Such are the measures which I advise, which I propose; adopt them, and even yet, I believe, our prosperity may be re-established. If any man has better advice to offer, let him communicate it openly. Whatever you determine, I pray to all the gods for a happy result.

Translation of Charles R. Kennedy.



INVECTIVE AGAINST LICENSE OF SPEECH

This, you must be convinced, is a struggle for existence. You cannot overcome your enemies abroad till you have punished your enemies, his ministers, at home. They will be the stumbling-blocks which prevent you reaching the others. Why, do you suppose, Philip now insults you? To other people he at least renders services though he deceives them, while he is already threatening you. Look for instance at the Thessalians. It was by many benefits conferred on them that he seduced them into their present bondage. And then the Olynthians, again,—how he cheated them, first giving them Potidaea and several other places, is really beyond description. Now he is enticing the Thebans by giving up to them Boeotia, and delivering them from a toilsome and vexatious war. Each of these people did get a certain advantage; but some of them have suffered what all the world knows; others will suffer whatever may hereafter befall them. As for you, I recount not all that has been taken from you, but how shamefully have you been treated and despoiled! Why is it that Philip deals so differently with you and with others? Because yours is the only State in Greece in which the privilege is allowed of speaking for the enemy, and a citizen taking a bribe may safely address the Assembly, though you have been robbed of your dominions. It was not safe at Olynthus to be Philip's advocate, unless the Olynthian commonalty had shared the advantage by possession of Potidaea. It was not safe in Thessaly to be Philip's advocate, unless the people of Thessaly had secured the advantage by Philip's expelling their tyrants and restoring the Synod at Pylae. It was not safe in Thebes, until he gave up Boeotia to them and destroyed the Phocians. Yet at Athens, though Philip has deprived you of Amphipolis and the territory round Cardia—nay, is making Euboea a fortress as a check upon us, and is advancing to attack Byzantium—it is safe to speak in Philip's behalf.



JUSTIFICATION OF HIS PATRIOTIC POLICY

Do not go about repeating that Greece owes all her misfortunes to one man. No, not to one man, but to many abandoned men distributed throughout the different States, of whom, by earth and heaven, AEschines is one. If the truth were to be spoken without reserve, I should not hesitate to call him the common scourge of all the men, the districts, and the cities which have perished; for the sower of the seed is answerable for the crop....

I affirm that if the future had been apparent to us all,—if you, AEschines, had foretold it and proclaimed it at the top of your voice instead of preserving total silence,—nevertheless the State ought not to have deviated from her course, if she had regard to her own honor, the traditions of the past, or the judgment of posterity. As it is, she is looked upon as having failed in her policy,—the common lot of all mankind when such is the will of heaven; but if, claiming to be the foremost State of Greece, she had deserted her post, she would have incurred the reproach of betraying Greece to Philip. If we had abandoned without a struggle all which our forefathers braved every danger to win, who would not have spurned you, AEschines? How could we have looked in the face the strangers who flock to our city, if things had reached their present pass,—Philip the chosen leader and lord of all,—while others without our assistance had borne the struggle to avert this consummation? We! who have never in times past preferred inglorious safety to peril in the path of honor. Is there a Greek or a barbarian who does not know that Thebes at the height of her power, and Sparta before her—ay, and even the King of Persia himself—would have been only glad to compromise with us, and that we might have had what we chose, and possessed our own in peace, had we been willing to obey orders and to suffer another to put himself at the head of Greece? But it was not possible,—it was not a thing which the Athenians of those days could do. It was against their nature, their genius, and their traditions; and no human persuasion could induce them to side with a wrong-doer because he was powerful, and to embrace subjection because it was safe. No; to the last our country has fought and jeopardized herself for honor and glory and pre-eminence. A noble choice, in harmony with your national character, as you testify by your respect for the memories of your ancestors who have so acted. And you are in the right; for who can withhold admiration from the heroism of the men who shrank not from leaving their city and their fatherland, and embarking in their war-ships, rather than submit to foreign dictation? Why, Themistocles, who counseled this step, was elected general; and the man who counseled submission was stoned to death—and not he only, for his wife was stoned by your wives, as he was by you. The Athenians of those days went not in quest of an orator or a general who could help them to prosperous slavery; but they scorned life itself, if it were not the life of freedom. Each of them regarded himself as the child not only of his father and of his mother, but of his country; and what is the difference? He who looks on himself as merely the child of his parents, awaits death in the ordinary course of nature; while he who looks on himself as the child also of his country, will be ready to lay down his life rather than see her enslaved....

Do I take credit to myself for having inspired you with sentiments worthy of your ancestors? Such presumption would expose me to the just rebuke of every man who hears me. What I maintain is, that these very sentiments are your own; that the spirit of Athens was the same before my time,—though I do claim to have had a share in the application of these principles to each successive crisis. AEschines, therefore, when he impeaches our whole policy, and seeks to exasperate you against me as the author of all your alarms and perils, in his anxiety to deprive me of present credit is really laboring to rob you of your everlasting renown. If by your vote against Ctesiphon you condemn my policy, you will pronounce yourselves to have been in the wrong, instead of having suffered what has befallen you through the cruel injustice of fortune. But it cannot be; you have not been in the wrong, men of Athens, in doing battle for the freedom and salvation of all: I swear it by your forefathers, who bore the battle's brunt at Marathon; by those who stood in arms at Plataea; by those who fought the sea fight at Salamis; by the heroes of Artemisium, and many more whose resting-place in our national monuments attests that, that as our country buried, so she honored, all alike—victors and vanquished. She was right; for what brave men could do, all did, though a higher power was master of their fate.



THOMAS DE QUINCEY

(1785-1859)

BY GEORGE R. CARPENTER



De Quincey's popular reputation is largely due to his autobiographical essays,—to his 'Confessions.' Whatever may be the merits of his other writings, the general public, as in the case of Rousseau, of Dante, of St. Augustine, and of many another, has, with its instinctive and unquenchable desire for knowledge of the inner life of men of great emotional and imaginative power, singled out De Quincey's 'Confessions' as the most significant of his works. There has arisen a popular legend of De Quincey, making him (not unlike Dante, who had seen hell with his bodily eyes) a man who had felt in his own person the infernal pangs and pleasures consequent upon enormous and almost unique excesses in the use of that Oriental drug which possesses for us all such a romantic attraction. He became the "English Opium-Eater"; and even the most recent and authoritative edition of his writings, that of the late Professor Masson, did not hesitate in advertisements to avail itself of a title so familiar and so sensational.

To a great degree, this feeling on the part of the public is natural and proper. De Quincey's opium habit, begun in his youth under circumstances that modern physicians have guessed to be justifiable, and continued throughout the remainder of his life,—at first without self-restraint, at last in what was for him moderation,—has rendered him a striking and isolated figure in Western lands.

We have a right eagerly to ask: On this strongly marked temperament, so delicately imaginative and so keenly logical, so receptive and so retentive, a type alike of the philosopher and the poet, the scholar and the musician—on such a contemplative genius, what were the effects of so great and so constant indulgence in a drug noted for its power of heightening and extending, for a season, the whole range of the imaginative faculties?

Justifiable as such feelings may be, however, they tend to wrong De Quincey's memory and to limit our conceptions of his character and genius. He was no vulgar opium drunkard; he was, to all appearances, singularly free even from the petty vices to which eaters of the drug are supposed to be peculiarly liable. To be sure, he was not without his eccentricities. He was absent-mindedly careless in his attire, unusual in his hours of waking and sleeping, odd in his habits of work, ludicrously ignorant of the value of money, solitary, prone to whims, by turns reticent and loquacious. But for all his eccentricities, De Quincey—unlike Poe, for example—is not a possible object for pity or patronage; they would be foolish who could doubt his word or mistrust his motives. He was "queer," as most great Englishmen of letters of his time were; but the more his at first enigmatic character comes to light, through his own letters and through the recollections of his friends, the more clearly do we see him to have been a pure-minded and well-bred man, kind, honest, generous, and gentle. His life was almost wholly passed among books,—books in many languages, books of many kinds and times. These he incessantly read and annotated. And the treasures of this wide reading, stored in a retentive and imaginative mind, form the basis of almost all his work that is not distinctly autobiographical.

De Quincey's writings, as collected by himself (and more recently by Professor Masson), fill fourteen good-sized volumes, and consist of about two hundred and fifteen separate pieces, all of which were contributed to various periodicals between 1813, when at the age of thirty-eight he suddenly found himself and his family dependent for support on his literary efforts, to his death in 1859. Books, sustained efforts of construction, he did not except in a single instance, and probably could not, produce; his mind held rich stores of information on many subjects, but his habit of thought was essentially non-consecutive and his method merely that of the brilliant talker, who illumines delightfully many a subject, treating none, however, with reserved power and thorough care. His attitude toward his work, it is worth while to notice, was an admirable one. His task was often that of a hack writer; his spirit never. His life was frugal and modest in the extreme; and though writing brought him bread and fame, he seems never, in any recorded instance, to have concerned himself with its commercial value. He wrote from a full mind and with genuine inspiration, and lived and died a man of letters from pure love of letters and not of worldly gain.

As we have noticed, it is the autobiographical part of De Quincey's writing—the 'Confessions' of one who could call every day for "a glass of laudanum negus, warm, and without sugar"—that has made him famous, and which deserves first our critical attention. It consists of four or five hundred pages of somewhat disconnected sketches, including the 'Confessions of an English Opium-Eater' and 'Suspiria de Profundis.' De Quincey himself speaks of them as "a far higher class of composition" than his philosophical or historical writings,—declaring them to be, unlike the comparatively matter-of-fact memoirs of Rousseau and St. Augustine, "modes of impassioned prose, ranging under no precedents that I am aware of in any literature." What De Quincey attempted was to clothe in words scenes from the world of dreams,—a lyric fashion, as it were, wholly in keeping with contemporary taste and aspiration, which under the penetrating influence of romanticism were maintaining the poetical value and interest of isolated and excited personal feeling.

Like Dante, whose 'Vita Nuova' De Quincey's 'Confessions' greatly resemble in their essential characteristics of method, he had lived from childhood in a world of dreams. Both felt keenly the pleasures and sorrows of the outer world, but in both contemplative imagination was so strong that the actual fact—the real Beatrice, if you will—became as nothing to that same fact transmuted through idealizing thought. De Quincey was early impressed by the remarkable fashion in which dreams or reveries weave together the separate strands of wakeful existence. Before he was two years old he had, he says, "a remarkable dream of terrific grandeur about a favorite nurse, which is interesting to myself for this reason,—that it demonstrates my dreaming tendencies to have been constitutional, and not dependent on laudanum." At the same age he "connected a profound sense of pathos with the reappearance, very early in the spring, of some crocuses." These two incidents are a key to the working of De Quincey's mind. Waking or sleeping, his intellect had the rare power of using the facts of life as the composer might use a song of the street, building on a wandering ballad a whole symphony of transfigured sound, retaining skillfully, in the midst of the new and majestic music, the winning qualities of the popular strain. To such a boy, with an imaginative mind, an impassioned nature, and a memory which retained and developed powerfully year by year all associations involving the feelings of grandeur, magnificence, or immensity,—to such a boy, life and experience were but the storing up of material which the creative mind might weave into literature that had the form of prose and the nature of poetry.

De Quincey shared Dante's rare capacity for retaining strong visual images, his rare power of weaving them into a new and wonderful fabric. But De Quincey, though as learned and as acute as Dante, had not Dante's religious and philosophical convictions. A blind faith and scholastic reason were the foundations of the great vision of the 'Divine Comedy.' De Quincey had not the strong but limited conception of the world on which to base his imagination, he had not the high religious vision to nerve him to higher contemplation, and his work can never serve in any way as a guide and message to mankind. De Quincey's visions, however, have the merit of not being forced. He did not resolve to see what faith and reason bade him.

While all controlled reasoning was suspended under the incantation of opium, his quick mind, without conscious intent, without prejudice or purpose, assembled such mysterious and wonderful sights and sounds as the naked soul might see and hear in the world of actual experience. For De Quincey's range of action and association was not as narrow as might seem. He had walked the streets of London friendless and starving, saved from death by a dram given by one even more wretched than he, only a few months after he had talked with the king. De Quincey's latent images are therefore not grotesque or mediaeval, not conditioned by any philosophical theory, not of any Inferno or Paradise. The elements of his visions are the simple elements of all our striking experiences: the faces of the dead, the grieving child, the tired woman, the strange foreign face, the tramp of horses' feet. And opium merely magnified these simple elements, rendered them grand and beautiful without giving them any forced connection or relative meaning. We recognize the traces of our own transfigured experience, but we are relieved from the necessity of accepting it as having an inner meaning. De Quincey's singular hold on our affection seems, therefore, to be his rare quality of presenting the unusual but typical dream or reverie as a beautiful object of interest, without endeavoring to give it the character of an allegory or a fable.

The greater part of De Quincey's writings however are historical, critical, and philosophical in character rather than autobiographical; but these are now much neglected. We sometimes read a little of 'Joan of Arc,' and no one can read it without great admiration; the 'Flight of the Tartars' has even become a part of "prescribed" literature in our American schools; but of other essays than these we have as a rule only a dim impression or a faint memory. There are obvious reasons why De Quincey's historical and philosophical writings, in an age which devotes itself so largely to similar pursuits, no longer recommend themselves to the popular taste. His method is too discursive and leisurely; his subjects as a rule too remote from current interest; his line of thought too intricate. These failings, from our point of view, are the more to be regretted because there has never been an English essayist more entertaining or suggestive than De Quincey. His works cover a very wide range of subject-matter,—from the 'Knocking on the Gate in Macbeth' to the 'Casuistry of Roman Meals' and the 'Toilet of a Hebrew Lady.' His topics are always piquant. Like Poe, De Quincey loved puzzling questions, the cryptograms, the tangled under sides of things, where there are many and conflicting facts to sift and correlate, the points that are now usually settled in foot-notes and by references to German authorities. In dealing with such subjects he showed not only that he possessed the same keen logic which entertains us in Poe, but that he was the master of great stores of learned information. We are never wholly convinced, perhaps, of the eternal truth of his conclusions, but we like to watch him arrive at them. They seem fresh and strange, and we are dazzled by the constantly changing material. Nothing can be more delightful than the constant influx of new objects of thought, the unexpected incidents, the seemingly inexpugnable logic that ends in paradox, the play of human interest in a topic to which all living interest seems alien. There is scarcely a page in all De Quincey's writings that taken by itself is actually dull. In each, one receives a vivid impression of the same lithe and active mind, examining with lively curiosity even a recondite subject: cracking a joke here and dropping a tear there, and never intermitting the smooth flow of acute but often irrelevant observation. The generation that habitually neglects De Quincey has lost little important historical and philosophical information, perhaps, but it has certainly deprived itself of a constant source of entertainment.

As a stylist De Quincey marked a new ideal in English; that of impassioned prose, as he himself expresses it,—prose which deliberately exalts its subject-matter, as the opera does its. And it was really as an opera that De Quincey conceived of the essay. It was to have its recitatives, its mediocre passages, the well and firmly handled parts of ordinary discourse. All comparatively unornamented matter was, however, but preparative to the lyric outburst,—the strophe and antistrophe of modulated song. In this conception of style others had preceded him,—Milton notably,—but only half consciously and not with sustained success. There could be no great English prose until the eighteenth century had trimmed the tangled periods of the seventeenth, and the romantic movement of the nineteenth added fire and enthusiasm to the clear but conventional style of the eighteenth. Ruskin and Carlyle have both the same element of bravura, as will be seen if one tries to analyze their best passages as music. But in De Quincey this lyric arrangement is at once more delicate and more obvious, as the reader may assure himself if he re-read his favorite passages, noticing how many of them are in essence exclamatory, or actually vocative, as it were. In this ideal of impassioned prose De Quincey gave to the prose of the latter part of the century its keynote. Macaulay is everywhere equally impassioned or unimpassioned; the smooth-flowing and useful canal, rather than the picturesque river in which rapids follow the long reaches of even water, and are in turn succeeded by them. To conceive of style as music,—as symmetry, proportion, and measure, only secondarily dependent on the clear exposition of the actual subject-matter,—that is De Quincey's ideal, and there Pater and Stevenson have followed him.

De Quincey's fame has not gone far beyond the circle of those who speak his native tongue. A recent French critic finds him rough and rude, sinister even in his wit. In that circle however his reputation has been high, though he has not been without stern critics. Mr. Leslie Stephen insists that his logic is more apparent than real: that his humor is spun out and trivial, his jests ill-timed and ill-made. His claim that his 'Confessions' created a new genre is futile; they confess nothing epoch-making,—no real crises of soul, merely the adventures of a truant schoolboy, the recollections of a drunkard. He was full of contemptuous and effeminate British prejudices against agnosticism and Continental geniuses. "And so," Mr. Stephen continues, "in a life of seventy-three years De Quincey read extensively and thought acutely by fits, ate an enormous quantity of opium, wrote a few pages which revealed new capacities in the language, and provided a good deal of respectable padding for the magazines."

Not a single one of the charges can be wholly denied; on analysis De Quincey proves guilty of all these offenses against ideal culture. Rough jocoseness, diffusiveness, local prejudice, a life spent on details, a lack of philosophy.—these are faults, but they are British faults, Anglo-Saxon faults. They scarcely limit affection or greatly diminish respect. De Quincey was a sophist, a rhetorician, a brilliant talker. There are men of that sort in every club, in every community. We forgive their eccentricity, their lack of fine humor, the most rigid logic, or the highest learning. We do not attempt to reply to them. It is enough if the stream of discourse flows gently on from their lips. A rich and well-modulated vocabulary, finely turned phrases, amusing quips and conceits of fancy, acute observations, a rich store of recondite learning, these charm and hold us. Such a talker, such a writer, was De Quincey. Such was his task, to amuse, to interest, and at times to instruct us. One deeper note he struck rarely, but always with the master's hand, the vibrating note felt in passages characteristic of immensity, solitude, grandeur; and it is to that note that De Quincey owes the individuality of his style and his fame.

There are few facts in De Quincey's long career that bear directly on the criticism of his works. Like Ruskin, he was the son of a well-to-do and cultivated merchant, but the elder De Quincey unfortunately died too early to be of any help in life to his impulsive and unpractical boy, who quarreled with his guardians, ran away from school, and neglected his routine duties at Oxford. His admiration for Wordsworth and Coleridge led him to the Lake country, where he married and settled down. The necessity of providing for his family at last aroused him from his life of meditation and indulgence in opium, and brought him into connection with the periodicals of the day. After the death of his wife in 1840 he moved with his children to the vicinity of Edinburgh, where in somewhat eccentric solitude he spent the last twenty years of his uneventful life.



CHARLES LAMB

From 'Biographical Essays'

It sounds paradoxical, but is not so in a bad sense, to say that in every literature of large compass some authors will be found to rest much of the interest which surrounds them on their essential non-popularity. They are good for the very reason that they are not in conformity to the current taste. They interest because to the world they are not interesting. They attract by means of their repulsion. Not as though it could separately furnish a reason for loving a book, that the majority of men had found it repulsive. Prima facie, it must suggest some presumption against a book that it has failed to gain public attention. To have roused hostility indeed, to have kindled a feud against its own principles or its temper, may happen to be a good sign. That argues power. Hatred may be promising. The deepest revolutions of mind sometimes begin in hatred. But simply to have left a reader unimpressed is in itself a neutral result, from which the inference is doubtful. Yet even that, even simple failure to impress, may happen at times to be a result from positive powers in a writer, from special originalities such as rarely reflect themselves in the mirror of the ordinary understanding. It seems little to be perceived, how much the great Scriptural idea of the worldly and the unworldly is found to emerge in literature as well as in life. In reality, the very same combinations of moral qualities, infinitely varied, which compose the harsh physiognomy of what we call worldliness in the living groups of life, must unavoidably present themselves in books. A library divides into sections of worldly and unworldly, even as a crowd of men divides into that same majority and minority. The world has an instinct for recognizing its own, and recoils from certain qualities when exemplified in books, with the same disgust or defective sympathy as would have governed it in real life. From qualities for instance of childlike simplicity, of shy profundity, or of inspired self-communion, the world does and must turn away its face towards grosser, bolder, more determined, or more intelligible expressions of character and intellect; and not otherwise in literature, nor at all less in literature, than it does, in the realities of life.

Charles Lamb, if any ever was, is amongst the class here contemplated; he, if any ever has, ranks amongst writers whose works are destined to be forever unpopular, and yet forever interesting; interesting moreover by means of those very qualities which guarantee their non-popularity. The same qualities which will be found forbidding to the worldly and the thoughtless, which will be found insipid to many even amongst robust and powerful minds, are exactly those which will continue to command a select audience in every generation. The prose essays, under the signature of "Elia," form the most delightful section amongst Lamb's works. They traverse a peculiar field of observation, sequestered from general interest: and they are composed in a spirit too delicate and unobtrusive to catch the ear of the noisy crowd, clamoring for strong sensations. But this retiring delicacy itself, the pensiveness checkered by gleams of the fanciful, and the humor that is touched with cross lights of pathos, together with the picturesque quaintness of the objects casually described, whether men, or things, or usages; and in the rear of all this, the constant recurrence to ancient recollections and to decaying forms of household life, as things retiring before the tumult of new and revolutionary generations;—these traits in combination communicate to the papers a grace and strength of originality which nothing in any literature approaches, whether for degree or kind of excellence, except the most felicitous papers of Addison, such as those on Sir Roger de Coverley, and some others in the same vein of composition. They resemble Addison's papers also in the diction, which is natural and idiomatic even to carelessness. They are equally faithful to the truth of nature; and in this only they differ remarkably—that the sketches of Elia reflect the stamp and impress of the writer's own character, whereas in all those of Addison the personal peculiarities of the delineator (though known to the reader from the beginning through the account of the club) are nearly quiescent. Now and then they are recalled into a momentary notice, but they do not act, or at all modify his pictures of Sir Roger or Will Wimble. They are slightly and amiably eccentric; but the Spectator himself, in describing them, takes the station of an ordinary observer.

Everywhere, indeed, in the writings of Lamb, and not merely in his 'Elia,' the character of the writer co-operates in an undercurrent to make the effect of the thing written. To understand in the fullest sense either the gayety or the tenderness of a particular passage, you must have some insight into the peculiar bias of the writer's mind, whether native and original, or impressed gradually by the accidents of situation; whether simply developed out of predispositions by the action of life, or violently scorched into the constitution by some fierce fever of calamity. There is in modern literature a whole class of writers, though not a large one, standing within the same category; some marked originality of character in the writer becomes a coefficient with what he says to a common result; you must sympathize with this personality in the author before you can appreciate the most significant parts of his views. In most books the writer figures as a mere abstraction, without sex or age or local station, whom the reader banishes from his thoughts. What is written seems to proceed from a blank intellect, not from a man clothed with fleshly peculiarities and differences. These peculiarities and differences neither do, nor (generally speaking) could intermingle with the texture of the thoughts so as to modify their force or their direction. In such books—and they form the vast majority—there is nothing to be found or to be looked for beyond the direct objective. (Sit venia verbo!) But in a small section of books, the objective in the thought becomes confluent with the subjective in the thinker—the two forces unite for a joint product; and fully to enjoy the product, or fully to apprehend either element, both must be known. It is singular and worth inquiring into, for the reason that the Greek and Roman literature had no such books. Timon of Athens, or Diogenes, one may conceive qualified for this mode of authorship, had journalism existed to rouse them in those days; their "articles" would no doubt have been fearfully caustic. But as they failed to produce anything, and Lucian in an after age is scarcely characteristic enough for the purpose, perhaps we may pronounce Rabelais and Montaigne the earliest of writers in the class described. In the century following theirs came Sir Thomas Browne, and immediately after him La Fontaine. Then came Swift, Sterne, with others less distinguished; in Germany, Hippel the friend of Kant, Harmann the obscure, and the greatest of the whole body—John Paul Friedrich Richter. In him, from the strength and determinateness of his nature as well as from the great extent of his writing, the philosophy of this interaction between the author as a human agency and his theme as an intellectual reagency might best be studied. From him might be derived the largest number of cases, illustrating boldly this absorption of the universal into the concrete—of the pure intellect into the human nature of the author. But nowhere could illustrations be found more interesting—shy, delicate, evanescent—shy as lightning, delicate and evanescent as the colored pencilings on a frosty night from the Northern Lights, than in the better parts of Lamb.

To appreciate Lamb, therefore, it is requisite that his character and temperament should be understood in their coyest and most wayward features. A capital defect it would be if these could not be gathered silently from Lamb's works themselves. It would be a fatal mode of dependency upon an alien and separable accident if they needed an external commentary. But they do not. The syllables lurk up and down the writings of Lamb, which decipher his eccentric nature. His character lies there dispersed in anagram; and to any attentive reader the re-gathering and restoration of the total word from its scattered parts is inevitable without an effort. Still it is always a satisfaction in knowing a result, to know also its why and how; and in so far as every character is likely to be modified by the particular experience, sad or joyous, through which the life has traveled, it is a good contribution towards the knowledge of that resulting character as a whole to have a sketch of that particular experience. What trials did it impose? What energies did it task? What temptations did it unfold? These calls upon the moral powers, which in music so stormy many a life is doomed to hear,—how were they faced? The character in a capital degree molds oftentimes the life, but the life always in a subordinate degree molds the character. And the character being in this case of Lamb so much of a key to the writings, it becomes important that the life should be traced, however briefly, as a key to the character.



DESPAIR

From 'Confessions of an English Opium-Eater'

Then suddenly would come a dream of far different character—a tumultuous dream—commencing with a music such as now I often heard in sleep, music of preparation and of awakening suspense. The undulations of fast gathering tumults were like the opening of the Coronation Anthem; and like that, gave the feeling of a multitudinous movement, of infinite cavalcades filing off, and the tread of innumerable armies. The morning was come of a mighty day—a day of crisis and of ultimate hope for human nature, then suffering mysterious eclipse, and laboring in some dread extremity. Somewhere, but I knew not where,—somehow, but I knew not how,—by some beings, but I knew not by whom,—a battle, a strife, an agony, was traveling through all its stages,—was evolving itself, like the catastrophe of some mighty drama; with which my sympathy was the more insupportable from deepening confusion as to its local scene, its cause, its nature, and its undecipherable issue. I (as is usual in dreams, where of necessity we make ourselves central to every movement) had the power, and yet had not the power, to decide it. I had the power, if I could raise myself to will it; and yet again had not the power, for the weight of twenty Atlantics was upon me, or the oppression of inexpiable guilt. "Deeper than ever plummet sounded," I lay inactive. Then like a chorus the passion deepened. Some greater interest was at stake, some mightier cause than ever yet the sword had pleaded or trumpet had proclaimed. Then came sudden alarms; hurryings to and fro; trepidations of innumerable fugitives, I knew not whether from the good cause or the bad; darkness and lights; tempest and human faces; and at last, with the sense that all was lost, female forms, and the features that were worth all the world to me; and but a moment allowed—and clasped hands, with heart-breaking partings, and then—everlasting farewells! and with a sigh such as the caves of hell sighed when the incestuous mother uttered the abhorred name of Death, the sound was reverberated—everlasting farewells! and again, and yet again reverberated—everlasting farewells!

And I awoke in struggles, and cried aloud, "I will sleep no more!"



THE DEAD SISTER

From 'Confessions of an English Opium-Eater'

On the day after my sister's death, whilst the sweet temple of her brain was yet unviolated by human scrutiny, I formed my own scheme for seeing her once more. Not for the world would I have made this known, nor have suffered a witness to accompany me. I had never heard of feelings that take the name of "sentimental," nor dreamed of such a possibility. But grief even in a child hates the light, and shrinks from human eyes. The house was large, there were two staircases; and by one of these I knew that about noon, when all would be quiet, I could steal up into her chamber. I imagine that it was exactly high noon when I reached the chamber door; it was locked, but the key was not taken away. Entering, I closed the door so softly that although it opened upon a hall which ascended through all the stories, no echo ran along the silent walls. Then turning around, I sought my sister's face. But the bed had been moved, and the back was now turned. Nothing met my eyes but one large window wide open, through which the sun of midsummer at noonday was showering down torrents of splendor. The weather was dry, the sky was cloudless, the blue depths seemed the express types of infinity; and it was not possible for eye to behold or for heart to conceive any symbols more pathetic of life and the glory of life.

Let me pause for one instant in approaching a remembrance so affecting and revolutionary for my own mind, and one which (if any earthly remembrance) will survive for me in the hour of death,—to remind some readers, and to inform others, that in the original 'Opium Confessions' I endeavored to explain the reason why death, caeteris paribus, is more profoundly affecting in summer than in other parts of the year; so far at least as it is liable to any modification at all from accidents of scenery or season. The reason, as I there suggested, lies in the antagonism between the tropical redundancy of life in summer and the dark sterilities of the grave. The summer we see, the grave we haunt with our thoughts; the glory is around us, the darkness is within us. And the two coming into collision, each exalts the other into stronger relief. But in my case there was even a subtler reason why the summer had this intense power of vivifying the spectacle or the thoughts of death. And recollecting it, often I have been struck with the important truth, that far more of our deepest thoughts and feelings pass to us through perplexed combinations of concrete objects, pass to us as involutes (if I may coin that word) in compound experiences incapable of being disentangled, than ever reach us directly and in their own abstract shapes. It had happened that amongst our nursery collection of books was the Bible, illustrated with many pictures. And in long dark evenings, as my three sisters with myself sate by the firelight round the guard of our nursery, no book was so much in request amongst us. It ruled us and swayed us as mysteriously as music. One young nurse, whom we all loved, before any candle was lighted would often strain her eye to read it for us; and sometimes, according to her simple powers, would endeavor to explain what we found obscure. We, the children, were all constitutionally touched with pensiveness; the fitful gloom and sudden lambencies of the room by firelight suited our evening state of feelings; and they suited also the divine revelations of power and mysterious beauty which awed us. Above all, the story of a just man—man and yet not man, real above all things and yet shadowy above all things, who had suffered the passion of death in Palestine—slept upon our minds like early dawn upon the waters.

The nurse knew and explained to us the chief differences in Oriental climates; and all these differences (as it happens) express themselves in the great varieties of summer. The cloudless sun-lights of Syria—those seemed to argue everlasting summer; the disciples plucking the ears of corn—that must be summer; but above all, the very name of Palm Sunday (a festival in the English Church) troubled me like an anthem. "Sunday!" what was that? That was the day of peace which masked another peace, deeper than the heart of man can comprehend. "Palms!" what were they? That was an equivocal word; palms in the sense of trophies expressed the pomps of life; palms as a product of nature expressed the pomps of summer. Yet still, even this explanation does not suffice; it was not merely by the peace and by the summer, by the deep sound of rest below all rest, and of ascending glory, that I had been haunted. It was also because Jerusalem stood near to those deep images both in time and in place. The great event of Jerusalem was at hand when Palm Sunday came; and the scene of that Sunday was near in place to Jerusalem. Yet what then was Jerusalem? Did I fancy it to be the omphalos (navel) of the earth? That pretension had once been made for Jerusalem, and once for Delphi; and both pretensions had become ridiculous as the figure of the planet became known. Yes, but if not of the earth, for earth's tenant Jerusalem was the omphalos of mortality. Yet how? There on the contrary it was, as we infants understood, that mortality had been trampled under foot. True; but for that very reason, there it was that mortality had opened its very gloomiest crater. There it was indeed that the human had risen on wings from the grave; but for that reason, there also it was that the Divine had been swallowed up by the abyss; the lesser star could not rise before the greater would submit to eclipse. Summer therefore had connected itself with death, not merely as a mode of antagonism, but also through intricate relations to Scriptural scenery and events.

Out of this digression, which was almost necessary for the purpose of showing how inextricably my feelings and images of death were entangled with those of summer, I return to the bedchamber of my sister. From the gorgeous sunlight I turned round to the corpse. There lay the sweet childish figure, there the angel face; and as people usually fancy, it was said in the house that no features had suffered any change. Had they not? The forehead indeed,—the serene and noble forehead,—that might be the same; but the frozen eyelids, the darkness that seemed to steal from beneath them, the marble lips, the stiffening hands laid palm to palm as if repeating the supplications of closing anguish,—could these be mistaken for life? Had it been so, wherefore did I not spring to those heavenly lips with tears and never-ending kisses? But so it was not. I stood checked for a moment; awe, not fear, fell upon me; and whilst I stood, a solemn wind began to blow,—the most mournful that ear ever heard. Mournful! that is saying nothing. It was a wind that had swept the fields of mortality for a hundred centuries. Many times since, upon a summer day, when the sun is about the hottest, I have remarked the same wind arising and uttering the same hollow, solemn, Memnonian, but saintly swell; it is in this world the one sole audible symbol of eternity. And three times in my life I have happened to hear the same sound in the same circumstances; namely, when standing between an open window and a dead body on a summer day.

Instantly, when my ear caught this vast AEolian intonation, when my eye filled with the golden fullness of life, the pomps and glory of the heavens outside, and, turning, when it settled upon the frost which overspread my sister's face, instantly a trance fell upon me. A vault seemed to open in the zenith of the far blue sky a shaft which ran up forever. I in spirit rose, as if on billows that also ran up the shaft forever, and the billows seemed to pursue the throne of God; but that also ran before us and fled away continually. The flight and the pursuit seemed to go on for ever and ever. Frost, gathering frost, some Sarsar wind of death, seemed to repel me; I slept—for how long I cannot say; slowly I recovered my self-possession, and found myself standing as before, close to my sister's bed.

O flight of the solitary child to the solitary God—flight from the ruined corpse to the throne that could not be ruined!—how rich wert thou in truth for after years! Rapture of grief that, being too mighty for a child to sustain, foundest a happy oblivion in a heaven-born dream, and within that sleep didst conceal a dream; whose meaning, in after years, when slowly I deciphered, suddenly there flashed upon me new light; and even by the grief of a child, as I will show you, reader, hereafter, were confounded the falsehoods of philosophers.

In the 'Opium Confessions' I touched a little upon the extraordinary power connected with opium (after long use) of amplifying the dimensions of time. Space also it amplifies, by degrees that are sometimes terrific. But time it is upon which the exalting and multiplying power of opium chiefly spends its operation. Time becomes infinitely elastic, stretching out to such immeasurable and vanishing termini that it seems ridiculous to compute the sense of it, on waking, by expressions commensurate to human life. As in starry fields one computes by diameters of the earth's orbit, or of Jupiter's, so in valuing the virtual time lived during some dreams, the measurement by generations is ridiculous—by millennia is ridiculous; by aeons, I should say, if aeons were more determinate, would be also ridiculous. On this single occasion, however, in my life, the very inverse phenomenon occurred. But why speak of it in connection with opium? Could a child of six years old have been under that influence? No, but simply because it so exactly reversed the operation of opium. Instead of a short interval expanding into a vast one, upon this occasion a long one had contracted into a minute. I have reason to believe that a very long one had elapsed during this wandering or suspension of my perfect mind. When I returned to myself, there was a foot (or I fancied so) on the stairs. I was alarmed; for I believed that if anybody should detect me, means would be taken to prevent my coming again. Hastily, therefore, I kissed the lips that I should kiss no more, and slunk like a guilty thing with stealthy steps from the room. Thus perished the vision, loveliest amongst all the shows which earth has revealed to me; thus mutilated was the parting which should have lasted forever; thus tainted with fear was the farewell sacred to love and grief, to perfect love and perfect grief.

O Ahasuerus, everlasting Jew! fable or not a fable, thou, when first starting on thy endless pilgrimage of woe,—thou, when first flying through the gates of Jerusalem and vainly yearning to leave the pursuing curse behind thee,—couldst not more certainly have read thy doom of sorrow in the misgivings of thy troubled brain, than I when passing forever from my sister's room. The worm was at my heart; and confining myself to that state of life, I may say, the worm that could not die. For if when standing upon the threshold of manhood, I had ceased to feel its perpetual gnawings, that was because a vast expansion of intellect,—it was because new hopes, new necessities, and the frenzy of youthful blood, had translated me into a new creature. Man is doubtless one by some subtle nexus that we cannot perceive, extending from the new-born infant to the superannuated dotard; but as regards many affections and passions incident to his nature at different stages, he is not one: the unity of man in this respect is coextensive only with the particular stage to which the passion belongs. Some passions, as that of sexual love, are celestial by one half of their origin, animal and earthly by the other half. These will not survive their own appropriate stage. But love which is altogether holy, like that between two children, will revisit undoubtedly by glimpses the silence and the darkness of old age; and I repeat my belief—that unless bodily torment should forbid it, that final experience in my sister's bedroom, or some other in which her innocence was concerned, will rise again for me to illuminate the hour of death.



LEVANA AND OUR LADIES OF SORROW

From 'Confessions of an English Opium-Eater'

Oftentimes at Oxford I saw Levana in my dreams. I knew her by her Roman symbols. Who is Levana? Reader, that do not pretend to have leisure for very much scholarship, you will not be angry with me for telling you. Levana was the Roman goddess that performed for the new-born infant the earliest office of ennobling kindness,—typical, by its mode, of that grandeur which belongs to man everywhere, and of that benignity in powers invisible which even in pagan worlds sometimes descends to sustain it. At the very moment of birth, just as the infant tasted for the first time the atmosphere of our troubled planet, it was laid on the ground. That might, bear different interpretations. But immediately, lest so grand a creature should grovel there for more than one instant, either the paternal hand as proxy for the goddess Levana, or some near kinsman as proxy for the father, raised it upright, bade it look erect as the king of all this world, and presented its forehead to the stars, saying perhaps in his heart, "Behold what is greater than yourselves!" This symbolic act represented the function of Levana. And that mysterious lady, who never revealed her face (except to me in dreams), but always acted by delegation, had her name from the Latin verb (as still it is the Italian verb) levare, to raise aloft.

This is the explanation of Levana. And hence it has arisen that some people have understood by Levana the tutelary power that controls the education of the nursery. She that would not suffer at his birth even a prefigurative or mimic degradation for her awful ward, far less could be supposed to suffer the real degradation attaching to the non-development of his powers. She therefore watches over human education.

Therefore it is that Levana often communes with the powers that shake man's heart: therefore it is that she dotes upon grief. "These ladies," said I softly to myself, on seeing the ministers with whom Levana was conversing, "these are the Sorrows; and they are three in number, as the Graces are three, who dress man's life with beauty; the Parcae are three, who weave the dark arras of man's life in their mysterious loom always with colors sad in part, sometimes angry with tragic crimson and black; the Furies are three, who visit, with retributions called from the other side of the grave, offenses that walk upon this; and once even the Muses were but three, who fit the harp, the trumpet, or the lute, to the great burdens of man's impassioned creations. These are the Sorrows, all three of whom I know." The last words I say now; but in Oxford I said, "One of whom I know, and the others too surely I shall know." For already in my fervent youth I saw (dimly relieved upon the dark background of my dreams) the imperfect lineaments of the awful sisters. These sisters—by what name shall we call them?

If I say simply "The Sorrows," there will be a chance of mistaking the term; it might be understood of individual sorrow,—separate cases of sorrow,—whereas I want a term expressing the mighty abstractions that incarnate themselves in all individual sufferings of man's heart; and I wish to have these abstractions presented as impersonations; that is, as clothed with human attributes of life, and with functions pointing to flesh. Let us call them therefore Our Ladies of Sorrow.

The eldest of the three is named Mater Lachrymarum, Our Lady of Tears. She it is that night and day raves and moans, calling for vanished faces. She stood in Rama, where a voice was heard of lamentation.—Rachel weeping for her children, and refusing to be comforted. She it was that stood in Bethlehem on the night when Herod's sword swept its nurseries of Innocents, and the little feet were stiffened forever, which, heard at times as they tottered along floors overhead, woke pulses of love in household hearts that were not unmarked in heaven.

Her eyes are sweet and subtile, wild and sleepy, by turns; oftentimes rising to the clouds, oftentimes challenging the heavens. She wears a diadem round her head. And I knew by childish memories that she could go abroad upon the winds, when she heard that sobbing of litanies, or the thundering of organs, and when she beheld the mustering of summer clouds. This sister, the elder, it is that carries keys more than papal at her girdle, which open every cottage and every palace. She, to my knowledge, sate all last summer by the bedside of the blind beggar, him that so often and so gladly I talked with: whose pious daughter, eight years old, with the sunny countenance, resisted the temptations of play and village mirth to travel all day long on dusty roads with her afflicted father. For this did God send her a great reward. In the springtime of the year, and whilst yet her own spring was budding, he recalled her to himself. But her blind father mourns forever over her; still he dreams at midnight that the little guiding hand is locked within his own; and still he wakens to a darkness that is now within a second and a deeper darkness. This Mater Lachrymarum also has been sitting all this winter of 1844-5 within the bedchamber of the Czar, bringing before his eyes a daughter (not less pious) that vanished to God not less suddenly, and left behind her a darkness not less profound. By the power of her keys it is that Our Lady of Tears glides, a ghostly intruder, into the chambers of sleepless men, sleepless women, sleepless children, from Ganges to the Nile, from Nile to Mississippi. And her, because she is the first-born of her house, and has the widest empire, let us honor with the title of "Madonna."

The second sister is called Mater Suspiriorum, Our Lady of Sighs. She never scales the clouds, nor walks abroad upon the winds. She wears no diadem. And her eyes, if they were ever seen, would be neither sweet nor subtile; no man could read their story; they would be found filled with perishing dreams, and with wrecks of forgotten delirium. But she raises not her eyes; her head, on which sits a dilapidated turban, droops forever, forever fastens on the dust. She weeps not. She groans not. But she sighs inaudibly at intervals. Her sister Madonna is oftentimes stormy and frantic, raging in the highest against Heaven, and demanding back her darlings. But Our Lady of Sighs never clamors, never defies, dreams not of rebellious aspirations. She is humble to abjectness. Hers is the meekness that belongs to the hopeless. Murmur she may, but it is in her sleep. Whisper she may, but it is to herself in the twilight. Mutter she does at times, but it is in solitary places that are desolate as she is desolate, in ruined cities, and when the sun has gone down to his rest. This sister is the visitor of the Pariah; of the Jew; of the bondsman to the oar in the Mediterranean galleys; of the English criminal in Norfolk Island, blotted out from the books of remembrance in sweet far-off England; of the baffled penitent reverting his eyes forever upon a solitary grave, which to him seems the altar overthrown of some past and bloody sacrifice, on which altar no oblations can now be availing, whether towards pardon that he might implore, or towards reparation that he might attempt. Every slave that at noonday looks up to the tropical sun with timid reproach, as he points with one hand to the earth, our general mother, but for him a stepmother,—as he points with the other hand to the Bible, our general teacher, but against him sealed and sequestered; every woman sitting in darkness, without love to shelter her head or hope to illumine her solitude, because the heaven-born instincts kindling in her nature germs of holy affections, which God implanted in her womanly bosom, having been stifled by social necessities, now burn sullenly to waste like sepulchral lamps among the ancients; every nun defrauded of her unreturning May-time by wicked kinsmen, whom God will judge; every captive in every dungeon; all that are betrayed, and all that are rejected; outcasts by traditionary law, and children of hereditary disgrace:—all these walk with Our Lady of Sighs. She also carries a key; but she needs it little. For her kingdom is chiefly amongst the tents of Shem, and the houseless vagrant of every clime. Yet in the very highest ranks of man she finds chapels of her own; and even in glorious England there are some that, to the world, carry their heads as proudly as the reindeer, who yet secretly have received her mark upon their foreheads.

But the third sister, who is also the youngest—! Hush! whisper whilst we talk of her! Her kingdom is not large, or else no flesh should live; but within that kingdom all power is hers. Her head, turreted like that of Cybele, rises almost beyond the reach of sight. She droops not; and her eyes rising so high might be hidden by distance. But being what they are, they cannot be hidden; through the treble veil of crape which she wears, the fierce light of a blazing misery, that rests not for matins or for vespers, for noon of day or noon of night, for ebbing or for flowing tide, may be read from the very ground. She is the defier of God. She also is the mother of lunacies, and the suggestress of suicides. Deep lie the roots of her power; but narrow is the nation that she rules. For she can approach only those in whom a profound nature has been upheaved by central convulsions; in whom the heart trembles and the brain rocks under conspiracies of tempest from without and tempest from within. Madonna moves with uncertain steps, fast or slow, but still with tragic grace. Our Lady of Sighs creeps timidly and stealthily. But this youngest sister moves with incalculable motions, bounding, and with a tiger's leaps. She carries no key; for though coming rarely amongst men, she storms all doors at which she is permitted to enter at all. And her name is Mater Tenebrarum,—Our Lady of Darkness.

These were the Semnai Theai, or Sublime Goddesses, these were the Eumenides, or Gracious Ladies (so called by antiquity in shuddering propitiation) of my Oxford dreams. Madonna spoke. She spoke by her mysterious hand. Touching my head, she beckoned to our Lady of Sighs; and what she spoke, translated out of the signs which (except in dreams) no man reads, was this:—

"Lo! here is he whom in childhood I dedicated to my altars. This is he that once I made my darling. Him I led astray, him I beguiled, and from heaven I stole away his young heart to mine. Through me did he become idolatrous; and through me it was, by languishing desires, that he worshiped the worm, and prayed to the wormy grave. Holy was the grave to him; lovely was its darkness; saintly its corruption. Him, this young idolator, I have seasoned for thee, dear gentle Sister of Sighs! Do thou take him now to thy heart, and season him for our dreadful sister. And thou,"—turning to the Mater Tenebrarum, she said,—"wicked sister, that temptest and hatest, do thou take him from her. See that thy sceptre lie heavy on his head. Suffer not woman and her tenderness to sit near him in his darkness. Banish the frailties of hope, wither the relenting of love, scorch the fountains of tears, curse him as only thou canst curse. So shall he be accomplished in the furnace, so shall he see the things that ought not to be seen, sights that are abominable, and secrets that are unutterable. So shall he read elder truths, sad truths, grand truths, fearful truths. So shall he rise again before he dies. And so shall our commission be accomplished which from God we had,—to plague his heart until he had unfolded the capacities of his spirit."



SAVANNAH-LA-MAR

From 'Confessions of an English Opium-Eater'

God smote Savannah-la-mar, and in one night by earthquake removed her, with all her towers standing and population sleeping, from the steadfast foundations of the shore to the coral floors of ocean. And God said:—"Pompeii did I bury and conceal from men through seventeen centuries; this city I will bury, but not conceal. She shall be a monument to men of my mysterious anger, set in azure light through generations to come; for I will enshrine her in a crystal dome of my tropic seas." This city therefore, like a mighty galleon with all her apparel mounted, streamers flying, and tackling perfect, seems floating along the noiseless depths of ocean; and oftentimes in glassy calms, through the translucid atmosphere of water that now stretches like an air-woven awning above the silent encampment, mariners from every clime look down into her courts and terraces, count her gates, and number the spires of her churches. She is one ample cemetery, and has been for many a year; but in the mighty calms that brood for weeks over tropic latitudes, she fascinates the eye with a Fata Morgana revelation as of human life still subsisting, in submarine asylums sacred from the storms that torment our upper air.

Thither, lured by the loveliness of cerulean depths, by the peace of human dwellings privileged from molestation, by the gleam of marble altars sleeping in everlasting sanctity, oftentimes in dreams did I and the Dark Interpreter cleave the watery veil that divided us from her streets. We looked into the belfries, where the pendulous bells were waiting in vain for the summons which should awaken their marriage peals; together we touched the mighty organ keys, that sang no jubilates for the ear of Heaven, that sang no requiems for the ear of human sorrow; together we searched the silent nurseries, where the children were all asleep, and had been asleep through five generations. "They are waiting for the heavenly dawn," whispered the Interpreter to himself: "and when that comes, the bells and the organs will utter a jubilate repeated by the echoes of Paradise." Then turning to me he said:—"This is sad, this is piteous; but less would not have sufficed for the purpose of God. Look here. Put into a Roman clepsydra one hundred drops of water; let these run out as the sands in an hour-glass, every drop measuring the hundredth part of a second, so that each shall represent but the three-hundred-and-sixty-thousandth part of an hour. Now count the drops as they race along; and when the fiftieth of the hundred is passing, behold! forty-nine are not, because already they have perished; and fifty are not, because they are yet to come. You see therefore how narrow, how incalculably narrow, is the true and actual present. Of that time which we call the present, hardly a hundredth part but belongs either to a past which has fled, or to a future which is still on the wing. It has perished, or it is not born. It was, or it is not. Yet even this approximation to the truth is infinitely false. For again subdivide that solitary drop, which only was found to represent the present, into a lower series of similar fractions, and the actual present which you arrest measures now but the thirty-six-millionth of an hour; and so by infinite declensions the true and very present, in which only we live and enjoy, will vanish into a mote of a mote, distinguishable only by a heavenly vision. Therefore the present, which only man possesses, offers less capacity for his footing than the slenderest film that ever spider twisted from her womb. Therefore also even this incalculable shadow from the narrowest pencil of moonlight is more transitory than geometry can measure, or thought of angel can overtake. The time which is, contracts into a mathematic point; and even that point perishes a thousand times before we can utter its birth. All is finite in the present; and even that finite is infinite in its velocity of flight towards death. But in God there is nothing finite; but in God there is nothing transitory; but in God there can be nothing that tends to death. Therefore it follows that for God there can be no present. The future is the present of God, and to the future it is that he sacrifices the human present. Therefore it is that he works by earthquake. Therefore it is that he works by grief. Oh, deep is the plowing of earthquake! Oh, deep"—(and his voice swelled like a sanctus rising from the choir of a cathedral)—"Oh, deep is the plowing of grief! But oftentimes less would not suffice for the agriculture of God. Upon a night of earthquake he builds a thousand years of pleasant habitations for man. Upon the sorrow of an infant he raises oftentimes from human intellects glorious vintages that could not else have been. Less than these fierce plowshares would not have stirred the stubborn soil. The one is needed for earth, our planet,—for earth itself as the dwelling-place of man; but the other is needed yet oftener for God's mightiest instrument,—yes" (and he looked solemnly at myself), "is needed for the mysterious children of the earth!"



THE BISHOP OF BEAUVAIS AND JOAN OF ARC

From 'Miscellaneous Essays'

Bishop of Beauvais! thy victim died in fire upon a scaffold—thou upon a down bed. But for the departing minutes of life, both are oftentimes alike. At the farewell crisis, when the gates of death are opening, and flesh is resting from its struggles, oftentimes the tortured and torturer have the same truce from carnal torment; both sink together into sleep; together both, sometimes, kindle into dreams. When the mortal mists were gathering fast upon you two, bishop and shepherd girl,—when the pavilions of life were closing up their shadowy curtains about you,—let us try, through the gigantic glooms, to decipher the flying features of your separate visions.

The shepherd girl that had delivered France—she from her dungeon, she from her baiting at the stake, she from her duel with fire, as she entered her last dream saw Domremy, saw the fountain of Domremy, saw the pomp of forests in which her childhood had wandered. That Easter festival which man had denied to her languishing heart, that resurrection of springtime which the darkness of dungeons had intercepted from her, hungering after the glorious liberty of forests, were by God given back into her hands, as jewels that had been stolen from her by robbers. With those, perhaps (for the minutes of dreams can stretch into ages), was given back to her by God the bliss of childhood. By special privilege, for her might be created in this farewell dream, a second childhood, innocent as the first; but not, like that, sad with the gloom of a fearful mission in the rear. The mission had now been fulfilled. The storm was weathered, the skirts even of that mighty storm were drawing off. The blood that she was to reckon for had been exacted; the tears that she was to shed in secret had been paid to the last. The hatred to herself in all eyes had been faced steadily, had been suffered, had been survived.

Bishop of Beauvais! because the guilt-burdened man is in dreams haunted and waylaid by the most frightful of his crimes; and because upon that fluctuating mirror, rising from the fens of death, most of all are reflected the sweet countenances which the man has laid in ruins; therefore I know, bishop, that you also, entering your final dream, saw Domremy. That fountain of which the witnesses spoke so much, showed itself to your eyes in pure morning dews; but neither dews nor the holy dawn could cleanse away the bright spots of innocent blood upon its surface. By the fountain, bishop, you saw a woman seated, that hid her face. But as you draw near, the woman raises her wasted features. Would Domremy know them again for the features of her child? Ah, but you know them, bishop, well! Oh mercy! what a groan was that which the servants, waiting outside the bishop's dream at his bedside, heard from his laboring heart, as at this moment he turned away from the fountain and the woman, seeking rest in the forests afar off. Yet not so to escape the woman, whom once again he must behold before he dies. In the forests to which he prays for pity, will he find a respite? What a tumult, what a gathering of feet is there! In glades where only wild deer should run, armies and nations are assembling; towering in the fluctuating crowd are phantoms that belong to departed hours. There is the great English Prince, Regent of France. There is my lord of Winchester, the princely cardinal that died and made no sign. There is the Bishop of Beauvais, clinging to the shelter of thickets. What building is that which hands so rapid are raising? Is it a martyr's scaffold? Will they burn the child of Domremy a second time? No; it is a tribunal that rises to the clouds; and two nations stand around it, waiting for a trial. Shall my Lord of Beauvais sit upon the judgment seat, and again number the hours for the innocent? Ah! no; he is the prisoner at the bar. Already all is waiting; the mighty audience is gathered, the Court are hurrying to their seats, the witnesses are arrayed, the trumpets are sounding, the judge is taking his place. Oh! but this is sudden. My lord, have you no counsel?—"Counsel I have none; in heaven above, or on earth beneath, counselor there is none now that would take a brief from me; all are silent." Is it indeed come to this? Alas! the time is short, the tumult is wondrous, the crowd stretches away into infinity; but yet I will search in it for somebody to take your brief: I know of somebody that will be your counsel. Who is this that cometh from Domremy? Who is she in bloody coronation robes from Rheims? Who is she that cometh with blackened flesh from walking the furnaces of Rouen? This is she, the shepherd girl, counselor that had none for herself, whom I choose, bishop, for yours. She it is, I engage, that shall take my lord's brief. She it is, bishop, that would plead for you: yes, bishop, SHE—when heaven and earth are silent.



PAUL DEROULEDE

(1848-)



Paul Deroulede received his education in Paris, where he was born. In accordance with the wishes of his friends, he was educated for the law; but before even applying for admission to the bar he yielded to the poetic instinct that had been strong in him since boyhood, and began, under the name of Jean Rebel, to send verses to the Parisian periodicals. When only twenty-three years of age he wrote for the Academie Francaise a one-act drama in verse, 'Juan Strenner,' which however was not a success. The outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war in the same year roused his martial spirit; he enlisted, and at once entered active service, in which he distinguished himself by acts of signal bravery. A wound near the close of the hostilities took him from the field; and it was during the retirement thus enforced that he wrote the lyrics, 'Songs of the Soldier,' that first made him famous throughout his native country.

Not since the days of the 'Marseillaise' had the fighting spirit of the French people found such sympathetic expression; his songs were read and sung all over the country; they received the highest honor of the Academy, and their popularity continued after peace was declared, nearly one hundred and fifty editions having been exhausted up to 1895. Deroulede now devoted himself to literature and politics. 'New Songs of the Soldier' and a volume of 'Songs of the Peasant,' almost as popular as the war songs, were interspersed with two more dramatic works, also in verse, one of which, 'L'Hetman,' was received on the stage with great favor. A cantata, 'Vive la France,' written in 1880, was set to music by Gounod. He also wrote a novel and some treatises dealing with armies and fighting, but his prose works did not attract much attention.

Deroulede's best verses are distinguished for their inspiration and genuine enthusiasm. Careless of form and finish, not always stopping to make sure of his rhymes or perfect his metre, he gave the freest vent to his emotions. Some of the heart-glow which makes the exhilaration of Burns's poems infectious is found in his songs, but they are generally so entirely French that its scope is limited in a way that the Scotch poet's, despite his vernacular, was not. The Frenchman's sympathy is always with the harder side of life. In the 'Songs of the Soldier' he plays on chords of steel. These verses resound with the blast of the bugle, the roll of the drum, the flash of the sword, the rattle of musketry, the boom of the cannon; and even in the 'Songs of the Peasant' it is the corn and the wine, as the fruit of toil, that appeal to him, rather than the grass and the flowers embellishing the fields.



THE HARVEST

From 'Chants du Paysan'

The wheat, the hardy wheat is rippling on the breeze. 'Tis our great mother's sacred mantle spread afar, Old Earth revered, who gives us life, in whom we are, We the dull clay the living God molds as he please.

The wheat, the hardy wheat bends down its heavy head, Blessed and consecrate by the Eternal hand; The stalks are green although the yellow ears expand: Keep them, O Lord, from 'neath the tempest's crushing tread!

The wheat, the hardy wheat spreads like a golden sea Whose harvesters—bent low beneath the sun's fierce light, Stanch galley-slaves, whose oar is now the sickle bright— Cleave down the waves before them falling ceaselessly.

The wheat, the hardy wheat ranged in its serried rows, Seems like some noble camp upon the distant plain. Glory to God!—the crickets chirp their wide refrain; From sheaf to sheaf the welcome bread-song sweeping goes.

Translated for 'A Library of the World's Best Literature,' by Thomas Walsh.



IN GOOD QUARTERS

From 'Poemes Militaires'

MIREBEAU, 1871

Good old woman, bother not. Or the place will be too hot: You might let the fire grow old— Save your fagots for the cold: I am drying through and through.

But she, stopping not to hear, Shook the smoldering ashes near: "Soldier, not too warm for you!"

Good old woman, do not mind; At the storehouse I have dined: Save your vintage and your ham, And this cloth—such as I am Are not used to—save it too.

But she heard not what I said— Filled my glass and cut the bread: "Soldier, it is here for you!"

Good old woman—sheets for me! Faith, you treat me royally: And your stable? on your hay? There at length my limbs to lay? I shall sleep like monarchs true.

But she would not be denied Of the sheets, and spread them wide: "Soldier, it is made for you!"

Morning came—the parting tear: Well—good-by! What have we here? My old knapsack full of food! Dear old creature—hostess good— Why indulge me as you do?

It was all that she could say, Smiling in a tearful way: "I have one at war like you!"

Translated for 'A Library of the World's Best Literature,' by Thomas Walsh.



"GOOD FIGHTING!"

From 'Poemes Militaires'

The Kroumirs leave their mountain den; Sing, bullets, sing! and bugles, blow! Good fighting to our gallant men, And happy they who follow, when, Brothers in arms so dear, these go.

Yea, happy they who serve our France, And neither pain nor danger fly; But in the front of war's advance Still deem it but a glorious chance, To be among the brave who die!

No splendid war do we begin, No glory waits us when 'tis past; But marching through the fiery din, We see our serried ranks grow thin, And blood of Frenchmen welling fast.

French blood!—a treasure so august, And hoarded with such jealous care, To crush oppression's strength unjust, With all the force of right robust, And buy us back our honor fair:—

We yield it now to duty's claim, And freely pour out all our store; Who judges, frees us still from blame; The Kroumirs' muskets war proclaim:— In answer let French cannon roar!

Good fighting! and God be your shield, Our pride's avengers, brave and true! France watches you upon the field. Who wear her colors never yield, For 'tis her heart ye bear with you!

Translated for 'A Library of the World's Best Literature,' by Katharine Hillard.



LAST WISHES

From 'Poemes Militaires'

A grave for me—a grave—and why? I do not wish to sleep alone: Let me within the trenches lie, Side by side with my soldiers thrown.

Dear old comrades of wars gone by, Come, 'tis our final "halt" is nigh: Clasp your brave hearts to my own.

A sheet for me—a sheet—and why? Such is for them on their beds who moan: The field is the soldier's place to die, The field of carnage, of blood and bone.

Dear old comrades of wars gone by, This is the prayer of my soul's last sigh: Clasp your brave hearts to my own.

Tears for me—these tears—and why? Knells let the vanquished foe intone! France delivered!—I still can cry, France delivered—invaders flown!

Dear old comrades of wars gone by, Pain is nothing, and death—a lie! Clasp your brave hearts to my own!

Translated for 'A Library of the World's Best Literature,' by Thomas Walsh.



RENE DESCARTES

(1596-1650)



The broad scope of literature is illustrated by its inclusion of the writings of Rene Descartes (Latinized, Renatus Cartesius). Deliberately turning away from books, and making naught alike of learned precedent and literary form, he yet could not but avail himself unconsciously of the heritage which he had discarded.

This notable figure in seventeenth-century philosophy was born of ancient family at La Haye, in Touraine, France, March 31st, 1596; and died at Stockholm, Sweden, February 11th, 1650. From a pleasant student life of eight years in the Jesuit college at La Fleche, he went forth in his seventeenth year with unusual acquirements in mathematics and languages, but in deep dissatisfaction with the long dominant scholastic philosophy and the whole method prescribed for arriving at truth. In a strong youthful revolt, his first step was a decision to discharge his mind of all the prejudices into which his education had trained his thinking. As a beginning in this work he went to Paris, for observation of facts and of men. There, having drifted through a twelvemonth of moderate dissipation, he secluded himself for nearly two years of mathematical study, as though purposing to reduce his universe to an equation in order to solve it. The laws of number he could trust, since their lines configured the eternal harmony.

At the age of twenty-one he entered on a military service of two years in the army of the Netherlands, and then of about two years in the Bavarian army. From 1621, for about four years, he was roaming as an observer of men and nature in Germany, Belgium, and Italy, afterward sojourning in Paris about three and a half years. In 1629 he began twenty years of study and authorship in practical seclusion in Holland. His little work, 'Discours de la Methode' (Leyden, 1637), is often declared to have been the basis for a reconstitution of the science of thought. It would now perhaps be viewed by the majority of critics rather as a necessary clearing of antiquated rubbish from the ground on which the new construction was to rise. Next to it among his works are usually ranked 'Meditationes de Prima Philosophia,' and 'Principia Philosophiae.'

The long sojourn in Holland was ended in September 1649, in response to an urgent invitation from the studious young Queen Christina of Sweden, who wanted the now famous philosopher as an ornament to her court. After some hesitancy he sailed for Stockholm, where only five months afterward he died.

It has been said of Descartes that he was a spectator rather than an active worker in affairs. He was no hero, no patriot, no adherent of any party. He entered armies, but not from love of a cause; the army was a sphere in which he could closely observe the aspects of human life. He was never married, and probably had little concern with love. His attachment to a few friends seems to have been sincere. For literature as such he cared little. Erudition, scholarship, historic love, literary elegance, were nothing to him. Art and aesthetics did not appeal to him. Probably he was not a great reader, even of philosophic writers. He delighted in observing facts with a view to finding, stating, and systematizing their relations in one all-comprehending scheme. He never allowed himself to attack the Church in either its doctrine or its discipline. As a writer, though making no attempt at elegance in style, he is deemed remarkably clear and direct when the abstruseness of his usual themes is considered.

Descartes's method in philosophy gives signs of formation on the model of a process in mathematics. In all investigations he would ascertain first what must exist by necessity; thus establishing axioms evidenced in all experience, because independent of all experience. The study of mathematics for use in other departments drew him into investigations whose results made it a new science. He reformed its clumsy nomenclature, also the algebraic use of letters for quantities; he introduced system into the use of exponents to denote the powers of a quantity, thus opening the way for the binomial theorem; he was the first to throw clear light on the negative roots of equations; his is the theorem by use of which the maximum number of positive or negative roots of an equation can be ascertained. Analytical geometry originated with his investigation of the nature and origin of curves.

His mathematical improvements opened the way for the reform of physical science and for its immense modern advance. In his optical investigations he established the law of refraction of light. His ingenious theory of the vortices—tracing gravity, magnetism, light, and heat, to the whirling or revolving movements of the molecules of matter with which the universe is filled—was accepted as science for about a quarter of a century.

In mental science Descartes's primary instrument for search of truth was Doubt: everything was to be doubted until it had been proved. This was provisional skepticism, merely to provide against foregone conclusions. It was not to preclude belief, but to summon and assure belief as distinct from the inane submission to authority, to prejudice, or to impulse. In this process of doubting everything, the philosopher comes at last to one fact which he cannot doubt—the fact that he exists; for if he did not exist he could not be thinking his doubt. Cogito, ergo sum is one point of absolute knowledge; it is a clear and ultimate perception.

The first principle of his philosophy is, that our consciousness is truthful in its proper sphere, also that our thought is truthful and trustworthy under these two conditions—when the thought is clear and vivid, and when it is held to a theme utterly distinct from every other theme; since it is impossible for us to believe that either man who thinks, or the universe concerning which he thinks, is organized on the basis of a lie. There are "necessary truths," and they are discoverable.

A second principle is, the inevitable ascent of our thought from the fragmentary to the perfect, from the finite to the infinite. Thus the thought of the infinite is an "innate idea," a part of man's potential consciousness. This principle (set forth in one of the selections given herewith) is the Cartesian form of the a priori argument for the Divine existence, which like other a priori forms is viewed by critics not as a proof in pure logic, but as a commanding and luminous appeal to man's entire moral and intellectual nature.

A third principle is, that the material universe is necessarily reduced in our thought ultimately to two forms, extension and local movement—extension signifying matter, local movement signifying force. There is no such thing as empty space; there are no ultimate indivisible atoms; the universe is infinitely full of matter.

A fourth principle is, that the soul and matter are subsistences so fundamentally and absolutely distinct that they cannot act in reciprocal relations. This compelled Descartes to resort to his strained supposition that all correspondence or synchronism between bodily movements and mental or spiritual activities is merely reflex or automatic, or else is produced directly by act of Deity. For relief from this violent hypothesis, Leibnitz modified the Cartesian philosophy by his famous theory of a pre-established harmony.

Descartes did a great work, but it was not an abiding reconstruction: indeed, it was not construction so much as it was a dream—one of the grandest and most suggestive in the history of thought. Its audacious disparagement of the whole scholastic method startled Europe, upon the dead air of whose philosophy it came as a refreshing breath of transcendental thought. Its suggestions and inspirations are traceable as a permanent enrichment, though its vast fabric swiftly dissolved. The early enthusiasm for it in French literary circles and among professors in the universities of Holland scarcely outlasted a generation. Within a dozen years after the philosopher's death, the Cartesian philosophy was prohibited by ecclesiastical authorities and excluded from the schools. In the British Isles and in Germany the system has been usually considered as an interesting curiosity in the cabinet of philosophies. Yet the unity of all truth through relations vital, subtle, firm, and universal, though seen only in a vision of the night, abides when the night is gone.

With the impressive and noteworthy 'Discours de la Methode' (Leyden, 1637), were published three essays supporting it: 'La Dioptrique,' 'Les Meteores,' 'La Geometrie.' Of his other works, the most important are 'Meditationes de Prima Philosophia' (Paris, 1641; Amsterdam, 1642), and 'Principia Philosophiae' (Amsterdam, 1644). A useful English translation of his most important writings, with an introduction, is by John Veitch, LL.D.,—'The Method, Meditations, and Selections from the Principles' (Edinburgh, 1853; 6th ed., Blackwoods, Edinburgh and London, 1879). See also, English translations of portions of his philosophical works, by W. Cunningham (1877), Lowndes (1878), Mahaffy (1880), Martineau (1885), Henry Rogers, Huxley, and L. Stephen.

For his Life, see 'Vie de Descartes,' by Baillet (2 vols. 1691); 'Descartes sa Vie,' etc., by Millet (2 vols. 1867-71); 'Descartes and his School,' by Kuno Fischer (English translation, 1887).



OF CERTAIN PRINCIPLES OF ELEMENTARY LOGICAL THOUGHT

From the 'Discourse on Method'

As a multitude of laws often only hampers justice, so that a State is best governed when, with few laws, these are rigidly administered; in like manner, instead of the great number of precepts of which Logic is composed, I believed that the four following would prove perfectly sufficient for me, provided I took the firm and unwavering resolution never in a single instance to fail in observing them.

The first was never to accept anything for true which I did not clearly know to be such; that is to say, carefully to avoid precipitancy and prejudice, and to comprise nothing more in my judgment than what was presented to my mind so clearly and distinctly as to exclude all ground of doubt.

The second, to divide each of the difficulties under examination into as many parts as possible, and as might be necessary for its adequate solution.

The third, to conduct my thoughts in such order that, by commencing with objects the simplest and easiest to know, I might ascend by little and little, and as it were step by step, to the knowledge of the more complex; assigning in thought a certain order even to those objects which in their own nature do not stand in a relation of antecedence and sequence.

And the last, in every case to make enumerations so complete, and reviews so general, that it might be assured that nothing was omitted.

The long chains of simple and easy reasonings by means of which geometers are accustomed to reach the conclusions of their most difficult demonstrations, had led me to imagine that all things to the knowledge of which man is competent are mutually connected in the same way, and that there is nothing so far removed from us as to be beyond our reach, or so hidden that we cannot discover it, provided only we abstain from accepting the false for the true, and always preserve in our thoughts the order necessary for the deduction of one truth from another. And I had little difficulty in determining the objects with which it was necessary to commence, for I was already persuaded that it must be with the simplest and easiest to know, and, considering that of all those who have hitherto sought truth in the Sciences, the mathematicians alone have been able to find any demonstrations,—that is, any certain and evident reasons,—I did not doubt but that such must have been the rule of their investigations. I resolved to commence, therefore, with the examination of the simplest objects, not anticipating, however, from this any other advantage than that to be found in accustoming my mind to the love and nourishment of truth, and to a distaste for all such reasonings as were unsound. But I had no intention on that account of attempting to master all the particular sciences commonly denominated Mathematics: but observing that however different their objects, they all agree in considering only the various relations or proportions subsisting among those objects, I thought it best for my purpose to consider these proportions in the most general form possible; without referring them to any objects in particular, except such as would most facilitate the knowledge of them, and without by any means restricting them to these, that afterwards I might thus be the better able to apply them to every other class of objects to which they are legitimately applicable. Perceiving, further, that in order to understand these relations I should sometimes have to consider them one by one, and sometimes only to bear them in mind, or embrace them in the aggregate, I thought that in order the better to consider them individually, I should view them as subsisting between straight lines, than which I could find no objects more simple, or capable of being more distinctly represented to my imagination and senses; and on the other hand, that in order to retain them in the memory, or embrace an aggregate of many, I should express them by certain characters the briefest possible. In this way I believed that I could borrow all that was best both in geometrical analysis and in algebra, and correct all the defects of the one by help of the other.



AN ELEMENTARY METHOD OF INQUIRY

From the 'Discourse on Method'

Seeing that our senses sometimes deceive us, I was willing to suppose that there existed nothing really such as they presented to us; and because some men err in reasoning and fall into paralogisms, even on the simplest matters of geometry, I, convinced that I was as open to error as any other, rejected as false all the reasonings I had hitherto taken for demonstrations; and finally, when I considered that the very same thoughts (presentations) which we experience when awake may also be experienced when we are asleep, while there is at that time not one of them true, I supposed that all the objects (presentations) that had ever entered into my mind when awake had in them no more truth than the illusions of my dreams. But immediately upon this I observed that whilst I thus wished to think that all was false, it was absolutely necessary that I, who thus thought, should be somewhat; and as I observed that this truth,—"I think, hence I am,"—was so certain and of such evidence that no ground of doubt, however extravagant, could be alleged by the skeptics capable of shaking it, I concluded that I might without scruple accept it as the first principle of the philosophy of which I was in search.

In the next place, I attentively examined what I was, and as I observed that I could suppose that I had no body, and that there was no world nor any place in which I might be; but that I could not therefore suppose that I was not; and that on the contrary, from the very circumstance that I thought to doubt of the truth of other things, it most clearly and certainly followed that I was; while on the other hand, if I had only ceased to think, although all the other objects which I had ever imagined had been in reality existent, I would have had no reason to believe that I existed; I thence concluded that I was a substance whose whole essence or nature consists only in thinking, and which, that it may exist, has need of no place, nor is dependent on any material thing; so that "I"—that is to say, the mind by which I am what I am—is wholly distinct from the body, and is even more easily known than the latter, and is such that although the latter were not, it would still continue to be all that it is.