This light of other days is unfailingly, by its owners, carried over to every child they meet. As if the caterpillar were in better estate than the butterfly, each boy is seeing his best days. Yet there is not a child in the world but is pursued by cares. His desk-mate's marbles oppress him more than will forcemeat-balls and turtle-soup when he becomes an alderman; there are lessons to learn, terrible threats of telling the teacher to brave, and many a smart to suffer. Childhood is beautiful in truth, but not therefore blest,—that is, for the little bodiless cherubs of the canvas. It was one of Origen's fancies that the coats of skins given to Adam and Eve on their expulsion from Paradise were their corporeal textures, and that in Eden they had neither flesh nor blood, bones nor nerves. The opening soul, that puts back petal after petal till the fructifying heart of it is bare to all the sweet influences of the universe, is something lovely for older eyes to see,—perhaps no lovelier than the lawful development of later lives to larger eyes than ours,—perhaps no lovelier than that we are to undergo. The first moment when the force of beauty strikes a child's perceptions would be an ineffable one, if he had anything to compare it with or measure it by; but as it is, even though it pierce him through and through with rapture, he is not aware of that rapture till after-years reproduce it for him and sweeten the sensation with full knowledge. The child is so dear to the parents, because it is their own beings bound together in one; the baby is so beautiful to all, because so sacred and mysterious. Where was this life a moment since? Whither will it fleet a moment hence? He may be a fiend or an archangel by and by, as he and Fate together please; but now his little skin is like a blush rose-leaf, and his little kisses are so tender and so dear! yet it is as an object of nature that he charms, not in his identity as a sufferer of either pain or pleasure. Childhood, by these blind worshippers of yesterday, is simply so vaunted and so valued because it is seen again in the ideal: the detail is lost in distance; the fair fact alone remains.
But yesterday has its uses, of more value than its idolatries. Though too often with its aerial distances and borrowed hues it is a mere pleasure region, instead of that great reservoir from which we might draw fountains of inexhaustible treasure, yet, if we cultivated our present from our past, homage to it might be as much to the purpose at least as the Gheber's worship of the sun. The past is an atmosphere weighing over each man's life. The skilful farmer with his subsoil-plough lets down the wealthy air of the actual atmosphere into his furrows, deeper than it ever went before; the greedy loam sucks in the nitrogen there, and one day he finds his mould stored with ammonia, the great fertilizer, worth many a harvest. Are they numerous who thus enrich the present with the disengaged agents of the past, the chemic powers obtained from that superincumbent atmosphere ever elastically stretching over them? Let our farmer scatter pulverized marble upon his soil forever,—crude carbonate of lime,—and it remains unassimilated; but let him powder burnt bones there, and his crop uses it to golden advantage,—now merely the phosphate of lime, but material that has passed through the operations of animal life, of organism. With whatever manure he work his land, be it wood-ashes or guano or compost, he knows that that which has received the action of organic tissues fattens it the best; and so a wise man may fertilize to-day better with the facts of an experience that he has once lived through, than with any vague and unorganized dreams. But the fool has never lived;—life, said Bichat, is the totality of the functions;—his past has endured no more organization than his future has; he never understood it; he can make no use of it; so he deifies it, and burns the flying moment like a joss-stick before the wooden image in which he has caricatured all its sweet and beneficent capabilities;—as if it were likely that one moment of his existence could be of any more weight than another.
The sentiment which a generation feels for another long antecedent to itself, is not utterly dissimilar from this. Its individuals being regarded with the veneration due to parents and due to the dead, it is forgotten that they were men, and men whose lessons were necessarily no wiser than those of the men among us; men, too, of no surpassing humility, since they presumed to prescribe inviolable laws to ages far wiser than themselves. Yet though the philosophy of the Greek and Roman were lost, would it need more than the years of a generation to replace what scarcely can exceed the introspection of a single experience? If their art were lost, does not the ideal of humanity remain the same so long as the nature of humanity endures? But of the seven sciences of antiquity, two alone deserve the name,—their arithmetic and their geometry. Their music was a cumbrous and complicated machinery, and the others were exercises of wit and pleasure and superstition. It is true that the Egyptian excelled, that the Arabian delved somewhat into the secrets of nature; but who venerates those people, and who spends all that season in study of their language that he should spend in putting oxygen into his blood and lime into his bones? The sensuous Greek loved beauty; he did not care to puzzle his brain when he could please it instead. Euclid and Apollonius, indeed, carried the positive science of mathematics to great height, but physical science is the growth of comparative to-day; with habits of thought hampered by priesthoods and systems, the efforts of antiquity were like abortive shoots,—it is within the last four centuries that the strong stem has sprung up, and the plant has flowered. Neither do our youth study the classics for their science; and yet is not the pursuit of science nobler than all other pursuits, since it leads its followers into the mysteries of the creation and into the purposes of God? Small is the profit to be found in recital of the fancies of heathen ages or the warfares of savage tribes. But so far is the mere breath of the ancients exalted above this sacred search, that a university will turn out proficients who write Greek verses by the ream, but cannot spell their own speech; who can name you the winning athletes of the first Olympiad, but are unable to state the constituents of the gas that lights their page, and never dream, as the chemist does, that these "sunbeams absorbed by vegetation in the primordial ages of the earth, and buried in its depths as vegetable fossils through immeasurable eras of time, until system upon system of slowly formed rocks has been piled above, come forth at last, at the disenchanting touch of science, and turn the night of civilized man into day." They can paint to you the blush of Rhodope or Phryne, till you see the delicious color blend and mingle on the ivory of their tablets; but until, like Agassiz, we can all of us deduce the fish from the scale, and from that blush alone deduce the human race, we are no nearer the Divine intentions in the creation of man, for all such lore as that. An author has somewhere asked, What signify our telegraphs, our anæsthetics, our railways? What signifies our knowledge of the earth's structure, of the stars' courses? Are we any the more or less men? But certainly he is the more a man, he comes nearer to God's meaning in a man, who conquers matter, circumstance, time, and space. That one who sees the universe move round him understandingly, and fathoms in some degree the wonder and the beauty of the eternal laws, must be a pleasanter object to his Creator than any other who, merely employing pleasure, makes a fetich of his luxuries, his Aldines and Elzevirs, and, dying, goes into the unknown world no wiser concerning the ends and aims of this one than when he entered it. Rather than periods that decay and sin might bring again, should one remember the wonderful history of the natural world when the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. Rather should one read the record of the rain, it seems,—the story of the weather some morning, cycles since, with the way the wind was blowing written in the slanting drip of the rain-drops caught and petrified on the old red sandstone,—marks of the Maker as he passed, one day, a million years ago,—than decipher on the scroll of any palimpsest, under the light-headed visions of an anchorite, some half-erased ode of Anacreon.
But, after all, this veneration for the ancients—who personally might be forgiven for their misfortune in having lived when the world was young, were not one so slavish before them—is only because again one looks at the ideal,—looks through that magical Claude Lorraine glass which makes even the commonest landscape picturesque. We forget the dirty days of straw-strewn floors, and see the leather hangings stamped with gold; we forget the fearful feet of sandal shoon, but see the dust of a Triumph rising in clouds of glory. We look at that past, feeling something like gods, too.
"The gods are happy:
They turn on all sides
Their shining eyes,
And see, below them,
The earth and men."
We cannot consider those things happening remotely from us on the earth's surface, even now, without suffering them to partake somewhat of the property of by-gone days. It makes little difference whether the distance be that of meridians or of eras. When at sunrise we fancy some foreign friend beholding dawn upon the silver summits of the Alps, we are forced directly to remember that with him day is at the noon, and his sunrise has vanished with those of all the yesterdays,—so that even our friend becomes a being of the past; or when, bathed in the mellow air of an autumn afternoon, the sunshine falling on us like the light of a happy smile, and all the vaporous vistas melting in clouded sapphire, it occurs to us that possibly it is snowing on the Mackenzie River, and night has already darkened down over the wide and awful ice-fields,—then distance seems a paradox, and time and occasion mere phantasmagoria; there are no beings but ourselves, there is no moment but the present; all circumstance of the world becomes apparent to us only like pictures thrown into the perspective of the past. It requires the comprehensive vision of the poet to catch the light of existing scenes as they shift along the globe, and harmonize them with the instant;—whether he view
"The Indian
Drifting, knife in hand,
His frail boat moored to
A floating isle thick matted
With large-leaved, low-creeping melon-plants,
And the dark cucumber.
He reaps and stows them,
Drifting,—drifting. Round him,
Round his green harvest-plot,
Flow the cool lake waves:
The mountains ring them";—
or whether, far across the continent, he chance to see
"The ferry
On the broad, clay-laden
Lone Chorasmian stream: thereon,
With snort and strain,
Two horses, strongly swimming, tow
The ferry-boat, with woven ropes
To either bow
Firm harnessed by the mane:—a chief
With shout and shaken spear
Stands at the prow, and guides them; but astern,
The cowering merchants, in long robes,
Sit pale beside their wealth
Of silk-bales and of balsam-drops,
Of gold and ivory,
Of turquoise-earth and amethyst,
Jasper and chalcedony,
And milk-barred onyx-stones.
The loaded boat swings groaning
In the yellow eddies.
The gods behold them,"—
the gods and the poets. But, except to these blest beholders, the inhabitants of the dead centuries are mere spectral shades; for it takes a poet's fancy to vitalize with warmth and breath again those things that, having apparently left no impress on their own generation, seem to have no more signification for this than the persons of the drama or the heroes of romance.