Choice Specimens of American Literature, and Literary Reader Part 7

From "Lectures to Young Men."

=_49._= NATURE, DESIGNED FOR OUR ENJOYMENT.

The _necessity_ of amus.e.m.e.nt is admitted on all hands. There is an appet.i.te of the eye, of the ear, and of every sense, for which G.o.d has provided the material. Gaiety of every degree, this side of puerile levity, is wholesome to the body, to the mind, and to the morals. Nature is a vast repository of manly enjoyments. The magnitude of G.o.d's works is not less admirable than its exhilarating beauty. The rudest forms have something of beauty; the ruggedest strength is graced with some charm; the very pins, and rivets, and clasps of nature, are attractive by qualities of beauty, more than is necessary for mere utility. The sun could go down without gorgeous clouds; evening could advance without its evanescent brilliance; trees might have flourished without symmetry; flowers have existed without odor, and fruit without flavor. When I have journeyed through forests, where ten thousand shrubs and vines exist without apparent use; through prairies, whose undulations exhibit sheets of flowers innumerable, and absolutely dazzling the eye with their prodigality of beauty--beauty, not a t.i.the of which is ever seen by man--I have said, it is plain that G.o.d is himself pa.s.sionately fond of beauty, and the _earth_ is his garden, as an _acre_ is man's. G.o.d has made us like Himself, to be pleased by the universal beauty of the world. He has made provision in nature, in society, and in the family, for amus.e.m.e.nt and exhilaration enough to fill the heart with the perpetual suns.h.i.+ne of delight.

Upon this broad earth, purfled with flowers, scented with odors, brilliant in colors, vocal with echoing and re-echoing melody, I take my stand against all demoralizing pleasure. Is it not enough that our Father's house is so full of dear delights, that we must wander prodigal to the swine-herd for husks, and to the slough for drink?--when the trees of G.o.d's heritage bend over our head and solicit our hand to pluck the golden fruitage, must we still go in search of the apples of Sodom, outside fair and inside ashes.

Men shall crowd to the circus to hear clowns, and see rare feats of horsemans.h.i.+p; but a bird may poise beneath the very sun, or flying downward, swoop from the high heaven; then flit with graceful ease hither and thither, pouring liquid song as if it were a perennial fountain of sound--no man cares for that.

Upon the stage of life, the vastest tragedies are performing in every act; nations pitching headlong to their final catastrophe; others, raising their youthful forms to begin the drama of existence. The world of society is as full of exciting interest, as nature is full of beauty.

The great dramatic throng of life is bustling along--the wise, the fool, the clown, the miser, the bereaved, the broken-hearted. Life mingles before us smiles and tears, sighs and laughter, joy and gloom, as the spring mingles the winter-storm and summer-suns.h.i.+ne. To this vast Theatre which G.o.d hath builded, where stranger plays are seen than ever author writ, man seldom cares to come. When G.o.d dramatizes, when nations act, or all the human kind conspire to educe the vast catastrophe, men sleep and snore, and let the busy scene go on, unlocked, unthought upon.... It is my object then, not to withdraw the young from pleasure, but from unworthy pleasures; not to lessen their enjoyments, but to increase them, by rejecting the counterfeit and the vile.

From "Norwood."

=_50._= LIFE IN THE COUNTRY.

It was this union of seclusion and publicity that made Norwood a place of favorite resort, through the summer, of artists, of languid scholars, and of persons of quiet tastes. There was company for all that shunned solitude, and solitude for all that were weary of company. Each house was secluded from its neighbor. Yards and gardens full of trees and shrubbery, the streets lined with venerable trees, gave the town at a little distance the appearance of having been built in an orchard or a forest-park. A few steps and you could be alone--a few steps too would bring you among crowds. Where else could one watch the gentle conflict between sounds and silence with such dreamy joy?--or make idleness seem so nearly like meditation?--or more nimbly chase the dreams of night with even brighter day-dreams, wondering every day what has become of the day before, and each week where the week has gone, and in autumn what has become of the summer, that trod so noiselessly that none knew how swift were its footsteps! The town filled by July, and was not empty again till late October.

There are but two perfect months in our year--June and October. People from the city usually arrange to miss both. June is the month of gorgeous greens; October, the month of all colors. June has the full beauty of youth; October has the splendor of ripeness. Both of them are out-of-door months. If the year has anything to tell you, listen now! If these months teach the heart nothing, one may well shut up the book of the year.

From "The Life of Jesus the Christ."

=_51._= THE CONCEPTION OF ANGELS, SUPERHUMAN.

The angels of the oldest records are like the angels of the latest. The Hebrew thought had moved through a vast arc of the infinite cycle of truth, between the days when Abraham came from Ur of Chaldea, and the times of our Lord's stay on earth. But there is no development in angels of later over those of an earlier date. They were as beautiful, as spiritual, as pure and n.o.ble, at the beginning as at the close of the old dispensation. Can such creatures, transcending earthly experience, and far out-running any thing in the life of man, be creations of the rude ages of the human understanding? We could not imagine the Advent stripped of its angelic lore. The dawn without a twilight, the sun without clouds of silver and gold, the morning on the fields without dew-diamonds,--but not the Saviour without his angels? They s.h.i.+ne within the Temple, they bear to the matchless mother a message which would have been a disgrace from mortal lips, but which from theirs fell upon her as pure as dew-drops upon the lilies of the plain of Esdraelon. They communed with the Saviour in his glory of transfiguration, sustained him in the anguish of the garden, watched at the tomb; and as they had thronged the earth at his coming, so they seem to have hovered in the air in mult.i.tudes at the hour of his ascension. Beautiful as they seem, they are never mere poetic adornments. The occasions of their appearing are grand. The reasons are weighty. Their demeanor suggests and befits the highest conception of superior beings. These are the very elements that a rude age could not fas.h.i.+on. Could a sensuous age invent an order of beings, which, touching the earth from a heavenly height on its most momentous occasions, could still, after ages of culture had refined the human taste and moral appreciation, remain ineffably superior in delicacy, in pure spirituality, to the demands of criticism? Their very coming and going is not with earthly movement. They suddenly are seen in the air as one sees white clouds round out from the blue sky, in a summer's day, that melt back even while one looks upon them. They vibrate between the visible and the invisible. They come without motion.

They go without flight. They dawn and disappear. Their words are few, but the Advent Chorus yet is sounding its music through the world.

=_John McClintock,[18] 1814-1870._=

From a Sermon on "The Ground of Man's Love to G.o.d."

=_52._= THE CHRISTIAN THE ONLY TRUE LOVER OF NATURE.

It is not too much to say that the only _true_ lover of nature, is he that loves G.o.d in Christ. It is as with one standing in one of those caves of unknown beauty of which travellers tell us. While it is dark, nothing can be seen but the abyss, or at most, a faint glimmer of ill-defined forms. But flash into it the light of a single torch, and myriad splendors crowd upon the gaze of the beholder. He sees long-drawn colonnades, sparkling with gems; chambers of beauty and glory open on every hand, flas.h.i.+ng back the light a thousand fold increased, and in countless varied hues. So the sense of G.o.d's love in the heart gives an eye for nature, and supplies the torch to illuminate its recesses of beauty. For the ear that can hear them, ten thousand voices speak, and all in harmony, the name of G.o.d! The sun, rolling in his majesty,--

"And with his tread, of thunder force, Fulfilling his appointed course,"--

is but a faint and feeble image of the great central Light of the universe. The spheres of heaven, in the perpetual harmony of their unsleeping motion, swell the praise of G.o.d; the earth, radiant with beauty, and smiling in joy, proclaims its Maker's love; and the ocean,--that

"Glorious mirror, where the Almighty's form Gla.s.ses itself in tempests,"--

as it murmurs on the sh.o.r.e, or foams with its broad billows over the deep, declares its G.o.d; and even the tempests, that, in their "rising wrath, sweep sea and sky," still utter the name of Him who rides upon the whirlwind and directs the storm. In a word, the whole universe is but a temple, with G.o.d for its deity, and the redeemed _man_ for its wors.h.i.+pper.

[Footnote 18: Distinguished among the Methodist clergy for eloquence and learning; a native of Pennsylvania.]

=_Noah Porter,[19] 1811-_=

From "The Science of Nature versus the Science of Man."

=_53._= SCIENCE MAGNIFIES G.o.d.

We contend at present only for the position that we cannot have a science of nature which does not regard the spirit of man as a part of nature. But is this all? Do man and nature exhaust the possibilities of being? We cannot answer this question here. But we find suggestions from the spectrum and the spectroscope which may be worth our heeding. The materials with which we have to do in their most brilliant scientific theories seem at first to overwhelm us with their vastness and complexity. The hulks are so enormous, the forces are so mighty, the laws are so wide-sweeping, and at times so pitiless, the distances are so over-mastering, even the uses and beauties are so bewildering, that we bow in mute and almost abject submission to the incomprehensible all; of which we hesitate to affirm aught, except what has been manifest to our observant senses and connected by our inseparable a.s.sociations. We forget what our overmastering thought has done in subjecting this universe to its interpretations. Its vast distances have been annihilated, for we have connected the distant with the near by the one pervading force which Newton divined. We have a.n.a.lyzed the flame that burns in our lamp, and the flame that burns in the sun, by the same instrument,--connecting by a common affinity, at the same instant and under the same eye, two agents, the farthest removed in place and the most subtle in essence. As we have overcome distances, so we have conquered time, reading the story of antecedent cycles with a confidence equal to that with which we forecast the future ages. The philosopher who penetrates the distant portions of the universe by the _omnipresence_ of his scientific generalizations, who reads the secret of the sun by the glance of his penetrating eye, has little occasion to deny that all its forces may be mastered by a single all-knowing and _omnipresent_ Spirit, and that its secrets can be read by one all-seeing eye. The scientist who evolves the past in his confident thought, under a few grand t.i.tles of generalized forces and relations, and who develops and almost gives law to the future by his faith in the persistence of force, has little reason to question the existence of an intellect capable of deeper insight and larger foresight than his own, which can grasp all the past and the future by an all-comprehending intelligence, and can control its wants by a personal energy that is softened to personal tenderness and love.

[Footnote 19: A Congregational divine, born in Connecticut, long Professor of Metaphysics in Yale College, and writer of many critical Essays and Reviews. His treatise on "The Human Intellect," is the most elaborate American work upon Psychology.]

=_William Henry Milburn,[20] 1823-_=

From "Lectures."

=_54._= THE PIONEER PREACHERS OF THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY.

The spoken eloquence of New England is for the most part from ma.n.u.script. Her first settlers brought old-world forms, and fas.h.i.+ons from the old world, with them. Their preachers were set an appalling distance from their congregations. Between the pulpit, perched far up toward the ceiling, and the seats, was an awful abysmal depth. Above the lofty desk was dimly seen the white cravat, and above that the head of the preacher. His eye was averted and fastened downward upon his ma.n.u.script, and his discourse, or exercitation, or whatever it might be, was delivered in a monotonous, regular cadence, probably relieved from time to time by some quaint blunder, the result of indistinct penmans.h.i.+p, or dim religious light. It was not this preacher's business to arouse his audience. The theory of wors.h.i.+p of the period was opposed to that. This people did not wish excitement, or stimulus, or astonishment, or agitation. They simply desired information; they wished to be instructed; to have their judgment informed, or their reason enlightened. Thus the preacher might safely remain perched up in his far distant unimpa.s.sioned eyrie.

But how would such a style of eloquence--if, indeed, truth will permit the name of eloquence to be applied to the reading of matter from a preconcerted ma.n.u.script--how would such a style of delivery be received out in the wild West? Place your textual speaker out in the backwoods, on the stump, where a surging tide of humanity streams strongly around him, where the people press up toward him on every side, their keen eyes intently perusing his to see if he be in real earnest,--"dead in earnest"--and where, as with a thousand darts, their contemptuous scorn would pierce him through if he were found playing a false game, trying to pump up tears by mere acting, or arousing an excitement without feeling it. Would such a style of oratory succeed there? By no means.

The place is different; the hearers are different; the time, the thing required, all the circ.u.mstances, are totally different. Here, in the vast unwalled church of nature, with the leafy tree-tops for a ceiling, their ma.s.sy stems for columns; with the endless mysterious cadences of the forest for a choir; with the distant or nearer music and murmur of streams, and the ever-returning voice of birds, sounding in their ears for the made-up music of a picked band of exclusive singers: here stand men whose ears are trained to catch the faintest foot-fall of the distant deer, or the rustle of their antlers against branch or bough of the forest track--whose eyes are skilled to discern the trail of savages who leave scarce a track behind them; and who will follow upon that trail--utterly invisible to the untrained eye--as surely as a blood-hound follows the scent, ten or twenty, or a hundred miles, whose eye and hand are so well practised that they can drive a nail, or snuff a candle, with the long, heavy western rifle. Such men, educated for years, or even generations, in that hard school of necessity, where every one's hand and wood-man's skill must keep his head; where incessant pressing necessities required ever a prompt and sufficient answer in deeds; and where words needed to be but few, and those the plainest and directest, required no delay nor preparation, nor oratorical coquetting, nor elaborate preliminary scribble; no hesitation nor doubts in deeds; no circ.u.mlocution in words. To restrain, influence, direct, govern, such a surging sea of life as this, required something very different from a written address.

[Footnote 20: Born in Philadelphia; a Methodist divine, long afflicted with blindness; but widely popular as a preacher and lecturer.]

ORATORS, AND LEGAL AND POLITICAL WRITERS, OF THE ERA OF THE REVOLUTION.

=_John d.i.c.kinson, 1732-1808._= (Manual, p. 486.)

From "The Address of Congress to the States." May 26, 1779.

=_55._= THE ASPECT OF THE WAR.

To our const.i.tuents we submit the propriety and purity of our intentions, well knowing they will not forget that we lay no burdens upon them but those in which we partic.i.p.ate with them--a happy sympathy, that pervades societies formed on the basis of equal liberty. Many cares, many labors, and may we not add, reproaches, are peculiar to us.

These are the emoluments of our unsolicited stations; and with these we are content, if YOU approve our conduct. If you do not, we shall return to our private condition, with no other regret than that which will arise from our not having served you as acceptably and essentially as we wished and strove to do, though as cheerfully and faithfully as we could.

Think not we despair of the commonwealth, or endeavor to shrink from opposing difficulties. No! Your cause is too good, your objects too sacred, to be relinquished. We tell you truths because you are freemen, who can bear to hear them, and may profit by them; and when they reach your enemies, we fear not the consequences, because we are not ignorant of their resources or our own. Let your good sense decide upon the comparison....