It is the imagination of poets
which puts those brave speeches into the mouths of their heroes.
They may feign that Cato's last words were
"The earth, the air, and seas I know, and all
The joys and horrors of their peace and wars;
And now will view the Gods' state and the stars,"
but such are not the thoughts nor the destiny of common men.
What is this heaven which they expect, if it is no better than
they expect? Are they prepared for a better than they can now
imagine? Where is the heaven of him who dies on a stage, in a
theatre? Here or nowhere is our heaven.
"Although we see celestial bodies move
Above the earth, the earth we till and love."
We can conceive of nothing more fair than something which we have
experienced. "The remembrance of youth is a sigh." We linger in
manhood to tell the dreams of our childhood, and they are half
forgotten ere we have learned the language. We have need to be
earth-born as well as heaven-born, , as was said of
the Titans of old, or in a better sense than they. There have
been heroes for whom this world seemed expressly prepared, as if
creation had at last succeeded; whose daily life was the stuff of
which our dreams are made, and whose presence enhanced the beauty
and ampleness of Nature herself. Where they walked,
"Largior hic campos aether et lumine vestit
Purpureo: Solemque suum, sua sidera norunt."
"Here a more copious air invests the fields, and clothes with
purple light; and they know their own sun and their own stars."
We love to hear some men speak, though we hear not what they say;
the very air they breathe is rich and perfumed, and the sound of
their voices falls on the ear like the rustling of leaves or the
crackling of the fire. They stand many deep. They have the
heavens for their abettors, as those who have never stood from
under them, and they look at the stars with an answering ray.
Their eyes are like glow-worms, and their motions graceful and
flowing, as if a place were already found for them, like rivers
flowing through valleys. The distinctions of morality, of right
and wrong, sense and nonsense, are petty, and have lost their
significance, beside these pure primeval natures. When I
consider the clouds stretched in stupendous masses across the
sky, frowning with darkness or glowing with downy light, or
gilded with the rays of the setting sun, like the battlements of
a city in the heavens, their grandeur appears thrown away on the
meanness of my employment; the drapery is altogether too rich for
such poor acting. I am hardly worthy to be a suburban dweller
outside those walls
"Unless above himself he can
Erect himself, how poor a thing is man!"
With our music we would fain challenge transiently another and
finer sort of intercourse than our daily toil permits. The
strains come back to us amended in the echo, as when a friend
reads our verse. Why have they so painted the fruits, and
freighted them with such fragrance as to satisfy a more than
animal appetite?
"I asked the schoolman, his advice was free,
But scored me out too intricate a way."
These things imply, perchance, that we live on the verge of
another and purer realm, from which these odors and sounds are
wafted over to us. The borders of our plot are set with flowers,
whose seeds were blown from more Elysian fields adjacent. They
are the pot-herbs of the gods. Some fairer fruits and sweeter
fragrances wafted over to us, betray another realm's vicinity.
There, too, does Echo dwell, and there is the abutment of the
rainbow's arch.
A finer race and finer fed
Feast and revel o'er our head,
And we titmen are only able
To catch the fragments from their table.
Theirs is the fragrance of the fruits,
While we consume the pulp and roots.
What are the moments that we stand
Astonished on the Olympian land!
We need pray for no higher heaven than the pure senses can
furnish, a _purely_ sensuous life. Our present senses are but
the rudiments of what they are destined to become. We are
comparatively deaf and dumb and blind, and without smell or taste
or feeling. Every generation makes the discovery, that its
divine vigor has been dissipated, and each sense and faculty
misapplied and debauched. The ears were made, not for such
trivial uses as men are wont to suppose, but to hear celestial
sounds. The eyes were not made for such grovelling uses as they
are now put to and worn out by, but to behold beauty now
invisible. May we not _see_ God? Are we to be put off and
amused in this life, as it were with a mere allegory? Is not
Nature, rightly read, that of which she is commonly taken to be
the symbol merely? When the common man looks into the sky, which
he has not so much profaned, he thinks it less gross than the
earth, and with reverence speaks of "the Heavens," but the seer
will in the same sense speak of "the Earths," and his Father who
is in them. "Did not he that made that which is _within_, make
that which is _without_ also?" What is it, then, to educate but
to develop these divine germs called the senses? for individuals
and states to deal magnanimously with the rising generation,
leading it not into temptation, - not teach the eye to squint, nor
attune the ear to profanity.
