EDITOR'S TABLE.
Christmas is again upon us, dear readers; we may almost hear the gathering chime of its happy bells upon the frosty air. It is a time when even strangers may hold commune; let us take advantage of it, and learn to know something of each other. But are we indeed strangers? It is true that we stand as abstract impersonalities, as disembodied spirits, unknown even by name to one another. Yet have we held relations which we cannot shake off even if we would. 'The most obscure of literary men' we may be, yet has your kind smile often cheered us as we labored to place before you the wants, wishes, tastes, views, hopes, and aims of our common country. Caterer as we are for you, through us and the handywork of our skilful printer have our able writers spun their golden threads through heart, mind, and soul. Contributors, readers, and editor are alike linked in these glittering spiritual meshes, and can never be quite the same as if the web had never held them for its passing moment in its light zone of thought. For ideas generate duties, knowledge stimulates action, and to act in a world of doubt may well be onerous. We frankly confess to you that a dread responsibility has cast a deep shadow upon all our moments since the commencement of our intercourse with you. Our butterfly hours were then past: we grew into work-a-day bees—if only we have stored some honey in your hives to pay us for the lost idlesse of our dreamy summers! If it 'is greatly wise to talk with our past hours, and ask them what report they bear to Heaven' when spent only for ourselves, it is a solemn thing to call them back, and ask them what report they bear to Heaven for the thousands to whom they have ministered. We spread the table lovingly before you: what if there should be something in yourselves to turn our healthful food to poison? On marches The Continental with its light and heavy freight of winged words and thoughts, striding from monthly stepping-stone to stepping-stone on the long route of Time. Stepping-stones in Time are they now truly, but as we gaze they seem to grow into Eternity, and the buds which twine their glow around them ripen slowly into ever-living fruit in the strange clime of the Everlasting Now to which we are all hastening.
How clear that Christmas chime upon the frosty air!
Reader, is it too much to hope that in spite of all our short-comings, we have yet been loyal to your better hours, and faithful in the field given us to sow for the heavenly Reapers? We have labored to interest, amuse, and instruct you for the last eighteen months: have you learned in that time to trust us as we have learned to care for you? Do you know us loyal patriots and true Christians, even if of a broad and all-unsectarian faith? If we are too frank, it is because we are certain that truth can never contradict itself, that nature must be one with revelation, that he errs who fears the crucible of the savant or would hold science in leading strings. The Continental seeks the light, condemns to silence no new Galileo, tortures no creative Kepler, has no fires for heretics, and nothing worse than an incredulous smile for the shivering witches and mediums, the muscular demons of modern spiritualism. It rejects no scientific investigation honorably pursued, for all paths lead back to the Maker of the Universe, and the honest seeker must find Him at the end of his route. That God is our Father, that we are made in His triune image, that Christ is our elder Brother, the great Regenerator of our race, is surely the ever open, ever mystic secret of the universe!
We have travelled on together through a gloomy year. The air has been sad with sighs, dim with tears, restless with great sobs of human anguish. But we are drifting into calmer swells on the great Time-Ocean, and the crimson year of '64 is almost past. The dwellers of the Valley already look for the morning star, while those upon the Hilltop hail the auroral light of '65. Enshrined in and sparkling through its golden glow two mystic figures gleam; the star of the morning pales before their splendor. The one is godlike in her majesty, sublime through conquered suffering, the awful smile of the Crucified seems shining through the features transfigured since He wore them, and the cross glitters in all the glory of Self-sacrifice on her broad breast. She wears a girdle blue as if woven from the depths of heaven, and as we gaze we see great opals with veiled hearts of fire form into quaint old runic letters upon it, and the God-word LOVE flashes down the secret of her inner life upon us. She is still young as when she woke in Paradise, and, seeing the End, is not yet weary with her long journey of Exile. Brighter gates than those of Eden stand unbarred before her! In her right hand she holds unrolled, that all may read, the great Magna Charta of universal Human Rights, and even at this distance we may see EMANCIPATION upon its broad margin. We know the once sad spirit now, no longer sad, the radiant Genius of Humanity.
Her vigorous arm is round a younger and less solemn form, a form of wildering beauty, whose gold hair glitters like a nimbus in the level rays of morning; with an irresistible impulse we take her into the innermost folds of our hearts, we feel her to be our own; our banner in her right hand sways and tosses on the fresh breeze, its stars, round which new suns are ever clustering, throw their dazzling light upon her, and the young eagles turning from the sun throng around her to drink the splendor from her brighter brow. The long streamers from her girdle float athwart the sky, their wavy lines, red, white, and blue, quiver with delight as the wild zephyrs caress them, thrilling the air with shifting play of passionate color. Ha! what miracle is this?—whatsoever light may fall upon them, under what angle soever we may see them, as were it magically woven into their warp and woof, we read the word now graven on our hearts—Union! Her left hand holds closely clasped to her heart a great urn, glowing as it were an immense ruby—ah! we need no words to tell us what the young spirit clasps so fondly to her breast—we feel it is the dust of the holy dead, who gave their lives on the red battle field that she might live: their very ashes glow with living fire! Her white feet rest on the sacred graves of Shiloh, Antietam, Murfreesboro', Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Lookout Mountain, the Wilderness, Atlanta, Winchester, and Cedar Creek, from which she has newly risen in her young strength and ever-growing glory.
She is the brilliant Spirit of our Nation! the new hope of all People! Her career is ever onward with the Genius of Humanity into the enchanted realm of the happy Future. No chains are in her white hands now. The tired laborer rests as she smiles upon him; the bay of the bloodhound and sharp crack of the lash cease in the white cotton field; the Indian buries his tomahawk, no longer wounding the still ear of the forest with his shrill war whoop; the maiden walks fearlessly free, for all men are now her brothers; shielding her sanctity; the wife is happy, for the husband has won her esteem, and it is no shame to crown him with her love; and cherub-children sport around, lovely and happy as the heaven-seraphs.
Peace to our glorious dead! Eternal honor to the martyrs of freedom! From the sharp agonies of their true hearts springs now first to conscious birth the vigorous Spirit of our Nation. We never knew aright how very dear to us she was until the traitors tried to tear her limb from limb because her heart was open to all made in the image of their God—because she knew the sacred worth of man.
How near those Christmas chimes peal on the frosty air!
And if we will but think of it, a Nationality is always of slow growth, of gradual development. It, like man himself, is born in pain and anguish. It is indeed a living member of the Grand Man of which Humanity is composed. Since the forty years wandering of the children of Israel in the desert, how much suffering has been endured to hold it sacred! The history of the present time is but a record of fierce struggles to achieve or hold a Nationality. Poland has hung on the cross of her great enemy for centuries rather than yield its sanctity. He has torn and scattered its quivering members, blotted it out in blood from the names known on earth, it has been murdered, and fed upon by three great Christian Powers ('Oh, the pity of it!')—Catholic Austria, Protestant Prussia and Greek-Churched Russia—but it is not dead: it lives in all the energy of self-abnegating suffering on the mountains of Causasus, the steppes of Asia, the frozen plains of Siberia, in the depths of Russian mines, the darkness of Russian prisons, and it still will live until the last Pole is laid in the last grave of his heroic but unfortunate race. Such is its vitality when once truly born. Denmark turns pale and shivers as she feels it may be torn from her; 'Italia, with the fatal gift of beauty for her dower,' the fair land where fairer Juliets breathe the enamored air, art—crowned and genius-gifted, writhes in agony until it may be her own; Greece long bled for it; and the brave and haughty Magyar, to whom a courser fleet and the free air are necessities of daily life, braves and bears prisons, chains, and poverty, in the hope of its attainment. What is this precious Nationality? Like all basic elements, it is difficult to define. It is not a State, a Constitution, nor is it made by man at all. An able writer in The North American Review for October says: 'It may be said, in general, to be the sum of the differences, geographical, historical, political, and moral, which separate a people as a community from every other—of those differences which modify the character of each individual, and the results of which are combined in the traits of national character. The consciousness of its existence is developed slowly, and it is long before the sentiment of Nationality—the true foundation of patriotism—gains force over the hearts and convictions of a people. But this sentiment, when it has once taken root, is one of the most powerful of those by which human conduct is affected. It is a sentiment of the highest order, lifting men out of narrow and selfish individualism into a region where they behold their duties as members one of another, as partakers of the general life of humanity—the inheritors of the past, the trustees of the future.'