Recollections and Impressions, 1822-1890

by Octavius Brooks Frothingham

John Weiss was essentially a poet. His pages are saturated with poetry. His very arguments are expressed in poetic imagery. To take two or three examples:

One who rides from South-west Harbor to Bar Harbor in Mt. Desert will see a grove in which the pines stand so close that all the branches have withered two-thirds of the way up the trunks, and are nothing but dead sticks, broken and dangling. But every tree bears close, each to each, its evergreen crown; and they seem to make a floor for the day to walk on. This pavement for the feet of heaven, more precious than the fancied one of the New Jerusalem, stretches all round the world, above the thickets of our spiny egotism, where people run up into the only coherence upon which it is safe for Deity to tread.

Or this about the poet's inspired hour:

Through flat and unprofitable moments, a poet is waiting for the next consent of his imagination. The bed of every gift, that lately sparkled or thundered as the freshet of the hills sent its surprises down, lies empty, waiting for the master passion to open the sluice when it hears the steps of coming waves. The poet's nature strains against the dumb gates of his body and his mood. With power and longing he hears them open, and is brim full again with the rhythm that collects from the whole face of Nature,—the hillside, the ravine, the drifting cloud, the vapors just arrived from the ocean, the drops that flowers nod with to flavor the stream, the human smiles that colonize both banks of it. All passions, all delights hurry to possess his thought, crowd into the precincts of his person, pain him with the tumult in which they offer him obedience, remind him of his last joy in their companionship, and will not let him go till he ennobles them by bursting into expression. Relief flows down with every perfect word; the congested soul bleeds into the lyric and the canto; the poet's burden becomes light-hearted, and the supreme moment of his travail, when it breaks in showers of his emotion, cools and comforts him; he must die or express himself. All the blood in the earth's arteries is running through his heart; all the stars in the sky are set in his brain's dome. This light and life must be discharged into a word, and the poet restored to health and peace again.

Or the following rhapsody about health:

What a religious ecstasy is health! Its free step claims every meadow that is glad with flowers; its bubbling spirits fill the cup of wide horizons and drip down their brims; its thankfulness is the prayer that takes possession of the sun by day and the stars by night. Every dancing member of the body whirls off the soul to tread the measures of great feelings, and God hears people saying: "How precious also are thy thoughts, how great is the sum of them! When I awake, I am still with thee." Yes,—when I awake, but not before; not while the brain is saturated with nervous blood, till it falls into comatose doctrines, and goes maundering with its attack of mediatorial piety and grace; not while a stomach depraved by fried food, apothecary's drugs, and iron-clad pastry (that target impenetrable by digestion) supplies the constitution with its vale of tears, ruin of mankind, and better luck hereafter. When all my veins flow unobstructed, and lift to the level of my eyes the daily gladness that finds a gate at every pore; when the roaming gifts come home from Nature to turn the brain into a hive of cells full of yellow sunshine, the spoil of all the chalices of the earth beneath and the heavens above,—then I am the subject of a Revival of Religion.

Or these passages about music, of which he was always a devoted lover, a passionate admirer, an excellent critic. My first extract is used to illustrate the doctrine of evolution, and suggests Browning's poem of "Abt Vogler." It should be said, by the way, that Weiss was a great student of Browning, whose lines in "Paracelsus," prophetic of the evolution doctrine, was often on his lips. He even understood "Sordello."

The divine composer, summoning instrument after instrument into his harmony, climbed with his theme from those which offered but a single note to those that exhaust the complexity of thought and feeling, to combine them into expression, kindling through hints, phrases, sudden concords, mustering consents of many wills, releases of each one's felicity into comradeship, till the sweet tumult becomes his champion, and bursts into an acclaim of a whole world. "I ought—so then I will." The toppling instruments concur, become the wave that touches that high moment, lifts the whole deep, and holds it there.

When perfect music drives its golden scythe-chariot up the fine nerves, across the bridge of association, through the stern portcullis of care, and alights in the heart of man, there is adoration, whether he faints with excess of recognition of one long absent, and lies prostrate in the arms of rhythm, feeling that he is not worthy it should come under his roof, or whether he mounts the seat and grasps the thrilling reins; God's unity is riding through his distraction, brought by that team of all the instruments which shake their manes across the pavement of his bosom, and strike out the sparks of longing.

In calling Mr. Weiss essentially a poet, I am far from implying that he was not a thinker. Perhaps he was more subtle and more brilliant a thinker for being also a poet—that is, for seeing truth through the medium of the imagination, for following the path of analogy. At any rate, his being a poet did not in the least interfere with the acuteness or the precision of his thinking, as any one can see who reads his chapters—those, for example, which compose the volume entitled "American Religion." I had marked for citation so many passages that it would be necessary to quote half the book to illustrate my thesis. When I first knew him, he was a strict Transcendentalist. Dr. Orestes Brownson, no mean judge on such matters, spoke of him as the most promising philosophical mind in the country. To a native talent for metaphysics, his early studies at Heidelberg probably contributed congenial training. His knowledge of German philosophy may well have been stimulated and matured by his residence in that centre of active thought; while his intimacy, on his return, with the keenest intellects in this country may well have sharpened his original predilection for abstract speculation. However this may have been, the tendency of his genius was decidedly toward metaphysical problems and the interpretation of the human consciousness. This he erected as a barrier against materialism; and this he probed with a depth and a fearlessness which were truly extraordinary, and would have been remarkable in any disciple of the school to which he belonged. No one that I can think of was so fine, so profound, so analytical. His volume on "American Religion" was full of nice discriminations; so was his volume on the "Immortal Life"; so were his articles and lectures. His "Life of Theodore Parker" abounded in curious learning as well as in vigorous thinking. He could follow, step by step, the great leader of reformatory ideas, and went far beyond him in subtlety and accuracy of mental delineation. He could not rest in sentiment, must have demonstration, and never stopped till he reached the ultimate ground of truth as he regarded it. Ideas, when he found them, were usually, not always, expressed in symbolical forms. His alert fancy detected likenesses that would have been concealed from common eyes; and often the splendor of the exposition hid the keenness of the logical temper, as a sword wreathed with roses lies unperceived. But the tempered steel was there and they who examined closely felt its edge.