throne in 1558; America received her first permanent colony in1585, at St. Augustine, Florida. From this assemblage of dates, we seein what a ferment of momentous civil, religious, and political eventsthe Prince of Orange found his life cast. We may not choose our timeto live, not yet our time to die; but some eras are spacious aboveothers, not length, but achievement, making an age illustrious. William the Silent's age was a maelstrom of events, and there were noquiet waters; and this appears certain: The dominant force of thoseturbulent times was religious, by which I mean that religion is the keyof all movements, politics being shaped by theological dogmas andpurposes. These dates certify to the omnipresence of religiousmovement; for the Inquisition, Lepanto, the great Armada, the Edict ofNantes, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, are all ecclesiastical inintent, by which is not at all meant they were good, but were pervertedreligious views, in which human wickedness, ambition, and bigotrypre-empted religion, and used it as a medium of expression, and in turnwere used by the thing they had fostered. No more prevalentmisconception prevails than that religion is the cause of outrageousviolence, disorder, and misconduct; the truth being, rather, men'spassions, under guise of religion, rush their own wanton course. Inthis particular era of history, all movements were religious, as hasbeen shown; and Philip thought himself the apostle of religion, chosenof God, and was used by the Roman Catholic Church, and, as a wisehistorian affirms, "In fanatical enthusiasm for Catholicism, he wassurpassed by no man who ever lived. " His religion and his ambitionwere fellow-conspirators. Philip II of Spain was a Roman Catholicfanatic; Charles IX of France was a weak mind, of no definite religiousconviction, but used by the Catholics to bring about the massacre ofseventy thousand Huguenots; Henry IV of France was probably a Huguenotin genuine feeling, but a political trimmer, a daring and brilliantsoldier, a frenzied devotee of women, religion giving him smallconcern, and his change from Huguenotism to Catholicism a circumstanceas trifling as the exchange of his hunter's paraphernalia for courtapparel; Queen Elizabeth was as nearly devoid of religious instincts asis possible for a woman, though her purposes and position in politicsdrove her to the Protestant cause; William of Orange was born aProtestant, reared a Catholic, first in the household of the Regent ofthe Low countries, and afterward at the court of Charles V, sufferedrevulsion of sentiment under the unthinkable atrocities of theInquisition as carried on in the Netherlands, till at last he became aProtestant of the most pronounced and honest type. 

In Prince William's time, modern Europe was in the alembic, acircumstance which makes his epoch so engrossing to the student ofmodern history. Protestantism became a new political, social, intellectual, and religious order. Even apart from his religioussignificance, Martin Luther is the marked figure of the sixteenthcentury. Columbus discovered a New World; Luther peopled it with civiland religious forces. Puritanism was the flower of that earlier-dayProtestantism. Besides, the Walloons settled New Amsterdam; theHuguenots, the Carolinas; the Anglicans, Virginia; the Lutherans, NewSweden. From the standpoint of statesmanship, Luther was shapingpeoples for a New World, and was the commanding personality of thosestormy years in which, like a warrior who never knew fatigue, he foughtthe battles of the living God. Unquestionably, the Reformation meantliberty in conscience, intellect and citizenship, which are thequintessence of modern civilization. In those years, during whichWilliam the Silent was a prodigious force, Protestantism was troublingthe waters. New religious ideas must ultimate in new politicalinstitutions, of which the Dutch Republic was a sort of first draft, and the United States of America an edited and perfected draft. 

Protestantism was in justifiable revolt against Roman Catholicism, afoe to progress and liberty in religion, then and now, and now not lessthan then. It was intolerance run mad, whose method was theInquisition. One can not say a good word for this system, whereJesuitism finds home and inspiration, where the end justifies themeans, and any diabolism passes for saintliness if done for theadvancement of the "true faith. " Yet here, as always, we must be onguard, supposing this to be a fruit of religion; rather is it selfishhuman nature, taking an ecclesiastical system to do business in, thusavailing itself of the religious impulse in the soul to work out apurely earthly interest. Early Christianity, as all pure Christianity, presses Christ's method of making appeal to the individual, impressinghim with a sense of his sin and his lost estate; of the necessity ofrepentance; of salvation from sin by faith in a Divine Christ. WhenChristianity came to the throne with Constantine, when ultimatelymasses of people were baptized on compulsion, Christianity took on thepomp and paraphernalia of heathenism, so as to make appeal to thesensuous element in heathen nature; in a word, Christianity became asmuch or more heathen than Christian, and this mongrel of Christianityand heathenism is Roman Catholicism. Root, stem, and branch, it ishostile to the Word of God, and, as every such system must do, darkenedthe consciences of men. We may not forget, however, its essentialreligious and scholastic services in earlier years, nor that it hasnurtured some of the saints among the centuries. Catholicism has abasis of Christianity, and, could the excrescences be hewn away, andthis foundation be again discovered, then for Roman Catholicism woulddawn a new and greater era. But as the system stands, it affectedtemporal sovereignty, it humbled kings, and gave away empires. PopeLeo X was not a bad man, being so far superior to Alexander XII as topreclude comparison. Many popes had been so vile as to have shockedeven the moral indifference of those times; but Leo X, son of Lorenzothe Magnificent, heir of the traditions in companionship and thehumanities which had made Florence illustrious, --Leo, cultivated, brilliant, clean in his personal life, had assembled around him menreasonably good. His aesthetic inclinations were running him deeply indebt, and to fill the bankrupt treasury, His Holiness commissionedTetzel to sell indulgences--a practice repugnant to moral instinct, tothe dignity of the Church, and the honor of our God, and yet a practicecontinued by Romanism in our own day and under our own eyes. Tosuppose that Romanism has reformed is current with intelligent persons, though no supposition could be more erroneous. All those beliefsprevalent in the days of Luther are affirmed at this hour, with theaddition of the doctrine of papal infallibility and the immaculateconception. To-day indulgences are sold in the United States, noticeably so in Arizona; and a son of a bishop in the MethodistEpiscopal Church, because his name chanced to have a foreign flavor, was written to and offered one year's indulgences for twenty-fivedollars! Catholicism has not changed. The Inquisition was abolishedin Spain by Napoleon in 1808, re-established after the Spaniards hadreassumed their government, and finally abolished by the Cortes in1820. The system of Catholicism is leprous, and in the age of Williamthe Silent had power and political ascendency so as to command rack andfagot, and dungeons so deep as that from them no cry could reach anyear save God's; and in the person of the mean, sullen, andindefatigable Philip had apt instrument. 

When the Prince of Orange was ambassador in the court of France, HenryII, supposing him to be privy to his master's plans, on ahunting-excursion, casually mentioned a private treaty with Alva tojoin with Philip to exterminate heresy from their joint kingdoms. Small wonder if Orange, riding beside French royalty that day, grewpitiful toward unsuspicious, doomed thousands, and pitiless towardPhilip and his Spanish soldiers and followers, or that, to use his ownwords from the famous "Apology, " "From that moment I determined inearnest to clear the Spanish venom from the land. " Watch his flushedface; his eyes, like coals taken fresh from an altar of vengeance; hishand, nervously fingering his sword-hilt; his form, dilating as if forthe first time he guessed he had come to manhood, --and I miss inreckoning if we are not looking on the person of a patriot. For thisWilliam of Orange and Nassau is William the Silent, keeping hisdreadful secret; but keeping the secret, too, that the Inquisition andCatholicism, and Spain, and Philip have an enemy whose hostility canonly be silenced by a bullet. The day the French king gave Williamthis fatal confidence was an epoch in the life of William and of Europe. 

His life divides into two periods, this dialogue between himself andHenry II closing the one and opening the other. With that fatalconfidence his youth ended and his manhood began. Get a closer view ofhis youth. From his fifteenth to his twenty-first year he was inconstant attendance at the court of Charles V, who loved, trusted, andhonored him. He was at this age, rich, frivolous, spendthrift; inshort, a petted nobleman of the greatest monarch in Christendom. Hehad evident gifts; was generous to lavishness; mortgaged his estate togratify his luxurious tastes; was given to political expediency, caringless for conviction than popularity with his sovereign; wearing hisreligion, if he may be said to have possessed any, as lightly as alady's favor; lacking in reverence, he was flippant rather thanirreligious, but a youth of fashion, pleasure, and luxury. Charles V, discovering in him extraordinary parts, invested him, at the age oftwenty-two, with command of the imperial forces before Marienburg, andat his abdication leaned affectionately on William's shoulder. CountEgmont alone excepted, Orange was the most distinguished Flemishnobleman who passed from Charles to Philip as part of the emperor'sbequest. Early in Philip's reign, Orange was made one of the king'scounselors and Knight of the Golden Fleece, at that time most covetedand honorable of any military knighthood. At the age of twenty-six, hewas one of the peace commissioners between Henry II and Philip II, andat this time he came into possession of that secret which changed hislife. Here ends the youth of William of Nassau. Let us get this manmore clearly in the eye. He was above middle height, spare, sinewy;dark in complexion; had gentle brown eyes, auburn hair and beard; facethin, nose aquiline; head small, but well formed; his hair luxuriant, his beard trimmed to a point; about his neck the superb collar of theGolden Fleece. He is married, and his home is Breda. 

Between the young king and his Flemish Stadtholder was never any warmthof feeling. When Orange, pursuant to his resolution formed in theFrench king's presence, spurred the States to demand the removal of theSpanish soldiers from the Netherlands, with a pertinacity dogged andchangeless till the king, in sheer desperation, acquiesced in the justdemand, though with a chagrin of spirit toward the instrument of hisdefeat which became settled hatred, and never lifted from his heart fora moment in those long succeeding years, when the king, like a reclusein the Escurial, brooded over his defeat. His troops forced fromFlemish territories, Philip himself departed from a region he had neverloved and had scarcely tolerated, departed, not to return any more, save by proxy of fire and sword, and cruel soldiery, and more cruelgenerals--the pitiless Parmas and Alvas--and departing, he embraced theother noblemen with such cold warmth as was native to him, butupbraided Orange bitterly for the action of the States, and when Orangereplied the action was not his, but the States-General, Philip, besidehimself with rage, cried, "Not the States, but you! you! you!" ThusKing Philip passed into Spain, and the Prince of Orange into the secondera of his life. 

Macaulay has written the life of William III with such warmth, glow, fullness, and art as to have rendered other biographies superfluous. The history of William III was the history of England during his reign. He was England at its best. William the Silent was the Netherlands attheir best. Motley has written "The Rise of the Dutch Republic, " andin so doing has written a glowing narrative of the origin of theNetherland Republic; and has besides, in the same breath, given abiography of William the Silent. What nobler eulogy could bepronounced than to say a man's life was his country's history duringhis lifetime? Motley's thrilling narrative is the worthiest life ofWilliam written. Read Motley, and the last greatest word shall havebeen told you regarding this hero of the sixteenth century. InPrescott's "Philip the Second" may be found an incompletecharacterization of the prince, without the unfavorable attitude towardPhilip or the laudatory view of William presented in Motley. These twoAmerican historians have approached their theme with such ampleness ofscholastic research and elaborate access to and use of thecorrespondence of Margaret, Parma, Alva, Granvelle, Don John ofAustria, William, and Philip, as practically to exhaust the sources ofinformation on this tragic reign, at the same time shutting off much ofpossibility from the future historian. William has at last, in Motley, found a biographer for whom any illustrious character might bethankful. So elaborate and complete were these researches that MissPutnam, in her "William the Silent, " has scarcely developed a singlenew fact, and has in all cases conceded the thoroughness andsufficiency of Motley's investigations. The present writer's apologyfor attempting what has been done so incomparably well is, that hefeels an essay of moderate length, which, because of its brevity, mayfind an audience, is a desideratum in English literature, this essay topoint out the heroic proportions of William; enough so, if may be, tolend eagerness to those who read, so they may be decoyed into perusingMotley's noble histories. I would help a reader of this essay to seethe theater and actors, and to that end lift this curtain. 

Philip having, on August 26, 1559, sailed from Flushing, Spainward, William's lifework properly began. At this date, his attitude has notdeveloped, but stands as a block of marble a sculptor has chiseledenough to show a statue is intended, but not sufficiently to disclosethe sculptor's purpose. One thing alone was definite and unalterable, to combat the introduction of the Inquisition and the extermination ofthe Protestant Netherlanders by aid from the Spanish soldiery. Thefirst checkmate given Philip's nefarious scheme was when theStates-General compelled his removal of the troops, though at this timeWilliam was still Catholic in religion and a loyal subject of Philip, being in no sense a revolutionist. He was easily the first citizen ofthe Netherlands; twenty-six years of age; not matured, but maturing;not faultless, but in process of being fashioned for a distinguishedcareer of patriotism and catholicity. Our full selves bloom slowly. Our life is no mushroom, but a tree, and a tree requires longgrowth-periods. Orange was so. A grave, moral, and patriotic purposein itself suffices to shape a career of grandeur and service. Had hebeen told he would die a Protestant and a rebel, he would have beeninstant to deny the charge, and this through no duplicity, but fromlack of knowledge of his own soul temper, coupled with an inability toforecast a stormy future. We can not walk by sight in action andpolitics any more than in religion--a thing the prince found out as theturbulent years passed. He has been vehemently accused of duplicity. He has been depicted as hypocrite and plotter against his rightfulsovereign. I find no marks of this on him. That he had ambition isnot to be argued; but ambition is no sin if worthily directed. He didthings not consonant with our ethics, belonging, in that sense, to hisage, an age of diplomatic duplicity. He did not tell all he knew. Hehad in his pay the king's private secretary, and received a copy of anyletter the king wrote; and when at last the secretary's treason wasdiscovered, he paid the penalty of his perfidy by being torn in piecesby four horses; yet bribery of employees was common then, and was apractice of every potentate, and was what Philip did in every court inChristendom. Absolute fealty was all but unknown. Each man wasbelieved to have his price, and the belief, in most instances, was noterroneous. Besides, William was in a state of perpetual war withPhilip, and war makes its own code, and justifies the otherwiseunjustifiable, and but for this subtle surveillance of the king'sintention, no stand could have been made against his treachery andencroachments; for he was the sum of duplicities, deceiving everybody, those nearest to him and most intimately in his counsels no less thanhis foes. Duplicity was native to him as respiration. Granvelle, whoin treacherous diplomacy was not inferior to Macchiavelli, him Philipdeceived. Such a king, William met by finesse and deception againstfinesse and deception. To judge a statesman of the sixteenth centuryby the ethics of the nineteenth century is studied injustice. He isaccused of evasion in his marriage with Anne of Saxony, and theaccusation is, in my conviction, just; but probably at that juncture inhis career his religious notions were in a state of ferment, himself asyet knowing not what he would be. In any case, however, to use thewords of Putnam, "From the expediency of his youth he grew gradually toa high standard of honor. " In the stress of the battle for liberty, when he was reduced to counting his very garments, his luxurious habitsslipped from him, and disinterestedness grew upon him. Cromwell wasformed when first we saw him; Orange grows before our eyes, as we havewatched the blooming of some sacred flower. Orange was no saint. Whoso thinks him, thinks amiss. He had manifold faults, as what man hasnot? But that the growing purpose of his life was heroic and single, and that he devoted a laborious manhood to the enfranchisement of hiscountry and religion, no fair historian can deny. His career naturallyoscillated between the general and the statesman, the statesman beingin the ascendant. Some men are primarily soldiers; secondarily, statesmen; as was Sulla or Marlborough. In others, the statesmanstands first, the soldier in them being second, as in Julius Caesar, whose widest achievements always spring out of his statesmanship asnaturally as a plant out of the soil. At this point, Caesar andWilliam the Silent touch, by which is not meant that in either fieldWilliam approximates Caesar; for Julius Caesar is one of the fewgreatest products of the world. William fought because he must; he wasstatesman because he would. 

Philip never swerved from his purpose; but though his Armadas werewrecked and his treasure galleons seized, in his cabinet he set himselfto rigorous purpose, demanding impossibilities of his commanders, paying his soldiers ill if at all, equipping his expeditionsinsufficiently, but never failing in his demands on his servants. Inharmony with this dogged persistency of purpose, he never changed fromhis plan of making the Netherlands Roman Catholic, giving his subjects'scruples no thought. He had commanded--let that suffice; hisinstruments Margaret, and Alva, and Requesens, and Don John, and Parma, and the Inquisition, with which atrocious instrument of propagandismthe reader is doubtless familiar. To 1546 no symptom of disloyaltytoward the king is visible in William; he was jubilant rather, feelingthe grievances could be remedied if only Cardinal Granvelle's authoritywere lessened. His own involved finances troubled him, and to them hegave such vigilant attention as to reduce his debts to the point wherethey gave him no concern. Above financial difficulties, were thoseconnected with his wife, Anne, who proved half-mad and wholly lackingin virtue, though, in truth, her life was far from being a joyous one, if such were possible to a character like hers. How much of blameattaches to the prince for this estrangement can not now be discovered;suffice it to say, no lack in his conduct could excuse lack of virtuein her. William was lonely, and writes his brother Louis to come tohim, if only for a fortnight. So far as surfaces may indicate, hisrelations with Philip were at this period placid, and himself loyal, only he is alert always to avert any encroachment of tyranny. Philip, undeterred by all his fair words and promises, supported by royalhonor, spoken to Count Egmont, who had been sent to the Escurial tomake formal protest in behalf of the nobles against religiouspersecution, not so much as a question of tolerance as a question ofwisdom, seeing all the nobles were sincere Catholics, and the furtherimpossibility of enforcing such an edict, --Philip, in the face of theseadvices and in the face of his promises, sent, in 1565, peremptoryorders to Margaret of Parma, Regent of the Netherlands, to proceedagainst heretics. So Philip's duplicity was revealed and the die cast. One thing was fortunate: the worst was known. Protests poured in, averitable flood--protests against all Inquisitorial methods in a landaccustomed to liberty--the prince, meantime, remaining moderate, to theexasperation of the Protestants, whose blood boiled at the prospect ofan Inquisition in their midst and for their extermination. From Breda, William watched evils take shape, his very calm giving him advantage informing accurate judgment of the magnitude of opposition on which hemight rely, concurring in a remonstrance drawn up in March of 1566; andin the latter part of this month he went to a meeting of the Council atBrussels, where he spoke frankly against the measures of the king, urging moderation on this ground, "To see a man burn for his opiniondoes harm to the people, and does nothing to maintain religion;" and inthe ensuing April, Brederode presented the remonstrance, Margaret theRegent replying she could not--_i. E. _, dared not--suspend theInquisition. Thus were the famous "Beggars" ushered into history. Prince William, nothing revolutionary in character, still counseledquiet till all his hopes were frustrated and all his fears realized, when, on August 18th, in an annual festival of Antwerp Catholicism, atumult arose over the wooden Virgin, and rebellion against Philip IIwas actually inaugurated; for from this hour the Confederates armed andstrengthened themselves against the policy and duplicity of Margaretthe regent and Philip the king, having accurate knowledge of thecharacter of each. Orange is still on the side of submission, andMotley, than whom there is no better authority, thinks September themonth of his considering seriously forcibly resisting Philip'sencroachments; for now, through a trusted messenger, he puts on guardCount Egmont, whose sanguine temperament leads him still to putreliance in Philip's fair words. Evidently we have come to thebeginning of the end. Erelong, William of Orange will be a rebel. 

The second period of William's life, stretching from Henry II'srevelation to the prince's death, is divisible into two parts--partfirst reaching to the outbreak at Antwerp, in which, though on thedefensive, he was yet actually loyal; part second beginning with theAntwerp outbreak, when he saw Philip clearly, and as a patriot, andloving the Netherlands more than he loved a foreign and tyrannicalking, he, in a lesser or greater degree, meditated rebellion. We arenow come to the last stage in the journey of the prince. Events hadmore doom in them than he or any man could guess, and marched on likean army at double quick. In March, 1567, came Philip's ordercommanding every Flemish functionary (each of whom had taken oath atthe beginning of his reign) to take a new oath, demanding "every man inhis service, without any exception whatever, should now renew his oathof fealty, " said oath reading, "Demanding a declaration from everyperson in office as to his intention to carry out His Majesty's will, without limitation or restriction, " which William, refusing to take, offered his resignation to the regent; and the breach was made. OnApril 10, 1567, Orange wrote Philip his intention of withdrawing fromthe Royal Council, and on the day following, leaving his office vacant, departed from Antwerp for Breda; and the breach was complete, andWilliam the Silent was calendared as a traitor. In May, Alva set outfrom Spain with an army to subdue the rebellious Flemings; and Philip, sinister, pugnacious, relentless, was seen a life-size figure. Philipwas now himself. In September, Prince Maurice was born and christenedwith Lutheran rites, the Prince of Orange thus beginning his hegirafrom the Church of Rome. In the spring of 1568, Orange formally tookup arms against these Spanish invaders; and in October, 1573, heformally became a Protestant, thus becoming a civil and ecclesiasticalrefugee. 

Thus far events have been given in their chronological order, a processneedful no longer, the steps having been shown by which William ofOrange, a Catholic prince, loyal to and trusted by Charles V, has cometo be a rebel against the Church and Philip II, with a price put uponhis head. His remaining life is one long, bloody, tireless, valorous, magnificent, though often hopeless, effort to consummate the freeing ofhis native land from ecclesiastical and civil tyranny. 

William the Silent must be studied as soldier, for such heunquestionably was. Men are best pictured by comparisons. William wascool, deliberate, judicial, eloquent on occasion, but not magnetic. His qualities were not such as blaze in a battle-charge, such asMarshal Murat knew to lead. Those methods were entirely foreign tohim. He has even been accused of cowardice, though, so far as I canjudge, without justice. His circumstances--the lack of armies; thesluggard patriotism of his countrymen; his constant negotiations, notto say intrigues, with many persons; his perpetual efforts to raisemoneys to equip forces to carry on the patriotic warfare--seem to haveleft him scant time to lead armies in person. His retirement to Bredaon his first break with his sovereign was deliberate, open, and manly. If naturally timid, to quote Motley, "he was certainly possessed ofperfect courage at last. In siege and battle, in the deadly air ofpestilential cities, in the long exhaustion of mind and body, whichcomes from unduly protracted labor and anxiety, amid the countlessconspiracies of assassins, he was daily exposed to death in everyshape. Within two years, five different attempts against his life hadbeen discovered. Rank and fortune were offered to any malefactor whowould compass his murder. He had already been shot through the headand almost mortally wounded. Under such circumstances, even a braveman might have seen a pitfall at every step, a dagger in every hand, and poison in every cup. On the contrary, he was ever cheerful, andhardly took more precaution than usual. " Surely these are not marks ofcowardice. Compare William with Henry IV of France, and Count Egmont, hero of St. Quentin's. They were soldiers, never statesmen. Henry wasgoaded by impulse. He, on the now classic field of Ivry, calling hissoldiers to follow where his white plume leads, is a hero-soldierfigure; and Egmont, generous, impulsive, magnetic, chivalrous, devoidof forecast, had, at St. Quentin's, administered such defeat as "Francehad not experienced since the battle of Agincourt. " He was a brilliantsoldier, and burnt like lightnings before men's eyes. Both thesecommanders were dramatic, and compelled victory, so as to merit therank of soldiers forever. William the Silent falls not in suchcompany. His campaigns were not brilliant, though many generals whoare accounted great are devoid of this quality. He was not the soldierhis son Maurice was, who was properly ranked as a brilliant soldier, and in quality of action takes his place beside Henry IV and CountEgmont. His soldiership, however, monopolized his genius, using allits fire. Fortunate it was for the Netherlands that William was morestatesman than soldier; but equally fortunate for them that he wasenough of a soldier to baffle Requesens, Alva, and Parma. We measurepower by obstacles mastered. Apply this test to Orange, and he willstand huge of bulk as mountain ranges; for Alva and Parma were amongthe chief generals of their century, with royal authority and equipment(inadequate enough, truly, but still an equipment), with royal creditand prestige, with the taxes of the provinces to supply the exchequer;and these generals Orange met, hampered with lack of arms, men, funds, moral support; with mercenary troops, unreliable and mutinous, hiredmuch of the time with moneys raised by mortgaging his own estates, andbacked up by a supine and a divided people, himself clothed with noauthority compelling subordination, and, with the exception of hisbrother Louis (who was slain at the battle of Mookerheyde), without asingle captain of generous military capacity, --with such odds, seemingly insuperable, William of Orange met the chief captains of hisgeneration, and made head against them, creeping forward, as the tidesdo, till they own the shore. When these facts are co-ordinated, hisachievements become phenomenal. His resiliency was tremendous. Insome significant regards, his military career finds parallel in GeneralWashington. 

In a remarkable particular, William the Silent resembles QuintusSertorius; namely, that each, while rebel against his Government, fought in the name of his Government. Mommsen says: "It may be doubtedwhether any Roman statesman of the earlier period can be compared inpoint of versatile talent to Sertorius, " who, though in rebellionagainst Rome, did all he did in the name of Rome, fought battles, levied tributes, enfranchised cities, remodeled communities; in short, did in Spain what, in a later period, Julius Caesar did in Gaul. William the Silent for years carried on his warfare in Philip's name, tacitly assuming that Philip's agents were at fault, and not Philip'sself, and that himself was the king's true representative in the LowCountries. William made war in the king's name, Granvelle, in theearlier stages of the rebellion, being named as the agent ofoppression; while, in fact, that remarkable man and sagacious statesmanwas hopelessly subordinate to his master, though harmonious with him. As yet, the Netherlands had not conceived the extent of Philip'styranny, bigotry, and duplicity. Another similarity between the Dutchand Roman outlaw was, that both were statesmen rather than generals, having commanding outlook on their eras; and although each was, perforce, captain of a host, his signal service was as shaper of arealm. 

Here lies William the Silent's chosen might. He was born diplomat. Philip himself kept State secrets behind no more impenetrable reservethan William. His statesmanship was wrought into his patriotism likeglancing colors in silk; and he stands a patriot whose services no onecan overestimate, and a champion of liberty the most valiant andsagacious known prior to the Puritan Rebellion. Seventeen provincesconstituted the Netherlands. By the pacification of Ghent, in 1576, aunion was formed among certain of these, in which, for the first time, religious tolerance was asserted and applied--Catholics to allowProtestants to worship as they would, and Protestants to do the like byCatholics. This pacification, in its specifications, was an unheard-ofgain for Protestantism and for liberty, and constituted William's chieftriumph up to that date. The Netherlands were peopled with variedpopulations, with all but innumerable conflicting interests anddispositions, so much so that union seemed impossible. This is partialexplanation why Prince William suffered more from the inaction andsuspicion of his own countrymen than from all Philip's machinations. His patience was something godlike. No people known to history appearto less advantage or show less love of liberty, or even commonself-respect, than these Belgic provinces through many years. Theywere so abject, so schooled to suffer and resent nothing, that even thehorrors of the Spanish Inquisition did not lift them into rebellion, nor yet the savage cruelties of Alva, nor the execution of Count Egmontand Count Horn, though the atrocities of Spanish mutineers did at lastexpedite those deliberations which ultimated in the pacification ofGhent. I have wondered many, many times. Orange did not lose faith inhis countrymen and give them over to their servitude. His fortitudesustained him, and his patience held as if it had been a steel cable, and his natural cheerfulness was of unquestionable service in keepinghim from losing heart. Almost every leader proved false to him, someof his own relations included, and he kept on! He must use the men hehad. A great cause requires and equips a great leader. It was so inWilliam. His country and its cause had him, and in him was rich. Hesaw worth in men, and built on that. That men betrayed him did notunseat his faith in men. He did what every statesman does, had faithin men, appealed to their possibilities, to their prospective ratherthan their present selves, and so helped them to what they ought to be. He lifted them up to his levels, and they stood peers in manhood andpatriotism. Many failed him; but many did not. Much discouraged, but, specially later in his career, much encouraged him. Deeds of heroismso incredible as to read like a romance, --such deeds were not rare, rather common. The siege of Maestrich takes rank among the heroicepisodes in the battles for human liberty. One's blood grows fairlyfrantic in reading the thrilling story, and a man is glad he is a manand brother to men who could do feats so superb; and the flooding ofthe lands in raising the siege of Leyden is to be classed among thedeathless sacrifices for dear liberty. For these and all such loftyflights of courage and success, William was the inspiration. He wasnever defeated by defeat. Liberty must not fail. The Provincestrusted him in their hearts, and so long as he remained firm, self-sacrificing, undisturbed, the people (so he argued) could berelied on to trust in him and to justify his trust in them. In behalfof freedom, no sacrifice or achievement was other than feasible to him. He loaded his estate with debt for the common good. Through many yearspenury was his portion. Great events marshaled themselves about him asif he were their necessary captain. He knew the art of inspiring men, which is, at last, the mightiest resource of a great soul. He knew howto deal with men, --the finest of the arts. In his roused moments hiseloquence, whether spoken or written, swayed men's judgments and nervedtheir hearts. Motley says, "His influence on his auditors wasunexampled in the annals of his country or age. " His memory lostnothing; his ability to read men ranks him with Richelieu; he wascautious, politic, but not slow, though his uniform habit of cautionrobbed his acts of the fine flavor of spontaneity; he was painstaking, and as laborious as Philip, which is the last effort of comparison, seeing Philip's industry was all but without precedent. If he floodedcoasts and inlands by the seas he emptied on them as if the seas werehis, he also inundated courts of kings and assemblies of nobles withappeals, remonstrances, or letters of instruction or information. Helacked nothing of being ubiquitous, and was the moving spirit of alloccasions where liberty had followers. Nothing eluded nor bewilderedhim, from which observations Motley's estimate stands justified; for hecalled him "The first statesman of his age. " Compare him with Don Johnof Austria, hero of Lepanto, who was natural son of Emperor Charles V, vivacious, romantic, brilliant, and conqueror of the Turks at Lepanto, whence his name had risen, like a star, to flame at the eastern windowof every court in Christendom. Made governor of the Netherlands, hefound himself beset by difficulties through which sword and troop couldnot cut his way. Harassed by the distrust, unfaithfulness, andmeanness of Philip; hedged by the sagacious statecraft of hisadversary, William of Orange, he attempted the role of war; foundhimself defeated by an invisible antagonist, whose name haunted hisdays and nights--the name was "Father William"--at last, flared up likean expiring lamp, and died. Such the conqueror of Lepanto when broughtto cope with William the Silent. William stood possessed of vastcharacter-resources, so that what was lacking in supplies he made up inhimself. 

William of Orange, and Philip, King of Spain and the WesternHemisphere, challenge comparison. Philip was statesman in that hispowers were adapted to the cabinet rather than the battle; and Philipmay pass for a statesman in some particulars. Painstaking, laborious, with real ability in choice of servants to execute his will, andkeeping eyes on the horizons of the greatest empire the world had seen, he peopled this wide world of his with hopeless projects, since hisambition was topless as skies of night. His claims were fantastic orgreat, as you might elect to call them; for he claimed both England andFrance as provinces of his empire, keeping at the respective courtssecret agents, with lavish gold for corrupting those sovereigns'servants. His reign is a sort of free fight with him on everybody, hekeeping every item under his own surveillance, but displaying nocapacity to do other that baldly claim and attempt. He could notcompass his designs. There were no compensations in his reign. Helost and never gained. England defeated him at home and abroad. TheDutch defied him, and won their liberty after bitter years of struggle. His every effort to subdue them failed. Though the Inquisitionmurdered from fifty to one hundred thousand of his most industrioussubjects, this done, and still failure! He trusted no man. Heprobably poisoned his own son, Don Carlos. His treachery was black asCaesar Borgia's; and to his chosen counselors he wrote interminablelies, apparently deeming lying a virtue. He offered fabulous sums ofmoney for the assassination of Queen Elizabeth, of King Henry IV, andof William, Prince of Orange, and finally gave William's estate to therelatives of Gerard, the assassin of the prince. Philip waspainstaking, not sagacious. While admiring his industry, I can notbring myself to the point of believing he had greatness. A superiorchief clerk he was, and an inferior king. 

William the Silent, Prince of Orange, moneyless, resourceless, defeatedthe richest empire of the world without winning a single decisivevictory. So viewed, he is a statesman of magnificent proportions. Athis death, fifteen out of the seventeen provinces were in rebellion;and had he lived, there can be no rational doubt the remaining two hadrebelled and the seventeen become free. As it was, seven provinces wontheir liberty, and in 1648, at the Peace of Westphalia, wereacknowledged as a sovereign State and free from Spain. 

William was importuned, vehemently importuned, to become king. Herefused, as Cromwell in a later day refused, though, had Cromwellbecome king, there is no reason why he might not have handed down hisscepter to his son. What sealed Richard Cromwell's fate was that hewas not a king, the English wishing to feel they had a hereditary head. This was the mistake of the Prince of Orange. While his refusal ofregal honors reflected credit on his manhood and disinterestedpatriotism, that refusal was a weakness to the cause of liberty. Abouta king men of those days would have rallied as about no Stadtholder;for the Flemings were never essentially republican in instincts. Freemen they learned to be; republicans they never learned to be. HadWilliam of Orange become king, then had his son, as sovereign, led hissubjects to battle. As yet Europe was not ready for a commonwealth. As the case stood, William lived, loving his country with an ingenuousaffection; was a patriot statesman, whose reward for years of toil, which seamed his brow at the age of forty as if he had been seventy, was an impoverished estate, but an imperishable fame. 

On July 10, 1584, Belthazer Gerard shot "Father William" in his ownhome, and he, falling, cried: "My God, have pity on my soul! I amsorely wounded! My God, have pity on my soul and this poor people!"and this, save his whispered "Yes" to his sister's eager inquiry if hetrusted his soul to Jesus, were his last words, so that, as his countryhad been his thought through many turbulent years, so was it his lastthought and love--a fitting word for a patriot such as he to leave onhis dead lips. Let the historian's verdict stand as ours, "His lifewas a noble Christian epic. "

A statesman is a man of his own and succeeding ages, and in him, therefore, is much anticipatory. He outruns his time. The visionWilliam the Silent had, which outran the simple patriot in him, was thevision of religious tolerance. This might serve him for crown had heno other. What the world has learned to do, that this Dutch princetaught--virtually first of modern statesmen. In an utterly intolerantage and country, he apostled manly tolerance. In a later day, John ofBarneveldt came to the block because he was an Arminian. Protestants, though never wholesale persecutors, had yet to learn this wise man'slesson. And this must rank among the underscored virtues of this oldsoldier of liberty, that he wished men to worship God withoutmolestation. Nor did this tolerance grow out of indifference toreligion. In youth he was careless of Divine matters, and thoughtlittle of religion. But so sagacious and so burdened a man as he grewto feel need of strength beyond the help of man. In his mature yearshe was from conviction a Christian in the Protestant Church, and hislife walked on high levels to the end. God was to him as toinnumerable souls, "a refuge and strength and a very present help intime of trouble;" and in death he committed his soul to God. By worthand service; by fortitude and patriotism; by long years of devotion tothe task of breaking the scepter of tyranny; by genius burning as thelight, and goodness purifying itself as years marched past, --by theseattributes has William the Silent, Prince of Orange, earned a right tostand erect among the world's immortals. 

V

The Romance of American Geography

In traveling over the undulating prairies of many States of the Union, huge granite boulders are seen lying solitary, as if dropped by somepassing cloud, having no kindred in the rocky formations environing, but being absolute foreigners in a strange land. There they lie, prone, chiseled by some forgotten art, and so solitary as to bring atinge of melancholy to the reflection of the thoughtful. In certainregions these boulders are so numerous and so various in size as to beused in building foundations, and sometimes entire habitations. Theserocks were dropped in remote centuries by passing icebergs, and aresolitary memorials of the ice-drift across our continent. The craftson which they voyaged were wrecked long ago. They were passengers on

 "Some shattered berg, that, pale and lone, Drifts from the white north to the tropic zone, And in the burning day Melts peak by peak away, Till on some rosy even It dies, with sunlight blessing it. "

This instance may be taken as a parable, suggesting the historyembodied in names of localities, lakes, straits, rivers, cities, hamlets, States. Those names are the débris of a dead era; and forone, I can not escape the wonder and the pathos of these shatteredyesterdays, which have a voice, calling, as in hoarse whispers sad withtears, "We are not, but we were. "

Though we are little given to so esteeming the study, there is romancein geography, learned by us when lads and lasses--not because we would, but because we must--and such study was difficult and unsavory. Thecatalogue of names we learned, perforce, was dreary as the alphabet;and not a memory of pleasure lingers about the book in which westudied, save that, in cramped, sprawling hand, upon the margin iswritten the name of some little sweetheart beside our own, --and deadlong since. No, geography was not romantic. That was a possession wenever suspected. But romance is ubiquitous, like flowers of spring, sheltering where we little anticipate. 

To a lover of history, however, few studies will prove so fascinatingas a study of names in geography. Finding a few at random, feel thethrill of the history they embody--history and reminiscence:Providence, Roger Williams named the city so when himself was arefugee; Fort Wayne, named for General "Mad Anthony" Wayne, whodestroyed the Indian scourge in the Northwest Territory in 1792;Raleigh, so yclept for that chiefest friend of American colonizationamong Englishmen, Sir Walter Raleigh; Council Grove, because, in theIndian days, there, in a grove--rare in the prairie country ofKansas--the Red Men met for counsel; Astoria, bearing name of thatfamous fortune-maker in the fur country of the West and North; BuffaloLake, reminding us that there the buffalo tramped in days seeming nowso remote, when the buffalo rode, like a mad cavalry troop, across thewide interior plains of our continent; Eagle River, for here this royalbird used to love to linger as if it were his native stream. These arethe scattered, miscellaneous reminiscences of men and acts, and thingsand achievements. In Kansas is a village called Lane, a name which, tothe old settler in Kansas, is big with meaning, seeing it brings tolife one of the strange, romantic, contradictory, and brilliantcharacters of the "Squatter Sovereignty" days, when Jim Lane wrought, with his weird and wonderful eloquence, his journeys oft, and histireless industry, in championing the cause of State freedom. Him andhis history, reading like a tale told by a campfire's fitful light, this name embodies. What an archive of history does such a namebecome! Portage is a name pregnant with memories of the old days ofdiscovery, when America was still an unknown limit. "Grand Portage"you shall see on the map, neighboring the Great Lakes, whereby you see, as through a magic glass, the boats, loaded on the shoulders whennavigation was no longer possible, and the journey made over thewatershed till a stream was followed far enough to float the birch-barkcanoe once more. Prairie is another word full of interest. Pampas isa word, Peruvian in origin, designating the prairies of South America;while prairie is a French word, meaning meadow. Pampas is the Peruvianword for field. The words are synonyms, but come from differenthemispheres of the world. Does it not seem strange that a worddescriptive of these treeless wildernesses of North America should be agift, not of the Indian hunter who used to scurry across them swift asan arrow of death, but should really be the gift of those hardy andvalorous French voyagers who had no purpose of fastening a name on theflower-sown, green meadows that swayed in the wind like some emeraldsea? So the Incas have christened the plains of South America, and theFrench adventurer the plains of North America! Though, who thatcrosses our prairies, sweet with green, and lit with flowers like lampsof many-colored fires, thinks he is speaking the speech of the Frenchtrapper of long ago? Savannah is an Indian word, meaning meadow, andgives name to these dank meadowlands under warmer skies, where reedsand swamp-grasses grow; and the name of Savannah in Georgia is thusbestowed. How much we owe! Who has not helped us? Nor does thetraveler through the castellated steeps of the "Bad Lands" know, norprobably does he care, that this caption came from the far-travelingFrench trapper, whose venturesome and tireless feet have made him athome in all places on our continent. How valuable, however, must bethese names to one who cares to familiarize himself with the knowledgeand romance of those pioneers of geography! Of like origin is "butte. "The voyager saw those isolated peaks, too high to be called hills andtoo low to be called mountains, and said they are buttes(knolls)--names which cling to them as tenaciously as their shadows. 

In a word, I have found this study a breath blown from far mountainranges of history; and this breath upon the face has made an hour oflife grow young and beautiful, for which reason I now write the storyof my pleasure. The North American continent lends itself withpeculiar grace to such a study as is here suggested, because its storylies under the eyes of history. 'Twas scarcely an hour ago, in theworld's day, since Columbus found out this continent, and, with agiant's hand, swung its huge doors inward for the centuries to enter;and all those discoveries are our commonplace knowledge. What tribeswere here, Prescott and Parkman have told us in thrilling narratives;and columns of eager colonists we have seen press their way along theseashore, into forests, over mountains, across deserts, never halting, save to catch breath as a climber of a mountain does, --on, on, till acontinent is white with the tents of millions. But the Indianaborigine, for whom the tepee was portable habitation, and the stretchof plain and hill and lake and river, hunting-ground orbattle-ground, --the Indian is mainly the reminiscence of an old man'sstraggling speech; and these names he has left, clinging to lake andriver and hamlet, are his memorial. In Montezuma's empire, where oncea barbaric splendor held court and set in tragic splendor, lurid evenyet at these centuries' remove, what is left save a vocabulary or abroken idol lying black and foreboding in some mountain stream? Orthose discoverers whose adventurous deeds are part of the world'schosen treasure, what but their names are written on the streams orhills? The import of these observations is this, that from Americangeography we may, with reasonable accuracy and detail, decipher thisromantic history. In those newer parts of our continent names have toooften lost the flavor of history; have, in truth, done so, save inisolated instances. The "Smithtons" and "Griggsby Stations" aremonotonous and uninteresting, and the Tombstones are little short ofsacrilege. In the crush of movers' wagons there appeared to be ascramble for names of any sort. Places multiply, imagination isasleep, and names nearest at hand are most readily laid hold of; yet, even in such a dearth of originality and poetry, scant names flash outwhich remind you of the morning names in our continent's history. ASpringdale reminds you that colonists here found a dale, gladdened withliving springs; or an Afton suggests how some exiled Scot salved hisheart by keeping near his exile a name he loved. Our day will, in themain, attach names for simple convenience, as they put handles onshovels. Such names, of course, are meaningless. The day forinventing names is past, or seems so. We beg or borrow, as thesurveyor who marched across the State of New York, with theodolite andchain and a classical atlas, and blazed his way with Rome, and Illyria, and Syracuse, and Ithaca, --a procedure at once meaningless and dense. Greece nor Rome feels at home among us, nor should they. 

History is a method of remembrance, and names are a method ofremembrance also, the two conspiring to the same end. When the Saxon, sailing across seas, found a rude home in England, he named his newhome Saxonland, and there are East and West and South Saxons; and so, Essex and Wessex and Sussex. In like manner, emigrants from variousshores across the grim Atlantic kept the memory and names of that dearland from which they sailed; and by running your eyes over thoseearlier colonies, you shall see names--aboriginal and imported--and solearn, in an infallible way, who first pitched tents on that soil. This tracking dead races over seas by the local designations they haveleft has always fascinated my thought. Those names are verily plantedin the earth, and grow like trees that refuse to die. Throughcenturies of turbulence and slaughter and racial transplanting, see howsome Roman words stay and refuse to go, knowing as little of retreat asa Roman legion! "Chester" and "coin, " as good old English terminals, are tense with interest, since they as plainly record history as didminstrels in old castle hall. Chester is the Roman "castra, " camp, andwhere the name occurs across Britain, indicates with undeviatingfidelity that there, in remote decades, Roman legions camped and theRoman argent eagle flashed back morning to the sun. Coin is acontraction for "colonia, " indicating that at the place so designated aRoman colonia received honors at the hands of the Roman Senate. Inother words, these locative terminals are as certainly bequeathedEngland by the Roman occupancy as is London Tower. "Ton" is historicaltoo, but is footprint of another passing race--namely the Gaul, defeated of Caesar on many a bloody field--and is a contraction of"tuin, " meaning garden, appearing in Ireland as "dun, " meaninggarrison, both indicating an inclosure, and so becoming a frequentterminal for names of cities, as Huntingtuin or tun, probablyoriginally a hunting-tower or hamlet. A second form of "ton" is ourordinary "town, " which, as often as we use, we are speaking the tongueof the Trans-Alpine Gauls, taking a syllable from the word of ahalf-forgotten people. From yet another source is the locative "ham. "Chester is of Roman origin, tun is of Gaelic; but "ham" is Anglo-Saxon, and means village, whence the sweet word home. Witness the use of thissuffix in Effingham and the like. "Stoke" and "beck" and "worth" arealso Saxon. "Thorpe" and "by" are Danish, as in Althorp and Derby. These reminiscent instances from over seas will serve to illuminate thethought under discussion--the historical element embodied in the namesof localities. As in these three locatives we track three distinctpeoples through England, we may, by the same method, fall on thefootprints of divers civilizations in our New World. 

Thus far we have touched at random, as one does on a holiday. Now, seriously, as on a journey of discovery, may we take staff in hand totrace, if possible, the elusive march of populations by the ashes oftheir campfires, as Evangeline did the wanderings of Gabriel, herbeloved. 

The Dutch, more's the pity, have left scant memorials of their Americanempire. "Knickerbocker's History of New York" has effectually laughedthem out of court; but, notwithstanding, they were mighty men, whoseidiosyncrasies we readily catch at as a jest, but whose greatnessbreaks on us slowly, as great matters must. "Kill" was a Dutch word, meaning creek, a terminal appearing in many of the few words they haveleft us, such as Fishkill, Peekskill, Wynantskill, Catskill. Along thebanks of streams, with names like these, one could see ragged Rip VanWinkle, with his dog and gun, with shambling hunter's gait, or comesilently on solemn Dutch burghers, solemnly playing ninepins in theshadows. Brooklyn (Breuchelin) is Dutch, as are Orange, Rensselaer, Stuyvesant, Rhinebeck, Rhinecliff, Vanbrunt, Staatsburg, Rotterdam, Hague, Nassau, Walloonsack, Yonkers, and Zurich. Wallabout, a boroughof Brooklyn (Waalbogt), means Walloon's Bay, thus having areligio-historical significance. Nor dare we omit that river, noble asan epic, named after a Dutch discoverer, who, first of Europeans, flungthe swaying shadows of foreign sails on its beautiful waters. Hudsonis a prince among triumphant and adventurous discoverers. And I neversail past the Palisades, by summer or gorgeous autumn, when all thehills are blood and flame, without reverting in thought to Hudson, whogave the stream to our geography and his name to the stream, nor forgetthat he was set adrift in the remote and spacious sea, which likewisebears his name; though well it may, for it is doubtless his grave; for, set adrift by mutineers, he was crushed by icefloes, or fell asleep indeath in that winter sea. But Hudson River and Hudson Bay will makehim as immortal as this continent. All men shall know by them thatHeinrich Hudson hath sailed this way. So much, then, for followingalong dim paths once trod by a Dutch burgher's tramp of empire. 

Of the Swedes, who, under their victorious king, Gustavus Adolphus, theProtestant, settled New Sweden (now known as New Jersey), are left onlydim footprints, the path of them being all but lost, though, fortunately, sufficiently plain to trace the emigration of a race. These Swedish emigrants and founders of what they hoped would prove aState, never attained a supremacy, their enemies, who were theirimmediate neighbors and fellow-emigrants from Protestant States, sospeedily overwhelming them--first the Dutch, succeeded by theinevitable Saxon. Bergen, the first Swedish settlement, in comparativeisolation, still whispers the story of Gustavus Adolphus's statecraftand vision, and seems a solitary survivor of an old camp of emigrantsvoyaging by stream and plain, and all slain by famine and disease andIndian stealth and pioneer's hardship, save himself. Nordhoff andStockholm and Pavonta are scattered reminders of an attemptedsovereignty which is no more. 

Protestantism made valorous attempt to preempt this New World of NorthAmerica for civil and religious liberty and the Reformed faith. A lookat their breadth of plan must be a benefit to us and a praise to thosewho planned so large things for the glory of God. That they actedindependently of each other shows how wide-spread this thirst forliberty and this love for the kingdom of God. I know few things thatstir me more. Swedish Lutherans settled New Sweden; the Dutch Walloonssettled New Holland; the Baptists, Rhode Island; the Quakers, Pennsylvania; the Huguenots, the Carolinas; the Puritans, New England. The Anglican Church only incidentally, and not of intention, settledVirginia. Catholicism seized and holds South America, Central America, and Mexico, but in the United States was represented only by the colonyof Maryland, planted by Lord Baltimore, and bears mark of his religiousfaith in naming his plantation after Mary, the Catholic queen, his ownname appearing in the name of its present metropolis, Baltimore. Indays when in England the Catholic was under ban, he founded this colonyas a Canaan for Roman Catholics. Spanish Catholics worked their wayalong the Pacific Coast, and French Catholicism sailed up the St. Lawrence and down the Mississippi, though the latter territory nowbelongs to the Protestant faith. Admiral Coligny, an illustrious sonof France, attempted planting the Huguenots in America, though thiscolonizing experiment has left scant memorial of Huguenot occupancy, because the destruction of this colony by Spanish Catholics was sosudden and so utter; yet the Carolinas are witness to this hazard andhope, bearing the name of the infamous King Charles IX. How terribleis the irony when we recall how this same ruler, after whom Colignynamed his land of refuge for persecuted Protestants, was author of themost malignant religious massacre on record--the Massacre of St. Bartholomew! In Beaufort and Carteret may be discovered reminiscencesof an expedition whose close was disastrous, yet heroic. 

Everybody has contributed to giving names to the States; thereforeattention to them as a class is fitting. England gave name toMaryland, as suggested in another paragraph; to New York, named inhonor of the Duke of York, afterward known as James II, of evil memory;Virginia, so styled by Sir Walter Raleigh, that pattern of chivalry, inhonor of his queen, Elizabeth; New Jersey, after Jersey, the island;Rhode Island, after the Island of Rhodes; Delaware, after Lord de laWarre, early governor of Virginia; Pennsylvania, after William Penn, the good; New Hampshire, after Hampshire, in England, as New Englandwas, in love, called after the motherland; Georgia, named for GeorgeII, by philanthropic General Oglethorpe, who brought hither his colonyof debtors, --such the contributions of England to our commonwealth ofnames. America has supplied one State a name, Washington; and who moreor so worthy to write his name upon a State as George Washington, firstCommander-in-chief and President? Spain has christened theseCommonwealths: Florida, the land of flowers; California; Colorado, colored; Nevada. We must thank France for these: Maine, for a provincein France; Vermont, green mountains; the Carolinas; Louisiana, a nameattached by the valorous La Salle, in fealty to his prince, callingthis province, at the mouth of the river he had followed to itsentrance into the ocean, after Louis XIV, the then darling of theFrench people. Mexico is remembered in two instances: New Mexico andTexas. Italy has a memorial, bestowed in gratitude by America. TheDistrict of Columbia, with its capital, Washington, reminds men foreverthat Columbus discovered and Washington saved America. Besides this, to Italy's credit, or discredit--I know not which--must be charged thegiving title to two continents. Amerigo Vespucci has lent his name toone hemisphere of the world. Other States bear Indian captions. Thosewandering hunters have lost their hunting-grounds; but we can notforget whose hunting-grounds they were so long as the Indian nameclings to the Territory where he is not, but his name shall remain ashis monument. Indiana is generic, the land of the Indian. With thisexception, the States are called after tribes or by some Indian name:Alabama, Tennessee, Illinois, Iowa, Ohio, Michigan, Nebraska, Kansas, the Dakotas (who will forget when Hiawatha passed to the land of theDakotahs for his wooing?), Wyoming, Oregon, Idaho, and the like. Withsuch names, we are once more sitting in the woodland, by the wigwam, aswe did a century ago. The memory haunts us. Thus much for the racialelement in cognomens of States. 

Now again to set out on the journey on the trail of vanished peoples!

The Spanish invasion of America, now, as we recall its story, big withpathos and remorse, the pathos predominating, now that the last rag ofa province has been torn from their feeble hands, --the evacuation ofHavana, with its sorry pomp of exhuming Columbus's dust, is one of thesaddest sights history has called men to look upon. Columbus, aforeigner, gave Spain a New World; and foreigners of still anotherblood have taken away what by right never belonged to Spanishsovereignty. Just as this fate is, we can but feel the immense pathosof the Spanish evacuation of the New World. French discoverers huggedthe rivers, as by some deep affinity. Spaniards, conversely, mademarch without thought of riverways. They were accustomed to deserts intheir own land, and feared them not in a remote hemisphere. Theyswarmed in the desert. Nothing daunted them. Spain's best bloodpoured into the New World, a fact which doubtless accounts, in part, for the devitalized energies and genius of this mother country of theirbirth and hopes and initiative. "Florida" is a Spanish tide-mark. "St. Augustine" is a gravestone of history, marking the mound wherelies the dust of the first permanent colony planted in America. TheSpaniard headed toward the southern provinces of America, as theEnglishman to the east, and the Frenchman to the north and centralprovinces. Spain held southward. Though the colony of Florida wasretained till, in the year 1819, the subtle diplomacy of John QuincyAdams added this peninsula of flowers to the Union of States, it had noaggressive value as a basis of discovery or colonization. The base ofSpanish operations was Mexico, the fair land of their conquest. Spainexploited her energies in Mexico and Peru. She was mad with a lust forgold. Her galleons made these lands bankrupt. But Spaniards dared tolose themselves in desert or forests. The discovery and conquest ofPeru is mad with turbulent courage and adventure. This we can notdeny; and the discovery of the Amazon by a brother of Pizarro is astory to thrill a sluggard into a sleepless waking. We see theseheroic days, and forgive much of Spanish misrule and avarice. De Soto, crowding through jungles of undergrowth and miasms, through tribes ofhostile men, though stimulated by the wild lust for gold, is for all abrave chapter in the world's biography; and to see him buried in themassive river he discovered is to make other than the tender-heartedweep. To see on the map of the Union "Llano Estacado" is to give, asit were, the initials of heroic names. Spain, which staked theseplains, will walk across them no more. They did this service forothers. Were they fine-fibered enough to feel these losses, the sorrowwe feel for their exit would be intensified; but their centuries ofmisrule have certified to their all but utter lack of any finersentiment or sense of high responsibility. Give them what honor wemay. Recall their departed glory, and let it light the sky, if onlyfor a moment, like a flash of lightning. Spaniards were little lessgiven to naming their settlements "Saint" than the French. FromMexico, up the long Pacific Coast, they affixed names which will remainperpetually as the sole memorial that once these banished dons heldsway in the United States. These names cluster in the Southern UnitedStates, touching immediately on their chief dependency, Mexico; but arestill in evidence farther away, though growing scanter, as footprintsin a remote highway. Rio Grande, Del Norte, Andalusia, and thecharming name affixed to a charming mountain range, Sierra Nevada, --howthese names rehabilitate a past! Nevada and Andalusia! One needslittle imagination to see the flush that gathered on the dusky cheek ofthe old Spanish discoverer when he calmed, in part, his homesickness bygiving his wanderings the name of the dear home from which he came, andkindled his pride into a fire, like the conflagration of mountainpines, by telling the New World the names of his ancestral land. Buthis "San" and "Santa" are frequent as tents upon a battle-field whenthe battle is spent. "Corpus Christi"--how Spanish and Catholic thatis! San Antonio, Santa Fe, Cape St. Lucas. In Florida: Rio San Juan, Ponce de Leon, Cape San Blas, Hernando, Punta Rosa, Cerro de Oro, areindicative of the growing communities in that peninsula after theinvasion located at St. Augustine. But of all the parts of the UnitedStates, New Mexico is most honeycombed with Spanish locatives. Passingthat way, one seems not to be in America, but in Spain. Spain iseverywhere. Their names are here strewn thick as battle soldierssleeping on the battle-field: Las Colonias, Arayo Salado, Don CarlosHill, Cerillos, Dolores, San Pambo, Cańon Largo, Magdalene Mountains, San Pedro. Thence these names creep up into Utah, though there theyare never numerous: Santa Clara, Escalante Desert, Sierra Abaja; andfarther north, reaching to all but hand-clasp with the French Du ChasneRiver, is San Rafael River. St. Xavier, San Miguel, Santa Monica, Santa Cruz, San Francisco, San Gabriel, --can you not in these nameshear the Spanish languishing speech and see the Jesuit pioneer?Eldorado, Sacramento, El Paso, Los Angeles, are footprints of theSpanish discoverer. And Cape Blanco, in far-away Oregon, probablyrepresents the farthest campfire of the Spanish march. In his area thedon was indefatigable. De Soto marched like a conqueror. Coronadofound his way into Missouri, Kansas, and Colorado. La Junta, inKansas, may mark the subsidence of the wave of Spanish invasion, andKansas was part of the kingdom of "Quivera. " Eugene Ware, the Kansaspoet, who, under the _nom de plume_ of "Ironquill, " has writtengraceful and musical poems, has told of Coronado's excursion into thisnow populous and fertile region:

 QUIVERA

 "In that half-forgotten era, With the avarice of old, Seeking cities he was told Had been paved with yellow gold, In the kingdom of Quivera--

 Came the restless Coronado To the open Kansas plain, With his knights from sunny Spain; In an effort that, though vain, Thrilled with boldness and bravado. 

 League by league, in aimless marching, Knowing scarcely where or why, Crossed they uplands drear and dry, That an unprotected sky Had for centuries been parching. 

 But their expectations, eager, Found, instead of fruitful lands, Shallow streams and shifting sands, Where the buffalo in bands Roamed o'er deserts dry and meager. 

 Back to scenes more trite, yet tragic, Marched the knights with armor'd steeds; Not for them the quiet deeds; Not for them to sow the seeds From which empires grow like magic. 

 Never land so hunger-stricken Could a Latin race remold; They could conquer heat or cold-- Die for glory or for gold-- But not make a desert quicken. 

 Thus Quivera was forsaken; And the world forgot the place Through the lapse of time and space. Then the blue-eyed Saxon race Came and bade the desert waken. "

In Colorado, El Moro, Las Animas, and Buena Vista are credentials ofSpanish occupancy, the last-named place being, so far as I have beenable to trace, the farthest camp marked by a name in the Coloradodistrict. They all sought gold, and having failed to find the thingfor which they made their quest, ran back, like a retiring wave. Coronado and Eldorado are suffused with Spanish life, like a woman'scheek with blushes when her lover comes. Over scorching deserts, andalong the western coasts of America, the Spaniard toiled, nor haltedtill the soft Spanish speech mingled with the swift, ejaculatoryutterance of the far French frontier. For this search of theirs webless them, and shall always be glad they left their nomenclature tomind us of what this now wrecked people had achieved. 

And our geography is sown thick with reminiscences of the Frenchoccupancy of America. Now he is a total foreigner in this realm hehelped so largely to discover. Not Acadia was more bereft of theFrench after their sad banishment than our America is of French rule. New Orleans has its creole. 

In Quebec, of all American cities, you seem most in the old French_régime_. The names above the business blocks would make you believethat what you had read of the battle of Quebec was a myth, and thatWolfe truly died and Montcalm lived to celebrate a victory; but whenyou climb to the fortress, it is the Englishman's speech you hear, andthe English colors you see floating on the heights. The French empireis melted away like snows of winter in the month of June. But thosenow remote days, profligate of valor, when French trapper anddiscoverer, fearless as Eric the Bold, fought their way along lake andriver, over plain and mountain, with fierce Indian and fiercerwinter, --those remote days are on us once more, when we forget ourhistory and read our geography. There may be no new France incontemporaneous American history, but in contemporaneous geographythere is. The French discoverer fires the imagination. I confess towishing I might have tramped by his side through the dense forests;have sailed in his canoe on lake and stream; have plodded with him, byoar or sail, over the Great Lakes; have joined with him in portage;have been boon companion with La Salle on his journey to the sea on thewide and majestic Mississippi; have consorted with Pčre Marquette. FewAmerican histories will do more to raise the temperature of one's bloodthan Parkman's story of the French occupancy of North America. 

And one reason why Gilbert Parker's "An Adventurer of the North" and"Pierre and his People, " books vivid with a boundless freedom andheroism, hold attention and gather force in one's spirit is, that theyunconsciously, yet truly, carry us back to those bold days when suchepisodes were not the exception, but the rule. Pioneering appeals, insome degree, to us all; and in Frenchmen were such resiliency ofspirit, such abandon to adventure, as that they stand as typicalexplorers. Who would not have been alongside Hennepin when he, on asnowy winter day, first of all Europeans, saw thunder-voiced Niagara?The English colonies seized, fortified, and held domain in smallcompass, and guarded it against the world; but this was not the Frenchidea. They spread over a continent, as a sea might have done. Thelight step of Mercury belonged to the French colonizer. He loved toroam wherever untrod wastes beckoned. Englishmen in America did littlediscovering; Frenchmen did much. They crossed the continent, and wouldhave done so had it been twice the breadth it was. I have alreadyshown how some of our commonest words in Western speech are of thisorigin. While England hugged the Atlantic seaboard, Frenchmen hadnavigated the Great Lakes, had sailed the Mississippi to the Gulf, hadset the seal of their names on the land they had traversed, had gone into the shoreless interior of the Far West; and to this day you cantrack the old hunter to the Pacific Coast by the reminiscent names hehas left behind. The continent was his home. To him we owe much morethan we shall ever pay; but to recall the debt we owe him may serve tomake a wider margin to our own life at least. The vast extent of thispioneer work of France may be seen by recalling that the battle ofQuebec gave England undisputed sway over what is now known as BritishAmerica, and what in the history of the United States was known as "theTerritory of the Northwest. " This came from those by a single treaty. One defeat cost them an empire. Nor was this all their territory. This treaty of 1763 gave England only French acquisitions east of theMississippi and north of the Great Lakes, but left French America, westof that river and south of the lakes, intact, which shows how thecommon consent of nations accorded to French valor in exploration thebulk of the North American continent. Essentially chivalrous, theFrench explorer proved the knight-errant among American discoverers. By the treaty of 1803, Napoleon ceded 1, 171, 931 square miles to theUnited States, a tract eight times as large as France itself. France, by rights acquired by discoveries, owned about two-thirds of thecontinent of North America, and to-day owns not so much as would supplyburial room for a child! Saxon as I am, I confess I can not go toMontreal or Quebec, nor look upon the regal St. Lawrence, without asort of Indian Summer regret filling my sky. The French as explorerswere magnificent. 

And Frenchmen in those days of their discoveries were eminently devout, either in fact or in habits of thought--sometimes one, sometimesboth--as may be inferred from the religiosity of the names they sooften gave the places of their discovery. In some instances, this factis to be explained by recalling that Jesuits were the explorers; butmatters conspired to one effect, namely, starring the path of theirdiscoveries by "saints, " as with the Spaniards, as has been mentioned. From the St. Lawrence, which is the noblest stream on which my eyeshave ever rested, to the old Saint Louis at the Mississippi's mouth, itseems a march of palmers; for at every halt they planted a fleur de lisand a cross. In this nomenclature, despite ourselves, is a witchery, under whose spell I plead guilty to falling. On the Atlantic side ofNewfoundland is Notre Dame Bay, while beside the island northward themajestic St. Lawrence mingles the lakes with the sea. Toil your way upthe river, as in the long ago the discoverers did, and see on eithershore the sacred names: St. Charles, St. Johns, St. Paul's Bay, and onand on, across or through the continent, St. Mary's, St. Joseph, St. Paul, St. Louis. So the voyager made journey. Lake Champlain tellsthe inroad of a brave French discoverer. Au Sable chasm answers for itthat here, on this black water, the ubiquitous voyager has floated. Vermont and Montpelier say, "Remember who has been here. " Detroit (thestrait) is a tollgate for the French highway. Marquette, Joliet, LaSalle, wake from the dead a trinity of heroic discoverers. Than LaSalle, America never had a more valorous and indefatigable explorer. Hennepin minds us of the discoverer of Niagara. Sault Ste. Marie, EauClaire, St. Croix River, the Dalles, are old camp-grounds of thesewanderers. In Indiana, Vincennes is one of the oldest Frenchsettlements; Terre Haute (high ground) and La Porte are sign-manuals ofsunny France. St. Joseph, in Missouri, and Des Moines (swamp land), inIowa, and the name of a beautiful river in Kansas, Marais des Cygnes(the river of swans), tell the trail of the old French trapper. Wherehas he not been? Going farther westward, find in Wyoming the BelleFourche River; in Idaho are St. Joseph Creek, and Coeur d'Alene Lake, and Lake Pend d'Oreille; in Washington are The Little Dalles, and inOregon, The Dalles; and in Utah, the Du Chasne River. Thus we havetracked the French across the continent, from the St. Lawrence to thePacific. What travelers they were! But southward, along the greatRiver, there we come, not into scattering communities, but into averitable New France. Their names monopolize geography. Scan a map ofLouisiana, and see how populous it is with French patronymic locatives. New Orleans (pronounce it New Or-le-ans, and hear French pride risingin the word) is there, and St. John Baptist; Baton Rouge, andThibodeaux, and Prudhomme, and Assumption, and Calcasieu, and SaintLandry, and Grand Coteau, and scores besides, tell how surely Louisianawas a land peopled from the French kingdom and for the French king, and, as those who discovered and those who settled fondly thought, forever. So evanescent are the plans of men! The word "bayou, " socommon in the regions neighboring the Mississippi, is a French word. Prairie, butte, bayou, three terms in perpetual geography of thisWestern World, are bequests of a departed people. The farthest westand south I have tracked the French discoverer in a name is inNebraska, where they are identified in the name of the River Platte. La Plata is the Spanish form, as will be seen to the south--say inTexas--and here in the north is the French imprint in Platte, that widebut shallow stream, flowing over its beds of shifting sands. Verily, the French _régime_ in America was more than fiction. The names itleft will keep an eternal remembrance. 

And the English came, and seeded down a land with their ideas, language, laws, literature, political inclinations, and homesteadnames. Those early emigrants, though refugees from oppressive misrule, loved England notwithstanding. Of her they dreamed, to her they clung, from her they imported sedate and musical names for their new homesthis side the sea. New England was the special bailiwick for suchsowing, though Virginia partakes of this seed and harvest. The richold English names, having in them so much history and memory, --how goodto see them on our soil! Those early colonists were not original, norparticularly imaginative, but loyal lovers they were; and to give totheir home here the name attaching to their home there was pledge offidelity to dear old England. In Virginia, one will find what he cannot find in New England, namely, assertions of loyalty to Englishprinces; for the Puritans were never other than stanch friends ofliberty, a thing which grew upon the citizens of the Old Dominion bydegrees, and by slow degrees besides. They were loyalists androyalists. This, New England was not, and could not be. The OldDominion's name, Virginia, and its first colony, Jamestown, bearattestation to this loyalty of which mention is made, though theState's name was given by that lover of Queen Elizabeth and lover ofAmerica, Sir Walter Raleigh. Berkeley recalls that querulous oldloyalistic governor of Virginia, that fast believer in the divine rightof kings and of himself; Westmoreland, Middlesex, New Kent, Sussex, Southampton, Surrey, Isle of Wight, King and Queen, Anne, Hanover, Caroline, King William, Princess, Prince George, Charles City, arenames which tell of sturdy believers in kings. No such mark can befound in the English colonies to the north. To England they wereattached, but not to English kings. Bath, York, Bedford, Essex, Warwick, and time would fail to tell this story through. In Marylandyou may note this transplanted England too: Somerset, Saulsbury, Cecil, Annapolis, Calvert, and St. Mary's, betraying the Roman Catholic originof the colony, as do Baltimore, Saulsbury, Northampton, andMarlborough. Who can doubt the maternity of such names as these?

Now turn face toward New England, and find old England again: Berwick, Shapleigh, Boston, Litchfield, Clearfield, Norfolk, Springfield, NewBritain, Hampton, Middlesex, Fairfield, Windham, East Lynne, Roxbury, Kent, Cornwall, Bristol, Enfield, Stafford, Woodstock, Buckingham, Stonington, Fair Haven, Taunton, Barnstable, Falmouth, Middlebury, Bedford, Dartmouth, Pomfret, Abington, --but why extend the list, musical as it is with the home days and the home land? But namePlymouth, because it shows the tenacity of English loyalty to England;for though the Mayflower, with her Puritans, might not have an Englishport from which to set sail for a New World, they do yet name theirlanding-haven after the English harbor. Blood is thicker than waterwhen the instincts are consulted. Seeing these names, we can notmistake where we are. This is as certainly English as thePacific-coast line was Spanish and the Mississippi Valley French. These Englishmen imported names as well as populations. And I, forone, like them and their names; for they abound in suggestion. Whosettled Connecticut and Massachusetts we know from these locatives wehave read and for the names they brought; and for the liberty andreligion they sailed with across the seas, we remember them and lovethem. 

There are miscellaneous names, telling their tale, not of raceoccupancy, but of who or what has passed this way, of beast, or bird, or event, or man, which have left impress on geography, --things we dowell to study, and which will always lend a sort of enchantment andvivacious interest to the pages of travel or geography. The villagesalong a railroad are thus often of captivating interest. The Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad, for instance, may illustrate this point. Its name has interest of no common sort. Atchison is named after afamous pro-slavery advocate, who came to Kansas, with his due quota of"border ruffians, " for the avowed purpose of making Kansas a slaveState. Topeka is an Indian name; Santa Fe is a Spanish landmark, tallas a lighthouse builded on a cliff. At the Missouri line is KansasCity, so named because this metropolis is created by Kansas. Themetropolis is in Missouri; but is made rich and great by Kansas men andproducts. Kansas has not a large city in its borders, because thisKansas City has engrossed the great business interests of a greatCommonwealth. The metropolis of Kansas, in other words, is in theState of Missouri, and the name is as strict a speaking of truth as anapostle could have commanded. 

Passing along the line, find Holliday, so named from the projector of apart of this railroad line; on is De Soto, always thrillingly historic;farther is Eudora (a word of Greek genesis, and meaning a good gift, though likely enough he who christened this village may have known aslittle of Greek as a kitten); on is Lawrence, named for a famousanti-slavery agitator and philanthropist of Massachusetts--for Lawrenceis a New England colony, as is Manhattan, farther up the Kansas River, familiarly known as the "Kaw, " which is the leading river of Kansas;here is Lecompton, which keeps alive the memory of Lecompte, the Indianchief; then comes Tecumseh, as clearly an Indian name as the former;then Topeka, the capital of Kansas, and wearing an Indian sobriquet;then comes Wakarusa (Indian, meaning "hip deep, " the depth of thestream in crossing); then Carbondale, so called because of the coaldeposits which created the village; then Burlingame, a beautifulhamlet, wearing a famous name; then Emporia, a city of traffic, sodubbed for reason of thinking it a famous trade center in the earlierdays; Barclay, named for the famous Quaker apologist, because thisvillage is a Quaker colony; Nickerson, for one of the originalpromoters of this railroad; Great Bend, referring to a great bend theArkansas River makes at this place; Pawnee Rock, from a localrallying-point of the Pawnees when this was an Indian hunting-ground;Garden City, so named because, by irrigation, this locality wasredeemed from comparative barrenness; Granada, and Las Animas, and LaJunta, reminiscent words from the Spanish march into Kansas; Puebla, clearly designating that strange people whose cliff dwellings are atthis hour one of the rarest studies in American archaeology. Onanother branch of this same road: Olathe, an Indian name; Ottawa;Algonquin, for "trader, " Chanute, from an Indian chief, who was a localcelebrity; Elk Falls, referring to those days when this river (the Elk)was famous for that species of graceful motion called the elk; fartherare Indian Chief and White Deer, names of evident paternity. I havetaken this time to run along this railroad line so as to show thepossibilities in this direction anywhere. To learn to read historyfrom the stations as we pass is surely an art worth learning. Inpassing across the continent I have found it as if a guide had preparedthat way before us. The natural history of a region may thus be readwithout resorting to a book. Count the fauna: Eagle River, Bald Eagle, Buffalo Lake, Great Bear Lake, Salmon Falls, Snake River, Wolf Creek, White Fish River, Leech Lake, Beaver Bay, Carp River, Pigeon Falls, Elkhorn, Wolverine, Crane Hill, Rabbit Butte, Owl, Rattlesnake, Curlew, Little Crow, Mullet Lake, Clam Lake, Turtle Creek, Deerfield, PorcupineTail, Pelican Lake, Kingfisher, Ravens' Spring, Deer Ears, Bee Hill, Fox Creek, White Rabbit--can any one mistake the animals haunting theseplaces in earlier days? Trapper's Grove tells a story we feel, butneed not rehearse. So, descriptive words in vegetation, or person, orcharacteristic, what volumes are contained in them! Crystal River, Little Muddy, Elm Creek, Mission Creek (a stream on which was an Indianmission), Calumet, Table Rock, Crab Orchard, Elm Creek, Lost River (theriver lost in the sand), Soldier Creek, Battle Creek, Corn Creek, Spring Lake, Hackberry, Cottonwood Falls, Sand Hills, Poplar Hill, ColdSprings, Oak Hill, Cavalry Creek, Bluff Creek, Peace Creek, CedarBluff, Council Bluffs, Punished Woman's Lake, Highbank Creek, BigKnife, Black River, Cypress Creek, Black Raven, Brier Creek, Big Lick, Laurel, Hurricane Inlet, Dead Man's Bay, Pine Hill, Magnolia, MountainMeadow, Medicine Woods, Rush Creek, Salt Plain, Saline River, Lava Bed, Wild Horse, Sinking Creek, Nameless, Grassy Trail (in the desert), Azure Cliffs, Miry Bottom, Sand Dune Plateau, Grouse Creek, --these arenames as communicative of secrets as a child. Heath, Rock Lake, WoodLake, Grand Prairie, Lily Creek, Swift Falls, Calamus River, EvergreenLake, Lone Tree (a prairie locality), Spring Bank, Fort Defiance, Pontiac, Smoky Hill River (these hills are always as if smoky), --what alight these names shed on the region in which they occur!

And you can recapitulate American history in its most salient detailsfrom a reading of our geography. Great names stay, and will not begone. As moss clings to the rock, so do great memories cling tolocalities. Nature conspires to keep illustrious men from death. Witness such names as follows: Lincoln (General Lincoln ofRevolutionary fame), Madison, Pulaski (the brave Pole who fought forour freedom), Webster, Sumner, Henry (Patrick), Jackson (doughtygeneral and President), Breckinridge, Hancock (signer of theDeclaration of Independence), Lafayette, Clay, Pocahontas, Calhoun, Randolph, Monroe, Franklin, Jefferson, Clark (the explorer), Douglas(the "Little Giant"), Adams, Whitman (the Presbyterian missionary, whosaved to the United States Washington and Oregon, by a heroic episodewhich deserves the perpetual gratitude of those States), Custer (thegeneral slain in Indian warfare), Union (to commemorate thepreservation of our Union), Benton (Thomas H. , of Missouri, whosedaughter was wife of General John C. Fremont), Lewis and Clark(discoverers), Garfield, Kane (Arctic explorer), Lincoln (theemancipator), Polk, Houston, Lee (General Robert E. ), Tyler, Van Buren, Scott (General Winfield, of the Mexican War), Pike (the discoverer ofPike's Peak), Marshall (Chief-Justice), Berkely, Hamilton (Alexander, our first lord of the Treasury), Gadsden (he of "the GadsdenPurchase"), Marion, Sumter (both of Revolutionary fame), Carteret, Columbus, Stanton, Colfax, Greeley, Chase, Sherman, Seward, Fillmore, Harlan (Senator), Butler (Ben), Johnson (obstreperous "Andy"), Grant(our chiefest military hero), Polk (General), Brown (John Brown, ofOssawatomie), Thomas (General), Sheridan, Wallace (General), St. John(Prohibitionist, Republican governor of Kansas), Lane (Jim Lane, ofKansas), McPherson and Sedgewick (both Union generals), Case, Dallas, Boone, DeKalb, McDonough, Schuyler, DeWitt, Putnam, Kossuth, Hancock, Palo Alto, Cerro Gordo (reminders of the Mexican War), Clayton (of theClayton-Bulwer Treaty), Emmet, Fremont, Taylor (President), Warren(General), Clinton (DeWitt), Audubon, Story (Chief-Justice), Buchanan, St. Clair, Montcalm, Kosciusko, Steuben, Tippecanoe, --to be acquaintedwith these names is to possess knowledge of the virtual makers ofAmerica in the range of statesmanship and military achievement. 

One other item completes this tabulation. The aborigine of America, the Indian, has left "his mark" across and through this Nation. Henever, in any true sense, owned this continent. He hunted and foughtacross it. He swept by, like gusts of winter wind. He staid here, hedid not live here. Possession implies more than occupancy; it impliesimprovement, industry, habitations, cities, destiny, as worked out bysweat of toil. But this American Indian, who, in honor, neverpossessed the territory, and has left no ruins of cities built by hiscunning and perseverance, nor codes, nor literature, has left us namesof lake, and stream, and mountain, and city. This stolid Indian, though you would scarcely think it of him, had, in common with othernomad and untutored peoples, poetic instincts. Their names, like thoseof the Hebrews, had meanings, and were picturesque and beautiful, sometimes, oftentimes, bewitchingly so. Some words have a music, liquid as the whip-poor-will's notes heard in woodlands climbing amountain side. Minnehaha, "laughing water"--does not the word seemlaughing, like a falling stream? I once heard a distinguishedphilologist say that, of all the rhythmic words he had hit upon in anytongue, Winona was most exquisite. Surely it is not musical, butmusic. See the pomp of names, like an Indian war march begun:Athabasca, Wyoming, Tahoe, Niobrara, Mohawk, Sioux City, Nemaha, Hiawatha, Seneca, Chippewa, Chicago, Saskatchewan, Pepacton ("meetingof waters"), Winnepeg, Cheyenne, Manitoba, Penobscot, Narragansett, Chicopee, Manhattan, and a host besides, a numberless procession. Indian names cling with peculiar tenacity to lakes and rivers; forthose hunters knew all waters, and hunted beside all streams and lakes. They were not seamen, and have left scant memorials of themselves innames that fringe the sea; but to lakes they cling with tirelesstenacity. 

Let these words suffice. As one who journeys in circles finds no endof journeying, so I. This theme runs on, nor stops to catch breath. Imake an end, therefore, not because the subject is exhausted, butbecause it is dismissed. But this study in geography is journeyingamong dead peoples as certainly as it the land were crowded withobelisk and tomb. To those who were and are not, say, Vale! Vale!

 "Ye who love the haunts of Nature, Love the sunshine of the meadow, Love the shadow of the forest, Love the wind among the branches, And the rain-shower and the snowstorm, And the rushing of great rivers Through their palisades of pine-trees, And the thunder in the mountains, Whose innumerable echoes Flap like eagles in their eyries, -- Listen to these wild traditions. Ye who love a nation's legends, Love the ballads of a people, That like voices from afar off Call to us to pause and listen, Speak in tones so plain and childlike, Scarcely can the ear distinguish Whether they are sung or spoken, -- Listen to this Indian Legend. Ye whose hearts are fresh and simple, Who have faith in God and nature, Who believe that in all ages Every human heart is human, That in even savage bosoms There are longings, yearnings, strivings, For the good they comprehend not, That the feeble hands and helpless, Groping blindly in the darkness, Touch God's right hand in that darkness, And are lifted up and strengthened, -- Listen to this simple story. Ye, who sometimes, in your rambles Through the green lanes of the country, Where the tangled barberry-bushes Hang their tufts of crimson berries Over stone walls gray with mosses, Pause by some neglected graveyard, For awhile to muse, and ponder On a half-effaced inscription, Written with little skill of song-craft, Homely phrases, but each letter Full of hope and yet of heart-break, Full of all the tender pathos Of the Here and the Hereafter, -- Stay, and read this rude inscription. "

Only saying, Read not the "Song of Hiawatha, " but the story of deadpeoples by the ashes of their campfires, --these names they have left, clinging to places like blue to distant hills. 

VI

Iconoclasm in Nineteenth Century Literature. 

That history repeats itself is an apothegm which has descended to usfrom a dateless antiquity. It has been made to serve so often as tobecome trite; and yet its use is a necessity, inasmuch as it embodies averity, which to ignore were ignorance and folly linked together; andas we stand on our eminence and scan the way humanity has worn with itsmultitudinous feet, as the events of the world pass in review beforeus, some so closely resemble others as that the one seems the echo ofthe other; and there appears reason for that fascinating generalizationof the ancient philosopher, that the epochs and events of the physicalrealm and history were a fixed and limited quantity, which, revolvingin a vast cycle, would bring from time to time the reiteration of thefacts or doings of an ancient era. There was no new thing thinkable, only a reintroduction of the old. To illustrate this fact in brief, wehave but to note the history of philosophy. You read the names ofthose who figure as founders of philosophical systems, and thosesystems seem many. Read the systems as founded, and you find anold-time philosophy, rejuvenated with some little addition of cap orbell better to adapt it to the modern time. The much-lauded Hegelianphilosophy is the system of Democritus, with the addition of a littlemore absurdity in the assertion of the identity of contradictories. The multitudinous philosophies may thus be reduced to a singlequaternion, and the reputed inaugurator of a new philosophy is like tobe a charlatan. So history seems but a plagiarist. 

There is an epoch in ecclesiastical history known as the War of theIconoclast; but that was only an embodiment of what had transpiredbefore, and what has occurred often since. Iconoclasm is a bias ofhumanity. It grows out of the constitution of man. He is by hereditya breaker of images. If this view be not fictitious, we must not besurprised if there are developments of this spirit in our era or anyera. It is a perennial reappearance. Whether it come in religion, statecraft, economic science, or literature, can be of little moment. The fact is the matter of paramount importance. Christianity was theiconoclast which broke in pieces the images of decrepit polytheism, andhewed out a way where progress might march to fulfill her splendiddestiny. Luther was the iconoclast whose giant strokes demolished thecastle doors of Romish superstition, and broke to fragments the imagesof Mariolatry. The practical induction of Bacon, Earl of Verulam, wasthe death-warrant of the fruitless deductive philosophy which hadculminated in the vagaries of Scholasticism. The Declaration ofIndependence and the Federation of the States were the iconoclast whichslew the phantom of the divine necessity of kings. It is thus evidentthat iconoclasm abounds, and there will be no marvel if it have a placein literature. 

Innovation is a practical synonym of iconoclasm; for an innovation isputting the new in the place of the old. In ancient literature andliteratures, prose was an innovation as regards poetry; and later, rhyme was an innovation in the domain of poesy, and an innovation ofsuch a sort that against it the master-poet, Milton, lifted up hisvoice in solemn protest, and the solitary epic in English literature isa perpetual protestation against the custom. Shakespeare was aninnovator of the laws of the drama when he violated unities of time andplace; and in a sense the drama was an innovation on narrative poetry, and the novel an iconoclast in its attitude to the drama. 

The iconoclasm in literature in our time is objective rather thansubjective; and attention to the spirit of the age will give apractical comprehension of this iconoclastic spirit. 

It must be observed that the literature of an age is largely theproduct of that age. Times create literatures. The literature of anyperiod, in an emphatic sense, will be directly and easily traceable tosomething in that age for its peculiarity. 

The Iliad and Odyssey were necessities of the age which gave thembirth. In so far as a literature is purely human, in so far will it bestamped with the seal of the times, customs, and thoughts in the midstof which it bloomed into beauty. In early Greek times an epic withoutits gods and demigods, without resounding battle-shout and din ofmighty conflict, had been an anachronism for which there could havebeen offered no apology. The splendid era of Pericles demanded thetragedy, and such a tragedy as only Aeschylus and Sophocles couldoriginate; while the foibles of an earlier era made the comedyimperative. On like principles, the writings of Lucretius are notenigmatical, but easy of explanation. 

The age which made possible the revels of Kenilworth, made possiblealso the splendor, like that of setting suns, which characterizes the"Faerie Queen. " And the prowess, the achievement, the discovery, thecolonization, the high tide of life, which ran like lightning throughthe Nation's arteries, made the drama, not only a possibility, but afact. It was the embodiment of the mighty activities of a mighty age. The tragedy, to use the splendid figure of Milton, "rose like anexhalation. " A solitary lifetime brought it from sunrise to high noon;and from that hour what could the sun do but sink?

Our century is one of general iconoclasm. It is the Ishmael among theages. Its hand is against every man. It has reversed the old-timeorder, that what was believed by our fathers and received by themshould be received by us. It takes no truth second-hand. It goes tosources. Its motto is, "I came, I saw, I investigated. " It found manythings believed of old, which were founded on the sand. Physicalscience discovered the vast domain of physical law, and that sciencebegan to legislate for the universe, forgetting sometimes that it wasnot a law enactor, but a law discoverer. Investigation found that manyideas and systems of ideas, supposed philosophies and sciences, werefalse and unsubstantial as the "baseless fabric of a vision. " Thingsreceived as truths from time immemorial were shown to be untrue. Thetendency of the human intellect is to generalize; and finding manypreviously received systems and facts to be without evidence sufficientto substantiate them, there arose the unwilled generalization that allthese systems are likewise false. I do not say that man has formulatedthis thought into speech, but that the trend of the intellect in ourcentury has been such as is explicable only on this theory. In manyinstances the motto of investigation in the domain of history, criticism, and science has been, "Believe all things false until youprove them true. " If such is the spirit of the age, and if literaturebe colored with the light of the century which produces it, shall wewonder if the nineteenth-century literature is distinctively aniconoclastic one?

All about us is the battle of the books. War rages along the entireline. No work of antiquity is free from this belligerency. Mars hasthe field. The investigation has been crucial. In so far as it hasbeen learning coupled with wisdom, this is well. Truth never flinchesbefore the charge of a wise investigation. But no truth can stand assuch before a system of inquiry the canons of which are empirical, fallacious, and false. The task of demolition is a fascinating one. It possesses a charm impossible to explain, and impossible to fail toperceive. When one has a taste, it is much as with the tiger which hastasted blood. Such procedure seems to open vistas before men. Hereare open doors, from behind which seems to come a voice crying, "Enter. "

It will be chronologically accurate if we shall first notice theiconoclastic spirit as exemplified in the attack on the unity of theIliad; and I class this with the nineteenth-century doings because itbelongs to the spirit of that century, and was almost within itsborders. The Iliad had been the glory of international literature forcenturies. Greece held it in veneration from the beginning of itsauthentic history; and that work had blazed with a solar luster out ofthe Stygian darkness of prehistoric times. The book had made an epochin literature. The cyclic poets, who, for centuries after theappearance of the Iliad and Odyssey, were the only Greek bards, wereconfessedly disciples of one Homer, the reputed author of the poemswhich embody the fact of the war of the races. The judgment ofantiquity was: (_a_) These two works were ascribed to a single author. (_b_) This author was the master at whose wave of wand these revels hadbegun. In other words, Homer wrote the books which bear his name. However much they might discuss the location of the half-fabled Ilium, or marvel over the battles fought "far on the ringing plains of windyTroy, " it was not doubted that a sublime and solitary bard conceivedand wrought the wondrous work ascribed to him. It is not shown thatthis question was even mooted in the former times. Cities contendedfor the honor of having given this man birth. He was as much a verityas Pericles. Such was the status of the case when our century beheldit first. Bentley had hinted at the probability or possibility ofseparate authorship; but it remained for German criticism, in theperson of Wolf, to make the onslaught on the time-honored belief. Theattack was as impetuous as the charge of the Greeks across the plain ofthe Scamander. It astonished the world. It abashed scholarship. Grave philosophers and gifted poets were carried away in the rush ofthe attack. Goethe gave and Schiller withheld allegiance. The Atomistand Separatist for a time held the field. Wolf showed, by reasoningwhich he deemed irrefutable, that the Iliad could not have beencomposed by a single man. Writing did not exist. The story had manyrepetitions, contradictions, and inferiorities. Later, thephilological argument was used against it. These statements summarizethe Wolfian theory. The contrariety in dialect form was thought to bean invulnerable argument against the unity of authorship; and for atime the epic of the ancient world was declared to be the work of manyhands, the ballads sung by rhapsodists of many names; and the Iliad, with its astonishing display of genius, was declared to be authorless. Less than a century has elapsed since the theory was propounded. Thesubject has received a wealth of attention and study unknown before. Discoveries have been made in philology which have practically raisedit to the rank of a science; and to-day the atomistic theory of Wolf isnot received. Grote and Mahaffy have theories which vary markedly fromthe great original; and the result of a century of investigation is, that scholars do now generally believe that some one author, or two atmost, did give shape to the great epic of the Greek people. Wolf, Lachmann, and Bert have shown the follies of men of genius whenpursuing a line of evidence to prove a favorite theory. Theirassumptions are often absurd, and their conclusions, once admittingtheir premises, are a logical necessity. The spirit of iconoclasmrested, not with the authority of the book, but assailed the geographicand topographical features. Troy was declared a dream. The Trojan Warhad never been. But Schliemann has proven to virtual demonstration theexistence of, not only a Troy, but the Troy about which Hector andAchilles fought. 

This iconoclasm has nowhere more fully displayed itself than in itsattitude toward the Bible. That book comes properly under the head ofliterature, for the reason that the general line of attack during thiscentury has been made from a literary standpoint. Of course, there hasalways been, whether easily discoverable or not, an undertone ofskepticism of the rank sort. Oftentimes the battle has been avowedlyagainst the book as a professed inspiration. Strauss and Rénan made nocloak for their deed. But in many instances the method of procedurehas been to study, as under a calcium light, the literary style, thelinguistic peculiarities, the whole work as a literary composition. Inthis regard the method of criticism was such as was used in dissectingHomer's works. Each author laid down canons of criticism by which tomeasure the book in question. He cut the work into fragments. Hestated such and such parts were the work of an early writer, whilecertain others were the additions of men unknown, far removed in timeand place. For the most part these assumptions were wholly arbitrary, as may be seen by reading the authors on the various books. The thingwhich is the most observable is their lack of agreement, while themethod used is the dogmatic. They all agree that the book is not ofthe date nor authorship usually assigned to it; but what the date andwho the author, is very seldom agreed between any two. The criticismis largely of the _ipse dixit_ sort, and the grounds of attack are, though rationalistic, seldom rationally taken. In the vaunted name ofreason, the most monstrous absurdities are perpetrated. The line ofargument professed to be used is inductive; but in reality theinductive element in this criticism stands second, and the deductiveelement has the chief seat in the synagogue. The assumption in thecase, the _a priori, sine qua non_ ("without which nothing")--these arethe all-important elements in the discussion. It is the Homericargument restated. Each man professes to find his hypothesis in thestructure and language of the book. In fact, the author usually beganwith his hypothesis, and seeks to find proofs for the staying hisassumptions up. The Scriptures are open to investigation. Theychallenge it. No one need offer an objection to the most scrutinizinginquiry. The book is here, and must stand upon its merits. Its highclaims need not deter scholarship from its investigation. Only, to usethe language of Bishop Butler in regard to another matter, "Let reasonbe kept to. " If we are to be regaled with flights of imagination, letthem be thus denominated; but let men not profess to be following theleadership of scholarship and scientific candor, when they are inreality dealing in imagination and scientific dogmatism, and appealingto philology to give them much needed support. After these years ofattack from a literary standpoint, the books of the Bible are lessaffected than the Iliad. The Atomist has signally failed to make asingle case. Iconoclasm has performed its task as best it could, andfinds its labor lost. The criticism of to-day is, even in Germany, professedly in favor of the integrity of the Scripture. 

But I pass to another part of the literary field. From the Bible toShakespeare. This, at first thought, may seem a long journey. Thereappears but little congruity between the two. The only neededconnection is the similarity of attack. The same spirit has whettedits sword against each; but the lack of similarity is more apparentthan real. The Bible is God's exhibit of human nature and its relationto the Divine personality and plans. Shakespeare is man's profoundestexhibit of man in his relation to present and future. The fields arethe same. They differ in extent. The profoundness of Shakespeareseems a shoreward shallow when viewed alongside the Bible. The Bibleand Shakespeare have a further similarity, not one of character, but ofresults. 

Each has been a potential factor in the stability of the Englishlanguage. They each present the noble possibilities of the speech ofthe Anglo-Saxon. Each has left its indelible impress on speech andliterature. Kossuth's mastery of English is by him attributed to theBible, Shakespeare, and Webster's Dictionary. These were his solemasters, and sufficed to give him a command of language which ranks himamong the princes of our English speech. That the authorship of theIliad and the books of the Bible should be attacked is cause for littlesurprise. They were works of antiquity. It is an observable tendencyof the mind to doubt a thing far removed in time. We lose sight ofevidence. We dispense with the leadership of reason, and letinclination and imagination guide. This is a bias which antiquity mustmeet and, if it may, master. If the Iliad and the Bible werevulnerable in this regard, Shakespeare was not. He was a modern. Histhought is neither ancient nor mediaeval. He has the characteristicsof modern life, begotten of the hot-blooded era in which he lived. Themodern Shakespeare is a target for the iconoclast. It seems but astone's-cast from our time to the reign of Elizabeth and the day of theEnglish drama. The time was one of action in every department ofsociety. Conquest, colonization, literature, were beginning to renderthe Saxon name illustrious. It was the epoch of chivalry andchivalrous procedure, such as to create a species of literature andbring it to a perfection which half-wrested the scepter of supremacyfrom the hand of the Attic tragedy. In this literature there is a namewhich dwarfs all others. Otway, Ford, Massinger, Webster, Ben Jonson, Green, and Marlowe (some of these men of surprising genius) must take alower place, for the master of revels is come. William Shakespeare ishere. His life is not lengthily but plainly writ. He might have said, as did Tennyson's Ulysses, "I am become a name. " It would seem that aman at such a time, with such a reputation, would have naught to fearfrom iconoclasm, however fierce. He, in a sense, was known as Raleighor Essex were not. He has put himself into human history, and made theworld his debtor. The existence of a man whose personality wasadmitted by his contemporaries must be believed in. Stories concerninghim haunted the byways of London and literature. Ben Jonson paid him atardy tribute. Men received him as they received Chaucer. But thespirit of the age finds him vulnerable. Delia Bacon, Smith, O'Connor, Holmes, and Donnelly are leaders who deny Shakespeare's identity. Imay note Donnelly, an American gentleman of research and painstakingwhich would be creditable to a German scholar. He must be allowed tobe a man of ingenuity. His method of discovering that Shakespeare wasnot himself has all the flavor of an invention. It glitters, not withgeneralities, but ingenuities. A sample page of his folio, coveredwith hieroglyphics which mark the progress of finding the cipher whichhe thinks the plays contain--such sample page is certainly a marvel, even to the generation which has read with avidity "Robert Elsmere" and"Looking Backward. " A peculiarity in it all is, that his explanationmakes marvelous doubly so. To believe that a man should have hiddenhis authorship of such works as the plays of Shakespeare makes a drafton the credulity of men too great to be borne. Why Junius should nothave revealed himself is not difficult to discover. His life was atstake. But why the author of "The Tempest, " or "King Lear, " or "TheMerchant of Venice, " should have concealed his personality so carefullythat three centuries have elapsed before men could discover it--this isan enigma no man can solve. In general, it is objected bynon-believers in Shakespeare that it is impossible to conceive of a manwhose rearing possessed so few advantages as did that of Shakespeare, having written the plays attributed to him. This is really the strongpoint in the whole discussion. All other arguments are subordinate. It is admitted that it does seem impossible for the poacher and wildcountry lad to become the poet pre-eminent in English literature. Butthis question is not to be decided by _a priori_ reasoning. The geniusdisplayed in the dramatic works under consideration is little less thanmiraculous. This all concede. Now, history has shown that to geniusthere is a sense in which "all things are possible. " Genius can crossthe Alps, can conquer Europe, can dumfound the world. Genius knows norules. Once allow genius, and the problem is solved. It is concededthat for a common man, or even for one of exceptional ability, to haveacquired without help the learning which characterizes the works ofShakespeare is impossible. But the man who wrote Hamlet was nomediocre, be he Bacon or Shakespeare. He was a superlative genius. This fact admitted, we need have no difficulty with the problem. Itbecomes a question a child can answer. The "myriad-minded Shakespeare"could do what to an ordinary, or even extraordinary, man would be anabsolute impossibility. One critic discovers Shakespeare to be amusician; another, a classical scholar; and so he has been claimed inalmost every field. He was not all. So critics confound us. Theyalso confound themselves. The genius which could write the plays couldmaster all these, though he squandered his youth. Let the history ofgenius guide from this labyrinth. Was not Caesar orator, general, historian? Was not Napoleon the same? Does not genius destroy alldemonstrations with reference to itself? Do not Pascal, Euler, DaVinci, and Angelo confound us? How dare we dogmatize as to the doingsof genius? Read Shakespeare, and find you can not discover thecharacteristic of the man. You can not in his writings read hisinterior life. David Copperfield may display Dickens, and Byron'spoems may give us the author's autobiography, and Shelley's writingsmay give a photograph of his intellectual self; but Shakespeare's playsgive no clew to his character. He is all. He grovels in Falstaff; hetowers in Prospero. He smites all strings that have music in them. Hebaffles us like a spirit, hiding himself in darkness. To attribute theauthorship of the plays to Bacon is, to my thought, not to rid us ofour difficulty, but rather to increase difficulty. Bacon we know. Hewas jurist, statesman, natural philosopher. Add to these thepossibility of his having written Shakespeare, and the magnificence ofhis achievement would dwarf that of Shakespeare. Space forbidsdwelling on this longer, though the theme is fascinating to any loverof letters. The thought in this paper (and that goes without thesaying) is, not to discuss thoroughly these various phases of literaryiconoclasm, but rather to call attention to them and to co-ordinatethem. 

I desire to show that these phases of criticism are not difficult ofexplanation. These are natural, and are the outgrowth of animage-making age. Study the age, understand it thoroughly, and theliterature of that period can hardly be a puzzling question. Thenineteenth century will stand in history as the chiefest iconoclastwhich has arisen in the world's first six thousand years. And itsscience, statecraft, art, and literature will be looked upon assegments of the one circle, and that circle the century. 

VII

Tennyson the Dreamer

My earliest recollections of Alfred Tennyson are associated with theold Harper's volume, green-bound, large-paged, and frontispieced withtwo pictures of the poet--one of them, a face bearded, thoughtful, witheyes seeming not to see the near, but the remote; a head well-poisedand noble, with hair tangled as if matted by the wind; the face, as I alad thought, of a dreamer and a poet; and my first impressions, Ithink, were right, since the years are confirmatory of this firstconviction. The second portrait pictured the poet wrapped in hiscloak, standing, lost in thought, alone upon a cliff, gazing solitaryat the sea, and listening. If I do not mistake, these pictures caughtthe poet's spirit in so far as pictures can portray spirit. Tennysonwas always alone beside a sea, looking, listening, dreaming; and asdreamer this article purposes portraying him. 

Tennyson was, his life through, a recluse. He dwelt apart. He was asone who stands afar oft and listens to the shock of battle, hears theecho of cannon's roar, and so conceives a remote picture of the tragedyof onset. English poetry began with Chaucer, outrider to a king, associate with State affairs, participant in those turbulenciesrecorded in Froissart's voluble "Chronicles. " He was a courtier. Campand king's antechamber and embassage and battle made the arsis andthesis of his poetry, and his poems are a picture of Edward III's age, accurate as if a king's pageant passing flung shadow in a stream alongwhose bank it marched. Spenser was a recluse, looking on the world'smovement as an Oriental woman watches the street from her latticedwindow. Shakespeare was _bon vivant_, a player, therefore a briefchronicler of that time and of all times. He floated in people asbirds in air. Dramatists have need to study men and women as asculptor does anatomy. Seclusions are not the qualifications fordramatic art. Dryden was court follower and sycophant and a literarydebauchee. Milton was publicist. Burns, loving and longing for courtsand society, was enforced in his seclusion, and therefore angry at it. Wordsworth dwelt apart from men, as one who lives far from a publicthoroughfare, where neither the dust nor bustle of travel can touch hisbower of quiet; in its quality of isolation, Grasmere was an island inremote seas. Keats was a lad, dreaming in some dim Greek temple, listening to a fountain's plash at midnight which never whitened intodawn. 

Nor does there seem to be reasonable room for doubt that poetry, asidefrom the drama, gains by seclusion and solitude. Much of BayardTaylor's verse has a delicious flavor of poetry. He could writedreamily, as witness "The Metempsychosis of the Pine" and "Hylas, " orhe brings us into an Arab's tent as fellow-guest with him; but hebelonged too much to the world. Traveler, newspaper correspondent, translator, ambassador, he was all these, and his varied exploits andattrition of the crowded world hindered the cadences of his poetry. William Cullen Bryant lost as poet by being journalist, his vocationdrying up the fountains of his poetry. America's representative poet, James Russell Lowell, was editor, essayist, diplomat, poet, --in everydepartment distinguished. His essay on Dante ranks him among the greatexpositors of that melancholy Florentine. Yet who of us has not wishedhe might have consecrated himself to poetry as priest to the altar? Wegained in the publicist and essayist, but lost from the poet. And ourultimate loss out-topped our gain; for essayists and ambassadors aremore numerous than poets. Had Lowell been a man of one service, andthat service poetry, what might he not have left us as a poet'sbequest? Would he had lived in some forest primeval, from whoseshadows mountains climbed to meet the dawns, and streams stood insilver pools or broke into laughter on the stones, and where windsamong the pines were constant ministrants of melody! Solitudesminister to poets. You can hear a fountain best at midnight, becausethen quiet rules. 

Tennyson was a solitary. Hallam Tennyson's biography of the laureateresents the opinion that his father was unsocial, but really leaves thecommonly-received opinion unrefuted. Tennyson's reticence and love ofcontemplation and aloneness amounted to a passion. He was not a man ofthe people. He fled from tourists as if they brought a plague withthem. He did nothing but dream. You might as easily catch thewhip-poor-will, whose habitation changes at an approaching step, asTennyson. His was not in the widest sense a companionable nature. Hecared to be alone and to be let dream, and resented intrusion and adisturbance of his solitude. Some have dreamless sleep, like theprincess in "The Sleeping Beauty;" others sleep to dream, and to wakethem by a hand's touch or a voice, however loved, would be to break thesweet continuity of their dreams. Seeing Tennyson was as he was, hissolitude helped him. I think moonlight was wine to his spirit, and thedim voices of rolling breakers heard afar woke his passion and hispoetry. The

 "Break, break, break, On thy cold, gray stones, O sea!"

was what his spirit needed as qualification to

 "Utter the thoughts that arise in me. "

A dramatist needs the touching of living hands and sound of livinghuman voices, the uproar of the human sea; for is he not poet of streetand court and market-place and holiday? But there is a poetry whichneeds these accessories as little as a lover needs a throng to keep himcompany. Tennyson's poetry was such. We are not to conceive him asLord Tennyson and inhabitant of the House of Lords. He did not belongthere save as a recognition of splendid ability. If we are to get aclew to his genius, he must always be conceived as a recluse, who trulyheard the world's words, but at a dim remove. There is remoteness inhis poetry. The long ago was the day whose sunlight flooded his path. The illustrious Greek era and the Mediaeval Age were fields where hishosts mustered for battle. Consider how little of Tennyson's noblestpoetry belongs to his own era. "The May Queen;" "Locksley Hall, " andits complement, "Sixty Years After;" "In a Hospital Ward;" "TheGrandmother;" his patriotic effusions; "Maud;" and "In Memoriam, " sumup the modern contributions; nor is all of this impregnated with agenuinely modern spirit. "Enoch Arden" might have belonged to alustrum of centuries ago, and "The May Queen" to remote decades. Hewrites in the nineteenth century, rarely _of_ it, though, as isinevitable, he colors his thoughts of long-ago yesterdays with thecolors of to-day. He is not strictly a contemporaneous poet. "Dora, ""The Gardener's Daughter, " and others of the sort, have no timeear-marks. "The Princess" discusses a living problem, but from theartistic background of a knightly era. "Locksley Hall, " earlier andlater, "Maud" and "In Memoriam" are about the only genuinelycontemporaneous poems. My suggestion is, Tennyson hugs the shadows ofyesterdays; nor need we go far to find the philosophy of this seizureof the past. Romance gathers in twilights. It is hard to persuadeourselves that those heroisms which make souls mighty as the gods, belong to here and now. Imagination fixes this golden age in whatTennyson would call "the underworld" of time. Greek mythology was theessential poetry of nature, and mediaevalism the essential poetry ofmanhood. Nothing, as appears to me, was more accurate and in keepingwith Tennysonian genius than this choosing Greek antiquity andmediaevalism as the theater for his poetry; for he was the chiefromance poet since Edmund Spenser. Spenser and Tennyson are the poetslaureate of chivalry. What Spenser did in his age, that Tennyson didin his. So recall the chronological location of Tennyson's poetry. "Tithonus, " "Oenone, " "Ulysses, " "Tiresias, " "Amphion, " "TheHesperides, " "The Merman, " "Demeter and Persephone. " Do we not seemrather reading titles from some classic poet than from a poet of thenineteenth century?

The historical trilogy belongs to the mediaeval centuries; "Harold, " "ŕBecket, " and "Queen Mary" are of yesterday. Tennyson reached backward, as a child reaches over toward its mother. "Boadicea" belongs to astill earlier age of English history; and certainly "The Idyls of theKing" "Sir Galahad, " "St. Simeon Stylites, " "St. Agnes, " "The Mystic, ""Merlin and the Gleam, " belong to the romantic, half-hidden era ofhistory and of thought. "Sir John Oldcastle" and "Columbus" belong tothe visible historic era, while in his wonderful "Rizpah" the poet hasknit the present to dim centuries of the remotest past; and the tragic"Lucretius" takes us once more into the classic period. To the purelyromantic belong "Recollections of the Arabian Nights, " "TheLotos-Eaters, " "The Talking Oak, " "A Dream of Fair Women, " and"Godiva. " Now subtract these poems and their kin from the bulk ofTennyson's poetry, and the remainder will appear comparatively small. Certainly we may affirm with safety that Tennyson was poet of the past. 

You can get the poetry of the Alhambra only by moonlight; and to a mindso wholly poetic as Tennyson's it seemed possible to get the poetry ofconduct only by seeing it in the moonlight of departed years. To-dayis matter-of-fact in dress and design; mediaevalism was fanciful, picturesque, romantic. Chivalry was the poetry of the Christ incivilization; and the knight warring to recover the tomb of God was thepoem among soldiers, and in entire consonance with his nature, Tennyson's poetic genius flits back into the poetic days, as I haveseen birds flit back into a forest. In Tennyson's poetry two thingsare clear. They are mediaeval in location; they are modern in temper. Their geography is yesterday, their spirit is to-day; and so we havethe questions and thoughts of our era as themes for Tennyson's voiceand lute. His treatment is ancient: his theme is recent. He has givendiagnosis and alleviation of present sickness, but hides face and voicebehind morion and shield. 

Tennyson celebrates the return to nature. This return "The Poet'sSong" voices:

 "The rain had fallen, the Poet arose; He passed by the town and out of the street; A light wind blew from the gates of the sun, And waves of shadow went over the wheat, And he sat him down in a lonely place, And chanted a melody loud and sweet, That made the wild-swan pause in her cloud, And the lark drop down at his feet. 

 The swallow stopt as he hunted the bee, The snake slipt under a spray; The wild hawk stood with the down on his beak, And stared, with his foot on the prey; And the nightingale thought, 'I have sung many songs, But never a one so gay; For he sings of what the world will be When the years have died away. '"

Away from palaces to solitude; out of cities to hedgerows and the woodsand wild-flowers, --there is the secret of perennial poetry. AndTennyson is the climax of this dissent from Pope and Dryden aselaborated in Goldsmith, Cowper, Burns, Thomson, and Wordsworth. Thebest of this wine was reserved for the last of the feast; for Tennysonappears to me the greatest of the nature poets. And this return tonature, as the phrase goes, means taking this earth as a whole, whichwe are to do more and still more. Thomson's poetry was not pastoralpoetry at its best; seeing inanimate nature is not in itself sufficienttheme for poetry, lacking passion, depth, power. Sunrise, and flowingstream, and tossing seas are valuable as associates of the soul andhelping it to self-understanding. Tennyson took both men and natureinto his interpretation of nature. His voice it is, saying, "O would that my tongue could utter The thoughts that arise in me!"

The sea helps the soul's lack by supplying words and music. Tennysonnever was at his best in a National Ode, unless one speaks from theelocutionary standpoint, because such tasks lack the poetical essentialof spontaneity, and because, too, the themes seem to carry him outsideof his nature-mood. Art in our century has gone out of doors. Sceneryhas never had lovers as now; and participative in this mood isTennyson. He lives under the sky. He loved to be alone; and nature isloneliness as well as loveliness. Nor is his love of nature a passingpassion, but is passionate, intense, endearing. He never outgrew it. "Balin and Balan" is as beautiful with nature-similes as were "Enid"and "Oenone. " In Tennyson we have the odors of the country and the seaand the dewy night. He is laureate of the stars. Nature is notintroduced, but his poems seem set in nature as daisies in a meadow. He was no city poet. Of the poet Blake, James Thomson writes:

 "He came to the desert of London town Gray miles long. He wandered up, he wandered down, Singing a quiet hymn. "

Not so Tennyson. London and he were compatriots, but not friends; forhe belonged to the quiet of the country woods, and the clamor ofsea-gulls and sea-waves, whose very tumult drown the voice of care. Tennyson was to express the yearning of his era, and his poems are acry; for, like a babe, he has

 "No language but a cry. "

Our yearning is our glory. The superb forces of our spirits areinarticulate, and can not be put to words, but may be put to the melodyof a yearning cry. Souls struggle toward expression like a dyingsoldier who would send a message to his beloved, but can not framewords therefor before he dies. Our pathos is--and our yearning is--

 "O would that my lips could utter The thoughts that arise in me!"

But we have no words; and Holmes, in his most delicately-beautifulpoem, entitled "The Voiceless, " has made mention of this grief:

 "We count the broken lyres that rest Where the sweet wailing singers slumber; But o'er their silent sister's breast The wild-flowers, who will stoop to number? A few can touch the magic string, And noisy Fame is proud to win them: Alas for those that never sing, But die with all their music in them!

 Nay, grieve not for the dead alone, Whose song has told their heart's sad story, -- Weep for the voiceless, who have known The cross without the crown of glory! Not where Leucadian breezes sweep O'er Sappho's memory-haunted billow, But where the glistening night-dews weep On nameless sorrow's churchyard pillow. 

 O hearts that break and give no sign Save whitening lip and fading tresses, Till Death pours out his cordial wine, Slow-dropped from Misery's crushing presses, -- If singing breath or echoing chord To every hidden pang were given, What endless melodies were poured, As sad as earth, as sweet as heaven!"

Souls cry, "Give us a voice;" and nature enters into our yearningmoods. The autumn and the rain grieve with us, and June makes merrywith us as at a festival, and the deep sky gives room for the soaringof our aspirations, and the solemn night says, "Dream!" And for ourheartache and longing, Tennyson is our voice; for he seems nearneighbor to us. He lay on a bank of violets, and looked into the sky, and heard poplars pattering as with rain upon the roof. Really, in allTennyson's poems you will be surprised at the affluence of hisreference to nature. His custom was to make the moods of nature to beexplanatory of the moods of the soul. Man needs nature as birds needair, and flowers, and waving trees, and the dear sun. Tennyson willmake appeal to

 "The flower in the crannied wall"

by way of silencing the agnostic's prating against God. Hear him:

 "Flower in the crannied wall, I pluck you out of the crannies-- Hold you here, root and all, in my hand, Little flower, --but if I could understand What you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what God and man is. "

Here follow a few, among many, very many, delicious references to theout-of-door world we name nature, as explanatory of the indoor world wecall soul:

 "Who make it seem more sweet to be The little life on bank and brier, The bird that pipes his lone desire And dies unheard within his tree. "

 "A thousand suns will stream on thee, A thousand moons will quiver; But not by thee my steps shall be, Forever and forever. "

 "Storm'd in orbs of song, a growing gale. "

 "I saw that every morning, far withdrawn, Beyond the darkness and the cataract, God made himself an awful rose of dawn, Unheeded. "

 "There let the wind sweep and the plover cry; But thou go by. "

 "As through the land at eve we went, And pluck'd the ripen'd ears, We fell out, my wife and I, -- O we fell out, I know not why, And kiss'd again with tears. 

 For when we came where lies the child We lost in other years, There above the little grave, -- O there above the little grave, We kiss'd again with tears. "

 "Set in a cataract on an island-crag, When storm is on the heights of the long hills. "

 "Tall as a figure lengthen'd on the sand When the tide ebbs in sunshine. "

 "Ask me no more: the moon may draw the sea; The cloud may stoop from heaven, and take the shape, With fold to fold, of mountain or of cape; But O too fond, when have I answered thee? Ask me no more. "

 "And she, as one that climbs a peak to gaze O'er land and main, and sees a great black cloud Drag inward from the deeps, a wall of night. "

 "That like a broken purpose wastes in air. "

 "To rest beneath the clover sod, That takes the sunshine and the rains, Or where the kneeling hamlet drains The chalice of the grapes of God. "

 "So be it: there no shade can last In that deep dawn behind the tomb, But clear from marge to marge shall bloom The eternal landscape of the past. "

 "I sleep till dusk is dipt in gray. "

 "But Summer on the steaming floods, And Spring that swells the narrow brooks, And Autumn, with a noise of rooks, That gather in the waning woods. "

 "From belt to belt of crimson seas, On leagues of odor streaming far, To where in yonder Orient star A hundred spirits whisper 'Peace. '"

 "There rolls the deep where grew the tree: O earth, what changes thou hast seen! There where the long street roars, hath been The stillness of the central sea. 

 The hills are shadows, and they flow From form to form, and nothing stands; They melt like mist, the solid lands, Like clouds they shape themselves and go. "

 "If e'er when faith had fall'n asleep, I heard a voice, 'Believe no more, ' And heard an ever-breaking shore That tumbled in the godless deep. "

 "As slopes a wild brook o'er a little stone, Running too vehemently to break upon it. "

 "Whole, like a crag that tumbles from the cliff, And like a crag was gay with wilding flowers; And high above a piece of turret stair, Worn by the feet that now were silent, would Bare to the sun, and monstrous ivy-stems Claspt the gray walls with hairy-fibered arms, And suck'd the joining of the stones, and look'd A knot, beneath, of snakes; aloft, a grove. "

 "For as a leaf in mid-November is To what it was in mid-October, seem'd The dress that now she look'd on to the dress She look'd on ere the coming of Geraint. "

 "That had a sapling growing on it, slip From the long shore-cliff's windy walls to the beach, And there lie still, and yet the sapling grew: So lay the man transfixt. "

 "For one That listens near a torrent mountain-brook, All thro' the crash of the near cataract hears The drumming thunder of the huger fall At distance, were the soldiers wont to hear His voice in battle, and be kindled by it. "

 "And in the moment after, wild Limours, Borne on a black horse, like a thunder-cloud Whose skirts are loosen'd by the breaking storm, Half ridden off with by the thing he rode, And all in passion, uttering a dry shriek, Dash'd on Geraint"

 "Where, like a shoaling sea, the lovely blue Play'd into green, and thicker down the front With jewels than the sward with drops of dew, When all night long a cloud clings to the hill, And with the dawn ascending lets the day Strike where it clung: so thickly shone the gems. "

 "As the southwest that blowing Bala Lake Fills all the sacred Dee. So past the days. "

 "In the midnight and flourish of his May. "

 "Only you would not pass beyond the cape That has the poplar on it. "

 "And at the inrunning of a little brook, Sat by the river in a cove and watch'd The high reed wave, and lifted up his eyes And saw the barge that brought her moving down, Far off, a blot upon the stream, and said, Low in himself, 'Ah, simple heart and sweet, You loved me, damsel, surely with a love Far tenderer than my Queen's!'"

 "Rankled in him and ruffled all his heart, As the sharp wind that ruffles all day long A little bitter pool about a stone On the bare coast. "

 "A carefuler in peril did not breathe For leagues along that breaker-beaten coast Than Enoch. . . . And he thrice had pluck'd a life From the dread sweep of the down-streaming seas. "

 "All-kindled by a still and sacred fire, That burned as on an altar. "

 "With kisses balmier than half-opening buds Of April, and could hear the lips that kiss'd, Whispering I knew not what of wild and sweet, Like that strange song I heard Apollo sing, While Ilion, like a mist, rose into towers. "

 "Dearer and nearer, as the rapid of life Shoots to the fall. "

 "That sets at twilight in a land of reeds. "

 "And wearying in a land of sand and thorns. "

 "Pelleas and sweet smell of the fields Past, and the sunshine came along with him. "

 "By a mossed brookbank on a stone I smelt a wildweed flower alone; There was a ringing in my ears, And both my eyes gushed out with tears. "

 "Clash like the coming and retiring wave. "

 "Quiet as any water-sodden log Stay'd in the wandering warble of a brook. "

 "The wide-wing'd sunset of the misty marsh. "

From these quotations, not exhaustive, but representative, one may seein how gracious a sense Tennyson was a pastoral poet, in that he andhis thought haunted the brookside and the mountainside, the shadow andthe sunshine, the dark night, or dewy eve, or the glad dawn, always. Therefore is Tennyson a rest to the spirit. He takes you from yourcare, and ends by taking your care from you. He quiets your spirit. Igo to his poems as I would go to seashore or mountain; and a quietdeep, as the gently falling night, wraps my spirit. Bless him alwaysfor the rest he knows to give and cares to give!

Tennyson's genius is lyrical rather than either dramatic or epic. Whatmusic is like his? Say of his poems, in words of James Whitcomb Riley, "O but the sound was rainy sweet!"

Not great Milton was more master of music than he; though Milton's wasthe melody of wide ocean in open sea, or crash of waves upon the ruggedrocks, or wrathing up the yellow sands in tumult of majestic menace. Tennyson's music is rather the voice of gentle waters, or the cadenceof summer's winds in the tree-tops, or like human voices heard in somewoodland. In either poet is no marred music. Mrs. Browning fell outof time; Tennyson never. His verse is like some loved voice whichmakes perpetual music in our heart. Read all of his poetry, and howdiversified soever his meter is, music never fails; yet his lyrics arenot as those of Burns, whose words sing like the brook Tennyson hassung of. Burns's melody is laughter: it babbles, it sighs for amoment, but will sing. But Tennyson's is not laughter. He is nojoyous poet. Burns has tears which wet his lashes, scarcely hischeeks. Tennyson's cheeks are wet. He is the music of winds inpine-trees in a lonely land, or as a sea breaking upon a shore of rockand wreck; but how passing sweet the music is, stealing your ruggednessaway, so that to be harsh in thought or diction in his presence seems acrime!

Lyric differs from epic poetry in sustainedness. One form of poetryruns into another imperceptibly, as darkness into daylight or daylightinto darkness, so that the dividing line can not be certified. Lyricpoetry may be dramatic in spirit, as Browning's "The Ring and theBook;" or dramatic poetry may be lyric in spirit, as Milton's "Comus. "Tennyson has written drama and epic too; for such, I think, clearly heproposed the "Idyls of the King" to be. This we must say: Despite thegenial leniency of Robert Browning's criticism of the dramatic successof "Harold, " and "Becket, " and "The Cup, " we may safely refuseconcurrence in judgment. Trying made the failure of the playimpossible when he was character in them. There is no necessity ofdenying that the so-called trilogy has apt delineation of character, and that Green, the historian, was justified in saying that "Becket"had given him such a conception of the character of that courtier andecclesiastic as all his historical research had not given; nor need wedeny that these dramas are rich in noble passages. These things gowithout the saying, considering the author was Alfred Tennyson. Inattempting a criticism of the dramatic value, however, the realquestion is this: Would not "Harold" and "Queen Mary" have been greaterpoems if thrown out of the dramatic into the narrative form, like"Guinevere" or "Enoch Arden?" "Maud" is really the most dramatic ofTennyson's poems, and in consequence the least understood. Most men atsome time espouse what they can not successfully achieve. Was not thisTennyson's case? Are not the portrayal of character and the rhythm andthe melody of the drama qualities inherent in Tennyson, and are they inany distinct sense dramatic? If we declare Tennyson neither epic nordramatic, but always lyric, adverse criticism melts away like snow insummer. As lyrist, all is congruous and enthralling. "The Idyls ofthe King, " as a series of lyric romances, is beyond blame in technique. Tennyson tells a story. Dramatic poetry takes the story out of thepoet's lips and tells itself. The epic requires a strong centrality oftheme, movement, and dominancy, like a ubiquitous sovereign whose poweris always felt in every part of his empire. Viewing "The Idyls of theKing" as singing episodes, told us by some wandering minstrel, not onlydo they not challenge hostile criticism, but they take rank among thenoblest contributions to the poetry of any language. "Columbus, ""Ulyses, " "Eleanore, " "Enoch Arden, " "Lucretius, " "The Day-Dream, ""Locksley Hall, " "Dora, " "Aylmer's Field, " "The Gardener's Daughter, "have all the subdued beauty of Wordsworth's narrative poems, and are ascertainly lyric as those unapproachable lyrics in "The Princess. " Theocean is epic in its vast expanse; tragic in its power to crush Armadason the rocks and let them

 "Rot in ribs of wreck;"

and lyric in its songs, whether of storm outsounding cataracts, or thesinging scarce above the breath of waves that silver the shores ofsummer seas. Commend me to the ocean, and give all the ocean to me. Dispossess me of no might nor tragedy nor melody. Let the whole oceanbe mine. So, though Tennyson be not epic as Milton, nor dramatic asBrowning, he is yet a mine of wealth untold. He is more melodious thanSpenser (and what a praise!) Tennyson can not write the prose, butalways the poetry of life. So interpreted, how perfect his executionbecomes! His words distill like dews. Take unnumbered extracts fromhis poems, and they seem bits of melody, picked out from nature's bookof melodies, and in themselves and as related they satisfy the heart. Let these songs sing themselves to us:

 "Ask me no more: the moon may draw the sea; The cloud may stoop from heaven and take the shape, With fold to fold, of mountain or of cape; But O too fond, when have I answer'd thee? Ask me no more. 

 Ask me no more: what answer should I give? I love not hollow cheek or faded eye; Yet, O my friend, I will not have thee die! Ask me no more, lest I should bid thee live; Ask me no more. 

 Ask me no more: thy fate and mine are seal'd; I strove against the stream and all in vain; Let the great river take me to the main; No more, dear Love, for at a touch I yield; Ask me no more. "

 "Thy voice is heard through rolling drums, That beat to battle where he stands; Thy face across his fancy comes, And gives the battle to his hands: A moment, while the trumpets blow, He sees his brood about thy knee; The next, like fire he meets the foe, And strikes him dead for thine and thee. "

 "O love, they die in yon rich sky, They faint on hill or field or river; Our echoes roll from soul to soul, And grow forever and forever. Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying, And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying. "

 "Sweet and low, sweet and low, Wind of the western sea, Low, low, breathe and blow, Wind of the western sea! Over the rolling waters go, Come from the dying moon, and blow, Blow him again to me; While my little one, while my pretty one, sleeps. 

 Sleep and rest, sleep and rest, Father will come to thee soon; Rest, rest, on mother's breast, Father will come to thee soon; Father will come to his babe in the nest, Silver sails all out of the west Under the silver moon: Sleep, my little one, sleep, my pretty one, sleep. "

And "Tears, Idle Tears, " is beyond all praise. Passion was never wedto music more deliriously and satisfyingly. I am entranced by thispoem always, as by God's poem of the starry night:

 "Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean; Tears from the depth of some divine despair Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes In looking on the happy autumn-fields, And thinking of the days that are no more. 

 Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail, That brings our friends up from the under world; Sad as the last which reddens over one That sinks with all we love below the verge; So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more. 

 Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns The earliest pipe of half-awaken'd birds To dying ears, when unto dying eyes The casement slowly grows a glimmering square; So sad, so strange, the days that are no more. 

 Dear as remember'd kisses after death, And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign'd On lips that are for others; deep as love, Deep as first love, and wild with all regret; O Death in Life, the days that are no more. "

All these lyrics are such delights as leave us silent, seeing we haveno words to tell the glow of spirit we feel. The genius of lyricpoetry is its power of condensation. The drama may expand, the lyricmust condense, and Tennyson has the lyric power, summing up large areasof thought and feeling into a single sentence or a few verses, whichpresents the quintessence of the lyric method. Immense passion pouredinto the chalice of a solitary utterance--this is a song. Let theharpist sit and sing, nor stop to wipe his tears what time hesings, --only let him sing! Tennyson was as some rare voice which nevergrows husky, but always sounds sweet as music heard in the darkness, and when he speaks, it is as if

 "Up the valley came a swell of music on the wind. "

Tennyson is poet of love. Love is practically always the soil out ofwhich his flowers grow. Our American bards say little of love, and wefeel the lack keenly. Love is the native nobleman amongsoul-qualities, and we have become schooled to feel the poets must beour spokesmen here where we need them most. But Bryant, nor Whittier, nor Longfellow, nor yet Lowell, have been in a generous way eroticpoets. They have lacked the pronounced passion element. Poe, however, was always lover when he wrote poetry, and Bayard Taylor has arecurring softening of the voice to a caress when his eyes look love. Tennyson, on the contrary, is scarcely less a love poet than Burns, though he tells his secret after a different fashion. Call the roll ofhis poems, and see how just this observation is. Love is nodal withhim as with the heart. Bourdillon was right in saying:

 "The night has a thousand eyes, The day has one; Yet the light of the bright world dies With the dying sun. 

 The mind has a thousand eyes, And the heart but one; Yet the life of a whole life dies When love is done. "

In many poets, love is background, not picture, or, to change a figureas is meet, love is a minor chord in song. In Shelley, I would saythat love was a sort of afterglow upon the landscape, and softens hisrigid anarchy into something like beauty. With Tennyson is a verydifferent offering to love. It is omnipresent, though not obtrusivelyso; for he never obtrudes his main meanings. They rather steal on youas springtime does. You catch his meaning because you are not blindnor deaf. He hints at things as lovers do, and is as one who would notthrust his company upon you, so modest and reticent is he; yet we donot mistake him. Love is always close at hand, and in some form isnever absent. "Mariana, " "Lady of Shalott, " "Locksley Hall, " "Maud, ""The Sisters, " "The Talking Oak, " "Edward Gray, " "The Miller'sDaughter, " "Harold, " "Queen Mary, " "Enoch Arden, " and "The Idyls of theKing, "--is not love everywhere? These are poems of love between menand women as lovers; but there is other love. In Tennyson: love ofcountry, as in his "The Revenge, " "The Charge of the Light Brigade, "and others; love of nature, as "The Brook;" the love of Queen, as inthe dedication in "The Idyls of the King;" love of a friend (and suchlove!) flooding "In Memoriam" like spring tide's; love to God, as "St. Agnes' Eve, " "Sir Galahad, " and in "King Arthur. " By appeal to book dowe see how his poems constitute a literature of love, for he is inessence saying continuously, "Life means love, " and we shall not bethose to say him nay. May we not safely say no poet has given a morebeautiful and sympathetic explication of love in its entirety?Browning has expressed the sex-love more mightily in Pompilia andCaponsacchi. Tennyson has, however, given no partial landscape; he haspresented the whole. Love of the lover, of the widowed heart, of thefriend, of the parent, of the patriot, of the subject to sovereign, ofthe redeemed of God. Truly, this does impress us as a nearly-completedcircle. If it is not, where lies the lack? Love is life, gladness, pathos, power. A humblest spirit, when touched with the unspeakablegrace of love, becomes epic and beautiful, as is illustrated in "EnochArden. " Herein see a sure element of immortality in Tennyson. Therace will always with alacrity and sympathy read of love in tale orpoem; and this poet is always translating love's thought into speech. 

And may not this prevalence of love in his poetry account forTennyson's lack of humor? In his conversation, as his son tells us, hewas even jocular, loving both to hear and to tell a humorous incident, and his laughter rang out over a good jest, a thing of which we wouldhave next to no intimation in his poetry; for save in "WillWaterproof's Lyrical Monologue" and "The Northern Farmer, " and possiblyin "Amphion, " his verse contains scarcely a vestige of humor. Certainly his writings can not presume to be humorous. To Cervantes, chivalry was grotesque; to Tennyson, chivalry was poetry, --there laythe difference. Our laureate caught not the jest, but the real poetryof that episode in the adventure of manhood; and this I take to be thelarger and worthier lesson. Cervantes and Tennyson were both right. But Tennyson caught the vision of the surer, the more enduring truth. With love, as with chivalry, he saw not the humor, but the beauty ofit; and beauty is always touched with melancholy. I have sat a daythrough reading all this poet's verse, and confess that all the day Iwas not remote from tears, but was as one walking in mists along anocean shore, so that on my face was what might be either rain or tears. In Tennyson, "Love took up the glass of Time, and turned it in its glowing hands; Every moment lightly shaken, ran itself in golden sands. Love took up the harp of life, and smote on all the chords with might; Smote the chord of self, that, trembling, passed in music out of sight. "

And Tennyson is the picture poet. I feel in reading him as if I wereeither out of doors with pictures seen at first-hand, or in a gallerywith picture-crowded walls. He is painter among poets, his art beingat once admirably inclusive and exclusive--including essentials, excluding the irrelevant. He is consummate artist, giving pictures ofthings, and, what is vastly more difficult, pictures of moods. Withhim, one never feels and sees, but feels because he sees. His abilityto recreate moods for us is quite beyond praise, and is such subtle artas defies analysis or characterization, but wakens wonder and will notlet it sleep. Poets are, as is affirmed by the lord of all the poets, "Of imagination all compact;"

and may we be delivered from a colorless world and an unimaginativelife; for such is no life at all! God would have men dream andprophesy. Because the poet is artist and dreamer, his word, in oneform or another, is "like, " a word patented by poets; and all who useit are become, in so far, poets. Now, with Tennyson, all thingssuggest pictures, as if soul were itself a landscape; wherefore, as hasbeen shown, he riots in nature-scenes. A simile, when full, like aJune day of heaven, contains a plethora, an ampleness, for which youshall seek in vain to find rules, much less to make them; which is tosay that a perfect simile will betimes do something for which no reasoncan be assigned, yet so answering to the largest poetry of the occasionas to fill the mind with joy, as if one had discovered some new flowerin the woods where he thought he knew them all. One instance shallsuffice as illustrative:

 "An agony Of lamentation like a wind, that shrills All night in a waste land, where no one comes, Or hath come, since the making of the world. "

Considering the comparison, we must grant that, submitted to thejudgment of cold logic, the figure is superfluous and faulty; for, as asimple matter of fact, a wind blowing where no one comes or has comewould be not so lonely as one blown across a habitable and inhabitedland. From the standpoint of common observation, the simile might beset down as inaccurate. But who so blind as not to see that there isno untruth nor superfluity in the poet's art? He means to give the airof utter loneliness and sadness, and therefore pictures an untenantedlandscape, across whose lonely wastes a lonely wind pursues its lonelyway; and thus having saturated his thought with sadness, he transfersthe loneliness of the landscape to the winged winds. This seems to methe very climacteric of exquisite artistic skill, and I am alwaysdelighted to the point of laughter or of tears; for moods run togetherin presence of such poetry. No poet of my knowledge so haunts theillustrative. In reading him, so perfect are the pictures that yourfingers itch to play the artist's part, so you might shadow some beautyon every page. Some painter, working after the manner of Turner's"Rivers of France, " might make himself immortal by devoting his life tothe adequate illustration of Tennyson. As his verses sing themselves, so his poems picture themselves. He supplies you with painter'sgenius. A verse or stanza needs but a frame to be a choice painting. When told that the fool

 "Danced like a withered leaf before the hall, "

we must see him, so vivid the scene, so lifelike the color. 

I will hang some pictures up as in a gallery:

 "Ever the weary wind went on, And took the reed-tops as it went"

 "I, that whole day, Saw her no more, although I linger'd there Till every daisy slept. "

 "Love with knit brows went by, And with a flying finger swept my lips. "

 "Breathed like the covenant of a God, to hold From thence through all the worlds. "

 "Night slid down one long stream of sighing wind, And in her bosom bore the baby. Sleep. "

 "The pillar'd dusk of sounding sycamores. "

 "And in the fallow leisure of my life. "

 "Her voice fled always through the summer land; I spoke her name alone. Thrice-happy days! The flower of each, those moments when we met, The crown of all, we met to part no more. "

 "Now, now, his footsteps smite the threshold stairs Of life. "

 "The drooping flower of knowledge changed to fruit Of wisdom. Wait. "

 "Tall as a figure lengthen'd on the sand When the tide ebbs in sunshine. "

 "Love, like an Alpine harebell hung with tears By some cold morning glacier; frail at first And feeble, all unconscious of itself, But such as gather'd color day by day. "

 "I could no more, but lay like one in trance, That hears his burial talk'd of by his friends, And can not speak, nor move, nor make one sign, But lies and dreads his doom. "

 "Behold, ye speak an idle thing: Ye never knew the sacred dust; I do but sing because I must, And pipe but as the linnets sing. 

 I hold it true, whate'er befall; I feel it, when I sorrow most; 'T is better to have loved and lost, Than never to have loved at all. 

 But brooding on the dear one dead, And all he said of things divine, (And dear to me as sacred wine To dying lips is all he said). 

 And look thy look, and go thy way, But blame not thou the winds that make The seeming-wanton ripple break, The tender-pencil'd shadow play. 

 Beneath all fancied hopes and fears, Ah me! the sorrow deepens down, Whose muffled motions blindly drown The bases of my life in tears. 

 Be near me when my light is low, When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick, And tingle; and the heart is sick, And all the wheels of being slow. 

 I can not love thee as I ought, For love reflects the thing beloved; My words are only words, and moved Upon the topmost froth of thought. 

 From point to point, with power and grace And music in the bounds of law, To those conclusions when we saw The God within him light his face. 

 And while the wind began to sweep A music out of sheet and shroud, We steer'd her toward a crimson cloud That landlike slept along the deep. 

 Abiding with me till I sail To seek thee on the mystic deeps, And this electric force, that keeps A thousand pulses dancing, fail. 

 And hear at times a sentinel, Who moves about from place to place, And whispers to the worlds of space, In the deep night, that all is well. "

 "Brawling, or like a clamor of the rooks At distance, ere they settle for the night. "

 "In words whose echo lasts, they were so sweet. "

 "That I could rest, a rock in ebbs and flows. "

 "But as a man to whom a dreadful loss Falls in a far land, and he knows it not. "

 "The long way smoke beneath him in his fear. "

 "Then, after all was done that hand could do, She rested, and her desolation came Upon her, and she wept beside the way. "

 "Seam'd with an ancient sword-cut on the cheek, And bruised and bronzed, she lifted up her eyes And loved him, with that love which was her doom. "

 "And in the meadows tremulous aspen-trees And poplars made a noise of falling showers. "

 "No greatness, save it be some far-off touch Of greatness to know well I am not great. "

 "Hurt in the side, whereat she caught her breath; Through her own side she felt the sharp lance go. "

 "Rankled in him and ruffled all his heart, As the sharp wind that ruffles all day long A little bitter pool about a stone On the bare coast. "

 "Thy shadow still would glide from room to room, And I should evermore be vext with thee In hanging robe or vacant ornament, Or ghostly footfall echoing on the stair. "

 "Far off a solitary trumpet blew. Then, waiting by the doors, the war-horse neigh'd As at a friend's voice, and he spake again. "

 "Through the thick night I hear the trumpet blow. "

 "And slipt aside, and like a wounded life Crept down into the hollows of the wood. "

 "Then Philip, with his eyes Full of that lifelong hunger, and his voice Shaking a little like a drunkard's hand. "

 "Had he not Spoken with That, which being everywhere Lets none, who speaks with Him, seem all alone, Surely the man had died of solitude. "

 "Because things seen are mightier than things heard. "

 "For sure no gladlier does the stranded wreck See through the gray skirts of a lifting squall The boat that bears the hope of life approach To save the life despair'd of, than he saw Death dawning on him, and the close of all. "

 "And he lay tranced; but when he rose and paced Back toward his solitary home again, All down the narrow street he went, Beating it in upon his weary brain, As though it were the burthen of a song, 'Not to tell her, never to let her know. '"

 "Torn as a sail that leaves the rope is torn In tempest. "

 "Nay, one there is, and at the eastern end, Wealthy with wandering lines of mount and mere. "

 "Prick'd with incredible pinnacles into heaven. "

 "An out-door sign of all the warmth within, Smiled with his lips--a smile beneath a cloud; But Heaven had meant it for a sunny one. "

 "All the old echoes hidden in the wall. "

 "Their plumes driv'n backward by the wind they made In moving, all together down upon him Bare, as a wild wave in the wide North sea, Green-glimmering toward the summit, bears, with all Its stormy crests that smoke against the skies, Down on a bark, and overbears the bark, And him that helms it, so they overbore Sir Lancelot and his charger. "

 "There lies a vale in Ida, lovelier Than all the valleys of Ionian hills. The swimming vapor slopes athwart the glen, Puts forth an arm, and creeps from pine to pine, And loiters, slowly drawn. On either hand The lawns and meadow-ledges midway down Hang rich in flowers, and far below them roars The long brook falling through the clov'n ravine In cataract after cataract to the sea. Behind the valley topmost Gargarus Stands up and takes the morning; but in front The gorges, opening wide apart, reveal Troas and Ilion's column'd citadel, The crown of Troas. "

 "One seem'd all dark and red--a tract of sand, And some one pacing there alone, Who paced forever in a glimmering land, Lit with a low large moon. 

 One show'd an iron coast and angry waves. You seem'd to hear them climb and fall And roar rock-thwarted under bellowing caves, Beneath the windy wall. 

 And one, a full-fed river winding slow By herds upon an endless plain, The ragged rims of thunder brooding low, With shadow-streaks of rain. 

 And one, the reapers at their sultry toil. In front they bound the sheaves. Behind Were realms of upland, prodigal in oil, And hoary to the wind. 

 And one, a foreground black with stones and slags, Beyond, a line of heights, and higher All barr'd with long white cloud the scornful crags, And highest, snow and fire. 

 And one, an English home--gray twilight pour'd On dewy pastures, dewy trees, Softer than sleep--all things in order stored, A haunt of ancient Peace. "

Each stanza is a picture, bound, not in book nor gold, but in a stanza. 

 "Like flame from ashes. "

 "Sighing weariedly, as one Who sits and gazes on a faded fire, When all the goodlier guests are past away. "

 "As the crest of some slow-arching wave Heard in dead night along that table-shore Drops flat, and after the great waters break Whitening for half a league, and thin themselves Far over sands marbled with moon and cloud, From less and less to nothing. "

 "Belted his body with her white embrace. "

 "And out beyond into the dream to come. "

 "Thus, as a hearth lit in a mountain home, And glancing on the window, when the gloom Of twilight deepens round it, seems a flame That rages in the woodland far below. "

Looking at these landscapes, can words add weight to the claim forAlfred Tennyson as a painter?

And Tennyson is as pure as the air of mid-ocean. His moral qualitiesare in no regard inferior to his artistic qualities, although fromcenturies of poets we might have been schooled to anticipate that sosensitive and poetic a nature had been sensual, concluding a loweredstandard of ethics, theoretical or practical, one or both, especiallyconsidering his earliest literary admiration was that poetic Don Juan, Lord Byron, whose poems were a transcript of his morals, where aluxuriant imagination and a poetic diction were combined in a highdegree, and so the poet qualified to be a bane or blessing of acommanding order, he choosing so to use his extraordinary gifts as topollute the living springs from which a generation of men and womendrank. What we do find is, a Tennyson as removed from a Byron in moralmood and life as southern cross from northern lights. The morals ofboth life and poems are as limpid as the waters of pellucid Tahoe; andpurest women may read from "Claribel" to "Crossing the Bar, " and beonly purer from the reading. Henry Van Dyke has written on "The Biblein Tennyson, " an article, after his habit, discriminating andappreciative, in the course of which he shows how some of the deliciousverse's of the laureate are literal extracts from the Book of God, sonative is poetry to that sublime volume; though I incline to believethe larger loan of the Bible to Tennyson is the purity of thoughtevidenced in the poet's writings, and more particularly in the poet'slife. Who has not been touched by the Bible who has lived in theselater centuries? Modern life may no more get away from the Bible thanour planet may flee from its own atmosphere. We can never estimate themoral potency of such a poet, living and writing for sixty years, though we may fairly account this longevity of pure living and purethinking and pure writing among the primary blessings of our century. That two such pure men and poets as Tennyson and Browning were given asingle race in a single century is abundant cause for giving heartythanks to God. They have purified, not our day only, but remote dayscoming, till days shall set to rise no more, and have given the lie tothe poor folly of supposing highest genius and purest morality to beincompatibles; for in life and poem, and in the poem of life, they haveswept clouds from our sky, until all purity stands revealed, fair asthe morning star smiling at Eastern lattices. In Tennyson is noslightest appeal to the sensual. He hates pruriency, making protestagainst it with a voice like the clangor of angry bells. In "LocksleyHall Sixty Years After, " he speaks wisely and justly, in sarcasm thatbites as acids do:

 "Rip your brother's vices open, strip your own foul passions bare: Down with Reticence, down with Reverence--forward, naked--let them stare. Feed the budding rose of boyhood with the drainage of your sewer; Send the drain into the fountain lest the stream should issue pure. 

 Set the maiden fancies wallowing in the trough of Zolaism, Forward, forward, aye and backward, downward, too, in the abysm. Do your best to charm the worst, to lower the rising race of men. "

And this is Tennyson the aged, whose moral eyes were as the physicaleyes of Moses on Pisgah, "undimmed. " Bless him for his aged anger!Happily, to-day, realism has lost its charm. We have had enough livingin sewers, when the suburbs were near with their breezy heights andquiet homes. Stench needs no apostle. The age has outgrown thesehectic folk, who, in the name of nature, lead us back to Pompeii. Gehenna needs not to be assisted. Jean Valjean, bent on an errand ofmercy, fled to the sewers of Paris, his appeal to these foul subwaysbeing justified, since he sought them under stress for the preservationof a life. Does this prove that men should take promenades in thesewers as if they were boulevards? An author is not called on to tellall he knows. Let writers of fiction assume that the public knowsthere are foul things, and needs not to be reminded of them, and letthe romancist avoid them as he would a land of lepers. 

Those who companied with Tennyson through his beautiful career werehelped into a growing love of purity. He had no panegyric for lust andshame and sensuality, but made us feel they were shameful, so that weblushed for those who had not the modesty to blush for themselves. Weare ashamed for Guinevere and Lancelot, and are proud of Enid andElaine and Sir Galahad and King Arthur; and in them, and in others, have been helped to see the heroic beauty of simple virtue. This is anincalculable gain for soul. When we have learned that profligates, whatever their spasms of flashy achievements, are poor company, andthat the pure are evermore good company, and goodness is a questworthier than the quest for the golden grail, we have risen to nobilityof soul which can never become out of date. 

Noah was not more clearly a preacher of righteousness in his day thanTennyson in his, of whom say, as highest encomium we know to pronounce, "He made goodness beautiful to our eyes and desirable to our hearts;and, beyond this, made it easier for us to be good. "

Over all this poet wrote, he might have looked straight in God's eye, and prayed, as King Arthur:

 "And that which I have done May he within himself make pure!"

And we chant, sending our muse after him, --

 "Nor was there moaning of the bar When he set out to sea. "

To him saying, "We love him yet, and shall while life endures, "borrowing Whittier's God-speed to the dead Bayard Taylor:

 "Let the home-voices greet him in the far, Strange land that holds him; let the messages Of love pursue him o'er the chartless seas And unmapped vastness of his unknown star! Love's language, heard above the loud discourse, Of perishable fame, in every sphere Itself interprets; and its utterance here, Somewhere in God's unfolding universe, Shall reach our traveler, softening the surprise Of his rapt gaze on unfamiliar skies!"

VIII

The American Historians

The average American traveler is better acquainted with foreign landsthan with his own country. Nor is he unique in this regard. I haveknown persons who lived a lifetime within a dozen squares ofWestminster Abbey, and were never inside of that historic cathedral, asI have known persons to live forty years not fifty miles distant fromNiagara, and never to have heard the organ speech of that greatcataract. This is a common flaw in intellect. We tend tounderestimate the near, and exaggerate the remote. Another applicationof the same frailty is noticeable in literature. Homegrown literatureis, with not a few, depreciated. According to their logic, good thingscan not come out of Nazareth, and imported products are the only viandsworth a Sybarite palate. In mediaeval days the form assumed wasdifferent, while the principle remained the same. Then the question ofvalue turned upon whether a work was written in the learned language;namely, in Latin. If written in the vernacular, the work wasimmediately set down as vulgar. One of Martin Luther's valuableservices was that, when the reverse was prevalent, he honored thevernacular of his country, and insisted that it be taught in theschools, a thing accounted an educational heresy in his time; and inhis translation of the Bible into German, he created German literature. 

Americans are a race of readers, and are the Rome to which allliterature turns face and feet. Besides many books not great, allgreat books are translated into English. Everybody's book comes toAmerica. We are a cosmopolitan population in a literary way. If youwere to look at the book-counters of each succeeding month, you wouldsee how all the writing world has been writing for us. From suchconditions of supply, our taste becomes cultivated. We feel ourselvesconnoisseurs. If we give a more ready reading to a foreign than to adomestic book, the reason is not of necessity that the home book isdeficient in interest or literary finish, but may be attributed simplyto an undesigned and perhaps unperceived predisposition toward theimported and the remote. 

I confess to a love for what is American. I love its Government; itsprevalent and genuine democracy; its chance for the common man andwoman to rise into success and fame and valuable service; itsinheritance, unblemished by primogeniture or entail; its universalityof education to a degree of intelligence; its history and tendency; andI love its literature, though, as appears to me, our historians havedone the highest grade of work of any of our litterateurs--in sayingwhich there is no disparagement of other literary workers, but simply astated belief in the pre-eminent value of the historian in Americanletters. What I mean is this: During the fifty years last passed therewere poets and novelists in England who, with all deference to our ownwriters, were equal or superior to the poets and novelists of America. America had no poets who stood the peer of Browning and Tennyson; andamong novelists, our Hawthorne could not be said to surpass aThackeray, Dickens, or Eliot. But say, proudly, beyond the sea were nohistorians the masters of Bancroft, Prescott, Motley, and Parkman. This article wishes to point out the quality and range of Americanhistorians, with an expressed hope of causing research in this ampleand fertile field. 

Though first on the soil of the Western Hemisphere, the Spaniard hasmade no acknowledged and valuable contribution to American history. Nor, indeed, has any nation of this hemisphere, save our own. TheFrench and Spanish Jesuit submitted religious monographs touching theearly days of occupancy of New France and Mexico; but these willreadily be seen to be rather chronicles than histories. And thehistorian, native to the United States, is he in whose hands have beenthe historical studies of our Western World. La Salle, Hennepin, Marquette, and Las Casas have written faulty but valuable memoirs; butthey do not reach the dignity and value of histories, being what onemight name crude ore rather than refined gold. 

Another thing worthy a glad emphasis is, that America is her ownhistorian. The New World has begotten the writers of its own story. How fully this is true will not be appreciated until a detailed andinstantaneous survey is taken. Look down on this plain of history asone does on Tuscany from an Alp. Thus, and thus only, can we value ourpossession. In this estimate, mention is made of the greaterhistorians, not because others are not worthy of notice, but becausethe scope of this essay does not allow, inasmuch as reference is herehad to the specific gravity of the historian and the epoch of ourhistory he has exploited. 

Washington Irving, essayist, biographer, humorist, was, before all, ahistorian in temper, and was drawn as by some subtle and unseenattraction to study that nation to which America owed its discovery. Irving is an evident American. He loved the land through whosepalisades the stately Hudson flowed. What touched America touchedIrving, and who had loved or helped America had won Irving's heart as atrophy. And such evident patriotism is commendable in citizen andwriter. We love not Caesar less, but Rome the more, when we believe inAmerica before all nations of history. I love the patriot above thecosmopolitan, because in him is an honest look, a homeliness thattouches the heart like the sight of a pasture-field, with its brokenbars, where our childhood ran with happy feet. Carlyle was againstthings because they were English; so was Matthew Arnold. These menwere self-expatriated in spirit. I like not the attitude. Give us menwho love native land beyond all other lands, and who, removedtherefrom, turn homesick eyes toward its invisible boundaries. Irving, admirable in many ways, was in no way more to be admired than in hispredilection for his country as a theme for his historian's muse. Tohim pay tribute, because he is historian of the discovery of our braveWestern Hemisphere. Irving has told the story of that great admiral ofthe ocean, Christopher Columbus. This memoir may not be exact. Irvingmay have idealized this pathfinder of the ocean; though if he has, hehas observed the proprieties, literary and imaginative, as manysuccessors have not. Some writers are seemingly bent on making everygreat soul commonplace, thinking that if they fail to belittle adistinguished benefactor of the race, if they have not played theVandal with a swagger and conceit like Jack Falstaff, they haveignominiously failed; when the plain truth is, that if they succeededin taking the glamour for those heroes of whom they write, they havehurt mankind so far, and have impoverished imagination and endeavor bytheir invidious task. We need not suppose Christopher Columbus andWashington saints, seeing there is no inclination to canonize them; butwe need not hold their follies up to wake the guffaw of a crowd. Suchlaughter is dearly bought. One thing I hold so true no reasoning candamage it; namely, that a man like Columbus had nobler moods on whichhe voyaged as his caravel through the blue seas. Columbus was noswineherd, but a dreamer, whose dreams enlarged the world by half, andgave a new civilization room and triumph. He was of his age, and hismorality was not unimpeachable; but in him were still great moralitiesand humanities. He had mountain-tops in his spirits, and on thesepeaks he stood. What puerile work it is to attempt robbing Columbus ofhis discoverer's glory by attempting to show how vikings discoveredthis continent! Such historians might fight a less bloody battle stillby showing that the aborigines discovered this continent before theNorsemen did! What boots such folly? What gold of benefit comes ofsuch quests? Certain we are that when Columbus set sail for a NewWorld, no one believed the earth was round as he did, and no one knewthe Norsemen had piloted across seas and found land; and Europe wasignorant of any shore westward, and Columbus, in his ignorance, riskedall and vanquished all. 

 "Dragging up drowned honor by the locks, "

as says our Shakespeare. Columbus is America's benefactor. He showedthe Puritans a New World, toward whose shores to sail, and behind whoseharbor-bar to cast anchor. Nothing can invalidate these claims. Honorhim who honors us in giving us a rendezvous for liberty andcivilization. This mood of history Washington Irving caught, andbecause he did, I honor him. He was sagacious. He did not traduce ahero, but enthroned him. In short, Irving behaved toward ChristopherColumbus as a historian and a gentleman, and set Americans a pattern inhistory-writing in that they should be the historiographers of theirown world. This Nestor's lessons were heard and heeded. If you careto read Irving's various historical writings, the logic of thesewritings will appear. America was his home and love. He thought towrite the story of how a brave man gave a world this huge room it knewnot of. Loyalty made him historian. His researches gave himfamiliarity with Spanish archives. The movement of the era touchedhim; for Irving was susceptible to the finer moods of literature, asany who reads the "Sketch-book" knows; and once having set foot onSpanish historical _terra firma_, he began a journey as a travelermight. America led Irving to Columbus, Columbus led him to Spain, Spain led him to Mohammedism, and Mohammedism led him to Mohammed. Hownatural his literary travels! Consider the consecutiveness of hishistorical attempts: "Life of Columbus, " "Spanish Voyages, " "Conquestof Grenada, " "Conquest of Spain, " "Moorish Chronicles, " and "Life ofMohammed. " The influence of this historical research, too, you shallfind in reading his romances: "Wolfert's Roost, " "Legends of theConquest of Spain, " "Bracebridge Hall, " and "Alhambra. "

Patriotism taught Irving's Clio to find her voice. Nor must we forget, in any estimate of Irving's service, his biography of Washington. Thisis his tribute to the battle-days of his beloved America. 

In strict affinity with Irving in the time of his history is Prescott. This man is a distinguished historian. To history he devoted his life, and to such effect that he is to be ranked among the masters of historyamong the ages. America attracted him as it had attracted Irving. Theera of the discovery enticed him as the voyage had enticed Columbus. "Ferdinand and Isabella" are the dominant voices on his stage. Irvingmade them subordinate, and made Columbus the chief player, which modePrescott reverses. The union of Castile and Aragon, and the subsequentwars against the Moriscoes, which virtually put the knife in theirheart and concluded that triumph which had been begun by Charles Martelat Tours, is an attractive portion of history. In Prescott, as inMotley, is a wealth of research which fairly bewilders. Nothing isextemporaneous. Archives are ransacked. Moldy correspondence is madeto tell its belated story. Certainly Prescott is abundant ininformation. I do not recall, save in Gibbon's, a series of historieswhere so much new knowledge is retailed as in Prescott. In seeminglooseness of phrase, I have used the term "new knowledge, " but thesewords are happily descriptive of "Conquest of Mexico" and "Conquest ofPeru, " because the fields were practically untrodden to the ordinaryreader. Everything is new, like a college to the freshman. We see aNew World in more senses than one. The freshness of the facts isexhilarating. We march with Cortes; we conquer with Pizarro; weinspect Montezuma's palace; we become interested in the industrialsystem of the Incas, a system which should have given Henry George andEdward Bellamy a delight without alloy; we perceive the incrediblevalor and perseverance and endurance of Cortes; we front "new faces, other minds;" we discover the Amazon through perils and hardships somultitudinous and so severe as to tempt us to think these narrations amyth; we see rapacity insatiable as death, a bloody idol-worshippitiless and terrible; we read Prescott's history with growing avidityand increasing information; read Prescott, and become wiser concerningthe aborigines of the Americas and the possibilities of human fortitudeand prowess. A study of the Spanish era of discovery and conquestnaturally led to a study of Charles V, grandson of Ferdinand andIsabella, and Prescott has accordingly brought up to date "Robertson'sLife of Charles V, " appending a biography of Charles V subsequent tohis abdication; and as a certificate of indefatigable industry inhistorical research is an incomplete but exhaustive memoir, entitled, "The Life of Philip II. " This work is written with such fairness ofspirit and such wealth of information and investigation, such vividpresentation of a reign which had more of the movement of the universaldominion than any since the Roman days, and thus written so as to makeus rebellious in spirit in finding the work incomplete. Death came toosoon to give our indefatigable author time to complete his voluminoushistory. Read Prescott as a matter of American pride, and because hehas dealt more capably with the era with which he treats than any otherhistorian. 

The United States has supplied her own historians, not needing to goabroad for either history or historian. George Bancroft, with aprivate library larger by almost half than the ten thousand-volumelibrary Edward Gibbon used in writing "The Decline and Fall of theRoman empire;" George Bancroft, whose literary life was dedicated toone task, and that the writing the life of his country prior to theConstitution; George Bancroft, publicist as well as student of history, and who in such relation represented his Government with distinction atthe courts of Germany and England, --George Bancroft has written ahistory of the United States which will no more become archaic thanMacaulay or Grote. While one may now and then hear from the lips ofthe so-called "younger school of American historians" a criticism ofGeorge Bancroft, their carping is ungracious and gratuitous. Theirshas not been the art to equal him, nor will be. A literary lifedevoted to the mastery of one era of a nation's history is a worthysight, good for the eyes, and arguing sanity of method and profundityof investigation. Whoever has read Bancroft can testify to hisreadableness, to his comprehensive knowledge, to his philosophicalgrasp, to his ability to make dead deeds vividly visible, and to hisgift of interesting the reader in events and their philosophy. He haswritten a great history of the United States before the Constitution, so that no author has felt called on or equipped to reduplicate histask in the same detail and manner. 

Where George Bancroft left off, Schouler has begun. More dramatic thanBancroft, and in consequence more compelling in interest, the historymarches at a double-quick, like a charging regiment. His pictures ofJohn Quincy Adams, Calhoun, Clay, Webster, Sumner, Douglas, Lincoln, and a host beside, vitalize those men. We live with that giant brood. I have found Schouler invigoratingly helpful. He affords knowledge andinspiration; a man is behind his pages; we feel him and acknowledge him. 

One change has come over the spirit of history to which all must bearjoyful witness, and that is the passing of the king and the advent ofthe people. The world has grown more democratic than it knows. Thepeople engage attention now. We do not know so much of Queen Victoria;but of the conquering, splendid race whose hereditary sovereign she is, we know much, very much. The case used to be wholly otherwise, thesovereign monopolizing attention; but that day is passed. So let itbe. This change is one needed, and waited for long, and longed foreagerly. John Richard Green saw the demonetization of kings and aremonetization of the people, and so wrote a revolutionary history, calling it "A History of the English People, " in which he subordinatedthe intrigues of courts and the selfish wars of potentates to the quietgrowth of national spirit and the characteristics of domestic life, andthe development and solidification of social instincts into socialcustoms, and the framing of a literature, the reformation of religion, and the direction of the thought of the many. These constituted, as hebelieved, and as we believe, the genuine biography of a people; andMcMaster has done for the United States what Green has done forEngland. His "History of the People of the United States" is so packedwith knowledge; so accurate in laying hold of those things which we didnot know, but wanted to know; so free in giving us the inside life ofour country, as to make us wonder what we did before our historian ofthe people came to lend us knowledge. My conviction is, that a carefulreading of McMaster will suffice to cure most of our dyspeptic feelingsabout national discontent in our time, and dispel the fabulous notionof an older time in America, when everybody was happy and everybody wascontented. No such day ever existed. The kingdom of contentment iswithin us, like the kingdom of God. McMaster tells us the unvarnishedtale of inflation and political and financial asininity in the formerdays, so that when he is done we are less liable to that frailty of theignorant soul; namely, the moaning, "The former days were better thanthese. "

Thus far, those authors have been named who have chronicled thediscovery of America, the conquering of the Southern Hemisphere or theEastern territory of that era known as the United States. This wasdone to keep a natural movement and logical progress. At this point, however, must be mentioned those voluminous histories of the States andTerritories of the Pacific Coast, written by H. H. Bancroft. They aretreasure-houses of material for the future historian. Hubert Bancrofthas become the historian of the Spanish dominion in the United States, and deserves favorable thought for his wealth of research into archiveswhich might have been lost, or at least less ample with the advance oftime. Topography, geography, archaeology. State papers, --all havecontributed their quota to him, and he has, after the generous mannerof the scholar, contributed to us. 

Francis Parkman is a distinguished master in the art of history. Histheme is the "American Indian" and the "French Occupancy of America, "and he has told a thrilling story. He knows the Indian as no one ofour historians has known him, and has told of his noble traits, and hisruthless forays, and his sanguine cruelty. His utter lack of thrift;his feast-and-famine life; his stealth, stolidity, duplicity, andferocity, --all are rehearsed. To read his record of the Indian is tohave much of the glamour thrown around him by James Fenimore Cooperstripped from him incontinently and forever. The Indian wasself-exterminative. He was the assassin of his race, and civilizationwas impossible so long as the American Indian was dominant; so thatthose who shed tears over the white man's conquest of the Indian maynot well have weighed their cause. The Indian was not the quiet, inoffensive innocent presented in Cuba at its discovery. There wereIndians and Indians. Some of them were friendly, peaceful, and kindly;but that this was the character of the American Indian as a whole istotally incorrect. Parkman shows that the Indian was, throughout NorthAmerica, in his native strength furious in his ferocity, relentless asdeath, cruel beyond imagination, and occupied a territory he neithercultivated nor attempted to. The Indians were military vagabonds, whose continued control had left America an unpeopled wilderness tothis day. Huntsmen and warriors they were; citizens and cultivatorsand civilizers they were not, and never would have been. Parkman tellsthe truth as history found them, and those truths are well worth ourreading, because in their perusal we pass from sentimentality toreason, and see how this America of our day, rich, cultivated, civilized, and possessed of the largest amount of personal liberty evervouchsafed to a citizen, is a noble exchange for the thoughtlessness, improvidence, and barbarity which were original holders of this realm. Speaking for myself, no author ever helped me to knowledge of thecharacter of the aborigines of North America as Francis Parkman hasdone. I see that wild past, and feel it. And he has written thethrilling story of the French attempt to build an empire; and theattempt was courageous to the verge of wonder. There was in theFrenchman a careless ease and courage and sprightliness of temper, which lifted him above danger, as a boat is lifted on a billow'sshoulders. Those perils were his drink; with a laugh and a jest he methis appointment with death as he would have met tryst with a woman. In"The Romance of American Geography, " I have described the genius of theFrench voyager, for which I have an unbounded admiration, and in whichI take an intemperate delight. He is the discoverer at his best, butthe colonizer at his worst. The Jesuits had a brave chapter in theFrench occupancy. Their labors and sufferings and voyagings, theirfealty to what they thought to be the cause of God, makes us proud ofthem, as if they were our own fellow-citizens. The settlement ofMontreal and Quebec and contiguous territory, the religious fervor thatmixed with the military spirit as waters of two streams mingle in amountain-meadow, --read Parkman, and discover the dramatic instincts ofthese episodes which can be rehearsed no more upon our continent. Their day is past; but it was a great and stirring day. GilbertParker's "The Seats of the Mighty" is a chapter, torn from Parkman's"French Regime in Canada. " All his facts and the romance are accurate, and are taken from Parkman's narrative, which misses nothing, but tellsall. Parker's "Pierre and his People, " and "An Adventure of the North"are tales of adventure, dewy with the freshness of a frontier world, and are in brief a section of the old French voyagers' days. Parkman's"Wolfe and Montcalm" is a picture, painted in smoke and blood, whereheroism of Englishmen and Frenchmen mix themselves in an inextricableconfusion. Pray you read Parkman, and be transported to a world wheregreat deeds were done by men whose lives were as contradictory as anApril day; but "their works do follow them" for all that, and doglorify them. Be glad for Francis Parkman, historian. 

Many historians there are. John Fiske has written chapters on thediscovery and colonization days; Rhodes has written on ourConstitutional history; Winsor has written on our antiquities; Bairdhas written an exhaustive and competent history of the Huguenots, aseries one will do more than well to read. Many scholars have writtencomparatively brief memoirs of the United States. Localities andStates and single villages have had their historians; but thecommanding figures whose faces fill the canvas, so to say, --of themthis appreciation is written, to point youth to an Oregon of delight, where their leisure may stray with abundant profit and increasingpleasure, and, as I hope, with growing pride in American literature, sothat they may make mental boast of America's sons, who have been stanchto enjoy and study the history of their own native land. 

My final word is of that brilliant, irascible, and impressibleAmerican, John Lothrop Motley, historian of the Dutch Republic; andfitting it is that a native of the first great stable Republic wasdrawn to study the European Republic which rose at the touch of Williamthe Silent's genius, and sank back into lethargy of kingship when theblood of the tragic and heroic inauguration was all spilt. The contactof the United Netherlands with American history and future is known toall. From the Netherlands the Puritans set sail to found what provedto be a colony and Republic. The extent to which the Netherlandsexercised an influence in shaping the future of the AmericanCommonwealth has not been determined, and can not be, though DouglasCampbell has maintained that to the Dutch, and not to the EnglishPuritan, nor yet to the Magna Charta, does the American Republic oweits chief debt. The theme is productive and stimulative and worthy, though the facts are indeterminate. America is attached to the DutchRepublic as a bold attempt whose failure was nobler than manysuccesses. The Puritan exodus from Holland, when Pastor John Robinsonprayed, preached, and prophesied, is one of the most thrilling eventsrecorded of the seventeenth century--a century crowded with doings thatthrill the flesh like a bugle-call. 

Motley's histories are "The Rise of the Dutch Republic, " "The UnitedNetherlands, " and "John of Barneveld, " a series which, for brilliancyof characterization of men and times and events, and intereststimulated and held, may rank, without hyperbole, with the writings ofLord Macaulay. Both are always special pleaders, as I am of opinionhistory ought probably to be, seeing that it is human nature, and will, in all but solitary instances, be the case whether or no; both arefascinating as a romancist; both are colorists, gorgeous as Rembrandt;both glorify and make you admire and love their heroes, whether you areso minded or not; both have made the epoch of which they wrote vivid asthe landscape upon which the sunset pours its crimson dyes. Motley'shero was William the Silent, Prince of Orange; and Macaulay's hero wasWilliam III, King of England, Prince of Orange. Motley will bear beingranked as a great historian. He hates Philip II, as I suppose goodfolks ought who despise egotism, intolerance, vindictiveness, andhorrible cruelty. He lauds William the Silent as soldier andstatesman, Prince Maurice as a soldier, and John of Barneveld asstatesman. Motley marches across old battle-fields like a soldier cladin steel. He gives portraits of Queen Elizabeth, of Leicester, ofGranvelle, of Prince Maurice, of John of Barneveld, of Henry ofNavarre, of Philip II, of Count Egmont, of Charles V, of Don John ofAustria, of Hugo Grotius, and of William the Silent, which are as nobleas the portraits painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds. I confess myself aheavy debtor to Motley. He has taught me so much; has familiarized mewith the great world-figure, William the Silent, so that I feel at homewith him and his struggle, and participate with him in them. He hasdrawn so clearly the figures of Romanist, Arminian, and Calvinist, asto make them fairly glow upon his pages. Not as minister to St. James, under President Grant, was Motley at his best; but rifling the archivesof Holland and Spain with an industry which knew no bounds, andrehearsing the dry-as-dust discoveries in histories that glow like afurnace. Here is the field in which he is all but unconquerable. Longlive the American historians!

IX

King Arthur

Perhaps no reader of the world's literature would deny that letters andlife had been indefinitely enriched by Alfred Tennyson. 

How ideas affect life when once they have become participants thereinis the bar at which all ideas must stand for judgment. Carbonic-acidgas enters the lungs, fills them, and blows out the lamp of life. Common air enters the lungs, crimsons the blood, exhilarates thespirit, gives elasticity to step and thought and pulse; is health, andpours oil into the lamp of life whereby the flame burns higher, likewatch-fires on evening hills. One air brought death; one air broughtmore abundant life. What do ideas effect, and how do they affect himwho entertains them is the final question and the final test. Now, ourearth is always trying to grow men. Not harvests nor flowers norforests, but man, is what the earth is proudest of. On transparentJune days, standing upon the cliffs of the Isle of Man, I have seen thegolden wheatfields on the hills of Wales; but heaven, looking earth'sway, is oblivious to our tossing plumes of corn or tawny billows of thefields of wheat. Heaven's concern is in our crop of manhood; and shipsthat ply between the shores of earth and shores of heaven are neverladen with gold or silver ingots, as Spanish galleons were, nor withglancing silks nor burning gems, but are forever freighted with electspirits. Men and women are the commodity earth grows that heaven wants. 

What helps the growth of man is good; what hurts the growth of man isbad. When one has become a shadow, lost to human eyes, test him withthis acid. Did he do good? If he did evil, let his name perish; if hedid good, let his name blaze in the galaxy among the inextinguishablestars. If he has made the growth of manhood easier and its method moreapparent; if he has opened eyes to see the best, and spurred men toattempt the best they saw; if he has enamored them of virtue asaforetime they were enamored of vice, --trust me, that man was good. Hewill endure, and be passed from age to age, like rare traditionsthrough centuries, till time shall die. Submit Alfred Tennyson to thistest. Is virtue more apparent, more lovely, and of more luxuriantgrowth, like tropic forests, because of him? But one answer ispossible, and that answer is, "King Arthur. " To our moral riches, Victor Hugo added "Jean Valjean;" Dickens, "Sidney Carton;" Thackeray, "Colonel Newcome;" Browning, "Caponsacchi;" Tennyson, "King Arthur, "who stands and will stand as Tennyson's vision of manhood at its prime. 

The theme of this paper, then, is "King Arthur, " being a philosophy ofmanhood as outlined by Alfred Tennyson; and the purpose of this essayis to bring into vital relation to King Arthur the totality of argumentfor manhood which Tennyson has constructed in his cycle of poems, thustaking into our field of vision, not simply "The Idyls of the King, "adequate as they may be, but, in addition, "Enoch Arden, " "Ulysses, ""The Vision of Sin, " "The Palace of Art, " "Maud, " "Columbus, " "LocksleyHall, " "The Lotos-Eaters, " and "In Memoriam, " and all poems which, bynegation or affirmation, may suggest or enforce a thought regarding thefurnishing of the soul. 

In those idyls clustering about King Arthur, Tennyson has patentlypurposed painting the figure of a perfect man. How well he hasexecuted his design depends on himself much, on the beholder much. Onlookers differ in opinion. Painters have their clientage. Poets arenot omniscient; neither are we, a thing we are prone to forget. Formyself, I confess not to see with those who deride the king, nor yetwith those who think him statuesque, as if shaped, not out of flesh, but out of marble. He is not incredible, nor is he a shadow, stalkinggaunt and battle-clad across the crags that fringe the Cornish sea. Not a few among us approximate perfection in character as blameless asArthur's. I myself profess to have seen a King Arthur, and to haveheld high converse with him through many years. Whiteness of life isnot an episode foreign to biography. There are many lives runningwhite toward heaven as I have seen a path across the moonlit sea. Notto be credulous is well; not to be incredulous is better, when heavenlyvisions and heavenly incarnations are the theme. This is affirmed, that King Arthur is not more unreal than others Tennyson delineates. His art lacks the power to flood his people's veins with blood toplethora, with such bounding vitality as marks Shakespeare's creations. They lack, sometimes, color on the cheek and lip and sunlight in theeyes. His characters are as if seen in mist. Our failing is, we givecredence to fleshly instinct and lust and failure in ideal more readilythan to wise manliness and stalwart and heroic worth. But Enoch Ardenis no dream. Arthur is no myth. I know a man whose heart is as pure, whose conduct as above reproach, and whose words are as big withcharity, and thoughts as foreign to hypocrisy, as Arthur's were; forArthur is not dead. They did not dream who said, "Arthur returns. " Hehides his name, lest he become spectacular, a raree-show, for mobs tofollow and shout hoarse about; but he is here. I met him yesterday;and to-morrow I shall walk with him by the river, where the streammakes music, and the trees sing in minors, and the shadows darken onthe grass. 

What, then, is this Arthur's character? Looking at him as he sitsastride his steed, yonder at Camelot, with his visor up, he is seenmanhood at its prime. A ruddy face, with beard of gold, holding thesun as harvests do. Tourneys done, the king is turned battleward, where he is to die; and a man's picture comes to have special value athis death. When the wounded king is borne by Bedivere across theechoing crags toward the black funeral barge, we see him again, full inthe face, and remember him always. 

King Arthur was a self-made man. His birth was held to be uncertain. "Is he Uther's son?" was on many a lip. So men yet sometimes hold tosome poor question of ancestry when worth, evident as light, frontsthem. Some there are who live in so narrow a mood as to ask always"Where?" and never "What?" when the latter is God's unvarying method ofestimation. This quest for ancestry for Arthur is of service to us asshowing he had not empire ready to his hand. His kingdom did not makehim; he made his kingdom; or, to give the entire history, he madehimself and his kingdom. And this is oft-repeated history. When a manmakes a kingdom, he first made himself. He does two things. Mightgoes not single, loves not solitude, but makes itself company. Miltonmade himself before he made the Bible epic of the world. He wroughthimself and his complex history into his Iliad of heavenly battle. Souls have, in a true sense, a beaten path to tread. There is ahighway worn to ruts and dust by travel of the great men's feet. AndArthur had much company, if he knew it not. Such men seem alone, though if they saw all their companionships they would know they walkedon in a goodly company and great. Greatness has many fellowships, asstars have; and stars have fellowship of mountains and woods, andkindred stars, and waters where star-shadows lie, and oceans wheregalaxies tumble like defeated angels. All greatness is self-made. Names are bequeathed us, so much is borrowed. Character and value areself-made. Gold has intrinsic worth. Man has not, but makes his worthby the day's labor of his hands. 

This provision is God's excellent antidote to dissatisfaction withone's estate. If worth could be handed down, like name or fortune, onemight as well be a pasture-field, to pass from hand to hand as chattel, instead of man. Far otherwise God's plan. Each spirit works out, andmust work out, his own destiny. Destinies are not ready-made buthand-made. King Arthur's fame is not dependent on his ancestry, but onhimself. Ancestry we can not control; self we can. Tennyson, thoughpart of a hereditary system, sees with perfect clearness how ancestryaccounts for no man, and how every man must make his own room in theworld; how nobility depends, not on a family's past, but on theindividual's present; how wealth and service are the credentials ofcharacter society will accept, and the only credentials. This view isscarcely English, but is fully American. And Tennyson was notsympathetic with America. Democracies possessed not the flavor of thefruit he loved. When, however, the biography of greatness is to bewritten, who writes the story, if he write it truly, must tell a storyof democracy. Tennyson is unconscious democrat when he writes Arthur'sbiography, because as poet he saw. His intuitions led him. He spoke, not as a lover of a certain social and political system, but as adiscerner of spirits. The poet is not his best as a plannedphilosophizer; for in that role he becomes self-conscious; but is athis best when the wheel of his burning spirit, revolving as the planetsdo, throws off sparks or streams of fire. To the accuracy of thisobservation witness both Browning and Tennyson. When they were"possessed, " as the Delphic oracle would say, they marched toward truthlike an invincible troop. Truth seemed the missing half of their ownsphere, toward which, by a subtle and lordly gravitation, they swung. When Tennyson's instincts speak, he is democrat; when his reason andhis prejudice (for he was surcharged with both) speak, he is hotaristocrat. When he is biographer for royal Arthur, his instinctspeaks, and his conviction holds that character and deeds do and shallcount for more than blood; and this is no isolated idea advancedtouching Arthur, but is prevalent throughout his verse. In "Lady ClaraVere de Vere, " his heart speaks, full of eagerness, saying:

 "Howe'er it be, it seems to me, 'T is only noble to be good. Kind hearts are more than coronets, And simple faith than Norman blood. "

Nor is the Laureate's subsequent acceptance of the peerage a retractionof these earlier sentiments; for he did but accept the ribbon of anorder which was part of the political system of his native land. Himself was self-made. Who were the Tennysons? Who are the Tennysons?He made a house. And in the list of lords, does any one think there isa name whose device one would rather wear than that of Lord Tennyson?Holland has this bit of verse, whose application is apparent:

 "Heaven is not reached at a single bound; But we build the ladder by which we rise From the lowly earth to the vaulted skies, And mount to its summit round by round. "

Genius does the same. The stairs each generation climbed are rotten atits death, so that no foot's weight can be borne upon them afterward. Man builds his own stairway greatnessward. In the Idyl of the King, entitled "Gareth and Lynette, " is application of this thought ofmanhood above title or name or blood. Worth, the main thing, is thetheme of the idyl. 

Hear Gareth call, like voice of trumpets, "Let be my name; until I make my name My deeds will speak. "

He seemed, and was not, a kitchen knave. He seemed not, and he was, aknight of valor and of purity and might, of purpose and of succor. Silly Lynette might rain her superficial insults on him like a winter'ssleet--this hindered not his service. He knew to wait, and dare, anddo. His fame was in him. A great life bears not its honors on itsback, as mountains do their pines, but in his heart, as women do theirlove. In Tennyson's concept of manhood, worth counts, not rank. Tothis argument, words from "In Memoriam" are a contribution:

 "As some divinely-gifted man, Whose life in low estate began And on a simple village green;

 Who breaks his birth's invidious bar, And grasps the skirts of happy chance, And breasts the blows of circumstance, And grapples with his evil star;

 Who makes by force his merit known, And lives to clutch the golden keys, To mold a mighty State's decrees, And shape the whisper of the throne;

 And moving on from high to higher, Becomes on Fortune's crowning slope The pillar of a people's hope, The center of a world's desire. "

Such words seem as if fallen from the lips of Lincoln in a dream. "Aylmer's Field" is a protest, written in grief and tears and bloodagainst the iniquity of ancestry as divorced from the pure course ofnobler love. God made of one blood all kindreds of the earth, andmeans to mix this blood till time shall die. Hearts give scant heed toheraldry. Life is wider than a baron's field. Arthur Hallam, whoseepitaph is the sweetest ever written, and bears title of "InMemoriam, "--Arthur Hallam, so greatly loved and missed, was nevernobleman in genealogy, but was full prince in youth and ideality andpurity and genius and promise, worth more than all the ancestries ofburied kings. More: Tennyson was as much self-made as King Arthur. Hemade a house which rose to the sound of poet's lute, rehearsing, in ourdays, the story of Orpheus in the remote yesterdays. So myths come tobe history. And who would not rather be author of "The Lotos-Eaters, "and "Oenone, " and "Ulysses, " and "Enoch Arden, " and "In Memoriam" thanto have been possessed, with Sir Aylmer Aylmer, of

 "Spacious hall, Hung with a hundred shields, the family tree Sprung from the midriff of a prostrate king?"

King Arthur's knights were _novi viri_. Whence came Lancelot andGeraint and Sir Percivale? And how came they, save as

 "Rising on their dead selves To higher things?"

Arthur, at whose back march all the legions of Tennyson's poetrycelebrative of manhood, --Arthur asserts the nobleness of manhood, irrespective of the accidents of wealth or birth. Many scenes inTennyson are taken from the cottage. "The May Queen, " "The Gardener'sDaughter, " "The Grandmother, " "Rizpah, " and, above all, "Enoch Arden, "are poems showing how poetry dwells in the hearts of common folks. Theverse of books they may not know; the verse of sentiment they are athome with. Birth is not a term in the proportion of worth; and I holdArthur one of the strongest voices of our century assertive of thesufficiency of manhood. Self-made and greatly made was this king atCamelot. 

King Arthur was optimist. He expected good in men, was not suspicious. "Interpreting others by his own pure heart, " you interject, "He wasduped. " The harlot Vivien called him fool, and despised him; but shewas fallen, shameful, treacherous, and, what was worse, so fallen asnot to see the beauty in untarnished manhood, which is the last sign ofturpitude. Many bad men have still left an honest admiration for agoodness themselves are alien to. Vivien was so lost as that goodness, manhood, knightliness, sweet and tall as mountain pines, made no appealto her. Filth is dearer to some than mountain air. She was such. Afallen woman, given over to her fall, is horrible in depravity. Merlinsaw that her estimate of Arthur was the measure of herself. BeatrixEsmond did not appreciate Henry Esmond; for the Pretender was hermeasure of soul. Though to her praise be it said that, in her old age, Esmond dead, she thought of him as women think of Christ. Arthurbelieved in men, supposing them to be transcripts of himself; and in sodoing in details, he erred. His philosophy of goodness was erroneous;for he held to the theory of goodness by environment, fencing knightsand ladies about with his own fine honor and chastity, supposing pureenvironment would make them pure, forgetting how God's kingdom isalways within. Environment is not gifted to make men good. Arthurbelieved men pure, nor was he wholly wrong. The men about him gave thelie to his expectation; but these moral ragamuffins did not invalidatethe king's faith. The road taken was not the world. Lancelot andGuinevere and Gawain and Modred, false? False! Pelleas, seeingEttarre lustful and untrue, digging rowels into his steed and crying, "False! false!" was not wise as Arthur. The optimist is right. Somewere false, 't is true; but others were true as crystal streams, thatall night long give back the heavens star for star. There were and aretrue men and women. Our neighborhood, if so be it is foul, is not theearth. Enid, and Elaine, and Sir Galahad, and Sir Percivale, andGareth, and others not designated, were pure. Snows on city streetsare stained with soot and earth; snows on the mountains are as white aswoven of the beams of noon. King Arthur, expecting the better of theworld, in so doing followed the example of his Savior, Christ, who wasmost surely optimist. King Arthur, in his midnight hour, when knightand wife and Lancelot deserted him, when his "vast pity almost made himdie, " still kept the lamp of hope aflame and sheltered from the wind, lest it flame, flare, and die. His fool still loved him and claspedhis feet; and bold Sir Bedivere staid with him through the thundershock of that last battle in the west. Not all were false. Somefriends abide. Though his application was not always wise, hisattitude was justified. Having done his part, he had not beenbetrayed; for he was still victor. Lancelot and Guinevere weredefeated, ruined, as were Gawain and Ettarre, who, as they wake, findacross their naked throats the bare sword of Pelleas; then Ettarre knewwhat knight was knightly. Goodness wins in the long battle, thoughsupposed defeated in the petty frays, Tennyson makes his ideal man anoptimist. "Maud" is a study in pessimism. The lover's blood istainted with insanity. He raves, is suspicious, is at war with allthings and all men; rails at the social system, not from any broadsympathy with better things, but from a strident selfishness, raspingand self-proclamatory, lacking elevation, save as his love puts wingsbeneath him for a moment and lifts him, as eagles billow up theiryoung; is weak, and tries to cover weakness up by ranting. We pity, then despise him, then pity him once more, and in sheer charity thinkhim raving mad. Stand Maud's lover alongside King Arthur, and howsplendid does King Arthur look! The lover was pessimist and wrong;Arthur was optimist and, in his temper, right. Though hacked at by thecareless or vicious swords of cumulating hatreds, underestimations, selfishness, and lewdness of lesser and cruder souls, knowing, as hedid, how God is on goodness' side, knew, therefore, who is on God'sside keeps hope in good, believing better things. Those who, thinkingthemselves shrewd, and are perennially suspicious, do really lack inshrewdness, lacking depth. The far view is the serene view. Pelleas, too, is a study in lost faith. He was near-sighted in his moral life, and so, in losing faith in Ettarre, lost faith in womanhood, aconclusion not justified from the premises; and you hear him in thewild night, crying as beasts of the desert cry, and what he hisses asyou pass is, "I have no sword. " Arthur kept his sword till time cameto give it back to the "arm clothed in white samite. " He threw not hissword away until his hand could hold it no longer. Hands and swordsmust keep company while life and strength remain, and who breaks orthrows sword away from sheer despair has lost sight of duty, in so farthat our business is to do battle valiantly and constantly forrighteousness, and keep the sword at play in spite of dubiouscircumstances. Battles are often on the point of being won when theylook on the point of being lost, as was the case with Pelleas, whosehope died just at the hour when hope ought to have begun shoutsbefitting triumph; for that night when he lay his naked sword acrossEttarre's naked neck, she, waking and finding whose sword was lying, like a mad menace, on her breast, recovered her womanhood, loved theknight, who came and went, and slew her not, as his right was, andloved him to her death; while he, the cause of her reformation, swungthrough the gloomy night with faith and courage lost. He should haveheld his faith, however his trust in one had been shamed and sunk. Faith in one snuffed out is not in logic to lose faith; for all aremore than one. Trust Arthur; he was right. Pessimism is no sane mood. All history conspires to justify his attitude. Himself inspiresoptimism in us, and the three queens wait for him, and the blackfuneral barge that bears him, not to his funeral, but to some fair citywhere there seems one voice, and that a voice of welcome to this king;and besides all this, his name lights our nights till now, as if hewere some sun, pre-empting night as well as day. Has not his optimismbeen justified a hundred-fold? Do those who view the present only, think to see all the landscape where deeds reap victories? Time is soessential in the propagandism of good. Time is the foe of evil, butsworn ally of good. God owns the future. 

King Arthur considered life a chance for service. Life is noabstraction, no theoretical science; rather concrete, experimental. Magician Merlin's motto, too. We may think _or_ act, though this ofconduct. We may think or act, though this disjunctive is wrong, whollywrong. [Transcriber's note: Something seems to have gone wrong withthe typesetting of the previous three sentences. The first sentencemakes no sense, and the second two both start with the same sevenwords. ] There is no separation between act and thought in a wiseestimate. They are not enemies, but friends. We are to think _and_act. We are, in a word, not to dream or do, but dream and do, thedreaming being prelude to the doing. Who dreams not is metallic. Dreams redeem deeds from being stereotyped, and make motions sinuousand graceful as a bird's flight across the sky; and when theyimpregnate conduct, deed becomes instinct with a melody thrilling andsweet as a wood-thrush note. Arthur was no mystic. He did not dwellapart from men; he was a part of men. "The Mystic" is an admirableconception of the soul, living remote from society and action, seeingour world as through a smoke. Mysticism has its truth and power. Manyof us bluster and do, and do not stand apart and dwell enough with theunseen. 

 "Always there stood before him, night and day, The imperishable presences serene, One mighty countenance of perfect calm, "

And

 "Angels have talked with him and showed him thrones. "

So much in him is needed to a soul hungry to be fortified for danger, duty, manliness. Despise not a mystic's brooding, but recall thatbrooding is not terminal; that he who broods alone has left lifewearying around him as he found it, while his need was to change thecircumambient air of thought and action into something better than itwas; and for such change he must associate him with the lives he fainwould help. Arthur brooded and dreamed, and saw the Christ, and thenconceived his worthiest service to be to interpret the What he heardand Whom he saw to men; and in pursuance of such purpose he lived withknights, ladies, soldiers, and countrymen. Him they saw and knew. "St. Simeon Stylites" is an application of another side of the samethought. Heroism is in this pillar saint, but a mistaken heroism. Hestands, "A sign betwixt the meadow and the cloud. "

But to what purpose? Hear him call, "I smote them with the cross, "

and feel assured from such a word that he who spoke, had he been wherethe battle raged, had left his stroke on many a shield; for his wordshave the crash of a Crusader's ax. What a loss it was to men that St. Simeon came not down from his pillar, clothed himself, made himselfclean and wholesome, instead of filthy and revolting, and dwelt withpeople for whom Christ died. A religious recluse is a religiousignoramus, since he does not know that the one-syllable word in thevocabulary of Christ is, "Be of use. " The problem of living, as Arthursaw vividly, was not how to get yourself through the world unhurt, buthow to do the most for some one besides yourself while you are in theworld; and this attitude is otherness, altruism. Nurture strength touse. Pass your might on. Knighthood was to serve everybody elsefirst, after the fashion of the Founder of knighthood, even Christ, "who came, not to be ministered unto, but to minister. " King Arthurserved. Play battles stung him not to prowess, but, as Lancelot saw, in the actual battle, the hero was not Lancelot, but Arthur. May be atoo deep seriousness was in him. I think it probable. He had beenmore masterful in wielding men had he been colored more by laughter andjest. We must not take ourselves, nor yet the world, with toocontinuous seriousness. There are intervals between battles whenwarriors may rest, and intervals in the stress of deeds and sorrowwhere room is given for the caress and wholesome jest. Thatarch-jester, Jack Falstaff, had much reason with him. We like him, despite himself, and despite ourselves, because there was in him suchcomradery. Though he was boisterous, yet was he jovial. Allcharacters, save Christ, have limitations. Arthur had his. Lack ofsprightliness was his mistake and lack. But the work to be done fillshim with might unapproachable, so that, "Like fire, he meets the foe, And strikes him dead for thine and thee. "

He is no play soldier, and foemen mark his sword as a thing to fear. Amutilated herdsman, rushing into Caerlaen, and shaking bloody storyfrom his hideous wounds, which, Arthur hearing, though a tourneymentwould blow its bugles on the plain erelong, forgets the coming joust, remembering only a wrong to be avenged, and evil-doers to be punishedor destroyed, so they may no longer be a noxious presence in the land, and goes, and at tourney's close comes back, through the dark night, wet with rain; but he has cleansed the hostile land of villains on thatday. In human nature is a bias to escape the world, to get out of theturmoil, to seek cloisters of quiet, which bias "The Holy Grail"attacks. Arthur was no friend to the pursuit of the grail; not that heloves not, with a passion white as sun's flame, the good and pure, butthat he has sagacity to see such quest will scatter the round table andits fellowship, and would dispeople his forces, whose presence makesfor peace and sovereignty in all his realm and compels the sovereigntyof law. Him, their king, these errant knights heeded not, so enticingand noble seemed the warfare they espoused, and thought their sovereigncold and calculating, while, in fact, he knew them for visionaries. Hewas right. Without them he was bankrupt in strength to compel socialbetterment. The visionary, in so far as he is simply visionary, is foeto progress; for progress comes by battle and by association inaffairs, and he who would be helper to the better life of man must mixwith the currents of his time. Snowdrifts in the mountains and on thenorthern slopes that hold snows in their shadows for the summer's use;and dark mountain meadows, where fogs and rains soak every particle ofsod, and waters percolate through the spongy root and soil to formbubbling streams; and the pines, whose shadows make a cool retreatwhere streams may not be drained dry by the sun; the silver threads oftributary brooks; the sponge of mountain mosses, which squeezes its cupof water into a larger laver, --all these seem remote from the broadriver on whose flood merchants' fleets are slumbering, nor seemparticipants with these floodgates to the sea; yet are they adjuncts, though so far removed, and pay their tribute to the flood. 

Their service was as pronounced and valuable as if they had been hugeas Orontes. There is an absence which is presence, and there is apresence which is absence; and what is asked of all men, near or far, is that they be helpers to the general good. They must not, by intentor mistake, escape their share of the public burden. 

A poet seems apart, and is not, but is to be esteemed a portion of thisworld's most turbulent life. To intend to have a share in this world'sbusiness is important. To shun the taking up your load when need is, is to be coward when your honor bids you be courageous. This means, bea citizen, neglect no office in that worthy relation; be not wanderingknights, pursuing fire-flies, supposing them to be stars; but be asArthur, who found the Holy Grail, and drained its sacramental wine intruest fashion, in "staying by the stuff;" in being statesman, soldier, defender of the weak, reformer, liver of a clean life in public place, builder of a State, negotiator of schemes which make for the diminutionof earth's ills and increase of earth's fairer provinces. Edward theConfessor was a monk, wearing a king's crown and refusing to dischargea king's offices, and thought himself a saint by such omission, whenwhat God and the realm wanted and needed was a man to rule and sufferfor the common weal. Arthur was not a thing "enskied and sainted;"rather a wholesome man, whose duty lay in working for men. SirPercivale became a monk; other knights returned no mote, thus spillingthe best blood of the table round. Meantime the king's enemiesmultiplied, and these visionaries decimated the ranks of opposition tothe wrong; but come what would, King Arthur served. An appeal to himfor help found answer, though treasons plotted at his back. As to hislast battle, though his heart was breaking, he marched nor paused, perceiving, so long as he was king, he must uphold the order of theState. He was no dilettante. Great service called him, and he thoughthe heard the voice of God. Duty is a ponderous word in Arthur'slexicon. In "Lucretius, " Tennyson shows the moral apathy ofmaterialism by letting us look on at a suicidal death, and hear thecry, half-rage and half-despair, "What is duty?" and in that fated cry, atheism has run its course. Here it empties into its dead sea, andmaterialism finds its only possible outcome. This materialist of longago is the mouthpiece for his fraters in these last days. There is onespeech, and that a speech of dull despair, for those who say there isno God; and for them who have no God, there is no duty, for duty isborn of hold on God. King Arthur, sure of God, therefore never asking, "What is duty?" but in its stead urges the nobler query, "Where isduty?" and so infused himself into the blood of empire; aye, and more, into the spiritual blood of uncalendared centuries. 

And King Arthur was pure. Vice is so often glorified and offers suchchromo tints to the eye as that many superficial folks think virtuetame and vice exhilarating. Here lies the difficulty. They look onthose parts which are contiguous to vice, but are really not parts ofit. In the self of vice is nothing attractive. Lying, lust, envy, hate, debauchery, --which of these is not tainted? Penuriousness isvice unadorned, and who thinks it fair? Like Spenser's "false Duessa, "it is revolting. Drunkenness, bestiality, spleen, --what roseate viewsshall you take of these? Who admires Caliban? And Caliban is vice, standing in its naked vileness and vulgarity. Man, meant for manhood, self-reduced to brutehood, --that is drunkenness. In an era when Dumasby fascinating fictions was making vice ingratiating, Tennyson wasrendering virtue magnificent. Can any person of just judgment risefrom reading "Idyls of the King" without feeling a repugnance towardvice, like a nausea, and a magnetism in virtue? An admiration forArthur becomes intense. The poet draws no moral from his parable:doing what is better, he puts morals into one's blood. While neverrailing at Guinivere, he makes us ashamed of her and for her, and doesthe same with Lancelot. He makes virtue eloquent. King Arthur isneither drunkard nor libertine, therein contradicting the pet theoriesof many people's heroes. He loves cleanness and is clean. He demandsin man a purity equal to woman's; setting up one standard of mortalsand not two. The George Fourth style of king, happily, Arthur is not;for George was a shame to England and to men at large, while Arthur isa glory, burning on above the cliffs of Wales, like some brave sunrisewhose colors never fade. To men and women, he is one law of virtue andone law of love. When the years have spent their strength, then viceshows itself hideous vice. The glamour vanished, no one can love orplead for wickedness. Virtue is wholly different; for to it the agesburn incense each year, rendering its loveliness more apparent andbountiful. Virtue grows in beauty, like some dear face we love. Heroism is virtue; manliness is virtue; devotion is virtue. Sum upthose remembered deeds of which the centuries speak, and you will findthem noble, virtuous. Seen as it is, and with the light of history onits face, vice is uncomely as a harlot's painted face. King Arthur isvirile and he is noble, engaging and fascinating us like a romancewritten by a master, full of persuasive sweetness and enduring help. 

Besides, King Arthur was a religious man. This is the transparentexplanation of his career. He is an attempted incarnation of theprecepts and love of Christ. This long-vanished prince knew that if aking might but repeat the miracle of Jesus' life in his own history, hewould have achieved kingship indeed. "_Mea vita vota_" was Dempster'smotto, --a sentiment Arthur knew by heart. His life was owed to God, and right manfully he paid his debt. Arthur exalted God in his heartand court and on hard-fought field. So intense and vivid his sense ofGod, he reminds us of the Puritan; but the Puritan touched to beatificbeauty by the interpretation of love God's Christ came to give. Tennyson always made much of God, saw Him immanent in every hope ofhuman betterment, saying, as we remember and can not forget:

 "Our little systems have their day-- They have their day and cease to be: They are but broken lights of thee; And thou, O Lord, art more than they. "

"The Idyls of the King" and "In Memoriam" might felicitously be calledtreatises on theology written in verse. St. Augustine and Wesley werenot more certainly theologians than this poet Laureate. The rest andhelp that come to men in prayer is burned into the soul in "EnochArden:"

 "And there he would have knelt, but that his knees Were feeble, so that falling prone he dug His fingers into the wet earth and prayed. "

And

 "He was not all unhappy. His resolve Upbore him, and firm faith and evermore Prayer from a living source within the will, And beating up through all the bitter world, Like fountains of sweet water in the sea, Kept him a living soul. "

And Arthur, dying, whispers:

 "More things are wrought by prayer Than this world dreams of. Wherefore let thy voice Rise, like a fountain, for me night and day. For what are men better than sheep or goats That nourish a blind life within the brain, If knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer, Both for themselves and those that call them friend? For so the whole round world is every way Bound by gold chains about the feet of God. "

No wonder is there if King Arthur was upheld: such faith makesimpotence giant-strengthed. He does not tremble. The earth may knowperturbations, but not he. To tournament or battle, or to death, hegoes with smiling face. His trust upholds him. So good is faith. "InMemoriam" is the biography of doubt and faith at war. The battle waxessore, but the day is God's. The battle ebbs to quiet. Calm aftertempest. Tennyson could not stay in doubt. 'T is not a goodly land. If trepidation has white lip and cheek, 't is not forever. Livingthrough an age of doubt, Tennyson, so sensitive to every current ofthought as that he felt them all, and in that feeling andinterpretation and strife for mastery over the doubt that kills, madehis book, as Milton has it, "The precious life-blood of a masterspirit;" and ends with:

 "Sunset and evening star, And one clear call for me. 

 For though from out our bourn of Time and Place The flood may bear me far, I hope to see my Pilot face to face, When I have cross'd the bar. "

"In Memoriam" is thought, King Arthur is action; and action is antidotefor doubt. Charles Kingsley's advice, "Do noble deeds, not dream them all day long, "

is always pertinent and reasonable. This is explanation of thatprofound saying of Jesus, "If any man will do my will, he shall know ofthe doctrine. " Life is exegesis of Scripture. Who do God's will catchsight of God's face, and their hearts are helped. Lowell's "SirLaunfal" urges this same truth. He who, for weary and painful years, had haunted the world, seeking the Holy Grail and finding not the thinghe sought, comes home discouraged to find in winter his castle hadforgotten him, and he was left a wreck of what he had been in hisbetter days; yet finds, in giving alms to a leprous beggar at hiscastle gate to whom he had denied alms in the spirit of alms when heset out to hunt the Holy Grail, that in so giving he found the Christ. Action helps God into the heart. Doubts are, many of them, brain-bornand academical; and such, service helps to dispel. To Arthur, God wasvital fact. To Him he held as tenaciously as to his sword; and he wascomforted. All good things are included in religion, and all greatthings. If men become martyrs, they become at the same timefunctionaries in the palace of every worthy spirit. I suppose thehunger for discovery and knowledge are nothing other than the soul'shunger after God. He is the secret of great discontent. The soulwants God, and on the way to Him are astronomies, and literatures, andnew-found hemispheres. Aspiration finds voice in Christianity. "Columbus, " a poem of resonant music, speaks aspiration. Him--

 "Who pushed his prows into the setting sun, And made West East, and sailed the dragon's mouth, And came upon the mountain of the world, And saw the rivers roll from paradise, "--

him, God-inspired as himself holds, saying:

 "And more than once, in days Of doubt and cloud and storm, when drowning hope Sank all but out of sight, I heard His voice: Be not cast down. I lead thee by the hand; Fear not, --and I shall hear his voice again-- I know that He has led me all my life, And I am not yet too old to work His will-- His voice again. "

And King Arthur finds God helps him into all things worth while. Bravery, determination, kindness, purity, magnanimity, safe faith inGod's supremacy, --all spring about him as he walks as flowers about apath in summer-time. Nothing good was foreign to him. 

Christianity is the one philosophy of manhood in whose harness are novulnerable parts. "The Palace of Art" presents the poet's perceptionof the failure of culture. Ethics, not aesthetics, compel manhood; andbehind ethics, theology. God must live in life, if life shall put ongoodness as a royal robe. 

And such a man as Arthur has passed into the enduring substance of thisworld's best thought and purpose. We see him--not saw him. He isnever past, but ever present. We see him dying, and with Sir Bedivere, who loved him, cry, "Thy name and glory cling To all high places, like a golden cloud, Forever!"

X

The Story of the Pictures

A man and a woman were dreaming. Both were young; and one was strongand one was fair. They were lovers, and the world was very beautiful, and life as rhythmic as a poet's verse. Things which to some seemremote as heaven, to youth and love seem near enough to touch, if onedo but stretch out the hand. This youth and maid were dreaming, andtheir hands were clasped, and sometimes they looked in each other'seyes--sometimes out across the fields, sloping toward sunset. Theworld seemed young as they, and the sky was fairly singing, with voicessweet as kisses from dear lips long absent, --those voices saying, saying always, "Life is fair--is fair;" and receding, as blown by on agentle wind, drifted "Life is fair;" and the lovers looked at eachother and were glad. 

He was an artist, and his idle hand wrought pictures unconsciously. Hedid not think things, but saw things. His lips were not given tofrequent speech, even with the woman he loved. He saw her, whether hesat thus beside her or whether he sat apart from her with seasbetween--he saw her always; for his was the gift of sight. He sawvisions as rapt prophets do. Life was a pageant, and he saw it all. 

His brush is part of his hand, and his palette is as his hand's palm. Painting is to him monologue. He is telling what he sees; talking tohimself, as children and poets do. Now, he talks to the woman he lovesand to himself in pictures, she saying nothing, save as her hand speaksin a caress, and that her eyes are dreamy sweet; and the artist's handdreams over the paper with glancing touch, and this picture growsbefore their eyes: A man and a woman, young and fair, are on a hilltopalone, looking across a meadowland, lovely with spring and blossoms andlove-making of the birds; and ponds where lily-pads shine in the sun, like metal patines, floating on the pool; and a flock lying in a quietplace; and a lad plowing in a field, the blackbirds following hisfurrow; and a blue sky, with dainty clouds of white faint against it, like breathing against a window-pane in winter; and a farmhouse, whereearly roses cluster, and little children are at play, --this, and hisbrush loiters, and the woman knows her artist has painted a picture ofyouth; and both look away as in a happy dream. 

The artist paints again: and the landscape is in nothing changed. Itmight have been a reprint rather than a repainting. A morning land, where beauty and bounty courted like man and maid. No tints were lost. The sunlight was unfailing, and roses clustered with their spendthriftgrace and loveliness; and the woman, looking at her lover, wondered whyhe painted the same landscape twice, but, waiting, saw the artist painttwo figures, a man and woman at life's prime. She sees they are theyouth and maid of the first picture, only older--and what besides?Then they were a promise, a possibility, now they are--what are they?They are the same; they are not the same. She is disappointed in them;not because their beauty has faded, but that their look has changed. Their faces are not haggard, nor cut with strange arabesques of painand care, nor are they craven or vicious; but the artist speeds hishand as if at play, while every touch is bringing the faces out untilthey obliterate the former beauty utterly. The landscape is still dewyfresh and fair--the faces have no hint of morning in them. Faces, notbad, but lacking tenderness; expression, self-sufficient; eyes, frostycold; and the woman's eyes light on the children, playing beside thewhite farmhouse, and in them is no inexpressible tenderness ofmother-love, mute, like a caress; prosperous faces the world has gonequite well with, that is plain, but faces having no beckoning in them, no tender invitation, like a sweet voice, saying, "Enter and welcome. "And she who looked at the pictures sobbed, scarcely knowing why, onlythe man and woman sorely disappointed her when they had grown tomaturity; poetry and welcome and promise had faded from them as tintsfade from a withered flower. So much was promised--so little wasfulfilled. 

Meantime, while these lovers sit on the hillside, and the artist hasbeen talking in pictures as the clouds do, the sun has sloped fartoward setting. The west is aflame, like a burning palace; the crowsare flapping tired wings toward their nests; the swallows are sportingin the air, as children do in surf of the blue seas; smoke from thefarm chimneys visible begins to lie level across the sky, and stayslike a cloud at anchor. But the artist's hand is busy with anotherpicture. 

And the landscape is the same. Mayhap he is not versatile; and, thinkagain, mayhap he has purpose in his reduplication. Like wise men, letus wait and see. A springtime-land as of old, and two figures; and thewoman he loves watches, while her breathing is strangely like a sob. Now the figures are a man and a woman, stooped and gray. "Age, " shesays, "you paint age now, and age--is not beautiful;" and he, answeringwith neither lips nor eyes, paints swiftly on. The man is aged andleaning on a staff. His strength is gone. His staff is not forornament, but need. The woman is wrinkled, and her hair is snowywhite; and the girl at the artist's side tries vainly to suppress asob. She, too, will soon be gray, and she loves not age anddecrepitude; and the face in the picture is faded, no rose-tints in thecheeks. So old and weak--old age is very pitiful. But the picture isnot finished yet. Wait! Wait a little, and give the artist time. Itis not evening yet. Sunset lingers a little for him. His hand runsnow like a hurrying tide. He is painting faces. Why linger over theface of age? If it were youth--but age? But he touches these agedfaces lovingly, as a son might caress his aged father and mother withhand and with kiss; and beneath his touch the aged faces grow warm andtender, passing sweet. To look at them was rest. Their eyes weretender and brave. You remember they were old and feeble folk--youngonce, but long ago; but how noble the old man's face, scarred though itis with saber cut! To see him makes you valiant; and to see himlonger, makes you valiant for goodness, which is best of all. 

And the woman's face is lit with God's calm and God's comfort. A smileis in her eyes, and a smile lies, like sunlight, across her lips. Herhair is the silver frame that hems some precious picture in. She is abenediction, blessed as the restful night to weary toilers on a burningday. And the artist, with a touch quick as a happy thought, outlined ashadow, clad in tatters, and a child clad in tatters at her side; andthe girl, leaning over the painting, thought the chief shadow wasDeath. But the artist hasted; and on a sudden, wings sprung from theshoulders of tattered mother and child, and they two lifted up theirhands; the woman, lifting her hands above the dear forms of old age, spread them out in blessing, and the little child lifted her hands, clasped as in prayer; and these angels were Poverty, praying for andblessing the man and woman who had been their help. 

And the artist lover, under the first picture, in quaint letters, suchas monks in remote ages used, wrote this legend, "To-morrow;" and thewoman, taking the pencil, wrote in her sweet girlish hand, "Youth isVery Beautiful. " The artist took back his pencil, and under the secondpicture scrolled, "These Loved Themselves Better Than They LovedOthers;" and the woman wrote, "Their To-morrow was Failure. " Under thethird picture the artist wrote, "These Loved God Best and TheirNeighbors as Themselves;" and the woman took the pencil from his handand wrote, "Old Age is Very Beautiful--More Beautiful Than Youth, " anda tear fell and blotted some of the words, as a drop of rain makes ablurred spot on a dusty pane. And the lover said, "Serving others isbetter than serving ourselves;" and the girl's sweet voice answering, like an echo, "Serving others is better than serving ourselves. "

And the sun had set. The glow from the sky was fading, as embers on ahearth, pale to gray ashes; and an owl called from an elm-tree on thehillside, while these two arose, with faces like the morning, and, taking the pictures, walked slowly as lovers will; and so, fading intothe deepening twilight, I heard her saying, "Serving others is life atits best, " and him replying, "Jesus said, 'The poor ye have always withyou;'" and their footsteps and voices died away together in thegloaming; and a whip-poor-will called often and plaintively from thewoodland across the field. 

XI

The Gentleman in Literature

Humor is half pathos and more. This sword has two edges. On the one, shining like burnished silver, you may see smiles reflected as from amirror; on the other, tears stand thick, like dews on flowers at earlymorning of the later spring. Humor is a dual faculty, as muchmisconceived by those who listen as by those who speak. We do notalways have wit to know the scope of what we do. Thoughts ofchildhood, says the poet, are long, long thoughts; but who supposeschildhood knows they are? Nor is this altogether a fault. To feel thesublime sequence of all we did would burden us as Atlas was burdened byholding up the sky. Life might easily come to be sober to somberness, which is a thing unwholesome and undesirable. Sunlight must have itsway. Darkness must not trespass too far; and every morning says toevery night, "Thus far, but no farther. "

To many readers, Don Quixote seems fantastic, and Cervantes alaughter-monger. Cervantes had suffered much. His life reads like anovelist's tale. He belonged to the era of Spenser and Shakespeare; ofPhilip II and William the Silent; of Leicester and Don John of Austria;of The Great Armada and the Spanish Inquisition; of Lope de Vega andCervantes--for he was, in the Hispanian peninsula, his own greatestcontemporary--and to this hour this battle-scarred soldier of fortunestands the tallest figure of Spanish literature. His was a letteredrearing, and a young manhood spent as a common soldier. At Lepanto helost hand and arm. In five long, weary, and bitter years of slaveryamong Algerine pirates, he held up his head, being a man; plottedescape in dreams and waking; fought for freedom as a pinioned eaglemight; was at last rescued by the Society for the Redemption of Slaves;sailed home from slavery to penury; came perilously near the age ofthreescore, poverty-stricken and unknown, when, like a sun which leapsfrom sunrise to noon at a single bound, this maimed soldier sprangmid-sky, impossible to be ignored or forgotten, and disclosed himself, the marked Spaniard of his era; and on the same day of 1616, Cervantesand Shakespeare stopped their life in an unfinished line, and not a mansince then has been able to fill out the broken meaning. This man hadnot wine, but tears to drink. Yet he jests, and the world laughs withhim; though we feel sure that while his age and after ages laugh andapplaud, Miguel Cervantes sits with laughter all faded from his face, and the white look of pain settled about his lips, while tears "rise inthe heart and gather to the eyes. " Tears sometimes make laughter andjest the wilder. Men and women laugh to keep their hearts frombreaking. 

Cervantes has ostensibly drawn a picture of a madman, and in fact haspainted a gentleman. What his intent was, who can be so bold as tosay? What part of his purpose was, we know. He would excoriate afalse and flippant chivalry. Contemporaneous chivalry he knew well;for he had been a common soldier, wounded and distressed. He had seenwhat a poor triviality that once noble thing had grown to be. Institutions become effete. Age is apt to sap the strength ofmovements as of men. Feudalism and the Crusades had commissioned theknight-errant; and now, when law began to hold sword for itself, theself-constituted legal force--knight-errantry--was no longer needed. But to know when an institution has served its purpose is little lessthan genius. Some things can be laughed down which can not be argueddown. A jest is not infrequently more potent than any syllogism. Somethings must be laughed away, other things must be wept away; so thathumor and pathos are to be ranked among the mighty agents for reform. And one purpose Cervantes had was to laugh a tawdry knight-errantry offthe stage. In long years of soldiery, I doubt not he had grown to hatethis empty boast, and his nursed wrath now breaks out like a volcano. This was his apparent purpose--but who can say this was all hispurpose? "King Lear" has a double action. Mayhap, Don Quixote has adouble meaning. We are always attaching meanings to works of genius. But you can not tie any writer's utterance down to some poor altitude. Great utterances have at least a half-infinite application. Tennysonfelt this, saying--as we read in his son's biography of him--regardingexplanations of his "Idyls of the King:" "I hate to be tied down to'this means that, ' because the thought within the image is much morethan any one interpretation;" and, "Poetry is like shot-silk, with manyglancing colors. Every reader will find his own interpretationaccording to his ability, and according to his sympathy, with thepoet. " What is true of poetry is true of all imaginative literature. An author may not have analyzed his own motive in its entirety. In anycase, we may hold to this, Don Quixote was a gentleman, and is thefirst gentleman whose portrait is given us in literature. We havelaughed at Don Quixote, but we have learned to love him. The "knightof the rueful countenance, " as we see him now, is not himself a jest, but one of literature's most noble figures; and we love him because wemust. Was it mere chance that in drawing this don, Cervantes clothedhim with all nobilities, and shows him--living and dying--good, courageous, pure; in short, a man? This scarcely seems a happening. Seas have subtle undercurrents. I venture, Don Quixote has the same, and marks the appearance of a gentleman in literature, since which daythat person has been a recurring, ennobling presence on the pages offiction and poetry. 

A gentleman is a comparatively recent creation in life, as in letters. Christ was the foremost and first gentleman. After him all gentilitypatterns. With the law of the imagination we are familiar, which isthis: Imagination deals only with materials supplied by the senses. Imagination, in other words, is not strictly originative, but, rather, appropriative, giving a varied placing to images on hand, just as thekaleidoscope makes all its multiform combinations with a given numberof pieces. Imagination does not make materials, is no magician, but isan architect. Admitting this law, we can readily see how the creationof a gentleman does not lie in the province of imagination. Homer'sheroes are the men Homer knew, with a poetic emphasis on strength, stature, prowess. His era grew warriors and nothing else, and so Homerpaints nothing else. Human genius has limits. Man is originative incharacter; and poets--"of imagination all compact"--catch this new formof life, and we call the picture poetry. All civilization, to the daysof Jesus, produced but one character, so far as we may read, worthy tobe thought entire gentleman, and this was Joseph, the Jew, premier ofEgypt. He is the most manly man of pre-Christian civilizations. Orprobably Moses must be listed here. Classic scholarship can show nogentleman Greece produced. Greek soil grew no such flowers beneath itsradiant sky. Plato was a philosopher--not gentleman. Socrates was aniconoclast, but not a manly man and helpful spirit. Greek heroes wereguilty of atrocious and unthinkable sins. Test them by this canon ofAlfred Tennyson: "I would pluck my hand from a man, even if he were mygreatest hero or dearest friend, if he wronged a woman or told her alie;" and, so tested, where must Greek heroes be classified? Greeceand Rome produced heroes, but not gentlemen. Julius Caesar was theflower of the Latin race. Nothing approximates him. Great qualitiescluster in him like stars in the deep sky. But his ambition was liketo that of Milton's Satan, and his lust was a bottomless pit. As anational heroic figure, Julius Caesar is dazzling as a sun at summernoon; but as a gentleman he cuts poorer figure than Lancelot or SirTristram. The gentleman is not an evolution, but a creation. Christcreated the gentleman as certainly as he created the world. 

Now, literature is what Emerson says genius is, a superlative borrower. The state of a civilization at a given time will gauge the poet'sconcept. He can not pass beyond the world's noblest notions to hishour. If Greece and Rome produced no man, settle to it that Greek andRoman literatures will produce no man. Sculptor, as Phidias;statesman, as Pericles; dramatist, as Aeschylus; general, asThemistocles; stern justice, as Aristides, --Greece can show; and suchcharacters the historians, dramatists, and epic poets will delineateand celebrate. Horace is a looking-glass, and holds his genius so asto catch the shadows of men passing by. This poets do, and can do nomore. They are not strictly creative. We mistake their mission. Godhas somehow kept the creative power in his own possession. Men canappropriate; God can create. So what we find is, that ancientliterature never attempted depicting a gentleman. Those days had nosuch persons. But Christ came and set men a-dreaming. He filled men'ssouls to the brim with expectation and wonder akin to fear andanticipation of impossibilities; and what he was, men fondly andgreatly dreamed they might aspire to be. And thus the gentleman becamea prospective fact in life and after life, in literature; for we thinkit has been fairly shown how literature produces no type till life hasproduced it first. Literature is not properly productive, butreproductive; not creative, but appropriative. As men climb a mountainon a dark, still night, to watch a sunrise, so the race began to climbtoward manhood. The night was long, and this mountain taller thanHimalayas; and man slept not, but climbed. His groping toward thissunrise of soul is the epic of history. Dante knew not a gentleman, and could not dream him therefore. Mediaevalism learned to paint theMadonna's face, but not manhood's look. Character is the last test ofgenius. Man saw gray streaks of dawn, rimming far, ragged peaks, andstill he climbed; and, on a morning, beheld the sunrise! And if youwill note, 't is Don Quixote standing on the mountain's crest. 

Some things can be adequately represented in marble. For "the Laocoon"marble is probably the best method of expression. Fear, superhumaneffort, anguish, brute strength mastering human strength, --these arethe thoughts to be expressed, and are brought out in marble withsingular clearness and fidelity. For some things color is a necessity;and marble would be totally inadequate. "The Greek Slave" may be putin stone; the bewildering face of a world's Christ can never beseriously attempted in marble, the futility of such attempt being soapparent. Color, lights and shadows are essential to give hints ofdeep things of deep soul. Hoffman must have canvas and colors. Youmust paint the Christ. And some facts can not be painted. They areabstract, and can not be intimated by anything short of words. You canpaint a man--Saul of Tarsus, or Charlemagne--but can not paint agentleman; for he represents no single majesty, but an essential andintricate balance of all useful, great, and noble qualities. He can bepainted only by words; so that literature is the solitary means ofmaking apparent the shadow of that divine thing, a gentleman. 

Don Quixote becomes intensely interesting, then, as a new attempt increative genius. But dare we think a gentleman could be ludicrous andfantastic? for this the don was. We revolt against the notion that sogracious a thing could be grotesque. Yet is this our mature thought?Do not the facts certify that from this world's unregenerate standpointmanliness is grotesque? Was not Christ looked upon as mad? Did nothis ideas of manliness appear as nothing other than fantastic, when hewould substitute love for might, meekness for braggadocio, and purityof heart for an omnipresent sensuality? What were his ideals ofmanhood but battling with windmills or being enamored of a myth?Tested by standards of this world's make, his notions and conduct weresheerly fantastic. As recorded on one occasion, "They laughed him toscorn;" and this they did many another time, covertly or openly. Indeed, grasping the state of civilization as then existing, andcomprehending Christ's non-earthly idea of what a gentleman was, we cannot be slow to perceive how ludicrous this conception would be to theRoman world. Tall dreams seem madness. Hamlet's feigned madnesspuzzles us even yet. Many an auditor heard Columbus with a smileill-concealed behind his beard. All high ideality sounds a madman'sbabble. To see a true life live truly will strike many as a jest, andothers as pathos too deep for sobs. 

Don Quixote conceived a man ought to live for virtue. To beself-dedicated to the help of others; to be courageous as an army whichhad never met defeat; to be self-forgetful, so that hunger, pain, thirst, fatigue, become trifles; to have love become absorbing; to fillthe mind's unfathomed sky with dreams outshining dawns; to count honorto be so much more than life, as that honor is all and life is naught;to interpret all men and women at their best, and so to expect good andnot suspicion evil; to meet all men on the high level of manhood; andto love God with such persistency and eagerness as that the soul'ssolitudes are peopled with him as by a host, --if this be not agentleman, we have misconceived the species. Read this history of hisearly and later battles for right, and you will not find an impurity ofword, suggestion, thought. God's lilies are not cleaner. I confessthat the knight's love for Dulcinea del Tobosa moves me to tears. Inever can smile or jest at him when his heart and lips hold with fealtyto an ideal love. His love created her. He found her a clod, butflung her into the sky and made her a star. Is not this love's uniformhistory? Blinded, not of lust or ambition, but of ideality. Saul metChrist at noon, and was blinded by his vision; and would not all bravemen covet blindness thus incurred? And better to be blinded, as DonQuixote, by a ravishing ideal, than to see, besotted in soul and shutout from God. That humorous figure astride lean Rosinante, esquired bypudgy, sensible Sancho; eager for chances to be of use; faithful to hislove as dawn to sun; strong in his desire of being all eyes to seedistress, all ears to hear a call for succor; sitting a dark nightthrough in vigil, tireless, courageous, waiting for day to charge onwhat proved to be fulling hammers, making tumult with their ownstamping; or, again, asleep in the inn bed, fighting with wine-skinsand dreaming himself battling with giants, --this does not touch me asbeing humorous so much as it does as being pathetic, unspeakablypathetic, and manfully courageous. I see, but do not feel, the humor. I have followed Don Quixote as faithfully as Sancho Panza on his"Dapple;" have seen him fight, conquer, suffer defeat, ride through hisland of dreams; have seen his pasteboard helmet; have noted melancholysettle round him as shadows on the landscape of an autumn day; haveseen him grow sick, weaken, die; but have known in him only highdreams, attempted high achievings; have found him honor's soul, andholding high regard for women; have been spectator of goodness asunimpeachable as heaven, and purity deep, like that which whitens roundthe throne--a human soul given over to goodness, and named, for cause, "Quixada the Good. " And his goodness seems a contagion. 

For two and a half centuries since Cervantes painted this picture of agentleman, literature has given less or more of heed to similarattempts; though as result, as I suppose, there are but two life-sizepictures which unhesitatingly we name gentlemen as soon as our eyeslight on them. Profile or silhouette of him there has been, but of thefull-length, full-face figure, only two. Shakespeare did not attemptthis task. Aside from Hamlet--who was not meant to sit for thispicture, though he had been no ill character for such sitting--there isnot among Shakespeare's men an intimation of such undertaking. Wouldthis princely genius had put his hand to this attempt, though, as seemsclear to me, Shakespeare did not conceive a gentleman. His ideas werenot quite whitened with Christ's morning light enough to have perceivedother than the natural man. Shakespeare's men are always "a littlelower than the angels;" whereas a gentleman might fittingly stand amongangels as a brother. This one star never swung across the optic-glassof our great Shakespeare. That spiritual-mindedness which is life hescarcely possessed. This was his limitation. Spenser stood higher onthis mount of vision. He conceived and executed a picture of purewomanhood, and, had he attempted, might have sketched a wondrous faceand figure of a gentleman. Even as it was, he gave intimations of thiscoming king. He seems one who gathers fuel for a fire, but never setsthe flame. His figures shift, and present no central character ofmanhood who grows and furnishes standard of comparison. Milton'sgenius was cast in a cyclopean mold, and needed distances remote asheaven and hell to give right perspective to his figures, and hissupreme art concerns itself with Satan, and archangels, and God. 

Of this ideal gentleman we have had growing hints. Literature, moreand more, concerns itself with spiritual quantities. The air of ourcentury is aromatic with these beautiful conceptions, as witness JeanValjean, Dr. MacLure, Deacon Phoebe, Sidney Carton, Daniel Deronda, Donal Grant, Bayard, Red Jason, Pete, Captain Moray, John Halifax, andCaponsacchi. Some of these pictures seem more than side views. But agentleman should be, must be, nobly normal. He is a balance of virtue. Symmetry impresses us in him, as when we look at the Parthenon. Allhis powers are in such delicate balance as that they seem capable ofeasy perturbation, yet are, in fact, imperturbable as stars. Thegentleman in life is becoming a common figure. We have known such--sostrong, quiet, heroic, calm, sure of the future, knit to God, big withfidelity and faith, that they translated into literal speech the holyprecepts of the Book of God. So tested, this world grows surelybetter. Man has lost in romantic glitter of costume and bearing, buthas gained immeasurably in manhood. The gospel is peopling the worldwith men. To suppose God meant to change men to saints was amisconception. St. Simeon Stylites was that old misconceptionrealized. We can but honor him, so vast his hunger, so noble hisstrife, so courageous his attitude, when he shouts, "I smote them withthe cross;" but St. Simeon did not realize God's notion. Goodness isfraternal, accessible, genial. John Storm, in Hall Caine's "TheChristian, " is susceptible to the same criticism. He is not balanced. He means well, but is erratic, fitful, lacking center. He is like abird lost in storms, flying in circles. He thought to be a saint, whereas Christ did not come to make saints, but to make men; and thesooner we realize that a "saint" or a "Christian" is not the end of thegospel, the better will it be for Christianity. Christianity is God'smethod of making men; and Christianity is not an end, but a means. When God gets his way, he wants to have this world populated with menand women. Whether Caine meant John Storm for an ideal Christian wecan not say. There is strength here, as in all he has written; butStorm's lacks are many and great. He is enthusiast, but flighty. Hemeans well, but is spasmodic in its display. Storm might have growninto a hero had he lived longer, and, as a flame, leaped high at somepoint in his career. Both as man and Christian, he disappoints us. Red Jason, in "The Bondman, " is a worthier contribution to the naturalhistory of the gentleman. View him how you will, he is great. Hismoral stature lifts itself like the mass of a mountain. His natureseems a fertile field seeded down to heroisms, and every seedgerminating and growing to maturity. Jason has virtues vast of girthas huge forest-trees, but he is scarcely companionable. Glooms gatherround him as night about a hamlet in a valley. He is moral, imposing, heroic, yet is there something lacking--is it voice, self-poise, what?--lacking of being quite a gentleman. Nor was he shaped for sucha role by his creator, but was meant to sit for the portrait of a hero. And such he is to the point of moving the spirit, as by the lightning'stouch, Goethe was not capable of conceiving a gentleman. His "WilhelmMeister" and himself fall so low in the scale of worth as to precludehis seeing so serene a face. Goethe's sky was clouded, and fine linesof finest character are only brought out under unhindered sunlight. Manhood is a serene thing. Though storm-bolts rain about it thick ashail, the quiet of deep seas reigns in it. And Dumas's men are each a_bon vivant_, save the son of Porthos. These dusty and bloodyguardsmen had not enough moral fiber to fill a thimble. They think theworld of men and women a field for forage. This physical dash andcourage, this galloping of steeds, and sabers pummeling steeds' sides, stands instead of character. In "Marius the Epicurean, " Walter Paterhas given, as I think, a true picture of one who in the Roman eraaspired to be a man. He is cold, and in consequence barren; but suchis an accurate reading of Roman attempts at manhood; for ordinaryEpicureanism was fervid to sensuality, and the Stoic was frigid. Toheathen conception there was no middle ground. The warm color oncheek, the morning in the eyes, the geniality in the hand, the fervorat the heart, the alert thought, the winged imagination, the sturdywill, the virile moral sense, the responsive conscience, the couragewhich laughed to die for duty, --these could not be amalgamated. Heroicqualities have always been native to the soul as warmth to the southwind. All history is rich with tapestries of tragic and colossalheroisms, so as to make us proud that we are men. Heroisms are harsh, but manliness is tender. And in this seeming irreconcilability liesthe difficulty of constructing a gentleman. 

But attempts thicken. In our century they group together like violetson a stream's bank fronting the sun in spring. Literary artists, knowing how difficulties hedge this attempt, hesitate. There are manyhints of the gentleman. Let us be glad for that, seeing we areenriched thereby. "Rab and His Friends" gives so strong a picture ofstolid strength in love's fidelity, which knows to serve and suffer anddie without a moan or being well aware of aught save love. And Dr. MacLure is a dear addition to our company of manhood, shouldering hisway through Scotland's winter's storm and cold because need calls him;serving as his Master had taught him so long ago; forgetting himself inabsorbing thought for others; lonely as a fireless hearth; longing forfriendship which would not fail; reaching for Drumsheugh's hand, andholding it when death was claiming the good physician's hand. We couldeasily conceive we had been seated at the deathbed of a gentleman. Deacon Phoebe stands as a character in Annie Trumbull Slosson's "SevenDreamers, " a book which, outside Cable's "Old Creole Days, " is to methe most perfect series of brief character-sketches drawn by anAmerican author, and entirely worthy to stand by "A Window in Thrums, "and "Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush, " and "In Ole Virginia. " DeaconPhoebe has forgotten himself. Unselfishness does not often rise tosuch heights. This "dreamer" of "Francony Way" is full brother toSidney Carton, born across the seas. Self-forgetfulness, so beautifulas that even name and sex become a memory dim as a distant sail upon anevening sea, --this must be a sight fitted to bring laughter to theheart of God. Deacon Phoebe is one trait in a gentleman. SidneyCarton is of the same sort, save that the hero element stands moreapparent. His is a larger field, a more attractive background, thusthrowing his figure into clearer relief. Deacon Phoebe was theself-abasement of humility, Sidney Carton is the supreme surrender oflove; but the end of both is service. There ought to be a gallery inour earth from which men and women might lean and look on nobilitieslike Sidney Carton. That beatified face; that hand holding a woman'strembling hand, what time he whispered for her comfort, "I am theresurrection and the life, " as the crowded tumbrel rattled on to theguillotine, and he faced death with smile as sweet as love upon hisface, and love making a man thus divine, --this is Sidney Carton, whostirs our soul as storms stir the seas. Bonaventure, as drawn byCable, is of similar design. He is unconscious as a flower; but hadlearned, as his schoolmaster-priest had taught him, to write "self"with a small "s;" so an untutored soul, lacerated with grief, piercedby suffering, gave himself over to goodness and help, becoming absorbedtherein. Such is Bonaventure. He was what Tennyson has said of "thegardener's daughter, " "A sight to make an old man young. "

Love has learned to work miracles in character. Rains do not wash airso clean as love washes character, whiting "as no fuller on earth canwhite" it. And how constantly manhood neighbors with love is abeautiful and noteworthy circumstance. Here place Pete, in "TheManxman. " You can not over-praise him. Some esteem him a fabulouscharacter; but knowing his island and people well, I feel sure he isflesh and blood, though flesh and blood so uncommon and superiorstagger our faith for a moment. It is the glory of our race that atrare springtime it bursts into such bloom that painter and poet areboth bankrupt in attempting to copy this loveliness. Pete is such aneffort of nature. His letters to himself, written as from his wife, tocover her shame and desertion, present a spectacle so magnanimous andpathetic as to upbraid us that we had never learned nobilities sosublime. Love made him great. And Macdonald, in Donal Grant, hasshown us a strong, pure soul of moral strength, religious appetencies, determined goodness, of elevation of character, of strength and wisdom, so that in his accustomed walk he might have met Sir Percivale or SirLaunfal. Good, and given over to God, he was found out by love; andlove did with him as with us all--love glorified him. In his cleanlife is something sturdy you might lean on, as on a staff, and have nofear. So is Enoch Arden made hero by love. In love, remembrance, andabsence of self, he is manhood. We have all wept with Arden, findingour faces wet with tears, though not knowing we wept. His story nevergrows trite. Each time we read, new light breaks from this characteras if it were a sun. The sight of him when he, like a poor thief, looking in at the window, "Because things seen are mightier than things heard, Stagger'd and shook, holding the branch, and feared To send abroad a shrill and terrible cry Which in one moment, like the blast of doom, Would shatter all the happiness of the hearth. 

 And feeling all along the garden wall, Lest he should swoon and tumble and be found, Crept to the gate, and open'd it and closed As lightly as a sick man's chamber door Behind him, and came out upon the waste;"

and when, "Falling prone, he dug His fingers into the wet earth, and pray'd, --"

the sight of him is as unforgettable as a man's first look upon thewoman he loves. The poet was right. Arden was a "strong, heroicsoul, " and when he woke, arose, and cried, "A sail! a sail!" it wasGod's nobleman who sighted it. 

"Daniel Deronda" and "John Halifax, Gentleman, " may wisely be classedtogether as attempts of competent artists to sketch a gentleman. Whether they have failed in the attempt I would not make bold to say, but for some reason the characters impress me as being scarcelyadequate. Both faces are open, and lit as by a lamp of truth; theirlives are sweet as meadows scented with new-mown hay; we become swornfriends to both without our willing it; they have nothing to take back, because words and deeds are faithful to their best manhood; they arestrong, and women lean on them, which, aside from God's confidence, isthe highest compliment ever paid a man. Deronda is a man amongaristocrats, Halifax a man among plebeians and commercial relations;but manhood is the same quality wherever found; for God has made allsoils salubrious for such growth. But these do not compel, though theydo charm us. Bayard, in "A Singular Life, " may fall in with Derondaand Halifax. Tragedy darkens at "the far end of the avenue. " Bayardis a social reformer in attempt, though of the safe and right type, meaning to change men, that there may be wrought a change ininstitutions. He runs a tilt with Calvinian orthodoxy as Methodismdoes, and loves God and his fellow-men and a good woman, and finds notoil burdensome if he may be of spiritual help and healing. "Asingular life" he lives; but singular because it is the gospel life, and he merits the name the slums gave him, "The Christ-man. " He ishelpful, few more so, and knows power to stir us, which in the event isthe superb quality in character. Captain Moray, in "The Seats of theMighty, " and Henry Esmond, in "Henry Esmond, " are gentlemen of militarymold, and we love them both because they make for lordly inspiration inthe soul. Esmond must always keep his hold on men as a hero. Thesetwo soldiers need no one to remind us they know how to die; and knowthat other, larger thing--how to live. Esmond, over a long stretch oflife lying in our sight, walked ever as a prince. Any nationalliterature might be glad for one such as he. Our imagination takeswings when we think of him. Such cleanness, such lack of self, suchself-poise and firmness, such singleness of love and devotion, suchinaptitude for anything not noble, such tense heroic purposes, suchstalwart intention to make himself a man! He is greatness, and hisstory to be read as a tonic. He recruits heroisms in the heart, andrests us when we grow weary. Thackeray is reported by Anthony Trollopeto have called his creation, Esmond, "a prig. " He might better havecalled him a gentleman; for such he is, or narrowly lacks of being. Indeed, did not Thackeray present another who is altogether gentleman, Esmond would be catalogued as this ideal character; for he misses it solittle, if at all, and is by odds most magnetic of Thackeray'screations. And Browning's "Caponsacchi" and Hugo's "Valjean" have thetrue instincts of gentlemen. Valjean redeemed himself from worse thangalley slavery--from debauched manhood to spiritual nobility, bewildering in holy audacity and achievement. Were there a pantheonfor souls who have struggled up from the verge of hell to stand in theclear light of heaven, be sure Valjean would be there. Volumes arerequisite for his portrait, and we have only room for words! OfCaponsacchi, take the pope's estimate as accurate, "Thou sprang'stforth hero. " And Pompilia conceived him rightly, for he minded her ofGod. What farther need be said? Is not that panegyric enough for anyman? Because he was so strong, so fearless, so pure, so gifted withgreat might to love, so keen to see Pompilia was pure as a babe'sdreams, and the light on his forehead falls from the latticesoverhead--the lattices of heaven--we love him. Had his figure beenfully drawn we should have had a gentleman. Nor are we sure he oughtnot to be so catalogued; as he is, we find no fault in him. He mindsus of the morning star. 

Two characters in literature since Don Quixote are life-size gentlemen, and these are Colonel Newcome and King Arthur, as drawn by Thackerayand Tennyson, men of one era and pure souls. In these characters isevident deliberation of intent to create gentlemen. This article hasgiven no heed to biography or history, because these concern themselveswith truth as observed, and are therefore not imaginative. What we areconsidering is an ideal person, fashioned after the pattern discoveredin good lives, which happily grow more and more plentiful as yearsmultiply. Besides, biography can never get at the real man; forbiography is a story of doing, while what we need is a story of soul. In Boswell's "Johnson" or in Anthony Trollope's "Autobiography" thereis approach to what we care to know; but in the life of Jowett orTennyson, though both are admirable specimens of biography, what manamong us but closed those books with a sense of, not dissatisfaction, but unsatisfaction? What we were really hungry for was not there. What Jowett was, which made him a part of the life-blood of Englishthought and Englishmen--who found that out? Some things never can betold, unless the poets or prose dramatists tell them. Poetry andfiction do what history and biography fail to do--make us interior to asoul's true life. 

Colonel Newcome is all gentleman. He hangs a curtain of silence overone room in his life. To his wife, mother of his beloved Clive, hewill make no reference. Not bad, but frivolous and weak and querulous, she was; but Colonel Newcome never whispers it. What had made manymisanthropes, made him a better man. No bitterness tainted his spirit. Pure women put him in a mood of worship, as they ought to put us all. He could, in conduct, if not in memory, forget hurts and wrongs, whichis one mark of a large spirit. His was, his biographer affirms, "atender and a faithful heart. " In him paternity and maternity met, which is a conjunction we have not given heed to as we ought inthinking on the heart. Motherhood is in the best fatherhood. Not longsince I met a minister who, on my mentioning a black and scrawnyvillage, said, with lovelit face and ringing, jubilant voice, "O yes, that is where my boy was born!" How true hearts do remember! AndColonel Newcome loved his son with such sweet and wide fidelity asmakes the heart covet him for father. All those days of separationfrom his son, he thought of him "with such a constant longingaffection. " And his joy on seeing his son once more is the joy of onegetting home to heaven. "To ask a blessing on his boy was as naturalto him as to wake with the sunrise, or to go to rest when the day isover. His first and last thought was always the child. " He expectsgood of people, will say no ill of any, can not understand Sir BrianNewcome's frigid reception, and is hurt by it as by a poisoned arrowshot by the hill tribes in far India; he can not tolerate foul thoughtor speech, burns hot with righteous wrath against Captain Costigan whenhe sings a vile song, thundering, "Silence!" "'We ought to be ashamedof doing wrong. We must forgive other people's trespasses if we hopeforgiveness of our own. ' His voice sunk low as he spoke, and he bowedhis honest head reverently. " How unostentatious his bravery, andriches puffed him up not a trifle! How alert to love, how open toenjoyment, how young his heart and how pure! What simplicity and whatgrave courtesy, particularly to women! How wide those windows of hissoul open toward heaven! How magnanimous, how sad his face and heart, how sensitive his nature, to any lack of love on dear Clive's part!Though to his own heart he will not admit such lack exists, sittingabove in his cheerless room, listening to his son's merry-making, thatson glad to be left free of his father's presence, --how bravely he borepoverty when financial ruin came, not missing wealth for himself, butfor him he loved, and how he grieved for those who had lost throughhim! He was not faultless. Men are not often that; but his anger rosefrom his heart. His indignation was for those he loved. We can seehim now, as if he lived among us yet. His honest, melancholy face; hisloose clothes hanging on his loose limbs; sitting silent, with his sadeyes; a bankrupt, giving over his pension for reimbursing those who hadlost by him; and his eagerness for wealth for love's sake, alwaysthinking of somebody else, --such is this gentleman who trusts in God. And thus simple, noble, unhumiliated:

"I chanced to look up from my book toward the swarm of blackcoatedpensioners, and among them--among them--sat Thomas Newcome. His dearold head was bent down over his prayer-book; there was no mistakinghim. He wore the black gown of the pensioners of the Hospital of GreyFriars. His Order of the Bath was on his breast. He stood among thepoor brethren, uttering the responses to the psalm. . . . His own wanface flushed up when he saw me, and his hand shook in mine. 'I havefound a home, Arthur, ' said he; for save this he was homeless. Asdeath came toward him his mind wandered, driven as a leaf is driven bywandering winds. He headed columns in Hindustan; he called the name ofthe one woman he had loved. In death, as in life, his thought was forothers, for Clive, dear, dear Clive. He said, 'Take care of him when I'm in India;' and then, with a heartrending voice, he called out, 'Leonore, Leonore!' She was kneeling by his side now. The patientvoice sank into faint murmurs; only a moan now and then announced thathe was not asleep. At the usual hour the chapel bell began to toll, and Thomas Newcome's hands, outside the bed, feebly beat time. Andjust as the last bell struck, a peculiar sweet smile shone over hisface, and he lifted up his head a little, and quickly said, 'Adsum!'and fell back. It was the word we used at school when names werecalled; and lo! he, whose heart was as that of a little child, hadanswered to his name, and stood in the presence of his Master. "

Small wonder if, in India, they called Thomas Newcome "Don Quixote. "

And King Arthur is Alfred Tennyson's dream of a gentleman. Arthur ismanhood at its prime. He was strong, a warrior, a self-made man, sincethe foolish questioned, "Is he Uther's son?" Mystery and miracle mixwith his history, as is accurate, seeing no life grows tall without theadvent of miracle. He is rescuer of a realm from anarchy, founder ofthe Round Table--an order of knighthood, purposed to include only pureknights--was not spectacular; for we read that others were greater intournament than he, but he greater than all in battle, from which wesee how great occasions called out his greatness. He measured up toneeds. Though often deceived, he was optimist, hoping the best frommen. He counted life to be a chance for service. There was a hiddenquality in him, as when he, unknown to all, went out from Camelot totilt with Balin and overthrew him. His life was pure as the heart of"the lily maid of Astolat, " and demanded in man a purity as great asthat of woman. His love was mighty, unsuspicious, tender. He washimself a king, born to rule, fitted to inspire. No littleness sappedhis greatness. He rejoiced in others' strength, prowess, victory. Hiswas an eye quick to discover merit in woman or man, as in Lynette. Hisheart was tender, and a cry for help awoke him from deep sleep. Hehated foulness as he hated hell. He was like a sky, so high, pure, open. Himself makes an era, for his age clusters about him as if hewere a sun to sway a system. Like Cordelia, in "Lear, " he is a figurein the background; yet, despite his actual slight participancy in the"Idyls of the King, " he always seems the one person of the poem. Whatis Lancelot matched with him, or pure Sir Galahad? If knighthoodmisconceived King Arthur then, men do not misconceive him now. A greatspirit must not murmur if misconceived. The world will cluster to himhereafter, himself being God's hand to lift them to his Alp ofnobleness. Arthur's life upbraids men for their sin. His very purityalienated Guinevere. Goodness has tempests in its sky, and storms makemorning murk as night; and one true knight. King Arthur, goes sick atheart to battle with rebels in the West. Lancelot and Guinevere arefled; Modred has raised standard of rebellion; some knights are dead, slain in battle or searching for the Holy Grail; some have left offknighthood, --and King Arthur is defeated! Nay, this can not be. Herides into the battle, having forgiven Guinevere "as Eternal Godforgives"--the battle where

 "Host to host Shocks, and the splintering spear, the hard mail hewn, Shield-breakings, and the clash of brands, the crash Of battle-axes on shatter's [shatter'd?] helms, and shrieks After the Christ, of those who falling down Look'd up for heaven, and only saw the mist. "

And, the battle ended, Arthur moans, "My house hath seen my doom;" buthe has not forgotten God, nor hath God forgotten him. God is hisdestination, and he trusts him now as in the golden yesterdays:

 "I have lived my life, and that which I have done May He within himself make pure!"

And Arthur found, not sorrow nor defeat, but victory; for

 "Then from the dawn it seem'd there came, but faint As from beyond the limit of the world, Like the last echo born of a great cry, Sounds, as if some fair city were one voice Around a king returning from his wars. "

And one of earth's gentlemen was welcomed home to heaven. 

XII

The Drama of Job

The sun monopolizes the sky. Stars do not shine by day, not becausethey have lost their luster, but because the sun owns the heavens, anderases them as the tide erases footprints from the sands. In similarfashion a main truth monopolizes attention to the exclusion ofsubordinate truths. The Bible's main truth is its spiritualsignificancy, containing those ethical teachings which haverevolutionized this world, and which are to be redemptive in all agesyet to come. The Bible, as God's Book for man's reading andredemption, has proven so amazing as a moral force, illuminating themind; purifying the heart; freeing and firing the imagination; attuninglife itself to melody; peopling history with new ideas; seedingcontinents with Magna Chartas of personal and political liberties;making for religious toleration; creating a new ideal of manhood andwomanhood; presenting, in brief biographical sketches, perfect picturesof such men as the world has seen too few of; and portraying Christ, whose face once seen can never be forgotten, but casts all other facesand figures into shadow, leaving Him solitary, significant, sublime, --this is the Bible. So men have conceived the Scriptures as amagazine of moral might; and the conception has not been amiss. Thisis the Bible's chief merit and superior function, and this glory hasblinded us to lesser glories, which, had they existed in any otherliterature, would have stung men to surprise, admiration, and delight. "The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam" is a pleasure simply as an expression ofsensuous delight set to music. The poem is a bit of careless laughter, ringing glad and free as if it were a child's, and passing suddenly toa child's tears and sobbing. This solitary virtue has breathed intothe Rubaiyat life. The Bible is a series of books bound in a singlevolume, because all relate to a single theme: history, biography, letters, proverbial philosophy, pure idyls, lofty eloquence, elegiacpoetry, ethics, legal codes, memorabilia, commentaries on campaignsmore influential on the world's destiny than Caesar's, epic poetry, lyrics, and a sublime drama. The Bible is not a book, but a library;not a literary effort, but a literature. It sums up the literature ofthe Hebrew race, aside from which that race produced nothing literaryworthy of perpetuation. One lofty theme stung them to genius, theirmission and literature converging in Christ and there ending. TheBible as literature marks the book as unique as a literary fact as itis as a religious fact; in either, standing solitary. That lovers ofliterature have passed these surprising literary merits by withcomparative inattention is attributable, doubtless, to theover-shadowing moral majesty of the volume. The larger obscured thelesser glory. But, after all, can we feel other than shame inrecalling how our college curricula contain the masterpieces of Greek, Latin, English, and German literature, and find no niche for the Bible, superior to all in moral elevation and literary charm and inspiration?"Ruth" is easily the superior of "Paul and Virginia" or "Vicar ofWakefield. " "Lamentations" is as noble an elegy as sorrow has set towords; the Gospels are not surpassed by Boswell's "Johnson" in power ofrecreating the subject of the biography; the Psalms sing themselveswithout aid of harp or organ; "The Acts" is a history taking rank withThucydides; and Job is the sublimest drama ever penned. If theseencomiums are high, they must not be deemed extravagant, rather thenecessary eulogy of truth. 

What are the sublimest poems of universal literature? Let this standas a tentative reply: Aeschylus's "Prometheus Bound, " Dante's "DivineComedy, " Shakespeare's "Hamlet, " Milton's "Paradise Lost, " and Job, author unknown. To rank as a sublime production, theme and treatmentmust both be sublime, and the poem must be of dignified length. Prometheus has a Titan for subject; has magnanimity for occasion; hassuffering, on account of his philanthropy, as tragic element; and thebarren crags of Caucasus as theater; and the style is the loftiest ofAeschylus, sublimest of Greek dramatists. Perhaps "Oedipus Coloneus"is nearest approach among Greek tragedies to the elevation of"Prometheus Bound, " and Shelley's "Prometheus Unbound" has much of theGreek sublimity and more than the Greek frigidity. Dante is nearestneighbor to Aeschylus, though fifteen hundred years removed, and the"Divine Comedy" has all elements of sublimity. The time is eternal. The havoc of sin, the might of Christ, the freedom of the human spirit, the righteousness of God, the fate of souls, are materials out of whichsublimer cathedral should be built than ever Gothic Christians wroughtin poetry of stone. "Hamlet" is the sublimity of a soul fighting, single-handed, with innumerable foes, and dying--slain, but undefeated. "Paradise Lost" might easily be mistaken for the deep organ music of astormy ocean, so matchless and sublime the melody. In theme, epic; intreatment, epic; in termination, tragic, --which melts into holy hopeand radiant promise as a night of storm and fearful darkness melts intothe light and glory of the dawn and sunrise when the sky is fair. Ican hear and see this blind old Puritan, chanting the drama of a lostcause as a David lamenting for his Absalom dead. Milton is sublime inhistory, misfortune, range of ideas, warrior strength, and prowess tofight and die undaunted. Not even his darkness makes him sob more thana moment. A rebellion in heaven, a war in consequence; the flaminglegions of the skies led by Christ, God's Son; a conflict, whoseclangor fills the vaulted skies in heaven with reverberating thunders, ending in defeat for evil which makes all Waterloos insignificant; thefall of Satanic legions from the thrones which once were theirs, when, with dolorous cry, they stumbled into hell; the counterplot of Lucifer;the voyage across the wastes "of chaos and old night;" the horrid birthof Sin; the apocalypse of Sin and Death in Eden; and the Promise, whosepierced hand, held out, saved from utter ruin those who, "Hand in hand with wandering steps and slow, Through Eden took their solitary way. "

Musician, instrument, and oratorio, --all sublime. "Last named, thoughfirst written, is the drama of Job, in which all things conspire tolift the argument into sublimity. Are seas in tempests sublime? Whatare they, matched with Job's stormy soul? Are thunders reverberatingamong mountains sublime? What are they when God's voice makesinterrogatory? But above all, God walks into the drama as his right isto walk into human life; and God's appearance, whether at Sinai orCalvary, or in the weary watches of some heart's night of pain, makesmountain and hour and heart sublime. 

Thomas Carlyle once, reading at prayers in a friend's house from theBook of Job, became oblivious to surroundings, and read on and on, tillone by one the listeners arose and slipped out in silence, leaving therapt reader alone, he holding on his solitary way until the laststrophe fell from the reader's lips; nor can we wonder at him, for suchmust be the disposition of every thoughtful peruser of Job. As we willnot care to lay Hamlet down till Fortinbras is taking Hamlet, withregal honors, from the scene, so we cling to Job till we see lightbreak through the clouds, and the storm vanish, and the thunder cease. 

Job is a prince, old, rich, fortunate, benevolent, and good. Life hasdealt kindly with him, and looking at his face you would not, from hiswrinkles, guess his years. The great honor him; the good trust him;the poor, in his bounty find plenty; no blessing has failed him, sothat his name is a synonym of good fortune, --such a man is chief personof this drama, written by some unknown genius. Singular, is it not, that this voice, from an antiquity remoter than literature canduplicate, should be anonymous? Not all commodities have the firm'sname upon them. Some of the world's noblest thoughts are entailed onthe generations, they not knowing whence they sprang. He who speaks agreat word is not always conscious it is great. We are often hiddenfrom ourselves. But our joy is, some nameless poet has made Job chiefactor in the drama of a good man's life. "The steps of a good man areordered of the Lord, " the Scriptures say, and such a man was Job; andthe theme of this drama is, how shall a good man behave undercircumstances ruinously perverse, and what shall be his fate? Thetheme has rare attraction, and appeals to us as a home message, dear toour heart as a fond word left us by a departing friend. 

The drama has prologue, dialogue, and epilogue. The actors are Job'sfriends, Job's self, Satan, and God. 

Temporarily, as an object lesson to children in the moral kindergarten, God gave prosperity under the Mosaic code as proof of piety. This_régime_ was a brief temporality, God not dealing in giving visiblerewards to goodness, else righteousness would become a matter ofmerchandise, being quotable in Dun's. When we reason of righteousness, that the good are blest seems a necessary truth; yet they do not appearso. They are afflicted as others, "the rain falls on the just and theunjust;" nay, more, the wicked even seem favored; "he is not in troubleas other men;" prosperity smiles on him, like a woman on her favoredlover; and the spirit cries out involuntarily, as if thrust through byan angry sword, "How can these things be?" And this bitter cry, wrungfrom the suffering good man, is theme for the drama of Job; and in thisstands solitary as it stands sublime. 

A first quality of greatness in a literary production is, that it dealswith some universal truth. "How can good men suffer if God be good?"How pressingly important and importunate this question is! "Doesgoodness pay?" is the commercial putting of the question. Such beingthe meaning of Job, how the poem thrusts home, and how modern andpersonal is it become! When conceived as the drama of a good man'slife, every phase of the discussion becomes apparently just. Nothingis omitted and nothing is out of place. 

Job sits in the sunshine of prosperity. Not a cloud drifts across hissky, when, without word of warning, a night of storm crushes along hisworld, destroys herds and servants, reduces his habitations to ruins, slays his children, leaves himself in poverty, a mourner at the funeralof all he loved. Then his world begins to wonder at him; then distrusthim, as if he were evil; his glory is eclipsed, as it would seem, forever; and, as if not content at the havoc of the man's hopes andprosperity and joy, misfortune follows him with disease; grievousplagues seize him, making days and nights one sleepless pain; and hiswife, who should have been his stay and help, as most women are, became, instead of a solace and blessing, querulous, crying, like avirago, shrilly, "Curse God, and die!" Job opens with tragedy; Lear, and Julius Caesar, and Othello, and Macbeth, and Hamlet, close withtragedy. Job's ruin is swift and immediate. He has had no time toprepare him for the shock. He was listening for laughter, and he hearsa sob. You can fairly hear the ruin, crashing like falling towersabout this Prince of Uz; and you must hear, it you are not stone-deaf, the pant of the bleeding runner, who half runs, half falls into hismaster's presence, gasping, "Job, Prince Job, my master--ruin! ruin!ruin! Thy--herds--and thy servants--ruin--alas! Thy herds aretaken--and thy servants slain--and--I--only--I--am--left;" and ere hisstory is panted forth, another comes, weary with the race, and gasps, "Thy flocks--are slain--with fire--from heaven--and thy servants--withthem--and I--alone--am--am--" when another breathless runner breaksthat story off, crying, "Thy sons--and daughters--" and Job turns hispale face, and fairly shrieks, "My sons and daughters--what? Say on!""Thy sons and daughters were feasting--and--the storm sweptthrough--the--sky, and crushed the house--and slew--thydaughters--and--thy--sons--and I, a servant, I only, amescaped--alone--to tell thee;" and Job wept aloud, and his griefpossesses him, as a storm the sea--and was very pitiful--and he fell onhis face, and worshiped! The apocalypse of this catastrophe is geniusof the most splendid order. Tragedy has come! But Job rises abovetragedy, for he worshiped. 

In his "Talks on the Study of Literature, " Arlo Bates, in discussingAbraham Lincoln's Gettysburg oration, instancing this sentence, "Wehere highly resolve that those dead shall not have died in vain, " says, "The phrase is one of the most superb in American literature, and whatmakes it so is the word 'highly, ' the adverb being the last of which anordinary mind would have thought in this connection, and yet, oncespoken, it is the inevitable and superb word. " To all this I agreewith eagerness; but submit that, in this phrase from Job, "I only amescaped _alone_ to tell thee, " the word "alone" is as magical andwonderful; and I think the author of this drama may well be claimed aspoet laureate of that far-off, dateless time. 

And the good man's goodness availed him nothing? What are we to thinkof Job now? Either a good man is afflicted, and perhaps of God, or Jobhas been a cunning fraud, his life one long hypocrisy, his age a graydeception. Which? Here lies the strategic quality in the drama. Thethree friends are firmly persuaded that Job is unrighteous and his sinhas found him out. His dissimulation, though it has deceived man, hasnot deceived God. Such their pitiless reasoning; and the more blindthey are, the more they argue, as is usual; for in argument, menconvince themselves, though they make no other converts. In Job'scalamity, all winds blow against him, as with one rowing shoreward onthe sea, when tides draw out toward the deep and winds blow a gale offshore out to the night; and they blow against Job, because he is notwhat he once was. His life, once comedy, glad or wild with laughteraccording to the day, is now tragedy, with white face and bleedingwounds, and voice a moan, like autumn winds. Alas! great prince, thytragedy is come! Tragedy; but God did not commission it. This dramadoes not misrepresent God, as many a poem and many a sufferer do. Satan--this drama says--Satan sent this ruin. God has not seared thisman's flesh with the white heats of lightning, nor brought him intopenury nor suspicion, nor made his heart widowed. God is dispenser ofgood, not evil; for while an argument is not to be enforced againstpunitive justice, seeing justice is a necessity of goodness, yet we areto affirm that the notion of God slaying Job's children (or anybody'schildren, so far as that runs), or blotting out his prosperity, isobnoxious to reason and to heart. This drama perpetrates no suchblunder. Satan sent these disasters; for with him is evil purpose. The very nobility of Job stings him to enmity and madness; for iniquityis his delight, and ruin his vocation and pleasure. A power withoutman working evil is consonant with history and experience, and tosuppose this power a person rather than an influence is as rational asto suppose God not a barren principle, but a Person, fertile in loveand might and righteousness. In the drama of Job, God is not smirched. He is not Hurter, but Helper. In "Prometheus Bound, " Zeus is tyrant;in Shelley's "Prometheus Unbound, " Zeus is tyrant run mad. In Job, Godis majesty enthroned; thoughtful, interested, loving; permitting, notadministering evil; hearing and heeding a bewildered man's cry, andcoming to his rescue, like as some gracious emancipator comes, to breakdown prison doors and set wronged prisoners free. In Job, God is notaspersed, a thing so easy to do in literature and so often done. Hereis no dubious biography, where God is raining disaster instead ofmercies. To misrepresent God seems to me a high crime andmisdemeanor--nay, _the_ high crime and misdemeanor; because on therighteousness of God hangs the righteousness of the moral systemembracing all souls everywhere, and to misconceive or misinterpret God, sins against the highest interests of the world, since life never riseshigher than the divinity it conceives and worships. The permissiveelement in Divine administration is here clearly distinguished. Complex the system is, and not sum-totally intelligible as yet, thoughwe may, and do, get hints of vision, as one catches through the thickranks of forest-trees occasional glimpses of sky-line, where room ismade by a gash in the ranks of woods, and the open looks in like someone standing outside a window with face toward us. 

This drama of goodness gives words and form to our perplexity. How cana good life have no visible favors? How are we to explain prosperitycoming to a man besotted with every vice and repugnant to our souls, while beside him, with heart aromatic of good as spice-groves withtheir odors, with hands clean from iniquity as those of a little child, with eyes calm and watching for the advent of God and an opportunity tohelp men, --and calamities bark at his door, like famine-crazed, ravenous wolves at the shepherd's hut; and pestilence bears his babesfrom his bosom to the grave; and calumny smirches his reputation; andhis business ventures are shipwrecked in sight of the harbor; and hiswife lies on a bed of pain, terrible as an inquisitor's rack; penuryfrays his garments, and steals his home and goods, and snatches eventhe crust from his table, --and God has forgotten goodness? Here is noparable, but a picture our eyes have seen as we have stumbled from agarret, blinded by our tears as if some wild rain dashed in our faces. 

God does not care; more, God's lightnings sear the eyeballs of virtue, tall and fair as angelhood, --this is our agonized estimate betimes, andwe are troubled lest, unwittingly and unwillingly, we malign God. Toan explanation of this fiery tangle of adversity the drama of Job setsitself. How prodigious the task!

But the poem breathes perfume in our faces as we approach until wethink we neighbor with honeysuckle blooms. What hinders to catch thefragrance for a moment ere we enter this room of suffering lying a stepbeyond? "Job" has beauty. "Job" has bewildering beauty. This is nohasty word, rather deliberate and sincere. An anthology from Job wouldbe ample material for an article. All through the poem, thoughts flashinto beauty as dewdrops on morning flowers flash into amethyst, andruby, and diamond, and all manner of precious stones. In reading it, imagination is always on wing, like humming-birds above the flowers. You may find similes that haunt you like the sound of falling water, and breathe the breath of surest poetry in your face. 

 "Let the stars of the twilight thereof be dark: Let it look for light, but have none; Neither let it behold the eyelids of the morning. "

 "There the wicked cease from troubling, And the weary are at rest, "--

a beautiful, thought, which Tennyson has put bodily into his "Queen ofthe May, " where, as here, the words sob like a child sobbing itself tosleep when its mother is dead and missed. 

"There the prisoners are at ease together; They hear not the voice of the taskmaster. "

And to prisoners of hope, how healing such words are, and full of balm!But to us who have known not the blinding grief of prisoners, thepoetry of the thought is "rainy sweet. "

 "My roarings are poured out like water. "

 "Men which are crushed before the moth!"

 "For man is born unto trouble As the sparks to fly upward. "

 "The counsel of the froward is carried headlong: They meet with darkness in the daytime, And grope at noonday as in the night. "

 "For thou shalt be in league with the stones of the field, And the beasts of the field shall be at peace with thee; And thou shalt know that thy tent is in peace. "

Can one recall a description of peace more searching and ample, not tosay fraught with more tender suggestion?

 "My brethren have dealt deceitfully as a brook, As the channel of brooks that pass away. "

For my part, I know no cry that paints pain with surer pathos than apassage now to be quoted. 

I see and hear the lonely sufferer, and watch beside his bed as if tosubdue his pain. 

 "Is there not warfare to man upon the earth? Are not his days like the days of a hireling? As a servant that earnestly desireth the shadow, And as a hireling that looketh for his wages? So am I made to possess months of vanity, And wearisome nights are appointed to me. When I lie down, I say, When shall I arise? But the night is long; And I am full of tossings to and fro until the dawning of the day. My days are swifter than a weaver's shuttle, And are spent without hope. "

 "I would not live alway: Let me alone; for my days are vanity. "

In a passage now to be adduced is sublimity passing the sublimity ofMilton the sublime:

 "God, which removeth the mountains, and they know it not When he overturneth them in his anger; Which shaketh the earth out of her place, And the pillars thereof tremble; Which commandeth the sun, and it riseth not; And sealeth up the stars; Which alone stretcheth out the heavens, And treadeth upon the waves of the sea; Which maketh Arcturus, Orion, and the Pleiades, And the chambers of the South; Which doeth great things, past finding out; Yea, marvelous things without number: He breaketh me with a tempest. "

Before words like these one may well stand dumb, with the finger ofsilence on the lips. Hear Job wail:

 "Now my days are swifter than a post: They are passed away as the swift ships, As the eagle that swoopeth on the prey, My soul is weary of my life. "

 "Thou shalt forget thy misery: Thou shalt remember it as waters that are passed away. "

 "He poureth contempt upon princes, And looseth the belt of the strong; He discovereth deep things out of darkness, And bringeth out to light the shadow of death. "

This "bringeth out to light the shadow of death" appears to me as boldand transfiguring a figure as is to be found in literature. It ismajesty itself. 

 "They grope in the dark without light, And he maketh them to stagger like a drunken man. "

 "Wilt thou harass a driven leaf, And wilt thou pursue the dry stubble?"

 "I am like a garment that is moth-eaten. "

 "He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down; He fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not. "

 "He breaketh me with breach upon breach; He runneth upon me like a giant. "

 "Aforetime I was as a tabret. "

 "His strength shall be hunger-bitten, And calamity shall be ready at his side. "

 "My purposes are broken off. "

 "His remembrance shall perish from the earth, And he shall have no name in the street. "

 "Ye break me in pieces with words. "

How vigorously descriptive this is of what many a man has endured fromhammering speech of violent men!

 "They waited for me as for the rain. "

 "He overturneth the mountains by the roots. "

 "Out of the north cometh golden splendor. "

 "God hath upon him terrible majesty. "

 "Deck thyself now with excellency and dignity; And array thyself with honor and majesty. "

Has not this putting all the strength and beauty of a Shakespeareancouplet? Shakespeare uses such figures as this often, and in them heis his greater self. His is the splendor of imagination and clearnessof vision of a prince of poets. Time hastes. This task is decoying. To cease is a hardship; for "Job" lends itself with such wealth tothese nobler passages as to urge on our quest. Whole chapters arepoems, rich as if carven on blocks of solid gold. They blaze withsplendor. But the drama bears on its way like an invading army, andwill not wait. 

Disaster has overtaken a good man with its utter demolition; but, ashas been shown, the prologue of the drama settles the paternity of thedisaster. Evils come, but not necessarily from God. In a complexmoral system, God has found it good to administer by general ratherthan by special laws, and their operation does not work exact justiceto either wickedness or purity. God's administration being an eternalone, he dares take scope to bring rewards to goodness and to evil. Goddoes not need to haste. He has eternity, and dares therefore bepacific and not perturbed. Haste savors of lack in time. God must nothaste. That he could pour swift retribution on the head of offendingmen, we dare not doubt. That he does not is patent. Another scene isplainly the purpose of God. He has a scene behind a scene. If thisworld were an end, there is rank and unforgivable injustice done. Menhave not been dealt fairly with, and may, with legitimacy, makeacrimonious reply; but we are clearly taught that this world is a stagefor the display of character, not for its reward, and the next scenewill be for the reward of character, and not for its display. God willrecompense, but we are not told God does recompense. Such is the loftyargument of the drama, and may be named as major theme. 

Prince Job, smitten from his throne of prosperity and influence into apit of ignominy, in his abasement cries, "Wherefore do the wicked live, become old, yea, are mighty in power?" And in his conscious integrityhe might well shrill a cry to his own breaking heart. Job is sure(some things calamity reveals) integrity is not awarded according toits character and worth, while his three friends see in Job's downfalla disclosure of his wickedness. They urge him to repent. They thinkthere can be no arguing against doom. God has smitten him for hissins, --this they all agree, and say no other thing. Poor Job! Hisfriends consider his hypocrisy proven, and his wife has becomeforeigner to him in his day of disaster; disease climaxes hiscalamities, and he half says, half moans: "When I lie down, I say, Whenshall I arise and the night be gone? and I am full of turnings to andfro until the dawning of the day. My days are swifter than a weaver'sshuttle, and are spent without hope. I will speak in the anguish of myspirit. I will confess the bitterness of my soul. " Surely hisaffliction breaks like some desperate sea, and he is as a sailor hurledon jagged rocks, bleeding, half-drowned, shivering cold, and again thestorm-waves leap like mad tigers at his throat, and the sailor scarceknows well how to beat one stroke more against the sea. This is Job. He is bewildered. His first cry is as of one whose reason staggers. His face, his voice, his words--all are unnatural. To hear, I wouldnot know nor think this was Prince Job. Strangely, sadly, terriblychanged he is when he cries: "Let the day perish wherein I was born. Let that day be darkness. Let darkness and the shadow of death stainit. Let the blackness of the day terrify it. As for that night, letdarkness seize upon it. Let it not be joined unto the days of theyear. Let it not come into the number of the months. Lo, let thatnight be solitary; let no joyful voice come therein. Let the stars ofthe twilight thereof be dark; let it look for light, but have none;neither let it see the dawning of the day. " "Wherefore is light givento him that is in misery; and life unto the bitter in soul, which longfor death, but it cometh not; and dig for it more than for hidtreasures; which rejoice exceedingly, and are glad, when they can findthe grave? For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me. Iwas not in safety, neither had I rest, neither was I quiet; yet troublecame. " Alas, Prince Job, your voice is a-sob with tears; and we hadnot known it was he! But did grief ever tell its beads with deepermusic? Has not this bankrupt prince given sorrow words forever? Hispain and grief are unutterable in sadness, yet is he not alone. Multitudes have taken up his lament. There is no pathos deeper thanhis, "digging for death more than for hid treasures. " I fear Job'sgrief unmans him, and he hath gone mad with Lear. Pray, think you heis not as passionate, gray Lear, mad as the stormy night? It seems so, but is not so. He is baffled. He is a good man, but blinded for amoment, as a lightning-flash stupifies the sight. His cry is the crywrung from the white lips of pain through the ages. We can not blamehim, but only be pitiful to him. His disasters are so varied and soterrible; but we feel sure of him, and if he have lost footing andsight, 't will not be for long. 

But there he sits in ashes, fit to make marble weep; and his threefriends--stately, aged, gray, friends of many years--come to comforthim; for which service he has need, sore need. There are times when aheart is hungry for tenderness, when a word of love would be a gift ofGod, when a touch of some tender hand would be a consolation wide asheaven; and such a word and hand had melted Job to tears, and his tearswould have done him good, as prayer does. Sometimes tears clear thethroat and heart of sobs that choke. But these men were inquisitorsrather than comforters; they were philosophers, when they ought to havebeen men. They sat in silence seven days, but should have maintainedtheir quiet. These men lacked imagination, which is a fatal omissionfrom character; for they who came to comfort, became polemic, pitiless, belligerent, and their voices sound metallic. If a child had crepttoward the afflicted prince, and had reached out a pitiful hand, and, with childish treble, had said, "Poor Job; poor Job!" that word hadsalved his wounds, and helped him through his morass of pain and fearand doubt. But instead, his friend Eliphaz hectors his pain by saying, in stately fashion, "Thy words have upholden him that was failing, andthou hast strengthened the feeble knees; but now it has come upon thee, and thou faintest. " Shame, Eliphaz! What a bungler! A child hadknown better. What ails you? Do you not know this man needstenderness, and not lectures and disquisitions in moralities? Can younot see his heart is breaking, and his eyes turn to you as if he werewatching for the coming of some succor infinite? Have you no balm withfragrance? But he hears us not, or heeds us not, but measures out hisperiods as if he were orator at some state occasion: "Behold, happy isthe man whom God correcteth: therefore despise not thou the chasteningof the Almighty. Lo, this, we have searched it, so it is; hear it, andknow thou it for thy good. " Pray, is this friend mad, or foe, or fool, that he knows no better than to pour contempt on distress? Will not afoe, even, have pity on an enemy wounded and bleeding and prostrate inthe dust? But this man thinks he has a mission to teach an overthrownprince a lesson, harsh, cold, unrelenting, lacking sentiment. Job'spitiful affliction is enough to lift such a man into pity. No, no; heurges his lesson, like some dull schoolmaster who will instruct hispupil while he knows him dying. 

Job's broken voice calls, "O that my grief were thoroughly weighed, andmy calamity laid in the balances together. Is my strength the strengthof stones, or is my flesh brass? I will speak in the anguish of myspirit; I will complain in the bitterness of my soul. So that my soulchooseth strangling, and death rather than my life. I loathe it; Iwould not live alway; for my days are vanity. To him that isafflicted, pity should be shewn from his friend. " And to this pitifulappeal for considerate judgment, and for a word or look of compassion, another friend finds answer, with cruelty like the touch of winter onan ill-clad child: "If thou wouldst seek unto God betimes, and make thysupplication to the Almighty; if thou wert pure and upright; surely nowhe would awake for thee, and make the habitation of thy righteousnessprosperous. " What winter wind is bitter and biting as these words?

Job's friends now are his worst calamities. They are thrusting intohis naked and diseased flesh a cruel spear, and into his heart a sword. Are these men clad in steel that they are so impervious to pity? Andyet, if we pause to consider, this dramatist has not spoken rashly norunnaturally; for we can recall that often, often, when the window-panesof a life are smoky with the breath of suffering, just such criticismsas these are offered voluminously. We are hard folks. There seems astrain of cruelty in our blood which sometimes gloats over suffering asat a carnival. Were these men vultures, that wait to watch with joy awounded soldier die? Of what is our nature builded, that we are cruelas the unreasoning beasts? These harsh friends are voices from our ownpitiless hearts, and ought to make us afraid. 

There are three friends in number, but there is one voice and twoechoes, --three men debating with one moaning sufferer, and each sayingthe same thing. Had only one of them been present, all the three saidhad been spoken. These men were poor in ideas; for amongst the threeis only one thought, as if they had one sword among them, which betimeseach one brandishes. Besides, they have a polemic's pride; they areeager to make out a case, and thirst to prove poor Job a sinner. Oneof them (it might as well be any other of them) runs on: "Thehypocrite's hope shall perish: whose hope shall be cut off, and whosetrust shall be a spider's web. Behold, God will not cast away aperfect man; but the dwelling-place of the wicked shall come tonaught. " This is savage cruelty, pouring nitric-acid intosword-gashes. Nothing moves your plain man; for he delights in makingpeople wince. He is not angry, but natural, and his naturalness issomething worse than the choleric man's anger. He is saying: "Ah, Job, see now--comfort, comfort? Why the house of the wicked shall come tonaught. " And has not Job's house been splintered by the tempest? Andthis friend of many years is saying, "Hypocrite!" But this wordrecalls Job to himself. He rises above his pain, scarcely feeling thetwinges. His thought is drawn away from his physical calamity, andthat is a good anodyne for torture. His character is attacked, and hemust run to its succor as he would to the rescue of wife or child. NowJob ceases sobbing, and becomes attorney for himself. He pleads hiscause with full knowledge of his own heart. He therefore speaks _excathedra_ so far. Job is on the defensive--not against God, butagainst men. His "tongue is as the pen of a ready writer. " Job ishimself again. His perturbation is passed as a cloud swims across thesky. 

Job is the misjudged man, than which few things are harder to bear. That enemies misconstrue your motives and misjudge your conduct is tobe expected, though even then the spirit is lacerated; but when friendsmisjudge us, our pain seems more than we can bear. This was Job'scase. His familiar friends become His accusers, rasping such words, "How much more abominable and filthy is man which drinketh iniquitylike water!" and Job's cry crosses the centuries and reaches our earsthis day, "Have pity upon me, have pity upon me, O ye my friends; forthe hand of God hath touched me!" Old Lear's cry, "Stay a little, Cordelia, " is no more pitiful than this strong man reaching for a handand finding none, and pleading for sympathy, and pleading in vain. 

I see him sitting, with his gray beard blowing about him like a puff offog; I hear him when his pitiful voice intones its grief as if it werea chant; I see the pleading in his eyes, and it fills my breast withheart-break. You who love great delineations of passion, what thinkyou of our dramatist's vision of Job? You who count King Lear amongthe demigods of creative art, what think you of this Lear's olderbrother? His nature is so deep we can not fling plummet to its bottom. Lear was weak and wrong; but Job, with all his grief upon him, like acloud upon a mountain's crest--Job has violated no propriety of man orGod, so far as we have seen, and his cry fills the desert on whoseverge he sits, and clamors like the winds on stormy, winter nights. 

Job, misjudged, has the mercy of conscious integrity. Himself rises tohis own vindication, a course just and compatible with sincerity andmodesty. You will misjudge Job if you think him egotist. He is ratherone who knows himself, and feels sure of his purity in motive; hasself-respect therefore--a hard thing for a soul to have, and thepossession of which is a benediction. To know we meant well, to beable to justify us to ourselves, is next in grace to being justified ofGod; for next to Him, self is the most exacting master and judge. Hefeels misjudged, knows these men have misinterpreted him, beingdeceived by his calamities, and he therefore is thrown on thedefensive, and becomes his own attorney, pleading for his life. "Prayyou, my friends, do not misjudge me, " is his tearful plea, while theypress their cruel conclusions as a phalanx of spears against his nakedbreast. This conception will clear Job of the blame of beingself-righteous. I do not find that in his utterances; but do findsturdy self-respect, and assertion of pure motive and pure action; forhis argument proceeds thus: "I know my heart; I know all my purposes; Imeant right, and tried to do right. You think me hypocrite. I prayyou rectify your judgment, since neither in intent nor yet in executionhave I been other than I seemed, and who can bring accusations againstmy doings? God breaketh me with a tempest, yet will I cry to him, Donot condemn me: show me wherefore thou contendest with me. I call onGod to vindicate me, who knoweth my life to the full. Will God break aleaf, driven to and fro by the wind? Though to you, my friends, I seemsmitten of God, your logic is wrong. I am not vile. O that I knewwhere I might find Him! I would order my cause before him, seeing heknows the way that I take. " Job is himself confounded by his calamity, so that he does not see clearly; finding no reason why God shouldafflict him, he being as he is and as he has been, just in purpose; forJob had yet to learn that lesson he has taught us all; namely, that notGod, but Satan, sent his disaster. He thought God was sowing ruin, asthe rest thought; whereas God was letting Satan work his evil way, while God was to vindicate his servant by an apocalypse of himself. Job, though bewildered as to the meaning of his troubles, asserts hisinnocency; and as he presents his case, his sky clears, and his voicestrengthens, and his argument rises in its eloquence, sonorous as thesea: "Know now that God hath overthrown me. He hath fenced my way, that I can not pass. He hath stripped me of my glory, and taken thecrown from my head. His troops come together, and raise up their wayagainst me, and encamp round about my tabernacle. My kinsfolk havefailed, and my familiar friends have forgotten me. They that dwell inmine house, and my maids, count me for a stranger: I am an alien intheir sight. I called my servant, and he gave me no answer. My breathis strange to my wife, though I entreated for my children's sake ofmine own body. Yea, young children despised me; I arose, and theyspake against me. All my inward friends abhorred me: and they whom Iloved are turned against me. My bone cleaveth to my skin and to myflesh. Have pity upon me! Why do ye persecute me as God? Have pityupon me!" If in literature there is a more passionate passage toincarnate in words a life wholly bereft and utterly alone, I know notof it. Oedipus Coloneus had Antigone, and King Lear had the king'sfool and loyal Kent, and Prometheus had visitors betimes, who broughthim balm of sympathy; but Job's servants will not obey him, and littlechildren make sport of him, and his wife turns away from him, and willnot hear his sobbing words, nor hear him as he calls the names of theirchildren whom he loved. Tragic Job! Not Samson, blind and jeered atby the Philistine populace in Dagon's temple, is sadder to look uponthan Job, Prince of Uz, in the solitude of his bereavement. This olddramatist, as I take it, had himself known some unutterable grief, andout of the wealth of his melancholy recollections has poured tears likerain. He has no master in pathos. 

This lament of Job is one aspect, and but one; for as he rises towardGod, his calamities seem slipping away from him as night's shadows fromthe hills at dawn. God knows his case, and Job, conscious of hisintegrity, looks God in the face, and his voice lifts into triumph, passing out of complaint and bemoaning into sublime utterances, whichconstitute the sublimest oration man ever pronounced, and is containedin those parts of the poem reaching from chapter xxvi to chapter xxxi, inclusive. I have read this oration, recalling the occasion whichproduced it, and noted the movement of this aged orator's spirit, andhave compared it with Marc Antony's funeral oration over Caesar, given, by common consent, the chiefest place among orations in the Englishtongue. For that noble utterance my admiration is intense and glowing. I answer to it as waters to the touch of violent winds; and inconclusion, from comparing the orator Marc Antony with the orator Jobof Uz, I am compelled to confess that I love not Antony the less, butJob the more. Marc Antony's oration was diplomatic, tragic, masterful, pathetic; but Job's oration is spent in the realm of the pathetic andsublime. The theme is the appeal to God. He has turned from man andtoward God. His thought swings in circles majestic as the circuits ofthe stars. He fronts himself toward the Eternal as if to certify, "ToGod I make my plea. " His harshness is kinder than the kindness of man. Job's orbit includes life. He runs out to God, but he runs to God. Himself is point of departure on this long journey. This oration is anapology, a plea of a great soul, pleading for what is above life. Thewords have pathos, but they lift to sublime heights. Job sweeps onlike a rising tide. His false comforters sit silent, perplexed, butsilenced. His argument rises as a wind, which first blows lightly as achild's breath on the cheek, then lifts and sways the branches of thetrees, then trumpets like a battle troop, then roars like storm-wavesbeating on the rocks, until we hear naught but Job. What begins anapology, ends a paean. At first, he spoke as, "By your leave, sirs. "Later, he seizes the occasion; masses his lifetime of experience andthought and faith and attempted service; deploys his argument to showhow God's wisdom fills the soul's sky, as if all stars had coalesced toframe a regal sun; makes his argument certify his conscious integrityin motive and conduct, until he thunders like a tempest: "My desire isthat the Almighty would answer me. I would declare unto him the numberof my steps; as a prince would I go near unto him, "--and on a suddenhis trumpet tones sink into softness, and his dilated frame stoops likea broken wall, and he murmurs, "The words of Job--are ended. " Yet sopotent his self-defense, that his three comforters sit silent as thehushed night. Their argument is broken and their lips are dry. Thewords of the comforters, like the words of Job, are ended. 

Elihu, a youth, has been listening. Age has had its hour and argument, and age is silenced, when, like the rush of a steed whose master issmitten from the saddle, this impetuous youth speaks. At this point, genius is evidenced by this unknown dramatist. A young man speaks, buthis are a young man's words, hurried, fitful, tinctured withimpertinence, headlong in statement and method; for he is youth, notexperienced, not deliberate, and easily influenced by the agedargument, and taking strong ground, and is infallible in his own eyes;and in him are visible the swagger and audacity of a boy. He makes nocontribution to the argument. His is a repetitional statement, thoughhimself does not know it. He thinks he is original. How delightfulthe audacity of his opening: "If thou canst answer me, set thy words inorder before me. Stand up. Behold, I am according to thy wish inGod's stead. " Clearly this is a young man speaking. A novice he, yetwith all the assurance of a man whose years have run more thanfourscore. He is bursting with speech and impudence, not perceivingthat to answer where old men have failed is a valorous task, to say theleast; and to attempt answer to Job, who has unhorsed every opponent inthe lists, is a strong man's work; but beyond this, Elihu undertakes toanswer for God. He will be in God's stead. See in this a young man'slack of reverence. What the old men hesitated to attempt, knowing thework lay beyond their united powers, this youth flings into as he wouldinto a swelling stream, swollen by sudden rains among the uplands. Hisears have been keen. Nothing has escaped him. All the words ofeverybody he has in mind, his memory being perfect, since he is youngand no faculty impaired, and as the debate has proceeded and he hasseen old men overborne by the old man Job, his impetuous youth has seenhow he could answer. This is natural, as any one conversant withhimself (not to go further in investigation) must know. We itch toreply, thinking we see the vulnerable joint in the harness. Job hasspoken last, and silenced his adversaries, and Elihu recallspractically but one thought of Job's reply; namely, that he was notunrighteous in intent, and gets, as most of us do, but a part of theafflicted man's meaning, and concludes that Job is glaringlyself-righteous, missing the true flavor of Job's answer; for what Jobwas, was self-respecting. And so Elihu gives Job a piece of his mind;takes up the thread of argument where the old men had broken it, anddrives on, with many words and few ideas, to prove Job is wrong andbad, and that God has simply meted out justice, no more. Elihu's wordsfairly trample on each other's heels, and though only giving a weakenedstatement of what had been said before, like a strong voice weakened byage, he thinks his is a sledgehammer argument, illuminative, convincing, unanswerable; yet because he thinks he speaks in God'sbehalf and in God's stead, he rises into eloquence withal, though hiswords are pitiless; for himself knows not suffering, nor can he compassJob's calamity. Elihu mistakes the sight of his eyes for the truths ofGod, a blunder of not infrequent recurrence. He is not all wrong, noris he all wrong in his desire to help to the truth, but is as a ladtrying to lift a mountain, which, planted by God, requires God touproot it. 

So the drama sweeps on. Jobs sits silent, but not silenced. He makesno reply to Elihu's invective. Here is a dignified silence moreimpressive than any speech. He has been shot at by all the volleys ofthe earth and sky; and, wounded in every part, he retains his faith inGod; nay, his faith is burning brightly, like a newly-trimmed lamp:"Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him. I am misconceived by man, but not by God;" and his face has a strange light, as if he had beenwith Moses on the mount; and when, in a whirlwind's sweep, and aboveit, God's voice is heard; and it is Job God answers, as if to say, "Yours is the argument. " God has no controversy with Elihu, nor yetwith the aged counselors. Them he ignores; them, by and by, herebukes. Job, and not they, had been right. God is come asvindicator. If his voice thunders like tempestuous skies, there is toappear an unspeakable tenderness in it at the last. He is not come toride Job down, like a charge of Bedouin cavalry. He is come to clearhis sky. He is come to give him vision and to show him wisdom, ofwhich, though Job has spoken, he has had none too much. In the drama, God speaks in discussion to two persons. In conversational tones, inthe prologue to the drama, he talks with Satan when he leads Job totrial. Job's calamities, instead of being a proof of his turpitude, are proof of the confidence God reposes in him. 

What a revelation in character that is! If for a time God had, asobject-lesson to the Jew and through him to the world, granted visiblerewards and visible punishments, that was not the permanent scheme. God's administration is hid from vulgar eyes truly, but also from theeyes "of the wise and prudent. " Man's wisdom may not vaunt itself. God's moral system is no well-lit room in which all furnishings arevisible; rather a twilight gloom, where men and women grope. We knowenough. Virtue is made very evident, and vice very despicable, and Godvery apparent--and these be the sufficient data for the monograph oflife. "All things work together for good to them that love God, " isthe far-away response to Job's troubled cry. God converses with Satanlong enough to deny the allegation that Job serves God as a matter ofdollars and cents, that it is convenient--so runs the devil'ssneer--convenient for Job to be good; for he finds it profitable. Butif God will lower his rate of profit in goodness, and if God willshipwreck all Job's prosperity, and sting him with the serpent-touch ofdire disease, then will Job become as others. Profit in goodness gone, his goodness will "fade as doth a leaf. " This is evil's pessimisticphilosophy, and Job, on whom calamitous circumstances pile as Dagon'stemple on Samson's head; Job, trusting where he can not see, and makinghis appeal to God, whose ways are hid, --is the lie given to Satan'sprophecies, and the vindication of God's confidence in Job. Job hasbeen as one sold into servitude for a month. Satan hath been a hardmaster, has thrust him exceeding sore, has given no intermission ofperil or anguish, has crowded sorrow on sorrow, has snatched away everyflower from the field of this good man's life, and watches, leering, tohear him say, "I will curse God and die;" but when, after argumentscompounded of pain and tears and hope, Job returns to his silence, saying, "The words of Job are ended, " Satan has witnessed the triumphof a good man, and disproof of his own sorry accusations, and thevindication of God's estimate; and, as is fitting, he stays not toacknowledge defeat, but slips away as the whirlwind chariot of Jehovahdashes into sight. Satan, not Job, has been defeated. 

And in the long years of a prosperous life, no confidence has beenreposed in Job so worthy as this reposed in him of God, to put tosilence the slanders of wickedness that goodness was a species ofselfishness; so that what Job did not understand, and what his friendsinterpreted as the certain disfavor of God, was sign of the trust Godreposed in him. Satan had done his worst on a good man, and hadfailed! What an apocalypse this was! The second person with whom Godholds conversation is Job. Satan he talked with in conversationaltones, with no state nor eloquence. Job he honors, coming in regalsplendor, by thundering with his voice, by treating Job as if he wereambassador for some potentate whom God held in high regard. God'sargument is the climax of sublimity reached in literature; is mountainsummit of sublime thought and utterance. What effect is wanting tomake this scene bewildering in sublimity? One? No. The auditor isJob, sitting in the ruin of home and love, and friendships andconsequence among men, and good repute, and if, bending low, you willhear him, you shall know he is sobbing for children that are not. Onelonely, distraught, mystified, sorely-beleagured, and stillsurely-trusting man, --this is the audience. The scene is a tawnydesert, once sown to oases of flowers, and billowing grain, and statelypalm-tree, and olive-groves, now harvestless, flowerless, palmless. Once a stately palace rose beside a fountain here, and from its opendoors ran genial hospitality, to greet the coming guest and thewayfarer overtaken by the night and weariness; and from the windowssinging and laughter rose, like a chorus of youthful voices; andnow--where these things were are only ruins, havoc, disaster; and Jobsits amidst the desolation that once was home as if he were crownedking of the realm of Calamity; and the desert, tawny as a tiger's skin, stretches away to the horizon, barren as the sea, than which is nothingmore solitary or pregnant with melancholy and thought. 

The sky is ample and open. Not a cloud flecks it with its foam. Fromdesert line to the blue zenith is only bewildering blue; when, black asa stormy midnight, driving as if lightnings were its chariot steeds, comes the whirlwind whereon the Almighty rides, and halts; and Godpitches his midnight pavilion in front of silent Job on the silentdesert, and from this tent, whose curtains are not drawn, theretrumpets a voice. God is come! And God speaks! "The Lord answeredJob out of the whirlwind. " Eloquence like this on forum like this, literature knows nothing of. Sublimity is come to its noon. 

"Where wast thou when I laid the foundation of the earth?" is theastounding introductory. No exordium is here. Into the thick ofargument, God leaps as a soldier might leap into the midst of furiousbattle. "Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? Or who laidthe corner-stones thereof; when the morning stars sang together, andall the sons of God shouted for joy? Or who shut up the sea withdoors, when I made the cloud the garment thereof, and set bars anddoors, and said, Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further: and hereshall thy proud waves be stayed? Hast thou commanded the morning sincethy days; and caused the dayspring to know his place; that it mighttake hold of the ends of the earth that the wicked might be shaken outof it? It is changed as clay under the seal; and all things standforth as a garment; and from the wicked their light is withholden, andthe high arm shall be broken. Hast thou entered into the springs ofthe sea? Have the gates of death been opened unto thee? Where is theway where light dwelleth? And as for darkness, where is the placethereof? Hast thou entered into the treasures of the snow? By whatway is the light parted, or the east wind scattered upon the earth?Who hath cleft a channel for the waterflood, or a way for the lightningof the thunder? Hath the rain a father? or who hath begotten the dropsof dew? Canst thou bind the cluster of the Pleiades, or loose thebands of Orion? Canst thou lead forth the signs of the zodiac in theirseasons? or canst thou guide Arcturus with his sons? Knowest thou theordinances of the heavens? Canst thou lift up thy voice to the clouds, that abundance of waters may cover thee? Canst thou send forthlightnings, that they may go, and say unto thee, Here we are? Whoprovideth for the raven his food, when his young ones cry unto God, andwander for lack of meat? But seeing thou canst not understand thesethings, and they are too high for thee, canst thou understand somelittle things, and answer some trivial questions I will put to thee?Knowest thou the secret of the wild goat or the wild ass on the desert?or the wild ox? or the ostrich that scorneth the horse and his rider?or the horse, hast thou given him strength? for he paweth in thevalley, and leaps as a locust, and rejoiceth in his strength, and goethout to meet the armed men; he mocketh at fear, and is not dismayed, neither turneth his back from the sword; he smelleth the battle afaroff. Doth the hawk soar by thy wisdom, and stretch her wings towardthe south? Doth the eagle mount up at thy command, and make her neston high? And behemoth, what of him? His limbs are like bars of iron;he is confident, though Jordan swell even to his mouth. Or leviathan, what canst thou do with him, and what knowest thou of him? In his neckabideth strength; his breath kindleth coals; his heart is as firm as astone; he counteth iron as straw, and brass as rotten wood; and when heraiseth himself up, the mighty are afraid. Hast thou an arm like God?and canst thou thunder with a voice like him? Deck thyself now withexcellency and dignity, and array thyself with honor and majesty. Pourforth the overflowings of thy anger; and look upon every one that isproud, and abase him. Look on every one that is proud, and bring himlow; and tread down the wicked where they stand, and hide them in thedust together. "

And Job called, so that his words sounded through the whirlwind'scurtains: "I know that Thou canst do all things, and that no purpose ofThine can be restrained. Who is this that hideth counsel withoutknowledge? Therefore have I uttered that which I understood not;things too wonderful for me, which I knew not. Wherefore I abhormyself, and repent in dust and ashes. " And Job has learned thissalutary lesson, that no man can comprehend all the ways life leads, nor need to. God is above the ways of life:

 "He leads us on by paths we do not know; Upward he leads us, though our steps be slow; Though oft we faint and falter by the way; Though clouds and darkness oft obscure the day, And still He leads us on. "

Job has learned to rest his case with God. 

 "My God knows best! Through all my days This is my comfort and my rest; My trust, my peace, my solemn praise, -- That God knows all, and God knows best. 

 My God knows best! That is my chart-- That thought to me is always blest: It hallows and it soothes my heart; For all is well, and God knows best. 

 My God knows best! Then tears may fall: In his great heart I find my rest; For he, my God, is over all; And he is love, and he knows best. "

God's argument is burned into Job's mind. How can man, who understandsnot the visible things of daily recurrence, think to penetrate themeaning of the moral universe, whose ways are hidden, like the cavernsof the seas? Not Job, nor any one of those who have spoken, has foundthe clew to this maze. But Job is impregnable now in his trust in God, as if he were in a fortress whose approaches were guarded by the angelsof heaven. 

And God spake yet once more; and now a word of rebuke--not argument--tothe old men, who trembled near the tent of God's whirlwind: "My wrathis kindled against you: for ye have not spoken of me the thing that isright, as my servant Job hath. My servant Job shall pray for you; forhim I will accept. " And Job, what ails Job now? He thought he wasrebuked of God in the Divine argument, and now he knows himself, at aword, vindicated, exalted; honor burnished, and not tarnished; himself, not accused of God, but beloved of him, and praised by him, --and Job isweeping like a little child; and lifting up his face, while the tearsrain down his cheeks, his eyes and his heart and his face are likespringtime in laughter, and his voice is as the singing of a psalm!For "the Lord turned the captivity of Job. "

How great an advent! Beauty this drama has; but beauty belongs to therivulet and the twilights; but sublimity to the Niagaras, and theoceans, and the human heart, and the words of God. This drama issublimity's self. Theme, actors, movement, goal, pertinency to thedeepest needs of soul and experience, and chiefly, God as protagonist, say that sublimity belongs to this drama as naturally as to theprodigious mountains or to the desert at night. "Surely, God is inthis place, and we knew it not. "

And Job ends as comedy, though it began as tragedy. Hamlet ends intragedy. He has lost faith, and his arm is palsied. We hear themusicians of Fortinbras playing a funeral dirge. Hamlet was tragedybecause God was not there. When God is near, no tragedy is possible. God is out of Hamlet. Job had closed as Job began, with tragedy direand utter, but that here a man refused to let go of God. Job believed. He did not understand. He was sore pressed. His tears and his anguishblinded him for an hour; but where he could not see, he groped, andcaught

 "God's right hand in the darkness, And was lifted up and strengthened. "

And God comes! and Job ends not in funeral dirge, as it began, but inlaughter and the smiting of silver cymbals. A good man's life hastragedy, but ends not so. If he die, God is at his bedside, holdinghis hand; and when he dies, he has good hope and solemn joy; for heshall live again.