Essays — First Series
instantly appear supreme and beautiful actions, the top and radiance of
human life, and all people will get mops and brooms; until, lo!
suddenly the great soul has enshrined itself in some other form and
done some other deed, and that is now the flower and head of all living
nature.
We are the photometers, we the irritable goldleaf and tinfoil that
measure the accumulations of the subtle element. We know the authentic
effects of the true fire through every one of its million disguises.
V.
LOVE
“I was as a gem concealed;
Me my burning ray revealed.”
_Koran_.
LOVE
Every promise of the soul has innumerable fulfilments; each of its joys
ripens into a new want. Nature, uncontainable, flowing, forelooking, in
the first sentiment of kindness anticipates already a benevolence which
shall lose all particular regards in its general light. The
introduction to this felicity is in a private and tender relation of
one to one, which is the enchantment of human life; which, like a
certain divine rage and enthusiasm, seizes on man at one period and
works a revolution in his mind and body; unites him to his race,
pledges him to the domestic and civic relations, carries him with new
sympathy into nature, enhances the power of the senses, opens the
imagination, adds to his character heroic and sacred attributes,
establishes marriage, and gives permanence to human society.
The natural association of the sentiment of love with the heyday of the
blood seems to require that in order to portray it in vivid tints,
which every youth and maid should confess to be true to their throbbing
experience, one must not be too old. The delicious fancies of youth
reject the least savor of a mature philosophy, as chilling with age and
pedantry their purple bloom. And therefore I know I incur the
imputation of unnecessary hardness and stoicism from those who compose
the Court and Parliament of Love. But from these formidable censors I
shall appeal to my seniors. For it is to be considered that this
passion of which we speak, though it begin with the young, yet forsakes
not the old, or rather suffers no one who is truly its servant to grow
old, but makes the aged participators of it not less than the tender
maiden, though in a different and nobler sort. For it is a fire that
kindling its first embers in the narrow nook of a private bosom, caught
from a wandering spark out of another private heart, glows and enlarges
until it warms and beams upon multitudes of men and women, upon the
universal heart of all, and so lights up the whole world and all nature
with its generous flames. It matters not therefore whether we attempt
to describe the passion at twenty, at thirty, or at eighty years. He
who paints it at the first period will lose some of its later, he who
paints it at the last, some of its earlier traits. Only it is to be
hoped that by patience and the Muses’ aid we may attain to that inward
view of the law which shall describe a truth ever young and beautiful,
so central that it shall commend itself to the eye, at whatever angle
beholden.
And the first condition is, that we must leave a too close and
lingering adherence to facts, and study the sentiment as it appeared in
hope and not in history. For each man sees his own life defaced and
disfigured, as the life of man is not, to his imagination. Each man
sees over his own experience a certain stain of error, whilst that of
other men looks fair and ideal. Let any man go back to those delicious
relations which make the beauty of his life, which have given him
sincerest instruction and nourishment, he will shrink and moan. Alas! I
know not why, but infinite compunctions embitter in mature life the
remembrances of budding joy and cover every beloved name. Every thing
is beautiful seen from the point of the intellect, or as truth. But all
is sour, if seen as experience. Details are melancholy; the plan is
seemly and noble. In the actual world—the painful kingdom of time and
place—dwell care, and canker, and fear. With thought, with the ideal,
is immortal hilarity, the rose of joy. Round it all the Muses sing. But
grief cleaves to names, and persons, and the partial interests of
to-day and yesterday.
The strong bent of nature is seen in the proportion which this topic of
personal relations usurps in the conversation of society. What do we
wish to know of any worthy person so much, as how he has sped in the
history of this sentiment? What books in the circulating libraries
circulate? How we glow over these novels of passion, when the story is
told with any spark of truth and nature! And what fastens attention, in
the intercourse of life, like any passage betraying affection between
two parties? Perhaps we never saw them before, and never shall meet
them again. But we see them exchange a glance, or betray a deep
emotion, and we are no longer strangers. We understand them, and take
the warmest interest in the development of the romance. All mankind
love a lover. The earliest demonstrations of complacency and kindness
are nature’s most winning pictures. It is the dawn of civility and
grace in the coarse and rustic. The rude village boy teases the girls
about the school-house door;—but to-day he comes running into the
entry, and meets one fair child disposing her satchel; he holds her
books to help her, and instantly it seems to him as if she removed
herself from him infinitely, and was a sacred precinct. Among the
throng of girls he runs rudely enough, but one alone distances him; and
these two little neighbors, that were so close just now, have learned
to respect each other’s personality. Or who can avert his eyes from the
engaging, half-artful, half-artless ways of school-girls who go into
the country shops to buy a skein of silk or a sheet of paper, and talk
half an hour about nothing with the broad-faced, good-natured shop-boy.
In the village they are on a perfect equality, which love delights in,
and without any coquetry the happy, affectionate nature of woman flows
out in this pretty gossip. The girls may have little beauty, yet
plainly do they establish between them and the good boy the most
agreeable, confiding relations, what with their fun and their earnest,
about Edgar and Jonas and Almira, and who was invited to the party, and
who danced at the dancing-school, and when the singing-school would
begin, and other nothings concerning which the parties cooed. By and by
that boy wants a wife, and very truly and heartily will he know where
to find a sincere and sweet mate, without any risk such as Milton
deplores as incident to scholars and great men.
I have been told that in some public discourses of mine my reverence
for the intellect has made me unjustly cold to the personal relations.
But now I almost shrink at the remembrance of such disparaging words.
For persons are love’s world, and the coldest philosopher cannot
recount the debt of the young soul wandering here in nature to the
power of love, without being tempted to unsay, as treasonable to
nature, aught derogatory to the social instincts. For though the
celestial rapture falling out of heaven seizes only upon those of
tender age, and although a beauty overpowering all analysis or
comparison and putting us quite beside ourselves we can seldom see
after thirty years, yet the remembrance of these visions outlasts all
other remembrances, and is a wreath of flowers on the oldest brows. But
here is a strange fact; it may seem to many men, in revising their
experience, that they have no fairer page in their life’s book than the
delicious memory of some passages wherein affection contrived to give a
witchcraft, surpassing the deep attraction of its own truth, to a
parcel of accidental and trivial circumstances. In looking backward
they may find that several things which were not the charm have more
reality to this groping memory than the charm itself which embalmed
them. But be our experience in particulars what it may, no man ever
forgot the visitations of that power to his heart and brain, which
created all things anew; which was the dawn in him of music, poetry,
and art; which made the face of nature radiant with purple light, the
morning and the night varied enchantments; when a single tone of one
voice could make the heart bound, and the most trivial circumstance
associated with one form is put in the amber of memory; when he became
all eye when one was present, and all memory when one was gone; when
the youth becomes a watcher of windows and studious of a glove, a veil,
a ribbon, or the wheels of a carriage; when no place is too solitary
and none too silent, for him who has richer company and sweeter
conversation in his new thoughts than any old friends, though best and
purest, can give him; for the figures, the motions, the words of the
beloved object are not like other images written in water, but, as
Plutarch said, “enamelled in fire,” and make the study of midnight:—
“Thou art not gone being gone, where’er thou art,
Thou leav’st in him thy watchful eyes, in him thy loving heart.”
In the noon and the afternoon of life we still throb at the
recollection of days when happiness was not happy enough, but must be
drugged with the relish of pain and fear; for he touched the secret of
the matter who said of love,—
“All other pleasures are not worth its pains:”
and when the day was not long enough, but the night too must be
consumed in keen recollections; when the head boiled all night on the
pillow with the generous deed it resolved on; when the moonlight was a
pleasing fever and the stars were letters and the flowers ciphers and
the air was coined into song; when all business seemed an impertinence,
and all the men and women running to and fro in the streets, mere
pictures.
The passion rebuilds the world for the youth. It makes all things alive
and significant. Nature grows conscious. Every bird on the boughs of
the tree sings now to his heart and soul. The notes are almost
articulate. The clouds have faces as he looks on them. The trees of the
forest, the waving grass and the peeping flowers have grown
intelligent; and he almost fears to trust them with the secret which
they seem to invite. Yet nature soothes and sympathizes. In the green
solitude he finds a dearer home than with men:—
“Fountain-heads and pathless groves,
Places which pale passion loves,
Moonlight walks, when all the fowls
Are safely housed, save bats and owls,
A midnight bell, a passing groan,—
These are the sounds we feed upon.”
Behold there in the wood the fine madman! He is a palace of sweet
sounds and sights; he dilates; he is twice a man; he walks with arms
akimbo; he soliloquizes; he accosts the grass and the trees; he feels
the blood of the violet, the clover and the lily in his veins; and he
talks with the brook that wets his foot.
The heats that have opened his perceptions of natural beauty have made
him love music and verse. It is a fact often observed, that men have
written good verses under the inspiration of passion, who cannot write
well under any other circumstances.
The like force has the passion over all his nature. It expands the
sentiment; it makes the clown gentle and gives the coward heart. Into
the most pitiful and abject it will infuse a heart and courage to defy
the world, so only it have the countenance of the beloved object. In
giving him to another it still more gives him to himself. He is a new
man, with new perceptions, new and keener purposes, and a religious
solemnity of character and aims. He does not longer appertain to his
family and society; _he_ is somewhat; _he_ is a person; _he_ is a soul.
And here let us examine a little nearer the nature of that influence