I wish I were a poet; you should have a description of all this in verses, and welcome. But if I were a musician! Let us see what we should do as musicians. First, you should hear the distant sound of a bugle, which sound should float away: that is one of the heralds of the morning, flying southward. Then another should issue from the eastern gates; and now the grand reveillé should grow, sweep past your ears (like the wind aforesaid), and go on, dying as it goes. When as it dies, my stringed instruments come in. These to the left of the orchestra break into a soft slow movement, the music swaying drowsily from side to side, as it were, with a noise like the rustling of boughs. It must not be much of a noise, however, for my stringed instruments to the right have begun the very song of the morning. The bows tremble upon the strings, like the limbs of a dancer, who, a-tiptoe, prepares to bound into her ecstacy of motion. Away! The song soars into the air as if it had the wings of a kite. Here swooping, there swooping, wheeling upward, falling suddenly, checked, poised for a moment on quivering wings, and again away. It is waltz time, and you hear the Hours dancing to it. Then the horns. Their melody overflows into the air richly, like honey of Hybla; it wafts down in lazy gusts, like the scent of the thyme from that hill. So my stringed instruments to the left cease rustling, listen a little while, catch the music of those others, and follow it. Now for the rising of the lark! Henceforward it is a chorus, and he is the leader thereof. Heaven and earth agree to follow him. I have a part for the brooks—their notes drop, drop, drop, like his: for the woods—they sob like him. At length, nothing remains but to blow the hautboys; and just as the chorus arrives at its fulness, they come maundering in. They have a sweet old blundering “cow-song” to themselves—a silly thing, made of the echoes of all pastoral sounds. There’s a warbling waggoner in it, and his team jingling their bells. There’s a shepherd driving his flock from the fold, bleating; and the lowing of cattle.—Down falls the lark like a stone: it is time he looked for grubs. Then the hautboys go out, gradually; for the waggoner is far on his road to market; sheep cease to bleat and cattle to low, one by one; they are on their grazing ground, and the business of the day is begun. Last of all, the heavenly music sweeps away to waken more westering lands, over the Atlantic and its whitening sails.
And to think this goes on every day, and every day has been repeated for a thousand years! Generally, though, we don’t like to think about that, as Mr. Kingsley has remarked, among others; for when he wrote, “Is it not a grand thought, the silence and permanence of nature amid the perpetual noise and flux of human life!—a grand thought, that one generation goeth and another cometh, and the earth abideth for ever?” he also meant, “Isn’t it a melancholy thought?” For my part, I believe this reflection to be the fount of all that melancholy which is in man. I speak in the broadest sense, meaning that whereas whenever you find a man you find a melancholy animal, this is the secret of his melancholy. The thought is so common and so old; it has afflicted so many men in so many generations with a sort of philosophical sadness, that it comes down to us like an hereditary disease, of which we have lost the origin, and almost the consciousness. It is an universal disposition to melancholy madness, in short. Savages who run wild in woods are not less liable to its influence than we who walk in civilized Pall Mall. On the contrary, a savage of any brains at all is the most melancholy creature in the world. Not Donizetti, nor Mendelssohn, nor Beethoven himself ever composed such sad songs as are drummed on tom-toms, or piped through reeds, or chanted on the prairies and lagoons of savage land. No music was ever conceived within the walls of a city so profoundly touching as that which Irish pipers and British harpers made before an arch was built in England. Now this bears out our supposition; for the savage with the tom-tom, the piper with his pipe, the harper with his harp, lived always in sight of nature. Their little fussy lives and noisy works were ever in contrast with its silence and permanence; change and decay with the constant seasons and the everlasting hills. Who cannot understand the red man’s reverence for inanimate nature read by this light—especially his reverence for the setting sun? For the night cometh, reminding him of his own little candle of an existence, while he knows that the great orb has risen upon a hundred generations of hunters, and will rise upon a hundred more. As for him and his works, his knife will be buried with him, and there an end of him and his works.
And we Europeans to-day are in the same case with regard to the silence and permanence of Nature, contrasted with the perpetual flux and noise of human life. Who thinks of his death without thinking of it? who thinks of it without thinking of his death? Mother, whose thoughts dwell about her baby in churchyard lying; Mary, of sister Margaret who died last year, or of John who was lost at sea, say first and last—“There the sea rolls, ever as ever; and rages and smiles, and surges and sighs just the same; and were you and I and the whole world to be drowned to-day, and all the brave ships to go down with standing sails, to-morrow there would not be a drop the more in the ocean, nor on its surface a smile the less. Doesn’t the rain rain upon my baby’s grave, and the sun shine upon it, as indifferent as if there were neither babies nor mothers in the world?” Why, this strain is to be found in all the poetry that ever was written. Walter Mapes may be quoted, with his, “I propose to end my days in a tavern drinking,” but his and all such songs merely result from a wild effort to divorce this “grand thought” from the mind.
But we need not go to America for a red Indian, nor afield to the hills for illustration; that is to be found in the impression produced on many thoughtful minds by the contemplation of social life in any two periods. We behold Sir Richard Steele boozing unto maudlinness in purple velvet and a laced hat; Captain Mohock raging through Fleet Street with a drawn rapier; reprobate old duchesses and the damsels who were to be our grandmothers sitting in the same pew, and then looking about us, say—“Here we are again!—the duchess on the settee, Mohock lounging against the mantelpiece, Dick Steele hiccuping on the stairs in a white neckcloth. There they go through the little comedy of life, in ruffles and paste buckles; here go we in swallow-tails and patent leathers. Mohock married, and was henpecked: young Sanglant is to be married to-morrow. The duchess being dead, one of those demure little damsels takes up the tradition, and certain changes of costume having been accomplished, becomes another wicked old woman; and so it goes on. They die, and we die; and meanwhile the world goes steadily round. There is sowing and reaping, and there are select parties, and green peas in their season, and oh! this twopenny life!”
Mind you, I have other ideas. What is all this melancholy, at bottom, but stupidity and ingratitude? Are we miserable because He who made all beautiful things preserves them to us for ever? True, He has set bounds to intellect, and to aspirations which, when they are most largely achieved, do not always work for pure and useful ends; true, He does not permit us to become too impious in our pride by giving eternity to the Parthenons and telegraphs that we make such a noise about; but, all that is really good, and beautiful, and profitable for man, is everlastingly his. The lovely world that Adam beheld is not only the same to-day, it is created and given to us anew every day. What have we said about morning, which is born again (for us, for little ones, the ignorant, the blind, who could not see at all yesterday) three hundred and sixty-five times in a year—every time as fresh, and new, and innocent as that which first dawned over Eden? Now, considering how much iniquity and blindness all the nights have fallen upon, I must think this a bountiful arrangement, and one which need not make us unhappy. I love to think the air I breathe through my open window is the same that wandered through Paradise before our first mother breathed; that the primroses which grow to-day in our dear old woods are such as decked the bank on which she slept before sin and death came into the world; and that our children shall find them, neither better nor worse, when our names are clean forgotten. And is it nothing that if we have all death, we have all youth?—brand-new affections and emotions—a mind itself a new and separate creation, as much as is any one star among the rest? In the heavens there is a tract of light called the Milky Way, which to the common eye appears no more than a luminous cloud. But astronomers tell us that this vast river of light is a universe, in which individual stars are so many that they are like the sands on the shore. We cannot see each grain of sand here on Brighton beach, we cannot see the separate stars of the Milky Way, nor its suns and great planets, with all our appliances; and yet each of those orbs has its path, rolling along on its own business—a world. On learning which we are bewildered with astonishment and awe. But here below is another shifting cloud, called “the human race.” Thousands of years it has swept over the earth in great tracts, coming and going. And this vast quicksand is made up of millions and millions of individual I’s, each a man, a separate, distinct creation; each travelling its path, which none other can travel; each bearing its own life, which is no other’s—a world. I think this ought to strike us with as much awe as that other creation. I think we ought to be filled with as much gratitude for our own planetary being as astonishment at the spectacle of any Milky Way whatever. And I only wish that we, the human race, shone in the eyes of heaven with the light of virtue like another Milky Way.
Created, then, so purely of ourselves, this is the result with regard to the natural world about us: that with our own feelings and affections, we discover, each for himself, all the glory of the universe. And therefore is nature eternal, unchangeable—that all men may know the whole goodness of God. Whose eyes but mine first saw the sun set? Some old Chaldean, some dweller in drowned Atlantis, imagined the feelings of Adam when he first saw the sun go down; ever since when, this poetical imagining has been going about the world, and people have envied Adam that one grandest chance of getting a “sensation.” Why, the Chaldean was Adam! I’m Adam! The sun was created with me, with you; and by and by, when we had got over the morning of infancy, we sat on a wall, in a field, on a hill, at our own little bedroom window, and our childish eyes being by that time opened, we saw the sun go down for the first time.
Nor are these pleasures and advantages confined to the external world, to the sensations it inspires, or the influence it exerts upon us. No human passion, no emotion, the fiercest or the tenderest, comes to us at second hand. The experience and observation of a thousand years, all the metaphysical, and poetical, and dramatic books that ever were written, cannot add a jot to the duration or intensity of any emotion of ours. They may exercise it, but they cannot form it, nor instruct it; nor, were they fifty times as many and as profound, could they dwarf it. It lies in our hearts an original creation, complete, alone: like my life and yours. Now see how this arrangement works. When, dear madam, your little Billy was born, all that wondering delight, that awful tremor of joy, which possessed the heart of the first mother, was yours. You may have seen a piece of sculpture called the First Cradle. There sits Eve, brooding over her two boys, rocking them backward and forward in her arms and on her knees—wondering, awe-full, breathless with joy, drowned in a new flood of love. “Ah!” says the tender, child-loving female spectator, “what would not one give to have been that first mother, to have made with one’s arms the first cradle!” Ignorant soul! One would think, to hear her talk, that the gifts of heaven grow threadbare by course of time, and that in 1860 we have only the rags thereof! Don’t believe it, for there is another side to the question! If the gifts and rewards of heaven are paid in new coin, minted for you, with your effigies stamped upon it, so are the punishments. The flight of Cain when Abel was killed—Bill Sykes’s was every way as terrible; and any incipient poisoner who may happen to read this page may assure himself, that his new and improved process of murder—whatever advantages it may otherwise offer—is not specific against the torments of him who first shed blood: no, nor against any one of them.
FOOTNOTES:
[25] This paper was written a year ago. Mr. Mattieu Williams, in his book Through Norway with a Knapsack, has since confirmed my fancy that every day dies a natural death. In Scandinavia, there is a midnight sun; and Mr. Williams says that although the altitude of the sun is the same ten minutes before twelve as ten minutes after, there is a perceptible difference in atmospheric tone and colour—“the usual difference between evening and morning, sunset and sunrise; the light having a warmer tint before than after midnight.”