Complete Prose Works
yachts, sailing, this fine day, the free sea in a good wind. And
rising out of the midst, tall-topt, ship-hemm'd, modern, American,
yet strangely oriental, V-shaped Manhattan, with its compact mass, its
spires, its cloud-touching edifices group'd at the centre--the green of
the trees, and all the white, brown and gray of the architecture well
blended, as I see it, under a miracle of limpid sky, delicious light of
heaven above, and June haze on the surface below.
HUMAN AND HEROIC NEW YORK
The general subjective view of New York and Brooklyn--(will not the
time hasten when the two shall be municipally united in one, and named
Manhattan?)--what I may call the human interior and exterior of these
great seething oceanic populations, as I get it in this visit, is to
me best of all. After an absence of many years, (I went away at the
outbreak of the secession war, and have never been back to stay since,)
again I resume with curiosity the crowds, the streets, I knew so
well, Broadway, the ferries, the west side of the city, democratic
Bowery--human appearances and manners as seen in all these, and along
the wharves, and in the perpetual travel of the horse-cars, or the
crowded excursion steamers, or in Wall and Nassau streets by day--in the
places of amusement at night--bubbling and whirling and moving like
its own environment of waters--endless humanity in all phases--Brooklyn
also--taken in for the last three weeks. No need to specify
minutely--enough to say that (making all allowances for the shadows
and side-streaks of a million-headed-city) the brief total of the
impressions, the human qualities, of these vast cities, is to me
comforting, even heroic, beyond statement. Alertness, generally fine
physique, clear eyes that look straight at you, a singular combination
of reticence and self-possession, with good nature and friendliness--a
prevailing range of according manners, taste and intellect, surely
beyond any elsewhere upon earth--and a palpable outcropping of that
personal comradeship I look forward to as the subtlest, strongest future
hold of this many-item'd Union--are not only constantly visible here
in these mighty channels of men, but they form the rule and average.
To-day, I should say--defiant of cynics and pessimists, and with a full
knowledge of all their exceptions--an appreciative and perceptive study
of the current humanity of New York gives the directest proof yet
of successful Democracy, and of the solution of that paradox, the
eligibility of the free and fully developed individual with the
paramount aggregate. In old age, lame and sick, pondering for years on
many a doubt and danger for this republic of ours--fully aware of all
that can be said on the other side--I find in this visit to New York,
and the daily contact and rapport with its myriad people, on the scale
of the oceans and tides, the best, most effective medicine my soul has
yet partaken--the grandest physical habitat and surroundings of land and
water the globe affords--namely, Manhattan island and Brooklyn, which
the future shall join in one city--city of superb democracy, amid superb
surroundings.
HOURS FOR THE SOUL
_July 22d, 1878_.--Living down in the country again. A wonderful
conjunction of all that goes to make those sometime miracle-hours after
sunset--so near and yet so far. Perfect, or nearly perfect days, I
notice, are not so very uncommon; but the combinations that make perfect
nights are few, even in a life time. We have one of those perfections
to-night. Sunset left things pretty clear; the larger stars were visible
soon as the shades allow'd. A while after 8, three or four great black
clouds suddenly rose, seemingly from different points, and sweeping
with broad swirls of wind but no thunder, underspread the orbs from
view everywhere, and indicated a violent heatstorm. But without storm,
clouds, blackness and all, sped and vanish'd as suddenly as they had
risen; and from a little after 9 till 11 the atmosphere and the whole
show above were in that state of exceptional clearness and glory just
alluded to. In the northwest turned the Great Dipper with its pointers
round the Cynosure. A little south of east the constellation of the
Scorpion was fully up, with red Antares glowing in its neck; while
dominating, majestic Jupiter swam, an hour and a half risen, in the
east--(no moon till after 11.) A large part of the sky seem'd just
laid in great splashes of phosphorus. You could look deeper in, farther
through, than usual; the orbs thick as heads of wheat in a field. Not
that there was any special brilliancy either--nothing near as sharp as
I have seen of keen winter nights, but a curious general luminousness
throughout to sight, sense, and soul. The latter had much to do with it.
(I am convinced there are hours of Nature, especially of the atmosphere,
mornings and evenings, address'd to the soul. Night transcends, for that
purpose, what the proudest day can do.) Now, indeed, if never before,
the heavens declared the glory of God. It was to the full sky of the
Bible, of Arabia, of the prophets, and of the oldest poems. There,
in abstraction and stillness, (I had gone off by myself to absorb the
scene, to have the spell unbroken,) the copiousness, the removedness,
vitality, loose-clear-crowdedness, of that stellar concave spreading
overhead, softly absorb'd into me, rising so free, interminably high,
stretching east, west, north, south--and I, though but a point in the
centre below, embodying all.
As if for the first time, indeed, creation noiselessly sank into and
through me its placid and untellable lesson, beyond--O, so infinitely
beyond!--anything from art, books, sermons, or from science, old or new.
The spirit's hour--religion's hour--the visible suggestion of God in
space and time--now once definitely indicated, if never again. The
untold pointed at--the heavens all paved with it. The Milky Way, as if
some superhuman symphony, some ode of universal vagueness, disdaining
syllable and sound--a flashing glance of Deity, address'd to the soul.
All silently--the indescribable night and stars--far off and silently.
THE DAWN.--_July 23_.--This morning, between one and two hours before
sunrise, a spectacle wrought on the same background, yet of quite
different beauty and meaning. The moon well up in the heavens, and past
her half, is shining brightly--the air and sky of that cynical-clear,
Minerva-like quality, virgin cool--not the weight of sentiment or
mystery, or passion's ecstasy indefinable--not the religious sense,
the varied All, distill'd and sublimated into one, of the night just
described. Every star now clear-cut, showing for just what it is, there
in the colorless ether. The character of the heralded morning, ineffably
sweet and fresh and limpid, but for the esthetic sense alone, and for
purity without sentiment. I have itemized the night--but dare I attempt
the cloudless dawn? (What subtle tie is this between one's soul and the
break of day? Alike, and yet no two nights or morning shows ever exactly
alike.) Preceded by an immense star, almost unearthly in its effusion
of white splendor, with two or three long unequal spoke-rays of diamond
radiance, shedding down through the fresh morning air below--an hour of
this, and then the sunrise.
THE EAST.--What a subject for a poem! Indeed, where else a more
pregnant, more splendid one? Where one more idealistic-real, more
subtle, more sensuous-delicate? The East, answering all lands, all
ages, peoples; touching all senses, here, immediate, now--and yet so
indescribably far off--such retrospect! The East--long-stretching--so
losing itself--the orient, the gardens of Asia, the womb of history
and song--forth-issuing all those strange, dim cavalcades--Florid
with blood, pensive, rapt with musings, hot with passion. Sultry with
perfume, with ample and flowing garment. With sunburnt visage, intense
soul and glittering eyes. Always the East--old, how incalculably old!
And yet here the same--ours yet, fresh as a rose, to every morning,
every life, to-day--and always will be.
_Sept. 17_. Another presentation--same theme--just before sunrise again,
(a favorite hour with me.) The clear gray sky, a faint glow in the
dull liver-color of the east, the cool fresh odor and the moisture--the
cattle and horses off there grazing in the fields--the star Venus again,
two hours high. For sounds, the chirping of crickets in the grass, the
clarion of chanticleer, and the distant cawing of an early crow. Quietly
over the dense fringe of cedars and pines rises that dazzling, red,
transparent disk of flame, and the low sheets of white vapor roll and
roll into dissolution.
THE MOON.--_May 18_.--I went to bed early last night, but found myself
waked shortly after 12, and, turning awhile, sleepless and mentally
feverish, I rose, dress'd myself, sallied forth and walk'd down the
lane. The full moon, some three or four hours up--a sprinkle of light
and less-light clouds just lazily moving--Jupiter an hour high in the
east, and here and there throughout the heavens a random star appearing
and disappearing. So beautifully veiled and varied--the air, with that
early-summer perfume, not at all damp or raw--at times Luna languidly
emerging in richest brightness for minutes, and then partially envelop'd
again. Far off a poor whip-poor-will plied his notes incessantly. It was
that silent time between 1 and 3.
The rare nocturnal scene, how soon it sooth'd and pacified me! Is there
not something about the moon, some relation or reminder, which no poem
or literature has yet caught? (In very old and primitive ballads I have
come across lines or asides that suggest it.) After a while the clouds
mostly clear'd, and as the moon swam on, she carried, shimmering and
shifting, delicate color-effects of pellucid green and tawny vapor. Let
me conclude this part with an extract, (some writer in the "Tribune,"
May 16, 1878):
No one ever gets tired of the moon. Goddess that she is by dower of
her eternal beauty, she is a true woman by her tact--knows the charm
of being seldom seen, of coming by surprise and staying but a little
while; never wears the same dress two nights running, nor all night
the same way; commends herself to the matter-of-fact people by her
usefulness, and makes her uselessness adored by poets, artists, and
all lovers in all lands; lends herself to every symbolism and to
every emblem; is Diana's bow and Venus's mirror and Mary's throne;
is a sickle, a scarf, an eyebrow, his face or her face, and look'd
at by her or by him; is the madman's hell, the poet's heaven, the
baby's toy, the philosopher's study; and while her admirers follow
her footsteps, and hang on her lovely looks, she knows how to keep
her woman's secret--her other side--unguess'd and unguessable.
_Furthermore. February 19, 1880_.--Just before 10 P.M. cold and entirely
clear again, the show overhead, bearing southwest, of wonderful and
crowded magnificence. The moon in her third quarter--the clusters of
the Hyades and Pleiades, with the planet Mars between--in full crossing
sprawl in the sky the great Egyptian X, (Sirius, Procyon, and the main
stars in the constellations of the Ship, the Dove, and of Orion;) just
north of east Bootes, and in his knee Arcturus, an hour high, mounting
the heaven, ambitiously large and sparkling, as if he meant to challenge
with Sirius the stellar supremacy.
With the sentiment of the stars and moon such nights I get all the
free margins and indefiniteness of music or poetry, fused in geometry's
utmost exactness.
STRAW-COLOR'D AND OTHER PSYCHES
_Aug. 4_.--A pretty sight! Where I sit in the shade--a warm day, the sun
shining from cloudless skies, the forenoon well advanc'd--I look over