Surge, propera, amica mea, columba mea, formosa
mea, et veni. Jam enim hiems transiit, imber abiit et
recessit. Flores apparuerunt in terrâ nostrâ.
Arise, make haste, my love, my dove, my beautiful
one, and come. For the winter is now past, the rain is
over and gone. The flowers have appeared in our land.
We have familiar experience of the order, the
constancy, the perpetual renovation of the material
world which surrounds us. Frail and transitory
as is every part of it, restless and migratory as
are its elements, never ceasing as are its changes,[{5}]
still it abides. It is bound together by a law of
permanence, it is set up in unity; and, though it
is ever dying, it is ever coming to life again.
Dissolution does but give birth to fresh modes of
organization, and one death is the parent of a[{10}]
thousand lives. Each hour, as it comes, is but
a testimony, how fleeting, yet how secure, how
certain, is the great whole. It is like an image
on the waters, which is ever the same, though
the waters ever flow. Change upon[{15}]
change—yet one change cries out to another, like the
alternate Seraphim, in praise and in glory
of their Maker. The sun sinks to rise again;
the day is swallowed up in the gloom of the
night, to be born out of it, as fresh as if it[{20}]
had never been quenched. Spring passes into
summer, and through summer and autumn into
winter, only the more surely, by its own ultimate
return, to triumph over that grave, towards which
it resolutely hastened from its first hour. We
mourn over the blossoms of May, because they[{5}]
are to wither; but we know, withal, that May is
one day to have its revenge upon November, by
the revolution of that solemn circle which never
stops—which teaches us in our height of hope,
ever to be sober, and in our depth of desolation,[{10}]
never to despair.
And forcibly as this comes home to every one
of us, not less forcible is the contrast which exists
between this material world, so vigorous, so
reproductive, amid all its changes, and the moral[{15}]
world, so feeble, so downward, so resourceless,
amid all its aspirations. That which ought to
come to naught, endures; that which promises a
future, disappoints and is no more. The same
sun shines in heaven from first to last, and the[{20}]
blue firmament, the everlasting mountains,
reflect his rays; but where is there upon earth
the champion, the hero, the law giver, the body
politic, the sovereign race, which was great three
hundred years ago, and is great now? Moralists[{25}]
and poets, often do they descant upon this innate
vitality of matter, this innate perishableness of
mind. Man rises to fall: he tends to dissolution
from the moment he begins to be; he lives on,
indeed, in his children, he lives on in his name,[{30}]
he lives not on in his own person. He is, as regards
the manifestations of his nature here below,
as a bubble that breaks, and as water poured out
upon the earth. He was young, he is old, he is
never young again. This is the lament over him,
poured forth in verse and in prose, by Christians[{5}]
and by heathen. The greatest work of God's
hands under the sun, he, in all the manifestations
of his complex being, is born only to die.
His bodily frame first begins to feel the power
of this constraining law, though it is the last to[{10}]
succumb to it. We look at the gloom of youth
with interest, yet with pity; and the more
graceful and sweet it is, with pity so much the more;
for, whatever be its excellence and its glory, soon
it begins to be deformed and dishonored by the[{15}]
very force of its living on. It grows into
exhaustion and collapse, till at length it crumbles
into that dust out of which it was originally
taken.
So is it, too, with our moral being, a far higher[{20}]
and diviner portion of our natural constitution;
it begins with life, it ends with what is worse
than the mere loss of life, with a living death.
How beautiful is the human heart, when it puts
forth its first leaves, and opens and rejoices in[{25}]
its spring-tide! Fair as may be the bodily form,
fairer far, in its green foliage and bright blossoms,
is natural virtue. It blooms in the young, like
some rich flower, so delicate, so fragrant, and so
dazzling. Generosity and lightness of heart and[{30}]
amiableness, the confiding spirit, the gentle temper,
the elastic cheerfulness, the open hand, the
pure affection, the noble aspiration, the heroic
resolve, the romantic pursuit, the love in which
self has no part,—are not these beautiful? and
are they not dressed up and set forth for[{5}]
admiration in their best shapes, in tales and in poems?
and ah! what a prospect of good is there! who
could believe that it is to fade! and yet, as night
follows upon day, as decrepitude follows upon
health, so surely are failure, and overthrow, and[{10}]
annihilation, the issue of this natural virtue, if
time only be allowed to it to run its course.
There are those who are cut off in the first
opening of this excellence, and then, if we may trust
their epitaphs, they have lived like angels; but[{15}]
wait awhile, let them live on, let the course of
life proceed, let the bright soul go through the
fire and water of the world's temptations and
seductions and corruptions and transformations;
and, alas for the insufficiency of nature! alas for[{20}]
its powerlessness to persevere, its waywardness
in disappointing its own promise! Wait till
youth has become age; and not more different
is the miniature which we have of him when a
boy, when every feature spoke of hope, put side[{25}]
by side of the large portrait painted to his honor,
when he is old, when his limbs are shrunk, his
eye dim, his brow furrowed, and his hair gray,
than differs the moral grace of that boyhood from
the forbidding and repulsive aspect of his soul,[{30}]
now that he has lived to the age of man. For
moroseness, and misanthropy, and selfishness, is
the ordinary winter of that spring.
Such is man in his own nature, and such, too,
is he in his works. The noblest efforts of his
genius, the conquests he has made, the doctrines[{5}]
he has originated, the nations he has civilized,
the states he has created, they outlive himself,
they outlive him by many centuries, but they
tend to an end, and that end is dissolution.
Powers of the world, sovereignties, dynasties,[{10}]
sooner or later come to nought; they have their
fatal hour. The Roman conqueror shed tears
over Carthage, for in the destruction of the rival
city he discerned too truly an augury of the fall
of Rome; and at length, with the weight and the[{15}]
responsibilities, the crimes and the glories, of
centuries upon centuries, the Imperial City fell.
Thus man and all his works are mortal; they
die, and they have no power of renovation.
But what is it, my Fathers, my Brothers, what[{20}]
is it that has happened in England just at this
time? Something strange is passing over this
land, by the very surprise, by the very commotion,
which it excites. Were we not near enough the
scene of action to be able to say what is going[{25}]
on,—were we the inhabitants of some sister planet
possessed of a more perfect mechanism than this
earth has discovered for surveying the
transactions of another globe,—and did we turn our
eyes thence towards England just at this season,[{30}]
we should be arrested by a political phenomenon
as wonderful as any which the astronomer notes
down from his physical field of view. It would
be the occurrence of a national commotion, almost
without parallel, more violent than has happened
here for centuries—at least in the judgments[{5}]
and intentions of men, if not in act and deed.
We should note it down, that soon after St.
Michael's day, 1850, a storm arose in the moral
world, so furious as to demand some great
explanation, and to rouse in us an intense desire to[{10}]
gain it. We should observe it increasing from
day to day, and spreading from place to place,
without remission, almost without lull, up to this
very hour, when perhaps it threatens worse still,
or at least gives no sure prospect of alleviation.[{15}]
Every party in the body politic undergoes its
influence,—from the Queen upon her throne,
down to the little ones in the infant or day school.
The ten thousands of the constituency, the
sum-total of Protestant sects, the aggregate of[{20}]
religious societies and associations, the great body
of established clergy in town and country, the bar,
even the medical profession, nay, even literary
and scientific circles, every class, every
interest, every fireside, gives tokens of this[{25}]
ubiquitous storm. This would be our report of it, seeing
it from the distance, and we should speculate
on the cause. What is it all about? against what
is it directed? what wonder has happened upon
earth? what prodigious, what preternatural event[{30}]
is adequate to the burden of so vast an effect?
We should judge rightly in our curiosity about
a phenomenon like this; it must be a portentous
event, and it is. It is an innovation, a miracle,
I may say, in the course of human events. The
physical world revolves year by year, and begins[{5}]
again; but the political order of things does not
renew itself, does not return; it continues, but it
proceeds; there is no retrogression. This is so
well understood by men of the day, that with
them progress is idolized as another name for[{10}]
good. The past never returns—it is never good;
if we are to escape existing ills, it must be by
going forward. The past is out of date; the past
is dead. As well may the dead live to us, as well
may the dead profit us, as the past return. This,[{15}]
then, is the cause of this national transport, this
national cry, which encompasses us. The past has
returned, the dead lives. Thrones are overturned,
and are never restored; States live and die, and
then are matter only for history. Babylon was[{20}]
great, and Tyre, and Egypt, and Nineveh, and
shall never be great again. The English Church
was, and the English Church was not, and the
English Church is once again. This is the
portent, worthy of a cry. It is the coming in of a[{25}]
Second Spring; it is a restoration in the moral
world, such as that which yearly takes place in
the physical.