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II
RECREATION
"Thou who wouldst know the things that be,
Bathe thy heart in the sunrise red,
Till its stains of earthly dross are fled."
Goethe.
RECREATION
i. – the fountains
Nature is wholesome. Without her elixirs daily taken we perish of lassitude and inanity. The fountains must be stirred to their depths and their torrents sent bounding along their sluices, else we sink presently into the pool of inertia, victims of indecision and slaves of fate. "Thy body, O well disposed man, is a meadow through which flow three hundred and sixty-five rivulets." Every pulse pushes nature's quaternion along life's currents recreating us afresh; the morn feeding the morn, Memnon's music issuing from every stop, as if the Orient itself had sung.
Nature is virtuous. Imparting sanity and sweetness, it spares from decay, giving life with temperance and a continency that keeps our pleasures chaste and perennial. Nothing short of her flowing atmosphere suffices to refill our urns. Neither books, company, conversation, – not Genius even, the power present in persons, nature's nature pouring her floods through mind, – not this is enough. Nature is the good Baptist plunging us in her Jordan streams to be purified of our stains, and fulfil all righteousness. And wheresoever our lodge, there is but the thin casement between us and immensity. Nature without, mind within, inviting us forth into the solacing air, the blue ether, if we will but shake our sloth and cares aside, and step forth into her great contentments.
As from himself he fled,
Possessed, insane,
Tormenting demons drove him from the gate:
Away he sped,
Casting his woes behind,
His joys to find,
His better mind.
'Tis passing strange,
The glorious change,
The pleasing pain!
Recovered,
Himself again
Over his threshold led,
Peace fills his breast,
He finds his rest;
Expecting angels his arrival wait.
If we cannot spin our tops briskly as boys do theirs, the wailers may chant their dirges over us. Enthusiasm is existence; earnestness, life's exceeding great reward. How busy then, and above criticism. Our cup runs over. But a parted activity, divorcing us from ourselves, degrades our noblest parts to the sway of the lowest and renders our task a drudgery and shame. For what avails, if while one's mind hovers about Olympus, his members flounder in Styx, and he is drawn asunder in the conflict? Let the days deify the days, the work the workman, giving the joyous task that leaves pleasant memories behind, and ennobles in the performance:
Tasked days
Above delays;
Hours that borrow
Speed of the morrow,
Light from sorrow:
Business bate not,
Want nor wait not,
Doubt nor date not;
Life from limb forbid to sever,
Recreate in rapt endeavor.
We come as a muse to our toil and find amusement in it; to a taskmaster whose company never tires. 'Tis life, the partaking of immortality. A day lived so, glorifies all moments afterwards. Long postponed, perhaps, the hours wearisome, till broke this immortal morning with engagements that time can complete never, nor compel, and whose importunity outlasts the hours.
Sleep, too, having the keys of life in its keeping. How we rise from its delectable divinations with eyes sovereign and anointed for the day's occupations. All our powers are touched with flame, all things are possible. But last night, the world had come to an end; the floods ebbed low, as if the fates were reversing the torch. How we blazed all the morning, to be cinders yesternight. Then came the god to re-kindle our faded embers, the Phœnix wings her way to meet the rising dawn and embrace the young world once more. Sleep took the sleep out of us. From forth the void there rises a roseate morn upon us.
The flattering East her gates impearled,
We hunt the morning round the world.
Nor is a day lived if the dawn is left out of it, with the prospects it opens. Who speaks charmingly of nature or of mankind, like him who comes bibulous of sunrise and the fountains of waters?
"Mornings are mysteries, the first world's youth,
Man's resurrection, and the future's bud
Shown in their birth; they make us happy,
Make us rich."
Rise in the morning, rise
While yet the streaming tide
Flames o'er the blue acclivities,
And pours its splendors wide;
Kindling its high intent
Along the firmament,
Silence and sleep to break,
Imaginations wake,
Ideas insphere
And bring them here.
Loiter nor play
In soft delay;
Speed glad thy course along
The orbs and globes among,
And as yon toiling sun
Attain thy high meridian:
Radiant and round thy day; —
Speed, speed thee on thy way.
"Every day is a festival, and that which makes it the more splendid is gladness. For as the world is a spacious and beautiful temple, so is life the most perfect institution that introduces us into it. And it is but just that it should be full of cheerfulness and tranquillity." Our dispositions are the atmosphere we breathe, and we carry our climate and world in ourselves. Good humor, gay spirits are the liberators, the sure cure for spleen and melancholy. Deeper than tears, these irradiate the tophets with their glad heavens. Go laugh, vent the pits, transmuting imps into angels by the alchymy of smiles. The satans flee at the sight of these redeemers. And he who smiles never is beyond redemption. Once clothed in a suit of light we may cast aside forever our sables. Our best economist of this flowing estate is good temper, without whose presidency life is a perplexity and disaster. Luck is bad luck and ourselves a disappointment and vexation. Victims of our humors, we victimize everybody. How the swift repulsions play: our atoms all insular, insulating; demonized, demonizing, from heel to crown; at the mercy of a glance, a gesture, a word, and ourselves overthrown. Equanimity is the gem in Virtue's chaplet and St. Sweetness the loveliest in her calendar. "On beholding thyself, fear," says the oracle. Only the saints are sane and wholesome.
ii. – the cheap physician
"That which makes us have no need
Of physic, that's physic indeed.
Hark, hither, reader, wilt thou see
Nature her own physician be?
Wilt see a man all his own wealth,
His own music, his own health, —
A man whose sober soul can tell
How to wear her garments well:
Her garments that upon her sit,
As garments should do, close and fit;
A well-clothed soul that's not oppressed,
Nor choked with what she should be dressed;
A soul sheathed in a crystal shrine,
Through which all her bright features shine,
As when a piece of wanton lawn,
A thin, aerial veil is drawn
O'er beauty's face, seeming to hide,
More sweetly shows the blushing bride:
A soul, whose intellectual beams
No mists do mask, no lazy streams:
A happy soul that all the way
To heaven rides in a summer's day?
Wouldst see a man whose well-warmed blood
Bathes him in a genuine flood, —
A man whose tuned humors be
A seat of rarest harmony?
Wouldst see blithe looks, fresh cheeks beguile
Age; wouldst see December smile?
Wouldst see nests of new roses grow
In a bed of reverend snow?
Warm thought, free spirits flattering
Winter's self into a spring?
In sum, wouldst see a man that can
Live to be old, and still a man
Whose latest and most leaden hours
Fall with soft wings, stuck with soft flowers;
And when life's sweet fable ends,
Soul and body part like friends;
No quarrels, murmurs, no delay,
A kiss, a sigh, – and so away, —
This rare one, reader, wouldst thou see?
Hark within, and thyself be he."
III
FELLOWSHIP
"Health is the first good lent to men,
A gentle disposition then,
Next competence by no by ways,
Lastly with friends to enjoy one's days."
Herrick.
FELLOWSHIP
i. – hospitality
Evelyn writes of the manners and architecture of his times: "'Tis from the want of symmetry in our buildings, decorum in our houses, that the irregularity of our humors and affections may be shrewdly discerned." But not every builder is gifted with the genius and personal qualities to harmonize the apartments to the dispositions of the inmates. I confess to a partiality for the primitive style of architecture commended by Evelyn, and question whether in our refinements on these we have not foregone comforts and amenities essential to true hospitality. What shall make good to us the ample chimney-piece of his day, with the courtesies it cherished, the conversation, the cheer, the entertainments? Very welcome were the spacious yards and hospitable door-knockers on those ancestral mansions, fast disappearing from our landscape, supplanted by edifices and surroundings more showy and pretentious; yet, with all their costliness, looking somewhat asquint on the visitor, as if questioning his right to enter them; and, when admitted, seem unfamiliar, solitary, desolate, with their elaborate decorations and furnishings. Can we not build an elegant comfort, convenience, ease, into the walls and apartments, rendering the mansion an image of the nobilities becoming the residence of noblemen? To what end the house, if not for conversation, kindly manners, the entertainment of friendships, the cordialities that render the house large, and the ready receptacle of hosts and guests? If one's hospitalities fail to bring out the better qualities of his company, he fails of being the noble host, be his pretensions what they may. Let him entertain the dispositions, the genius, of his guests, the conversation being the choicer banquet; for, without baits for these, what were the table but a manger, alike wanting in elegancy as in hospitality, and the feast best taken in silence as an animal qualification, and no more.
What solitude like those homes where no home is, no company, no conversation, into which one enters with dread, and from which he departs with sadness, as from the sight of hostile tribes bordering on civilization, strangers to one another, and of mixed bloods! \Civility has not completed its work if it leave us unsocial, morose, insultable. Sympathy wanting, all is wanting; its personal magnetism is the conductor of the sacred spark that lights our atoms, puts us in human communion, and gives us to company, conversation, and ourselves.
"Oh wretched and too solitary, he
Who loves not his own company;
He'll find the weight of it many a day,
Unless he call in sin and vanity,
To help to bear it away."
The surest sign of age is loneliness. While one finds company in himself and his pursuits, he cannot be old, whatever his years may number.
Perhaps those most prize society who find the best in solitude, being equal to either; strong enough to enjoy themselves aside from companies they would gladly meet and repay by a freedom from prejudices and scruples in which these share and pride themselves, yet whose exclusiveness thrusts them out of their own houses and themselves also.
"It ever hath been known,
They others' virtues scorn who doubt their own."
If solitude makes us love ourselves, society gives us to others, peopling what were else a solitude. It takes us out of ourselves as from a multitude to partake of closer intimacies and satisfactions. Alone and apart, however well occupied, we lose the elasticity and dignity that come from sympathy with the aims and prospects of others. Nor has any been found equal to uninterrupted solitude. Our virtues need the enamel of intercourse. Exalting us above our private piques, prejudices, egotisms, into the commonwealth of charities, good company makes us catholic, courteous, sane; we retire from it with a new estimate of ourselves and of mankind. If intercourse have not this wholesome effect, it is dissipating and best shunned. Nor is fellowship possible without a certain delicacy and respect of diffidence. There hides a natural piety in this personal grace, while nothing good comes of brass, from whose embrasures there vollies forth but impudence, insolence, defiance. But the more influential powers are attended by a bashful genius, and step forth from themselves with a delicacy of boldness alike free from any blemishes of egotism or pretence. Nor do we accept as genuine the person not characterized by this blushing bashfulness, this youthfulness of heart, this sensibility to the sentiment of suavity and self-respect. Modesty is bred of self-reverence. Fine manners are the mantle of fair minds. None are truly great without this ornament. A fine genius has the timidity, the graces of a virgin nature, whose traits are as transparent in the boldest flights of imagination as discernible in the stateliest tread of reason, the play of fancy: a pleasing hesitancy, a refrain, setting off the more boldly by such graceful carriage, the natural graces due to beauty and truth; and bearing down all else by its charming persuasions.
Affinities tell. Every one is not for every one; nor any one good enough to flatter or scorn any; the kindly recognition being due to the meanest; even the humblest conferring a certain respect by his call. Yet one might as properly entertain every passing vagary in the presence chamber of his memory as every vagrant visitor seeking his acquaintance. Introductions are of small account. What are one's claims, a glance detects; if ours, he stays, and house and heart are his by silent understanding. If not ours, nor we his, the way is plain. He leaves presently as a traveller the innkeeper's door, an inmate for his meal only and the night.
The heroic bearing is always becoming. Egotists of the amiable species, one kindly considers. But the sour malcontents, devastators of one's time and patience, – what to do with such? Summon your fairest sunshine forthwith: give your visitor's humors no quarters from the shafts; smite him with the kindly radiance for dissipating his melancholy, and so send him away the wholesomer, the sweeter for the interview, if not a convert to the sun's catholicism, the courtesies due to civility and good fellowship. So when X, your worst sample approaches, meet him blandly at your door, and ask him civilly to leave his dog outside. But if he persist in bringing him along into your parlor, never hesitate on setting the cur forthwith upon his master though you should find him at your throat straightways. It were giving your visitor the warmest reception possible under the circumstances, and an interview very memorable to all parties. One need not fear dealing his compliments short and significant on the occasion; the deer running down the dogs for a wonder.
Does it seem cold and unhandsome, this specular survey of persons? Yet all hearts crave eyes whereby to measure themselves. And what better foil for one's egotism than this reflection of himself in the mirror of another's appreciation? The frank sun withholds his beams from none for any false delicacy. Nor till one rejoices in being helped to discern excellence in another, desiring to comprehend and compliment his own therein, is he freed from the egotism that excludes him from the best benefits one can bestow. Happy if we have dissolved our individualism in the fluent affections, and so made intercourse possible and delightful between us.
"We have three friends most useful to us; a sincere friend, a faithful friend, a friend that hears every thing, examines what is told him, and speaks little. But we have three also whose friendship is pernicious; a hypocrite, a flatterer, and a great talker. Contract friendship with the man whose heart is upright and sincere, who loves to learn and can teach you something in his turn. And in what part of the world soever thou chance to spend thy life, correspond with the wisest and associate with the best."
ii. – conversation
Good humor, flowing spirits, a sprightly wit, are essentials of good discourse. Add genial dispositions, graceful elocution, and to these accomplishments diffidence as the flower of the rest. There can be no eloquence where these are wanting. Any amount of sense, of logic, matter, leaves the discourse incomplete, interest flags, and disappointment ensues. None has command of himself till he can wield his powers sportfully, life sparkling from all his gifts and taking captive alike speaker and hearer, as they were docile children of his genius and surprised converts for the moment. "And I," says Socrates, "through my youth often change my mind, but looking to you and apprehending that you speak the things that are divine, I think so too." If one cannot inspire faith in what he says, no arts avail. Earnestness, sincerity, are orators whose persuasions are irresistible; they hold all gifts in fusion, magnetize, divinize, harmonize all. Good conversation is lyrical: a pentecost of tongues, touching the chords of melody in all minds, it prompts to the best each had to give, to better than any knew they had, what none claims as his own, as if he were the organ of some invisible player behind the scenes. What abandonments, reserves, which no premeditation, no cunning could have checked or called forth. What chasms are spanned with a trope, what pits forded, summits climbed, prospects commanded, perspectives gained, – the tour of the spheres made at a glance, a sitting; the circle coming safely out of the adventure. All men talk, few converse; of gossip we have enough, of argument more than enough, rhetoric, debate – omit these, speak from the heart to the heart underlying all differences, and we have conversation. For disputing there is the crowd; for ruminating, the woods; the clubs for wit and the superficial fellowship.
Companionableness comes by nature. For though culture may mellow and refine, it cannot give the flush of nobility to the current wherein ride our credentials for the posts of persuasion and of power. We meet magically, and pass with sounding manners; else encounter repulses, strokes of fate; temperament telling against temperament, precipitating us into vortices from which the nimblest finds no escape. We pity the person who shows himself unequal to the occasion; the scholar, for example, whose intellect is so exacting, so precise, that he cannot meet his company otherwise than critically; cannot descend to meet, through the senses or the sentiments, that common level where intercourse is possible with most. We pity him the more, who, from caprice or confusion can meet through these only. Still more, the case of him who can meet neither as sentimentalist nor idealist, or, rather, not at all in a human way. Intellect interblends with sentiment in the companionable mind, wit with humor. We detain the flowing tide at the cost of lapsing out of perception into memory, into the limbo of fools. Excellent people wonder why they cannot meet and converse. They cannot. No. Their wits have ebbed away, and left them helpless. Why, but because of hostile temperaments, states of animation? The personal magnetism finds no conductor. One is individual, the other is individual no less. Individuals repel. Persons meet. And only as one's personality is sufficiently overpowering to dissolve the other's individualism, can the parties flow together and become one. But individuals have no power of the sort. They are two, not one, perhaps many. Prisoned within themselves by reason of their egotism, like animals, they stand aloof, are separate even when they touch; are solitary in any company, having none in themselves. But the freed personal mind meets all, is apprehended by all, by the least cultivated, the most gifted; magnetizes all; is the spell-binder, the liberator of every one. We speak of sympathies, antipathies, fascinations, fates, for this reason.
IV
FRIENDSHIP
"So great a happiness do I esteem it to be loved, that I really fancy every blessing both from gods and men ready to descend spontaneously upon him who is loved." – Xenophon.
FRIENDSHIP
i. – persons
It was a charming fancy of the Pythagoreans to exchange names when they met that so they might partake of the virtues each admired in the other. And knowing the power of names they used only such as were musical and pleasing. The compliment thus bestowed upon the sentiment of friendship is most deserved, and suggestive of the magic of its influence at every age, throughout every period of our existence; our life, properly speaking, opening with the birth of fancy and the affections, and maintaining its freshness only as we are under their sway. A friendship formed in childhood, in youth, – by happy accident at any stage of rising manhood, – becomes the genius that rules the rest of life. What aspirations it awakens! what prospects! To what advantages, adventures, sacrifices, successes, does it not lead its votaries! What if these early unions are sometimes less tempered with discretion than those formed later, if they maintain their freshness and open out sure prospects of an endless future? He surely has no future who is without friends to share it with him, and is wasting an existence meant to give him that assurance. With this sentiment there comes every felicity into the breasts of those who partake of it. How large the dividend of delight! how diffusive! We are the richer for every outlay. We dip our pitchers in these fountains to come away overspilling with satisfaction. And had we a thousand friends, every spring within us would gush forth at the touch of these wands of tenderness, and the days pass as uncounted moments in their company.
"O friend, the bosom said,
Through thee alone the sky is arched,
Through thee the rose is red;
All things through thee take nobler form,
And look beyond the earth,
And is the millround of our fate
A sunpath in thy worth:
Me, too, thy nobleness has taught
To master my despair;
The fountains of my hidden life,
Are through thy friendship fair."
How handsome our friends are! Say they were not moulded at the celestial potteries, we paint them fair behind the plain exterior they wear to indifferent eyes, and as they appear in our gallery of enamels. For who has not seen the plainest features light with a beauty the eyes had not conceived at the rise of a tender sentiment? a lively thought, the recollection of a noble deed, effacing every trace of ancestral meanness; the friend we love all there without blemish or spot, the image we clasp to our breast and cannot forget.
Spectral and cold, indeed, were life surveyed from the senses alone, not from the soul, wanting the enthusiasm that persons inspire, the faith which exalts us above ourselves, giving us friends to love, and a God to adore. We enter heaven through the gates of friendship. 'Tis by some supreme fellowship that we complete ourselves, and are united to our kind.
I esteem friendship the fairest as the eldest of religious faiths, being the worship of the unseen through the seen, and excusing many superstitions coloring the need of a personal object of worship. The love and service rendered to persons symbolizes love and service due the Supreme Person; and he must be pronounced deficient in piety who fails of winning the noblest of victories, – a friend. A need of the heart, the best of our life is embosomed in others, much of it taken upon trust in some one or more whom we call by tender names, and whose words accost us with persuasions irresistible. How affectionately one name is pronounced throughout a revering Christendom, because it symbolizes man's friend, – that fairest word in the human vocabulary.
"Fair flowery name, in none like thee
And thy nectareal fragrancy,
Hourly there meets
A universal synod of all sweets,
By whom it is defined thus:
That no perfume
May yet presume
To pass for odoriferous,
But such alone whose sacred pedigree
Can prove itself some kin, sweet name, to thee."
We crave objects abreast and above us. And are bereft of ourselves without such. Friends are the leaders of the bosom, being more ourselves than we are, and we complement our affections in theirs. The passionless laws that sway our unseen Personality are not made lovely to us till thus clothed in human attributes and brought near to our hearts, person embracing person. Not some It in our friends, but the sentiment that transfigures the It into Him, into Her, – this alone makes them ours personally and beloved. Theists in our faith, we pay our vows to the Friend in our friend, thus becoming personally One with the Three, and alone no longer.
Nor elsewise man shall fellow meet,
In public place, in converse sweet,
In holy aisles, at market gate,
In learning's halls, or courts of state,
Nor persons properly shall find,
Save in the commonwealth of Mind;
Fair forms herein their souls intrude,
Peopling what else were solitude.
Persons are love's world. Our Paradise is too fair to be planted out of our breasts. We chase the fleeing beauty all our lives long;
"Nor is there near so brisk a fire
In fruition, as desire;
The niggard sense, too poor for bliss,
Pays us but dully with what is."
On, onwards, ever onwards are we led. Our Edens abreast of us journeying with ever-opening prospects in the distance.
THE CHASE
O'er earth and seas,
In sunshine, shade,
Blest Beauty crossed,
Nor stopt nor stayed,
Nor temples took,
Nor idols hewed,
Apart she dwelt
In solitude.
In solitude, Heart said:
"Where find the maid?
My bride's a fugitive,
From sight doth live,
And hearts are hunters of the game,
Pursuers of the same
Through every passing form,
The Beauty that all eyes do seek,
All eyes do but deform;
The love our faithless lips would speak
Dies on the listless air,
Nature befriends us not,
Nor hearthside doth prepare
In all her ample plot;
Life's but illusion,
Cunning confusion;
Flings shadows pale about our path,
She shadow is, and nothing hath;
Eyes are divorced from seeing,
Hearts cloven clean from being;
My bride I cannot find,
My love I cannot bind;
The thousand fair ones of our sphere,
Fond, false ones all, nor mine, nor dear;
The Paradise
I would surprise,
From all my following flies,
And I'm a thousand infidelities;
There's none for me
In all I see;
Surely the Fair One bides not here,
Where dwells she, where, in any sphere?"
"In any sphere?"
Love whispered: "Where, where, if not here?
Here in thy breast the maiden find,
Ideas sole imparadise the mind;
Here heart's hymeneals begin,
Here's ours and only ours housed here within:
Through parting gates of human kind
Enter thou blest the Unseen Mind."
ii. – woman
"Virtue sure
Were blind as fortune, should she choose the poor
Rough cottage man to live in, and despise
To dwell in woman's stately edifice;
Woman's approved the fairer sex, and we
Mean men repent our pedigree.
Why choose the father's name, when we may take
The mother's a more honor'd blood to make,
Woman's of later, though of nobler birth,
For she of man was made, man made of earth,
The son of dust, and though her sin did breed
His fall, again she raised him in her seed;
Who had he not her blest creation seen,
An Anchorite in Paradise had been."
Pythagoras said that only good things were to be predicted of women, since they were the mothers of ornaments, of conversation and of confidence, and that he who invented names, perceiving that women were adapted to piety and friendship, gave to each of their ages the name of some Deity – to a maiden, Core, or Proserpine, to a bride Nymphe, to a mother, Mater, to a grandmother, according to the Dorian dialect, Maia. And in accordance with the like persuasion the oracles were always unfolded into light by women. Tacitus tells us that the Northern nations also held women in high esteem, "believing ladies had something divine about them." And this faith has descended to men of the Saxon name, the best regarding her as endowed with magical properties, the type of the highest culture the advanced nations have attained. Endowed with magnetic gifts; by necessity of sex, a realist and diviner, she lives nearest the cardinal facts of existence, instinct with the mysteries of love and fate; a romance ever attaching itself to her name and destiny. Entering the school of sensibility with life, she seizes personal qualities by a subtlety of logic overleaping all deductions of the slower reason; her divinations touching the quick of things as if herself were personally part of the chemistry of life itself. We cannot conceive her as distinct, distant, unrelated, she seems so personal, concrete, so near; yet can never come quite up to her discernments, nor gainsay their delicacy and truthfulness. Then constancy, fidelity, fortitude, kindness, gratitude, grace, courtesy, discretion, taste, conversation, the adornments of life, were bare names without the splendor of illustration of which the history of the sex affords so many brilliant examples. It seems as if in moulding his world the Creator reserved his choicest work till the last, and consummated his art in her endowments. Shall our sex confess to some slight in not having been mingled more freely of her essence, that so we too might have had access to the crypts into which she is privileged by birthright to enter? Hers is the way of persuasion, of service, forbearance:
"If thou dost anything confer that's sweet,
In me a grateful relish it shall meet,
But if thy bounties thou dost take away,
The least repining word I will not say."
As there was only solitude till she brought company, conversation, civility, so stooping still to conquer, she is fast gaining ascendancy over passions and prejudices that have held her subservient and their victim. Can we doubt the better rule will be furthered indefinitely by a partnership in power thus intimate and acknowledged by States? What ideal republics have fabled, ours is to be. Nor need we fear the boldest experiments which the moral sense of the best women conceive and advocate. Certainly liberty is in danger of running into license while woman is excluded from exercising political as well as social restraint upon its excesses. Nor is the state planted securely till she possess equal privileges with man of forming its laws and taking a becoming part in their administration. No jury of men, however honorable or wise, are equal to pronounce upon questions relating to woman; questions involving considerations that concern the whole structure, not only of society, but of humanity itself. The public morals are insecure till the family is chastely planted, the state guarded by the continency of its male members.
A man defines his standing at the court of chastity by his views of women. He cannot be any man's friend nor his own if not hers. Either nature dealt coldly by him in his descent, else he is the victim of vices which his passions have inflamed till they have their own way with him.
