‘The tempests that rise.
Shall gloriously hurry our souls to the skies!’
So Bunyan’s bark sped onward, amidst howling gales, with rattling hail and thunder, but onward, still onward, and upward, still upward, to heaven!’
EDITOR’S TABLE.
The Inner Life of Man.—We are indebted to the kindness of an esteemed friend who was present at the recent delivery of a lecture before the ‘Young Men’s Society’ of Newark, New-Jersey, by Mr. Charles Hoover, upon ‘The Inner Life of Man,’ for a few passages from that admirable performance, which may be relied upon as very nearly identical with the language that fell from the lips of the speaker. We cannot but hope, on behalf of our citizens, that Mr. Hoover may be invited to repeat his lecture in this city. Surely, its enlarged views, its benign inculcations, its tender remonstrances, are needed among us; nor will the good seed fall altogether upon stony ground, nor be utterly choked by the tares that abound in our field of bustling and busy existence. ‘But what,’ the reader may ask, ‘is this inner, higher life, concerning which we hear so much in these latter days?’ Let Mr. Hoover make answer: ‘It is that ethereal, spiritual nature, which by an incarnation only less mysterious than that of the Son of God, is in present temporary alliance and partnership with our animal nature; which, itself imperishable and immortal, measures the cycle of its probation burthened with a dead body. It is that in man which loves the beautiful and the good, which expands and warms to the breathing and the voice of love; which, like the child listening to the murmuring sea-shell, catches the far-off sound of the solemn future, and hears celestial harmonies in silentest hours. It is that which in infancy gathers in its first excursion the stuff that infant dreams are made of; which in childhood makes the welkin ring with joy and laughter, crowns itself with flowers, and arches life and the world, and all inaccessible things and places, with airy bridges; which sees angel-forms in flitting clouds, and in the gorgeous glory of setting suns beholds the vestibule and drapery of other worlds: which holds communion with flowers as things of life, and with birds as beautiful and gentle friends; which rebounds like a liberated bow from the touch of grief to the freedom of joy, and sees in its own tear-drop a perfect rainbow. To the inner life of man, in its gradual and successive unfoldings, belong those deep musings of the heart, which suggested perhaps by trifles light as air, become mighty, like pent-up fires in a mountain’s bosom, and tossing off the superincumbent pressure, burst forth in a flame of patriotism to unyoke a nation, or in heroic religious love to bless a world. In the inner life of man are born and nurtured those deep and intense affections which make a man willing to die for his country, his faith, and his friends; which purified, lift him up an angel; which poisoned, burn to hell, and turn him into a fiend; there rise the fountains of generous sensibility; there dawn hope and love, and reverence and faith; there yearn the immortal desires of continued existence and eternal joy; there is the chamber of prophetic visions and poetic fires; there conscience holds its court, and in God’s stead utters its solemn decision. There too the acutest of our sensibilities to suffering reside. ••• And this inner, spiritual nature of man is his distinguishing glory, the priceless, inalienable treasure which he carries with him amid all the changes of time, and all the disasters of the universe. It is his all. It is his proper self. Other things are circumstances of his being. This is his being, subsisting independently of every other thing and being except the Deity. It invests all external objects with its own character and coloring; paints its own image on the sky, the floods, the fields, and faces of men, and turns the world into a thousand-faced mirror, and every face flings back upon the soul its own likeness, and all its flitting, changeful phases of mood and feeling. Is it guilty? ‘The fiends of its own bosom people air with kindred fiends that hunt it to despair.’ Is it sad? The sighing of the softest breeze is heard as a requiem, and the natural beatings of its own heart sound like ‘funeral marches and muffled drums.’ Is it glad, innocent, and happy? All nature smiles and puts on the garments of beauty; the stars sing together, the trees of the forest rejoice, and the floods clap their hands. Thus the visible universe becomes a mere reproduction of the spirit of man that beholds it. Create a mind, and it creates for its residence an external world of its own hue and character. Make that mind happy, and its external world, from pole to pole and from the zenith to its centre, is resplendent with light and beauty; balm-like airs, soft and fragrant as those of uncursed Eden, breathe upon it, and all its life is love. Dreaming, it sees a ladder reaching to heaven, and the angels of God ascending and descending on errands of mercy, and waking, exclaims with reverential joy, ‘Surely God is in this place.’ Make a mind miserable, and you darken its universe. The stars fall from its heaven, the golden fruitage of its paradise decays, and winter winds wail around it, and night and storm mingle their pitiless elements on its unsheltered head. Intertwined and involved in the inner life, are occurring at all times the great things of human history. In the sanctuary of unrevealed bosoms, in the ‘silent, secret sessions’ of thought, and in the glow of individual feeling, in the field, at the fire-side, in the closet, or on the sleepless bed, there is man’s history: there, unfolding to act, or infolding itself to die, the soul is in its greatness, is in labor with itself, and struggling with big, burning thoughts, and ‘truths that wake to perish never;’ decreeing with solemn form and force what is to be done, and what endured. Let no man despise what is revolved in the private mind.’
We scarcely know which most to admire, the nervous thoughts embodied in the following passage, or the fervent and beautiful language in which a just reproof is conveyed:
‘In all our wanderings round this world of care, we have been deeply moved and amazed at the fact, that down into the world of troubled, sorrowing mind and tortured sensibilities, the professors and light-bearers of the religion of Jesus have thrown so few of its melting beams. Of transcendent mysteries this is not the least, that of those who hold to a religion that is comprehended in one burning word, one transforming principle, Love; which is not a theory, but a divine passion, and whose hopes all rest on the doctrine of forgiveness; so few practically and heartily pity, forgive, and love the erring and the wretched of the family of man. Oh! it was not thus when Pity, eighteen hundred years ago, habited as a man, and leaning upon a pilgrim’s staff, set out from the brow of Nazareth to the hill of Calvary, tracing with tearful eye and weary foot the roads of Judea and the streets of Jerusalem! ••• In an age which, in sorrow not in anger, in heart-felt regret, not in bitterness, we are compelled to regard as extensively pseudo-philanthropic; when a vaunting benevolence is current, which hovers every where and alights no where; which loves all men in general and no man in particular; profuse of pity to the heathen, while bloated with poisonous hate to its neighbor; it is refreshing to see occasional instances of practical brotherhood with poor, down-trodden, benumbed and forsaken humanity. That is true benevolence, which with mingled faith, reverence, and love, descends in quest of the inner life beneath repulsive appearances, and tainted name, and shattered fortune, and from the depths brings up a bleeding heart, a scathed soul, and speaks to it of hope and consolation, and cheers it up to the purpose of self-recovery, and the recommencement of a virtuous life, and the reconstruction of a broken, blasted fame; that rekindles with vestal care its dying fires, and like a pious mother, nurses it through weakness, infirmity, irresolution, and despondency, back to hale strength and vigor; that by a generous confidence in its earliest repentings, and a generous forgiveness of its gravest faults, lends strength to its purposes and permanence to its reform. Oh! there are such hearts all around us, still warm and beating, though pierced through with many sorrows, goaded it may be at once by a sense of guilt and the horrors of abandonment, yet not dead to virtue, nay, sensitively alive to it; ‘for as certain flowers open only in the night, so often in the dark hours of a great sorrow the human soul first opens to the light of the eternal stars.’ There are such hearts buried all around us; and from their unquiet graves come up the low wail, the stifled sob, the muttered curse, the anguished prayer, appealing to the thoughtless brotherhood above them for a ray of light, and a breath of the free air of heaven! Hearken, and ye shall hear the tones of an eternal miserére, mingling and swelling like distant organ-peals, drowned by the din of day-light, but re-heard in all hours of thought and stillness, in all places of meditative retirement. Listen, and ye shall hear soliloquies of the heart with itself, revealing pleasant memories and hopes, and tendernesses and joys, that come up from the past in shadowy troops, with lights and garlands—and vanish, making the darkness more visible and solitude more hideous. Blessed, we say, for Heaven has said it, blessed are they whose ministry of love is in that unquiet inner world; whose sympathies intertwine themselves with its strained, snapped fibres and ligaments; whose hand gently withdraws the barbed arrows of outrageous fortune, and into the ragged wound pours the oil of consolation and the balm of joy! Select, sacred, and heaven-ordained and anointed priests and priestesses they, of a God of love in a world of sorrow. Not their commission is it to declare to cowering criminals a God wrathful, vindictive, and scarcely less bloody than the Druid’s deity, hating with infinite venom the unhappy violator of his laws; not theirs to deal out curious metaphysics and cold abstractions, giving a stone for bread and an adder for an egg to the sons of sorrow and the daughters of misfortune; but to inspire hope in the desponding and peace in the troubled bosom; to give light for darkness, the oil of joy for mourning, and the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness; to bring back the lost to their Father’s house, and raise the dead to life again.’
A brace of Pellets from ‘Julian.’—Not one of our readers, we will venture to say, has forgotten the spiritual Julian, whose ‘Top of New-York,’ and the inquiry concerning ‘the law’ between man and wife, in regard to getting up first in the morning, attracted so much attention and remark two or three months since. We annex two late paper-pellets of his brain; and must ask the reader to admire with us the fervent feeling of new paternity wreaked upon expression in the first, and the ease and simplicity of style which mark the unstudied sketch that succeeds it: ‘Have you ever any nervous days, my kind Editor? Nervous, beyond publishing days, or the want of copy; beyond excesses, the reaction of excitement, fast-days, and the giving of thanks?—for these last are animal only, and for such, doctors are made and abound every where. The cure for them you may get in a brown-paper parcel; it is buyable; and of late it is eatable; you may take it in a lozenge. But the days of which I speak are such as you must endure patiently unto the end. ‘They come like shadows, so depart,’ but the cloud that gives the shadow is beyond your reach. A new doubt or apprehension, or an old one with an uglier face than usual; a hideousness not before seen, a devilishness of malice flashing upon you for the first time, or even an unkind word, added to your previous gathering of matériel, may tip the balance of your pleasant thoughts, and then, all colors changing into one, the black cloud rolls over you, and dark thoughts, wholly foreign to your nature, throng round and stab at you, till at last, by that old snakish sympathy of excitement, your own dark passions rise and embrace them, and the sensitive guardians of the brain, mingling in the fray, give you up, one by one, captive to the devil. In the lighter hours of the day, the dead hopes of the Past, the beauties of other days, throng round you, and shake their dry bones; and oh, what efforts at sprightliness! what ravishing of graces! what whirling and rattling of bare bones, as they waltz round to that music of other days! And now, born of these, comes another group, with the laughing eye of young years and a full heart; and ah! the tempting lip, the heaving bosom, the light step of the perfect form; ha! ha! there is life, there is beauty in the world again! But then will they betray you? Will they grow old and ugly? Will they live to mock at you? And now the words, ‘No you don’t, you can’t come it,’ tremble upon your lips; but then, oh! the delight of giving up to it; going the whole, the entire, the unclipt, the blind-folded, the universal; ‘ha! ha! come to my heart, my beauties!’ and with open arms you stagger to their embraces. But in that long, long, kiss, with the hot breath of passion, and the bounding blood and brain reeling to madness, there is the bitterness of death. Dust and ashes!—take them away. ••• The drop too much in all this is, that you get no sympathy from others; it is quite too personal, too exclusive for that. Whereas, in the solemnities of New-Year’s, and in all the concernments of that day, the whole world beareth company. Not but that we have occasion for all our bravery, our greetings and rejoicings; it is well to affect that, for there is a strange man about town, all that day, and a disci mori whispered about the streets; and although we pretend not to know, or to hear him, there is one at our house who hath let him in; and all day long is he parleying and protesting and offering refreshments, forsooth, to that unwelcome visitor. But there is a pleasure in the assurance that the cunning of our neighbors shall not avail more than ours with his impertinence; that he shall be stabbed under the fifth rib, that he shall wince under his hits, his jokes, his stinging rebuke! There is also something companionable in the thought, that we are not alone in this onward movement of years, this stern necessity of motion, this tread-mill step! No one can defalcate in this particular; no one can Texas-ize and be quit of his transgressions and his onward travel. But millions of our own kith and kin travel the same way; England goes with us; Europe goes with us; and let not the indolent Turk dream that he is becalmed the while; let not the exclusives of the rising sun imagine that they in their nearness to Heaven do not, nevertheless, whirl on in the general motion, even as the outer barbarians! Decidedly, they do; their somersets avail not, and the edicts of the great Ching-poo are astounded at their non-effect. This is one pleasant reflection born of New-Year’s; beside, it would be amusing, if one could laugh at any thing so sad, to observe the humors of the few who think upon the bearings of that solemn time. In the year to be, there are many to come, many to go, and but few to tarry; yet all have their ambitions of a life-time; those even, to whom the stars have grown dim, and life become almost a mockery under Heaven, dashing into the coming day with something of the old zest; while the many, the oi polloi, who have not yet made their grand move, are now ready, and think that therefore the earth is to take a new route in creation; forgetting that the old round must be the round for ever. Nights sleepless with joy, nights sleepless with pain, nights long with watching, feverish thought; crime that stings like an adder, and nights short with perfect rest; days long and weary, days bright and dashing, hot and cold, wet and dry, and days and nights with all of these—as hath been in the time that’s past, and will be in the time to come.
‘There is something very pitiable in these humors, Mr. Editor; indeed very laughable, if your mouth is shaped to that effect; but as it happens with me to-night, my mouth refuses to twitch except in one direction. Its corners have what Prof. P—— used to call the ‘downward tendencies.’ Perhaps it is because this is with me the anniversary of a day upon the events of which are hanging the movements of all after-life; it may be this, and there may be thereto added the coloring of a winter’s day. The wind howls about the house-tops, and the air pierces like needles; even the stars, when they look down in thousands, as the rack goes by, seem to shiver in their high places; yet perhaps there is nothing so personal in all that, considering that just so the wind howled last night, and may for a month to come; but oh! as I am a nervous man, and look back upon the circling months, and feel the sting here and the stab there, in that galvanic battery; and as I look forward with eager eye, and ear open to the faintest whisper of the dim to-morrow, it is not as the stars shiver from excess of light, but with a shudder at the heart from the cooler blood of——Good night, my kind Editor; that sentence is quite too long already, and there are some things too personal to tell.