NATURE’S TRIUMPH.
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Great men were they of olden time; men with far-reaching and strong, grasping minds—men, too, of discrimination in what they gathered—“teach them selection, not collection,” was the word—and they prepared for us of this distant age monuments to excite admiration and insure awe; monuments which, while they exhibit what man is capable of doing, seem, by the perfection of their form and the adaptation of their parts, to check all spirit of imitation; monuments which denote all variety of mental exercise and all the adaptation of physical powers. It is not alone the chisel of Phidias working out the marble in a thousand forms, more beautiful than the human pattern—it is not alone the pencil of Zeuxis that fixed on canvas the flitting beauties of the field and grove—it is not alone the vast machinery that piled stone upon stone to finish the pyramids. Mind speaking to mind has uttered its powers, and has claimed of the present, wonder for the past; History and Poetry have embalmed the actions of the great, or expressed the devotion of the good, and assured us of the lofty resolves and great deeds of men of other years. The beauty of the ancient mind, however, is to be detected by the uses and adaptation of ordinary incidents—bending them to moral instruction by making them illustrative of some principle—patriotism, religion, social duty and domestic relations, or some deeply hidden power, which sudden emotion, strong impulse, or unexpected dilemma, is to call into action.
Take the following, which is some where extant. We give only the statement of the asserted fact. We have no copy of the narrative.
Leucippe was gathering the small delicate flowers which blossomed over the dampness of a rock that beetled far into the sea, and held its cold brow high above the waves breaking eternally at its base. It was a lovely spot, cool, fragrant, health-giving, and she took with her her little child, the only blessing which had been spared. For one moment the love of the beautiful of nature, the interest of collecting, triumphed over maternal vigilance. She turned, however, from the little harvest of sweets, and saw her boy bending over the edge of the rock, regardless of all danger, hopeful of only a single beautiful flower that blossomed on the very edge of the steep. One word of fear from the mother, one sudden movement toward the child would have disturbed his balance, and he must have toppled down beyond all hope of recovery even of the lifeless form. No time was left for calculation, no good could result from active efforts. With unspeakable anguish the mother saw the danger, with the promptness of woman’s judgment she rejected the ordinary means of safety; with the instincts of a mother’s heart she threw herself gently forward, and bared her bosom to the child, and lured him gently back to nestle on his own home of comfort, and draw life from the sympathetic founts that gushed to his honeyed lips. It was the triumph of nature, and the story seems to have inspired the artist for this month. A beautiful illustration, while the picture itself has suggested a title happily expressive of the idea conveyed in the anecdote, “Nature’s Triumph.”
But such a story, so full of instruction, so pregnant with moral hints, should not be allowed to pass without an improvement, that may make it more and more beneficial. The experiment and the result may be properly styled the triumph of nature, for the deep solicitude of the mother, and especially her prompt expedient, are as much the movement of nature as is the affection in which they originated; and the attraction of the exposed bosom for the exposed child, was as much the gift of nature as was the hidden food which that bosom secreted and stored.
But we love to consider the success of Leucippe as the “Triumph of Affection,” not less than the “Triumph of Nature.” It is both, as it is differently considered; it is either, in many ways regarded.
Would the child, amused as it was with the flowers that jutted out from the rock’s impending edge, and pleased with the species of independence which its movements and new position signified, would the child have been lured by the exhibition of any other bosom than that of its mother? Had a stranger discovered the little adventurer, and being like Leucippe, conscious of the danger of calling aloud, of startling the child by any approach, had she bared her bosom, would not the infant have turned away without interest from the exhibition, and pursued its new occupation of flower gathering? Undoubtedly the unknown, who had from prudence done what affection suggested to Leucippe, would have seen at once that she lacked the attractive power, that there was no sympathy between her and the child. She might have felt all that a woman can feel for the lovely infant of another—thus dangerously situated—but the infant itself would not have been influenced by a corresponding sympathy; it would have lacked that affection necessary to a proper response to the exhibition.
The triumph, then, is one of affection sympathizing with affection; corresponding love answering with miraculous organ, and instructing the great and good of all subsequent times by the promptings of a mother’s instincts, and the sympathies of an infant’s feelings. “Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings.”