They Are Clean And
Dry As Fossil Truths, Which Have Been Exposed To The Elements For
Thousands Of Years, So Impersonally And Scientifically True That
They Are The Ornament Of The Parlor And The Cabinet.
Any _moral_
philosophy is exceedingly rare.
This of Menu addresses our
privacy more than most. It is a more private and familiar, and,
at the same time, a more public and universal word, than is
spoken in parlor or pulpit now-a-days. As our domestic fowls are
said to have their original in the wild pheasant of India, so our
domestic thoughts have their prototypes in the thoughts of her
philosophers. We are dabbling in the very elements of our
present conventional and actual life; as if it were the primeval
conventicle where how to eat, and to drink, and to sleep, and
maintain life with adequate dignity and sincerity, were the
questions to be decided. It is later and more intimate with us
even than the advice of our nearest friends. And yet it is true
for the widest horizon, and read out of doors has relation to the
dim mountain line, and is native and aboriginal there. Most
books belong to the house and street only, and in the fields
their leaves feel very thin. They are bare and obvious, and have
no halo nor haze about them. Nature lies far and fair behind
them all. But this, as it proceeds from, so it addresses, what
is deepest and most abiding in man. It belongs to the noontide
of the day, the midsummer of the year, and after the snows have
melted, and the waters evaporated in the spring, still its truth
speaks freshly to our experience. It helps the sun to shine, and
his rays fall on its page to illustrate it. It spends the
mornings and the evenings, and makes such an impression on us
overnight as to awaken us before dawn, and its influence lingers
around us like a fragrance late into the day. It conveys a new
gloss to the meadows and the depths of the wood, and its spirit,
like a more subtile ether, sweeps along with the prevailing winds
of a country. The very locusts and crickets of a summer day are
but later or earlier glosses on the Dherma Sastra of the Hindoos,
a continuation of the sacred code. As we have said, there is an
orientalism in the most restless pioneer, and the farthest west
is but the farthest east. While we are reading these sentences,
this fair modern world seems only a reprint of the Laws of Menu
with the gloss of Culluca. Tried by a New England eye, or the
mere practical wisdom of modern times, they are the oracles of a
race already in its dotage, but held up to the sky, which is the
only impartial and incorruptible ordeal, they are of a piece with
its depth and serenity, and I am assured that they will have a
place and significance as long as there is a sky to test them by.
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