And rolls through all things.”
Our own Emerson to this generation quaintly says, “Hitch your wagon to a star,” and thousands strive to rise superior to occupation, rank, and habit into the dignity of manhood—to rise above the clouds of sorrow and disappointment, and bathe in the pure sunlight. The spiritual beauty of his face, the calm dignity of his life will live in the memory of men and add to the force of his writings.
Longfellow has said,
“Look, then, into thine heart, and write.”
Every aspiration, every care and sorrow, every mood and sentiment, finds in him a true sympathy; he stands foremost, not as a genius of the intellect, but as a genius of the heart. How often he enters our homes, sits at our firesides, touches the sweetest, tenderest chords of the lyre, awakens the purest aspirations of our being.
Then comes Dickens, and tells us that fiction may have a high and noble mission; that it may teach love, benevolence, and charity; that it may promote cheerfulness and contentment; that it may expose injustice and defend truth and right.
All these, each a master in his field, are powerful in their influence; but beyond this fact is the more significant one that they index some of the better tendencies of the century. Never before were so many fields of thought represented; never did any possess masters of greater skill. We may hope that, even in the midst of this period of material prosperity, invention, and scientific research, the spiritual side of man’s nature will ultimately gain new strength, and thought a deeper insight.
With our exact thought and practical energy, is there not danger of losing all the romance which clothes human existence with beauty and hope? The gods are banished from Olympus; Helicon is no longer sacred to the Muses; Egeria has dissolved into a fountain of tears; the Dryads have fled from the sacred oaks; the elves no longer flit in the sunbeams; Odin lies buried beneath the ruins of Walhalla; “Pan is dead.” That wealth of imagination which characterized the Greek, enabled him to personify the powers that rolled in the flood or sighed in the breeze, has passed away. We would turn Parnassus into a stone quarry and hew the homes of the Dryads into merchantable lumber. The spear of chivalry is broken in the lists by the implements of the mechanic, the tourney is converted into a fair. Romance is for a time clouded by the smoke of manufactories.
But a seer has arisen, who finds in remotest places and in humblest life the essence of romance. Carlyle is our true poet and we do well to comprehend his meaning. To his mind we have but to paint the meanest object in its actual truth and the picture is a poem. Romance exists in reality. “The thing that is, what can be so wonderful?” “In our own poor Nineteenth Century ... he has witnessed overhead the infinite deep, with lesser and greater lights, bright-rolling, silent-beaming, hurled forth by the hand of God; around him and under his feet the wonderfullest earth, with her winter snow storms and summer spice airs, and (unaccountablest of all) himself standing there. He stood in the lapse of Time; he saw eternity behind him and before him.” I cannot lead you to the end of that wonderful passage, but it is worth the devotion of solitude.