Be the farthest land."
Now the great navigator Columbus was born in the Genoese territory, not far from Corsica. The Corsicans will have it that he was born in Calvi, in Corsica itself, and they maintain this till the present day.
CHAPTER V.
SENECA MORALE.
——"e vidi Orfeo
Tullio, e Livio, e Seneca morale."—Dante.
Fair fruits grew for Seneca in his exile; and perhaps he owed some of his exalted philosophy rather to his Corsican solitude than to the teachings of an Attalus or a Socio. In the Letter of Consolation to his mother, he writes thus at the close:—You must believe me happy and cheerful, as when in prosperity. That is true prosperity when the mind devotes itself to its pursuits without disturbing thoughts, and, now pleasing itself with lighter studies, now thirsting after truth, elevates itself to the contemplation of its own nature and of that of the universe. First, it investigates the countries and their situations, then the nature of the circumfluent sea, and its changes of ebb and flow; then it contemplates the terrible powers that lie between heaven and earth—the thunder, lightnings, winds, rain, snow and hail, that disquiet this space; at last, when it has wandered through the lower regions, it takes its flight to the highest, and enjoys the beautiful spectacle of celestial things, and, mindful of its own eternity, enters into all which has been and shall be to all eternity.
When I took up Seneca's Letter of Consolation to his mother, I was not a little curious to see how he would console her. How would one of the thousand cultivated exiles scattered over the world at the present time console his mother? Seneca's letter is a quite methodically arranged treatise, consisting of seventeen chapters. It is a more than usually instructive contribution to the psychology of these old Stoics. The son is not so particularly anxious to console his mother as to write an excellent and elegant treatise, the logic and style of which shall procure him admiration. He is quite proud that his treatise will be a species of composition hitherto unknown in the world of letters. The vain man writes to his mother like an author to a critic with whom he is coolly discussing the pros and cons of his subject. I have, says he, consulted all the works of the great geniuses who have written upon the methods of moderating grief, but I have found no example of any one's consoling his friends when it was himself they were lamenting. In this new case, therefore, in which I found myself, I was embarrassed, and feared lest I might open the wounds instead of healing them. Must not a man who raises his head from the funeral-pile itself to comfort his relatives, need new words, such as the common language of daily life does not supply him with? Every great and unusual sorrow must make its own selection of words, if it does not refuse itself language altogether. I shall venture to write to you, therefore, not in confidence on my talent, but because I myself, the consoler, am here to serve as the most effectual consolation. For your son's sake, to whom you can deny nothing, you will not, as I trust (though all grief is stubborn), refuse to permit bounds to be set to your grief.
He now begins to console after his new fashion, reckoning up to his mother all that she has already suffered, and drawing the conclusion that she must by this time have become callous. Throughout the whole treatise you hear the skeleton of the arrangement rattling. Firstly, his mother is not to grieve on his account; secondly, his mother is not to grieve on her own account. The letter is full of the most beautiful stoical contempt of the world.
"Yet it is a terrible thing to be deprived of one's country." What is to be said to this?—Mother, consider the vast multitude of people in Rome; the greater number of them have congregated there from all parts of the world. One is driven from home by ambition, another by business of state, by an embassy, by the quest of luxury, by vice, by the wish to study, by the desire of seeing the spectacles, by friendship, by speculation, by eloquence, by beauty. Then, leaving Rome out of view, which indeed is to be considered the mother-city of them all, go to other cities, go to islands, come here to Corsica—everywhere are more strangers than natives. "For to man is given a desire of movement and of change, because he is moved by the celestial Spirit; consider the heavenly luminaries that give light to the world—none of them remains fixed—they wander ceaselessly on their path, and change perpetually their place." His poetic vein gave Seneca this fine thought. Our well-known wanderer's song has the words—