Complete Prose Works
something more effective than the palpable. Then I find no better text,
(it is always important to have a definite, special, even oppositional,
living man to start from,) for sending out certain speculations
and comparisons for home use. Let us see what they amount to--those
reactionary doctrines, fears, scornful analyses of democracy--even from
the most erudite and sincere mind of Europe.
[14] Not the least mentionable part of the case, (a streak, it may
be, of that humor with which history and fate love to contrast their
gravity,) is that although neither of my great authorities during their
lives consider'd the United States worthy of serious mention, all the
principal works of both might not inappropriately be this day collected
and bound up under the conspicuous title: _Speculations for the use of
North America, and Democracy there with the relations of the same to
Metaphysics, including Lessons and Warnings (encouragements too, and of
the vastest,) from the Old World to the New._
[15] I hope I shall not myself fall into the error I charge upon him, of
prescribing a specific for indispensable evils. My utmost pretension is
probably but to offset that old claim of the exclusively curative power
of first-class individual men, as leaders and rulers, by the claims,
and general movement and result, of ideas. Something of the latter kind
seems to me the distinctive theory of America, of democracy, and of the
modern--or rather, I should say, it _is_ democracy, and _is_ the modern.
[16] I am much indebted to J. Gostick's abstract.
[17] I have deliberately repeated it all, not only in offset to Carlyle'
s everlurking pessimism and world-decadence, but as presenting the most
thoroughly _American points of view_ I know. In my opinion the above
formulas of Hegel are an essential and crowning justification of New
World democracy in the creative realms of time and space. There is that
about them which only the vastness, the multiplicity and the vitality
of America would seem able to comprehend, to give scope and illustration
to, or to be fit for, or even originate. It is strange to me that they
were born in Germany, or in the old world at all. While a Carlyle, I
should say, is quite the legitimate European product to be expected.
A COUPLE OF OLD FRIENDS--A COLERIDGE BIT
_Latter April_.--Have run down in my country haunt for a couple of days,
and am spending them by the pond. I had already discover'd my kingfisher
here (but only one--the mate not here yet.) This fine bright morning,
down by the creek, he has come out for a spree, circling, flirting,
chirping at a round rate. While I am writing these lines he is
disporting himself in scoots and rings over the wider parts of the pond,
into whose surface he dashes, once or twice making a loud _souse_--the
spray flying in the sun--beautiful! I see his white and dark-gray
plumage and peculiar shape plainly, as he has deign'd to come very near
me. The noble, graceful bird! Now he is sitting on the limb of an old
tree, high up, bending over the water--seems to be looking at me while I
memorandize. I almost fancy he knows me. _Three days later._--My second
kingfisher is here with his (or her) mate. I saw the two together flying
and whirling around. I had heard, in the distance, what I thought was
the clear rasping staccato of the birds several times already--but I
couldn't be sure the notes came from both until I saw them together.
To-day at noon they appear'd, but apparently either on business, or for
a little limited exercise only. No wild frolic now, full of free fun and
motion, up and down for an hour. Doubtless, now they have cares, duties,
incubation responsibilities. The frolics are deferr'd till summer-close.
I don't know as I can finish to-day's memorandum better than with
Coleridge's lines, curiously appropriate in more ways than one:
All Nature seems at work--slugs leave their lair,
The bees are stirring--birds are on the wing,
And winter, slumbering in the open air,
Wears on his smiling face a dream of spring;
And I, the while, the sole unbusy thing,
Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.
A WEEK'S VISIT TO BOSTON
_May 1, '81._--Seems as if all the ways and means of American
travel to-day had been settled, not only with reference to speed and
directness, but for the comfort of women, children, invalids, and old
fellows like me. I went on by a through train that runs daily from
Washington to the Yankee metropolis without change. You get in a
sleeping-car soon after dark in Philadelphia, and after ruminating an
hour or two, have your bed made up if you like, draw the curtains,
and go to sleep in it--fly on through Jersey to New York--hear in your
half-slumbers a dull jolting and bumping sound or two--are unconsciously
toted from Jersey City by a midnight steamer around the Battery and
under the big bridge to the track of the New Haven road--resume your
flight eastward, and early the next morning you wake up in Boston. All
of which was my experience. I wanted to go to the Revere house. A tall
unknown gentleman, (a fellow-passenger on his way to Newport he told
me, I had just chatted a few moments before with him,) assisted me out
through the depot crowd, procured a hack, put me in it with my traveling
bag, saying smilingly and quietly, "Now I want you to let this be _my_
ride," paid the driver, and before I could remonstrate bow'd himself
off.
The occasion of my jaunt, I suppose I had better say here, was for a
public reading of "the death of Abraham Lincoln" essay, on the sixteenth
anniversary of that tragedy; which reading duly came off, night of
April 15. Then I linger'd a week in Boston--felt pretty well (the mood
propitious, my paralysis lull'd)--went around everywhere, and saw all
that was to be seen, especially human beings. Boston's immense material
growth--commerce, finance, commission stores, the plethora of goods, the
crowded streets and sidewalks--made of course the first surprising show.
In my trip out West, last year, I thought the wand of future prosperity,
future empire, must soon surely be wielded by St. Louis, Chicago,
beautiful Denver, perhaps San Francisco; but I see the said wand
stretch'd out just as decidedly in Boston, with just as much certainty
of staying; evidences of copious capital--indeed no centre of the New
World ahead of it, (half the big railroads in the West are built with
Yankees' money, and they take the dividends.) Old Boston with its zigzag
streets and multitudinous angles, (crush up a sheet of letter-paper
in your hand, throw it down, stamp it flat, and that is a map of old
Boston)--new Boston with its miles upon miles of large and costly
houses--Beacon street, Commonwealth avenue, and a hundred others. But
the best new departures and expansions of Boston, and of all the cities
of New England, are in another direction.
THE BOSTON OF TO-DAY
In the letters we get from Dr. Schliemann (interesting but fishy) about
his excavations there in the far-off Homeric area, I notice cities,
ruins, &c., as he digs them out of their graves, are certain to be in
layers--that is to say, upon the foundation of an old concern, very
far down indeed, is always another city or set of ruins, and upon
that another superadded--and sometimes upon that still another--each
representing either a long or rapid stage of growth and development,
different from its predecessor, but unerringly growing out of and
resting on it. In the moral, emotional, heroic, and human growths, (the
main of a race in my opinion,) something of this kind has certainly
taken place in Boston. The New England metropolis of to-day may
be described as sunny, (there is something else that makes warmth,
mastering even winds and meteorologies, though those are not to be
sneez'd at,) joyous, receptive, full of ardor, sparkle, a certain
element of yearning, magnificently tolerant, yet not to be fool'd; fond
of good eating and drinking--costly in costume as its purse can buy;
and all through its best average of houses, streets, people, that
subtle something (generally thought to be climate, but it is not--it is
something indefinable in the _race_, the turn of its development) which
effuses behind the whirl of animation, study, business, a happy and
joyous public spirit, as distinguish'd from a sluggish and saturnine
one. Makes me think of the glints we get (as in Symonds's books) of the
jolly old Greek cities. Indeed there is a good deal of the Hellenic in
B., and the people are getting handsomer too--padded out, with freer
motions, and with color in their faces. I never saw (although this is
not Greek) so many _fine-looking gray-hair'd women_. At my lecture
I caught myself pausing more than once to look at them, plentiful
everywhere through the audience--healthy and wifely and motherly, and
wonderfully charming and beautiful--I think such as no time or land but
ours could show.
MY TRIBUTE TO FOUR POETS
_April 16_.--A short but pleasant visit to Longfellow. I am not one
of the calling kind, but as the author of "Evangeline" kindly took the
trouble to come and see me three years ago in Camden, where I was ill,
I felt not only the impulse of my own pleasure on that occasion, but a
duty. He was the only particular eminence I called on in Boston, and I
shall not soon forget his lit-up face and glowing warmth and courtesy,
in the modes of what is called the old school.
And now just here I feel the impulse to interpolate something about the
mighty four who stamp this first American century with its birthmarks of
poetic literature. In a late magazine one of my reviewers, who ought
to know better, speaks of my "attitude of contempt and scorn and
intolerance" toward the leading poets--of my "deriding" them, and
preaching their "uselessness." If anybody cares to know what I
think--and have long thought and avow'd--about them, I am entirely
willing to propound. I can't imagine any better luck befalling these
States for a poetical beginning and initiation than has come from
Emerson, Longfellow, Bryant, and Whittier. Emerson, to me, stands
unmistakably at the head, but for the others I am at a loss where to
give any precedence. Each illustrious, each rounded, each distinctive.
Emerson for his sweet, vital-tasting melody, rhym'd philosophy, and
poems as amber-clear as the honey of the wild bee he loves to sing.
Longfellow for rich color, graceful forms and incidents--all that makes
life beautiful and love refined--competing with the singers of Europe
on their own ground, and, with one exception, better and finer work than
that of any of them. Bryant pulsing the first interior verse-throbs of a
mighty world--bard of the river and the wood, ever conveying a taste of
open air, with scents as from hayfields, grapes, birch-borders--always
lurkingly fond of threnodies--beginning and ending his long career with
chants of death, with here and there through all, poems, or passages
of poems, touching the highest universal truths, enthusiasms,
duties--morals as grim and eternal, if not as stormy and fateful, as
anything in Eschylus. While in Whittier, with his special themes--(his
outcropping love of heroism and war, for all his Quakerdom, his verses
at times like the measur'd step of Cromwell's old veterans)--in Whittier
lives the zeal, the moral energy, that founded New England--the splendid
rectitude and ardor of Luther, Milton, George Fox--I must not, dare not,
say the wilfulness and narrowness--though doubtless the world needs
now, and always will need, almost above all, just such narrowness and
wilfulness.
MILLET'S PICTURES LAST ITEMS
_April 18_.--Went out three or four miles to the house of Quincy Shaw,
to see a collection of J. F. Millet's pictures. Two rapt hours. Never