Returning from voluntary exile, to my father's house, not as a prodigal son, to make confession of sins, or of wasted patrimony or of wasted life, but to gain impressions from early places, where any boy gets the most important part of his education, seeing that it is in our youth that we lay the foundation of whatever character, position, or usefulness we later attain, I was most deeply stirred at those places that directly touch my interior life. "There is a story lodged in a room here," said Bushnell in speaking of Yale College, "that I pray God his recording angel may never suffer to be effaced." I removed my hat and bowed alone in silence standing before a place hallowed by a neighbor. He had everybody's sympathy on account of his bereavements. Adjacent to our garden was his barn, which he used as a devotional closet and like Daniel, as we infer, prayed aloud. When his voice broke the silence with spontaneous, vital prayer and grew tremulous with emotion and earnestness, there was a power and pathos in it, that penetrated the center of my soul and woke to life all the slumbering feeling of my better nature. A sense of awe took entire possession of me. My deference would have been less if I had been bowed, and with him, hearing the several petitions. But as it was I was conscious only of his communion and thought all the time of the two persons concerned in it.
Nothing Insignificant, Nothing
It is the early life that makes the after life. As every little brook, rivulet, and stream give depth and volume to the broad after current so in sailing up a river. As we make a journey to a birthplace we keep meeting the rills and tributaries to which we are so much indebted. One of them is named Example, a gentle effective teacher, who, it is said, lays his hand on your shoulder and remarks, This is the way to do it. In revisiting the earth by a singular discovery we find we are closely drawn where we took the hard lessons taught by Experience. This is the teacher that is said to throw us into the deep pool, exclaiming briskly: Now, swim. Human existence is rarely a great prairie stretching monotonously onward to the great river. Blessings and misfortunes meet us in disguise. Just as in the world's history, and in the history of invention, and in our political annals, we have our great days so we do in our personal experience, when destiny turns on a pivot. If one will give a recital of the ten most memorable days of his life the rest of it would be a matter of easy inference by his hearers. The time between them, and all its events, seem compressed into the narrowest space, verily a hand's breadth. Hidden forces have been at work, progress has been made with painstaking, untold influences meanwhile have not been idle, and upon a day all unforeseen springs of action are touched, concentrated power is let loose and a resistless energy awakes to action.
Halcyon Days
Our great days are the fruit of past toil. To count time only by sunrises and sunsets omits, in the reckoning, the human equation. Where daily wages and yearly dividends are concerned, it is a very convenient system, but it is no measure of our real life. Noah's ark answered to float lazily and safely on the old flood, but steam and electricity are internal powers. These forces enable a navigator to steer right out into the teeth of a storm.
Distinguished natural historians have given us a fine classification of the animal kingdom. But to put men in rows, and to put days into the orders shown in the calendars does not make them tally with what we know of them by observation and experience. Even a plant is a distinct individual. No other one is just like it. Yet it reveals its type. Species cannot be confounded, a briar will clasp a solid trunk of a tree and weave its tendrils and leaves through the branches of the pine to its top, but the briar was briar in every thorn and leaf and the pine was itself in all its green needles of which Nature makes her sweetest wind harp in the world. We are alike in the general features and attributes of body and soul. We are under similar laws, have similar wants, have a similar origin, common sympathies, and a common destiny, yet no two of us are alike. Nature never repeats itself. It has been shown that there is little difference in man's bodily stature. A fathom, or thereabouts, a little more or a little less is the ordinary elevation of the human family. Should a man add a cubit to his stature, he is followed along the streets as a prodigy; should he fall very far short of it, people pay money for a sight of him as a great curiosity. But were there any exact measurements of mental statures, we should be struck by an amazing diversity. It is obvious also that on certain days we are more alive and capable than on others, yet we are the same persons with the same education, with the same capabilities, and antecedents. On occasion, from causes of which at the time we were somewhat unconscious, our ideas and resolves were awaked and become effective. Some new energies, we did not know we had, were unlocked and came into play, and life was transfigured, on that spot, and that is the locality we long to revisit.
"I am a Part of All that I have Seen"
The place where any event in our history has occurred becomes a memorial of the feelings which that event excited in us. When one comes back to those places, it is as when one reads old letters or meets old friends. Byron affirms that after the most careful recollection of his experience, he could recall only eleven days of happiness, which he could wish to live over again. Memory hits the high places. Only relatively do the others come up into recognition. Mr. James Russell Lowell, standing upon the Alps, turned toward Italy, and raising his hat, exclaimed, "Glories of the past, I salute you." We express a like salutation. Grave ideas, movements, and reforms have their birthplace and their cradle, and we cannot fail to be interested in them. Long afterward, tender recollections come back to us like the murmurs of a distant hymn, and it is a great pleasure to listen to such voices.
One day we have full view of the delectable mountains, on another day we are mired in the slough of despond. There is a joyful holiday for the human intellect, which it will not soon forget, when the light blazes on us, and then come days of drudgery,—who cannot respond to this!—when our powers are shut up and will not come forth. Some of our best days seem reserved for celestial visitants. In others we "grunt and sweat under a weary life." There are many toilsome days of monotonous travel that we would gladly exchange for the single spectacle of Vesuvius in the plenitude of its eruptive power.
Those ideal days, in which we visited Mt. Washington, the loftiest object in our Atlantic country, made more grand with our greatest name, or in which we saw Niagara, the most remarkable waterfall in the world's scenery, or in which we heard the Messiah, or Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, perhaps the grandest piece of music ever composed by man, would stand in a succession of days and yet stand apart from them in our memory. So in the pulpit. Robert Hall was for fifty years the Prince of Preachers. His first three efforts had been failures. One day distinguished him. He did not know that the Princess Charlotte was dead till he entered his church and the sermon he preached then was the richest and most eloquent of all the hundreds delivered in the realm.