April 1st, 1836.
THE INFLUENCE OF MORAL FEELING UPON THE PLEASURES OF THE IMAGINATION.
Essay No. I.
By moral feeling, we mean a recognition of those great principles of right and wrong, which form the basis of our relation to each other as social beings. When it is exhibited in our varied character of members of a community, citizens of a commonwealth, and brethren of the human family, we give it the specific names of benevolence, patriotism, and philanthropy. Since then, these relations are so comprehensive, and so necessarily blended and interwoven with all our habits of thought and action, the influence of this feeling must extend to most, if not to all the powers of the mind. It will be our object in this series of essays, to demonstrate this influence as affecting the pleasures of the imagination.
By the benignity of our Creator, we have been endowed with the powers of taste and imagination, to throw a charm over the ruggedness of human life, and bring in a thousand tributes of enjoyment to cheer our hearts in our journeyings through this ‘vale of tears.’ These pleasures, as long as the powers themselves are uncorrupted by vice, and their purity free from the taint of unhallowed passions, are of a kind the most pure and innocent. We believe it to be an immutable law, in all the operations of the mind, that the exercise of our virtuous affections, as far as it is carried, induces the highest possible degree of happiness which we are capable of feeling. Our most exquisite enjoyments in Literature and the Fine Arts, will be found to receive their origin from something which most directly calls up virtuous associations; and in the beauties of the natural world, those scenes prove the most delightful, which elevate our contemplations to the infinite perfections of the ‘great First Cause.’
We would remark, that the influence of moral feeling tends to heighten the pleasure which we derive from Eloquence and Poetry. The pleasure which flows from these sources belongs to the highest and purest order of intellectual enjoyments. They bear with them a voice that wakes the soul to intense interest, now throwing over its powers the inspiration of sublimity, and now floating around it in tones as mellow and gentle as the last whisper of a summer breeze. Who, as he has listened to the voice of the living speaker, and been borne along on the full tide of eloquence at the will of the moving spirit, has not felt his heart swell within him to a loftier expansion, and his bosom throb with the pulsations of a new and more glorious intelligence? Who, as his imagination has drank in the sweet and thrilling strains of the poet’s lyre, and his own spirit has caught the glow of his burning aspirations, has not felt a yearning to soar above and beyond the cold, sluggish atmosphere of sense, and mingle in the fancied existence portrayed so winningly before him? There is something in the ideal but splendid creations of poetry, embodying in its images all that is sublime, and all that is beautiful in the world of thought and of nature, that must ever strike within us a kindred chord. It bids the dim and far off past roll back its tide of vanished years, and centuries of almost forgotten ages pass again, with their memorials, across the theatre of existence. Palmyra rises before us from her ruin of ages, and her long deserted streets are thronged once more by the congregated strangers from a thousand lands. Rome, too, shakes off the yoke of Goth and Vandal, and resumes her proud title of ‘mistress of the world.’ Again the lofty Capitol is reared on the Tarpeian rock, the long and splendid triumphal procession enters the gates of the temple of Jupiter, and Rome is once more the ‘eternal city.’ Then we turn toward the classic shores of Greece, and Athens, the ‘mother of the arts,’ opens her splendors before us. The stately Parthenon, sublime in its proportions and chastely beautiful in its Doric simplicity, still surmounts the summit of the Acropolis. We roam with Plato through the shades of Academia; we stray with Socrates along the banks of the Ilissus; we enter the crowded forum, and listen to the soul-thrilling eloquence of the ‘prince of orators.’ We need not waste words to prove, that to the man of sensibility, there is a rich repast of intellectual luxuries in such exercises of the imagination. But rich as it is, there is one thing which can bestow a still higher flavor. It is only when the orator rises in the kindling majesty of virtue, when the soul of a patriot lightens in the flashing eye, when the wrongs of the oppressed pour the flush of noble indignation over his brow, and a nation’s voice is heard in the thunders of his eloquence, that we can know the full power of his appeals, and receive our most exquisite gratification. For by the very constitution of our mind, our deepest sympathies can be excited only when the holier and lovelier sensibilities of our being are awakened by the exhibition of moral beauty. There is something so commanding, so godlike, in this subservience of great talents to high and noble ends, that while the graces and the fire of the orator delight the fancy and the taste, all our better feelings are enlisted in the purity and exaltation of his purpose. Thus also with the poet—it is only when a spirit from above has breathed the inspiration over him, and his harp is tuned to the minstrelsy of Holiness,—when in the glories of antiquity, the ravages of time, and the mighty revolutions of empires, he leads us, with tender sublimity of feeling, to trace the wonder workings of that wisdom which ‘sees the end from the beginning’—that the imagination revels in the fullness of its enjoyment.
C.
COLUMBIA’S BANNER.
Bright banner of Columbia,
A fragment of the sky,