THE LESSON OF WAR.
Lex est, non pœna, perire.—Martial.
Ye warriors of the past, whose flashing swords
Light up with fitful gleams the misty night
Of half-forgotten eld, in fiery words
Ye teach a truth 'twere well we read aright.
God sends the gentle breeze to woo the flower,
And stir the pulses of the ripening corn;
He, too, lets loose the whirlwind's vengeful power
To quench the plagues of foul stagnation born.
And thus in love, sometimes disguised as wrath,
He sends his hidden blessings in the storm,
Which dashes down in its resistless path
The hoar abuses that defied reform.
When Cyrus ravaged fair Chaldea's plain,
And mocked the strength of Babylon's haughty wall,
The proud Assyrian's guilt had earned the chain,
And man rejoiced to mark the oppressor's fall.
And when, made drunk with power, the Persian lost
The stern and simple virtues of his sires,
His empire's ruin and his slaughtered host
Kindled in Greece her world-illuming fires.
Then Greece, her swift career of glory stayed,
Exhausted by her madman's triumphs lay,
Till Rome's protecting arm the loss repaid
Of Corinth's sack and Pydua's fatal day.
Imperial Rome! though crime succeeded crime
As earth fell prostrate 'neath her giant tread,
Still shall her subjects reap to endless time
The priceless harvests by her wisdom spread.
What though the stern proconsul's grinding rule
Close followed on the legion's merciless sword?
Laws, arts, and culture, in that rigid school,
Evoked a nation from each savage horde.
And when at last her crimes, reacting, wrought
Their curse upon herself, to her, supine
And helpless, the barbarian spoiler brought,
With fire and sword, new life to her decline.
Theodoric, Clovis, Charles, your endless strife,
From Weser's marsh to Naples' laughing bay,
Was but the throe that marked the nascent life
Emerging from the worn-out world's decay.
Ye were, amid that elemental war,
But straws to show its course. Ye toiled, and won,
Or lost; your people bled—yet slow and far
The mighty cause of man pressed ever on.
Long has that travail been. Kings, Kaisers, Popes,
The stern Crusader and the pirate Dane,
Each, centered in his own ambitious hopes,
But helped the cause he labored to restrain.
Hildebrand's voice sets Christendom on fire;
'Neath Frederic's plow sinks Milan's lofty wall;
Unnumbered victims glut De Montfort's ire;
From Ecclin's dungeon shrieks the night appall.
If the tide ebbs, 'tis but to flow again.
Each fierce convulsion gains some vantage ground.
Man's fettered limbs grow stronger, and the chain
Falls link by link at each tumultuous bound.
The timid burgher dons the helm and shield,
The wretched hind reluctant grasps the bow,
To fight their master's quarrels. Courtrai's field
And Sempach's hill that lesson's worth may show.
The restless soul still yearns for things unknown;
It chafes against its bondage, points the way
That leads to freedom, but the sword alone
Makes good the dreams that else would but betray.
See, Luther speaks, and Europe flies to arms:
Her stubborn fight outlasts a hundred years;
A thousand fields her richest life-blood warms,
Yet gain the vanquished more than pays their tears.
If Orange and Gustavus conquering died,
Not Coligny nor Hampden fell in vain,
For one domain escaped the furious tide,
And peace made that one desolate—chivalrous Spain!
So, when the traitorous truth was whispered round,—
Equality for man on earth as heaven,—
It was but speculation's idlest sound,
Till by the sword the time-worn bonds were riven.
Though Moscow, Leipzig, Waterloo, might seem
To roll the tide back, they but marked its flood;
Nor could the Holy Allies' darkest scheme
Restore the wrongs so well effaced in blood.
The end is not yet. God's mysterious way
Evolves its purpose in its destined time.
Vainly we seek its fated march to stay:
All things subserve it—wisdom, folly, crime.
We are his instruments. The past has fled
For us. We suffer for the future dim.
Then sternly face the darkness round us spread,
Do each his duty—leave the rest to Him!
RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
The Nineteenth Century dawned upon a nation already glorious with the sublime promise of a prophetic infancy. The strong serpents of Tyranny and Superstition had been crushed in its powerful grasp. The songs of two oceans—the lullaby of its earlier days—had cheered it on to a youth whose dignity and beauty were bought with sword and rifle, with blood and death. Wrapped at last in the toga of an undisputed manhood, it took its place among the empires of the earth, the son of a king, mightier than all; free to enact new laws, to promulgate new systems of economy, social and political, free to worship and to think. With what success a government grounded on a principle so faultless has been administered, may not now be written, but is not more doubtful than it was when the drum beat its reveillé only on our distant frontiers, and the booming of guns from ship or shore was but the nation's welcome to days made memorable by its great men. But before the new republic stretched a vast field for thought, and within its almost boundless limits, hidden beneath the husks of old theories, lay the seed ready for the ripening. Far back toward the east rolled, like a mighty desert, the history of the Progress of Mind. Here and there, on its arid surface, rose, stately and awe-inspiring, great pyramids which marked those eras of agitation when Humanity, awaking suddenly to her power, grappled with giant strength the mighty enigmas of Being, and endeavored to wrench from their mute souls the great secrets that Faith alone has expounded to the satisfaction of her devotees. It availed little that one by one, in the vaults of these temples, the axioms and deductions of their founders were laid away lifeless and powerless. Another generation, vigorous and persevering, laid stone after stone the foundations of another edifice that strove to reach, with its yearning apex of desire, the very heavens. Still high and unmoved curved the blue infinitude above, while below its mirror in the soul of man surged wildly against shores stern, rock-bound, immutable, unanswering.
The 'limits of the forefathers' (fines quos posuerunt patres nostri) had been first transgressed by Abelard, and the speculating spirit of Scholasticism disseminated by him overwhelmed Europe with that rage for investigations, so futile yet so laborious, that terrified the theologians of the mediæval church, and marked the first modern epoch in Philosophy—the beginning of the revolt of Reason against Authority. Next, colossal against the still unrelenting skies, towered what may be called the Natur-Philosophie, 'Nature Philosophy' of Giordano Bruno. The echoes of Luther's bugle still pierced the mountain-fastnesses of Northern Italy and the gorges of Spain. In the church, Bruno found only skepticism and licentiousness, ignorance and tyranny. Before him four centuries had been swallowed up in debate on the fruitless question of Nominalism, and others equally insignificant, but were visible to him by the light of a logic so shallow, futile, and despotic, that it was known only to be scorned. With an energy that astonished the feeble and degraded clergy of his time, a fearlessness that exacted the admiration while it aroused the indignation of his contemporaries, and a genius that compelled the attention of those who were most zealous to combat its evidences, Bruno, casting off the shackles of the cloister, that 'prigione angusta e nera,' boldly advanced a system of Philosophy, startling, in those Inquisitorial times, from its independence, and horrible from its antagonism to Aristotle, the Atlas of the church. This was no less than pure Pantheism,—God in and through all, the infinite Intelligence. Deus est monadum monas—nempe entium entitas. This creed, by an incomprehensible metamorphosis, was styled, in the language of the day, Atheism; its promulgation, even its conception, was pronounced a crime whose penalty was death. And Bruno, who, from the depths of infamous superstition, had risen into the pure light of heaven, to a theory whose principles, though they might not satisfy, could not fail to refine, elevate, and encourage the soul long groveling in the mire of ignorance, or languishing in the dark dungeons of Scholasticism,—Bruno died for the truth. More foolish than the savages of whom Montesquieu speaks, who cut down trees to reach their fruit, these judges of Bruno destroyed the tree whose seeds were already strewn broadcast over the world. They hushed forever the voice whose echoes are not yet stilled,—echoes that resound in the cautious Meditations of Descartes, that rise from peak to peak of the majestic method of the great Spinoza, who was no less a martyr because reputation and not life was the forfeit of his earnestness; and that vibrate with thrilling sweetness in the Idealism of Schelling. 'The perfect theory of Nature,' says Schelling, 'is that by virtue of which all Nature is resolved into the intellectual element,' which 'intellectual element' is at once composed of intuitions and is the source of intuitions,—the Deus in nobis of Giordano Bruno. 'It is evident,' he continues, 'that Nature is originally identical with that which in us is recognized as the subject and the object.'
Thus the empirical school, in its representative, Aristotle, met in the martyr of Nola an opponent vigilant, earnest, powerful. And while the legitimate prosecution of the former mode of philosophizing has led to deism, skepticism, atheism, and materialism, it is to those who have retained in methods, more mathematically clear and more perfectly developed than that which Bruno disseminated, but still bearing, as their key-note, the one great idea of his bold crusade,—to those we must look for all that is most pure, most noble, in Philosophy: a system or succession of systems whose primitive idea—substance and essence—is the very God for a supposed denial of whom Bruno died. 'Cosi vince Goffredo!'
Thus rolled on the centuries. Germany, France, England, and Scotland had each contributed her knights to the great tournament of Mind. And now the first symptoms of agitation appeared on the hitherto unruffled surface of Thought in the New World. Still panting after her victories, scarcely used to her new freedom, at first the presence of a power antagonistic to the orthodox faith was unsuspected even by those who first entertained it. But the stone had been dashed into the tranquil ocean when the May-flower was moored on the New England coast, and its circling eddies drew curve after curve among the descendants, brave, conscientious, energetic, of the old Puritans. The stern Calvinism, by which their fathers had lived and died, was, by these early recreants, first mistrusted, then questioned, and finally abjured. The murmurs of dissent that had long agitated the sturdy upholders of the accepted faith, broke out in a demand for a system whose claims should be less absolute, and whose nature should satisfy those fugitive appeals to Reason and the Understanding, that, weak indeed, and faint, were yet distinctly audible to the thinkers of the day. From the cloud of accusation and denial, of suspicion and trial, the new Perseus, Unitarianism,—whilom a nursling of Milton, Locke, and Hartley,—was born, and took its place among the sects, sustained by the few, dreaded and condemned by the many.