Never was a more stupid maxim, than that common one, that nil admirari is the proper motto of a philosopher. To preserve a freshness, a juvenile sensibility of the heart for the admiration of whatever is new, beautiful and striking, for all the pleasures of taste and the understanding, seems to me the true secret of the highest wisdom. Who can fail to be inspired with disgust at witnessing the common spectacle of cognoscenti, men of virtu, travelled fools, who have been everywhere, and seen everything; and by the contemptuous sneer, with which they effect to see, hear, feel and speak of all, that passes under their present observation, instruct you, that they are too wise, and of a taste too refined, to be pleased with what satisfies untravelled people. For my part, when I hear them boast of the music, paintings and architecture of continental Europe, and England, as though all the sources of beauty were there, I can only say, that nature is always at hand, to mock at all the puny efforts of art; that she delights to mould living faces and forms in remote country cottages, that no beau idéal can reach; that the songs of the birds, that return from other climes to their forsaken groves with the first sunny days of spring constitute a music richer to the heart, than the most fashionable opera; and that a pure spring landscape is a pictured thousand times more splendid, than any that ever adorned the walls of the Louvre. He, who preserves, to his utmost age, his youthful sensibility of heart, and who is willing to be pleased with whatever will impart innocent pleasure, will find innumerable and never failing occasions to give his heart up to the full impulses of joy.
‘I pity,’ says Sterne, ‘the man, who can travel from Dan to Beersheba, and cry ’tis all barren; and yet so it is; and so is all the world, to him who will not cultivate the fruits it offers. I declare said I, clapping my hands cheerly together, that were I in a desert, I would find in it the wherewith to call forth my affections. If I could not do better, I would fasten them on some sweet myrtle, or seek some melancholy cypress, to connect myself to. I would court its shade, and greet it kindly for its protection; I would cut my name upon it, and swear, it was the loveliest tree in the desert. If its leaves withered, I would teach myself to mourn; and when they rejoiced, I would rejoice with them.’
I consider it no unimportant part of the process of prolonging our earthly sojourn, to lay in, if I may so speak, as great a stock as possible, of pleasant remembrances. I appeal to the experience of every one, if the sudden recollection of a foolish thing that we have said, or done, returning upon us after a lapse of years, has not brought back with the convulsive shudder of shame, a long train of associated remembrances, which have carried us back whole days upon the scene? How long seem the periods, in which these incidents occurred! Pleasant recollections are no less efficient, in prolonging the periods, in which they occurred, adding their duration to the sum of the fugitive existence that is stealing from us.
For myself I can confidently affirm, that I have long since learned to find my purest and most abiding satisfactions in the memory of the past. I repeat all its happier passages and incidents. I recall the bright days, verdant landscapes, loved persons, and joyous sensations from their shadowy mansions. I renew my youthful sports; and watch for the trout along the flush spring brooks. I seat myself again on the sunny banks of the pleasant spots of my career. I would be glad to convey some idea of the vivid pleasure, I experience after a lapse of forty winters, from the deeply impressed remembrance of one beautiful spring morning, after a long and severe winter, when I was still a school-boy. The vast masses of snow were beginning to melt. The birds of prey, shut up in their retreats during the bitter winter, sailed forth in the mild clear blue. The blue bird whistled; and my heart expanded with joy and delight unknown, in the same degree, before or since. The place where these thoughts, comprising my youthful anticipations, hopes and visions occurred, will never be obliterated from my mind, while memory holds her seat. I have a thousand such treasured recollections, with which I can at any time, and to a certain extent, cheer pain, sorrow and decay. These are enjoyments stored beyond the reach of fortune, which we can prolong, and renew at pleasure.
Is there not practical wisdom, in commencing every day with the steady effort, to make as much of it, as if it were to be our whole existence. If we have duties to perform, in themselves severe and laborious, we may inquire, if there be not some way, by which to invest them with pleasant associations? A man may find amusement in his free thoughts, while following his plough upon the hill side; in digging up the words for a dictionary, or in copying out a brief. He may train himself, by an inefficient and shrinking spirit, to recoil from these tasks, as insupportable burdens. How many men find their pleasure, in what would be the positive horror and torment of the indolent! How weak the spirit, and how silly the vanity which we display, in ever renewing narrations of our little personal troubles, pains and misfortunes! If we would have the discretion to measure the sympathy, which we may expect from others, in such discourses, by that, which we are conscious of feeling for theirs of the same character, it would go far to teach us the folly of that querulous spirit, which doles forth the story of sufferings and sorrows, as though the narrator were the only sufferer, and were entitled to a monopoly of all the passing pity.
This compendium of the moral acquirements, entering into the character of an accomplished philosopher, I consider one of the happiest, which any book of morals can show. Here is an ample volume of ethics, on a page. How differently would a modern auto-biographer have announced the same facts! In what rounded periods and circuitous expressions would he have striven to convey the same ideas, to impress the reader, that his modesty forbade the frank personality of the Roman philosopher. The whole spirit of this admirable summary would have evaporated in barren generalities. What we admire in the ancients is their noble simplicity and directness, which disdains the vanity of circumlocution, that wishes to hide itself under the semblance of modesty.
It seems to me, that it would not be amiss for the clergy of the day to seek the models of their homilies and sermons in such a manner of declaring moral truth. Abstract ethical declamation, and all the scholastic acquirements and the limæ labor are but poor substitutes for that searching directness, which, avoiding abstractions and generalities, appeals at once to the personal consciousness. I allow, that I should love to hear such sermons, as that of Dr Primrose to his fellow prisoners, in the Vicar of Wakefield. There is no eloquence, there can be none, except in simple and direct appeals to thought and conscience.