“Prince of Naphtali,” said he in a steadier tone, “among my teachers I forgot to mention one, and that one the most effective of all—Self-determination! not the mere disregard of personal risk, but the intrepidity of the mind. I loved knowledge, and I pursued it without fear. Nature is boundless, wise, and wonderful—but prejudice bars up the gate of knowledge. The man who would learn must despise the timidity that shrinks from wisdom, as he must hate the tyranny of opinion that condemns its pursuit. Wisdom is like beauty, to be won only by the bold.”
I looked up at the young pronouncer of the oracle. His countenance, animated by the topic, wore an expression of power, in which I should never have recognized the delicate and dejected being that he always appeared, except in some moment of sportiveness, come and gone with the quickness of lightning.
“Minstrel, apply this to our people or their bigoted and ignorant leaders. I have no prejudices.”
“All men have them, my prince, and the only distinction is that in some they are mean, dark, and malignant; in others they are lofty, generous, and sensitive; yet they are but the stronger for their nobleness. The mind itself struggles to throw off the vile and naked fetter. But how many forget the incumbrance of the chain of gold in its preciousness!”
He hesitated, and then, with a still more elevated air, again began:
“You despise, for instance, the little ingenuities of our profession, and I own that in general they deserve nothing else. But if there were to come before you some true lover of nature, a disciple of that sublimer philosophy which holds the secrets of her operations, a master of those superb influences which rule the frame of things, and yet more, guide the fates of men and nations—would not your prejudices—and noble ones they are—lead you to repel the offer of his mysteries?”
The Minstrel’s Attire
Thoughts tending to those mysteries had so often occurred to me, and my mind was by its original constitution so fond of the abstruse and the wild, that I listened with interest to the romance of philosophy. The figure before me was not unsuited to the illusion; slight, habited in the fanciful dress of his art, a tunic of purple cloth, bound round the waist with a girdle; the turban, a mere band of scarlet silk, lightly laid upon his curls. There was in all this nothing that was not to be seen at every hour in the streets, but round his waist, instead of the usual girdle of the minstrels, he wore to-night a large golden serpent, embossed and colored with a startling resemblance to life, and a broad golden circlet wrought with devices of serpents clasping his brow. The countenance was vividness itself, not without that occasional wandering and touch of melancholy that showed where early care has been, yet redeeming the gloom by a smile that had the sweetness and suddenness of the sunbeam across an April shower.
The evening music of the Roman camps roused me as their ranks were drawn out for the customary exercise. I turned from them to glance upon the battlements, that were now crowded with stragglers of the tribes inhaling the air of the fields and like myself gazing on the movements of the enemy. The thought pressed on me how soon and how terribly all this must end; what were the multitudes to be that now lived and breathed beneath my glance? The thought was too painful. I turned from earth to look upon the east, where the evening star was lying on a rosy cloud, like a spirit sent to bring back tidings from this troubled world.
“There, boy,” said I, “will your wisdom tell me the story of that star? Are its people as mad as we? Is there ambition on one side and folly on the other? Are their great men the prey of a populace, and their populace the fools of their great men? Have they orators to inflame their passions; lawyers to beggar them in pursuit of justice; traders, to cheat them; heroes, to give them laurels at the price of blood; and philosophers, to be the worst plagues among them?”