Norton, May 4, 1860. Our talk has been of the mystics again to-day. With all the vagaries into which some of them wandered, I cannot help feeling that these men had more of the truth than any of those more strictly styled philosophers. Cousin has a cool, patronizing way with all systems that rather amuses me at times. What he says of the relation of philosophy to religion seems very conceited: that, while they have been separated, philosophy must now take religion by the hand, and gently guide her steps to the light. The history of philosophy would rather show that he was making a guide of the one who needed to be led! Certainly it must be so, if God is wiser than man.
May 21. Out of door studies, these past days, among goldfinches, orioles, larks, brown thrushes, and all the singing brotherhood; and a course of lectures on natural history, to help out the classifying and naming. Better living than among philosophers.
June 13. These weeks that have been spent over a discussion of Eastern and Western mythologies, have allowed little time for reading or thinking of anything else. I have learned to value the thoughts of thinkers, and to perceive the difference between them and pleasant surface-writers. I expected to gain much from Mrs. Child’s “History of Religious Ideas,” and I have found it full of entertaining and instructive facts, told in a very kind and impartial way; but hers is not the philosophic depth of Carlyle, nor the broad and deep spiritual insight of Maurice,—the latter always pours light into the windows of my soul, and makes truth seem all near and clear. Mrs. C.’s work is still a most valuable one, because it makes so much comprehensible that had been shut up for the general reader, and such a spirit as hers makes everything that she writes good to read. This reading and writing have impressed me more fully than ever before with the certainty that truth is one, radiating from one source through all manner of mediums, colored and distorted by all sorts of error; yet wherever a good word has been spoken, there is the voice of God, whether the speaker were Christian or Pagan.
June 20. After reading the addresses at the Music Hall, in memory of Theodore Parker, and what is said of him in the religious papers, it seems to me a great relief that there is a perfect Judge of human character and human life above. Neither friends nor foes could know this man truly; his works will follow him, right or wrong, for he wrote himself in innumerable hearts, with all the energy of confidence in his own views. I did not like the tone of his preaching and lecturing,—it seemed to me often dogmatic, and abusive of other beliefs; certainly never very patient with what he did not like. Yet the noble impulses he communicated, the perfect freedom of thought which he advised, cannot be without their good results. The fire will try his work, as it does and will that of all human workers, to prove of what sort it is.
August 12, Gardiner, Maine. Now in the seclusion of this little bird’s nest in the woods, I feel easy and free, like the winds that sweep through pine and hemlock, and the birds that go singing or silent from the glen to the orchard. Heartsease grows here, best of all blossoms; I surely did not bring it with me, for I was very uneasy at home.
August 14. Leisure,—is it anything to be thankful for, or not? I never do what I mean to do, nor so much, as when I think my time all occupied. This vacation is almost gone, and not one of the achievements I had planned, in the way of writing, is executed. It is something to rest, but not so much, if one feels that it is not exactly right or necessary to rest!
August 18. The prospect of a journey to the mountains to-day. There is a thick fog from the river, but the birds are singing through it. I can scarcely let the summer go without giving me a glimpse of the mountains.
August 22. Returned last night after a very pleasant visit of three days. It rained on the way, but it was only the cooler and more comfortable traveling for that; and when the sun came out in the west just as we reached the top of a ridge from which the whole long mountain chain was visible on the horizon, I felt that that one view was enough compensation for going, and that first glimpse I shall never forget. The round summit of Blue, and the bolder ridges of Saddle-back and Abraham, lifted themselves above the lower elevations that would be mountains anywhere but among mountains, far off and solemn with the deepening purple of sunset, and over them the sky hung, fiery gold, intermingled with shadow. The first glimpse was finer than anything afterward, though I rode up the lovely valley of the Sandy River, which is like a paradise, if not one, recalling ever the old words of the hymn:—
“Sweet fields arrayed in living green,
And rivers of delight.”
What can be more beautiful than green meadow-lands, bordered by forest-covered slopes, that ever rise and rise, till they fade into dim blue mountain-distances?
I climbed one mountain half-way,—the bluest of the blue,—and so called, by emphasis, Mount Blue. It was a grand view,—the great distant mountain wall, and the valleys slumbering safe in its shadow. Yet the distant view is always more impressive, more full of suggestions for me; and coming back to the first point of observation, I hoped for a repetition of the first delight. But the far-off ridges were closely veiled with mist and rain, and a thunder-shower swept toward us from them, across the wide valley. Yet as we turned to leave, Mount Blue just lifted off his mist-cap for a few minutes, as if to say good-by!
Altogether, it is a most charming and comforting picture for future remembrance: flowery mountain-slopes, little garden patches of golden-rod, white everlasting and purple willow-herb, under the shade of maples, and firs, and graceful hemlocks; and glimpses of cottagers’ homes on hillsides and by running streams. My eyes are rested, and my heart is glad.August 24. Beverly. The sail down the Kennebec River was delightful, and I took a wicked sort of pleasure in shutting myself up from the crowd and enjoying it!
August 26. Sabbath day memories and regrets—how unlike everything else they are! One thing to be grateful for, in a Puritan training, is that it makes one day in the week a thoughtful one, at least. The old customs we may not keep up,—may even regard them as foolish,—still, there is a questioning as to right and wrong on this day, which we must be hardened to get wholly rid of. If I have lived unworthily for a week, the Sabbath quietly shows me myself in her mirror.
Lately I have heard some discussion as to the name and manner of keeping the day. “The Sabbath,” they say, “was a Jewish institution, not a Christian festival, such as we should keep.” But I believe that rest is still the noblest idea of the day; the old Sabbath was a type of Christian rest; not constrained, but free, full, peaceful; so I like not anything that disturbs the quiet of the day.
September 17. Whether such a record as this is a useful thing, or entirely useless, I begin to question. I don’t want to feel interested in anything which is only to benefit myself, and I don’t want to write these trifles for other people’s eyes. A journal of the “subjective” kind I have always thought foolish, as nurturing a morbid self-consciousness in the writer; and yet, alone so much as I am, it is well to have some sort of a ventilator from the interior. Letter-writing is a better safety valve than a journal, when we write to those we can trust, and this I meant to be a sort of prolonged letter, a mirror of my occupations and progress, for my old friend, Esther. But she, I fear will never read it; she is on her way to a place of better occupation, and I feel that the first stimulus is gone.
Shall I stop in the middle of my book? No, I believe not; for I think it will be indirectly a useful thing, and I shall write just when I feel like it, often enough to keep track of myself, and give account of myself to myself.
Since I returned to school I have read—well, not much; two little works on natural history; I have begun Ruskin’s fifth volume, with great interest, and Trench on the Parables for my Sunday class. “The Limits of Religious Thought” I am reading with a pupil, and with it Maurice’s reply, “What is Revelation?” My impression of these two writers, so far, is that Maurice is a much more deeply religious man than Mansel; and that the latter’s logic will not always sustain his footing. I do not like logic in religion,—reason is not always logic; reason seems to me to be the mind wide open—no faculty numb or asleep; and to that state of inner being, truth must come like sunshine, and the mysteries which cannot be explained will be harmonized with our certain knowledge, in such light.
September 22. Morris’s Poems have come to me to-day, by mail. I have just glanced through the book, and find myself attracted by the clearness and simplicity of the songs; the most beautiful the most familiar, as songs should be. It does not strike me that any of them came from the very deep places of the heart,—many of them sound as if written only to please, and as if the highest aim of the author was to have them pretty and unobjectionable. I’ve written things in that way myself sometimes, and I don’t like it.
September 26. I know I haven’t regarded ministers as others do, yet it seems to me that there are few “ministers” or “pastors” nowadays,—real ones,—such as the apostolic times knew. A “preacher” does not mean the thing, for he may preach himself only. I wonder whether the relations between pastor and people can ever be again as they have been? People are becoming their own judges and guides in religious things; this is a necessity of Protestantism, I think. And yet my “liberal” Mr. Maurice says that the “right of private judgment” only makes every man his own pope. The true idea of a church has not yet been shown the world,—a visible Church, I mean,—unless it was in the very earliest times; yes, the twelve disciples bound to their Lord in love, to do his work forever,—that was a church,—a Christian family. But then they had no system of theology to which all were expected to conform; love was all their theology. And then, afterwards, while they took the wisest and best as teachers, and called no one Master or Head but Christ, they were a true Church.
I don’t believe we can look upon our ministers as the early disciples did upon Paul and John, unless they have the spirit of Paul and John. The ministry is trifled with too much by ministers themselves, and it sometimes seems to me as if this was so, because it is made a business.
September 29. “Blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear.” This is the blessing of life: to be in the light and harmony of the love of God and reveal it. To “know the mysteries” of the kingdom of Heaven,—what is it, but to be in God’s universe with a soul opened, by love, to truth; unto such only “it is given.” Yet we have hearing and vision and the spiritual sense, all of us, and for the use of each, or misuse, or neglect, and consequent loss, every one is to blame. Oh, for a heart always opened; to read all parables in the light in which they were born!
November 10. I have actually forgotten to write for months in this book. I fear me, “my heart is nae here.” I have lived a good deal in the past week, and the world has been doing a great business,—our country in particular. The Prince has turned the heads of our democratic people, and Republicans have chosen a President at last. That is glorious! Freedom takes long strides in these better days. The millennium is not so far off as we feared. While there is so much to be lived outside, who cares for the little self-life of a journal? But I never meant it to be a “subjective” one, and when it has been so, it has been so because I was living below my ideal. Yet this shall be just the book my thoughts shape from their various moods; when the thought is for myself, I will write it, and when it is for another, I will write it too.
“Whose window opened towards the rising sun.”
So the happy pilgrim rested, knowing that as soon as there was light anywhere, he should have the first ray. Strange, that every Christian sojourner should not seek a room with windows opening to the dawn! Some of them seem afraid of the sun; they choose a chamber having only a black, northerly outlook, and lie down saying, “What a dreary, miserable world!” And what wonder that they should grow thin and sickly—plants of the shade must ever be so; the soul, as well as the body, needs large draughts of sunshine for vigorous life.
November 27. Since I came to Beverly I have been looking over “Wilhelm Meister” for the first time. I am disappointed in it, and have little respect for Goethe as a man, great as was his genius. Great thoughts he had, and they shine like constellations through the book; artistic, no doubt he was, but everything that relates to principle or right feeling is terribly chaotic, it seems to me. And Wilhelm is an embodiment of high-strung selfishness, under a cloak of generosity and spontaneous good feeling. If I could despise any man, it would be such a one as he.
December 9. God be thanked for the thinkers of good and noble thoughts! It wakes up all the best in ourselves, to come into close contact with others greater and better in every way than we are. Having just made myself the possessor of “Guesses at Truth,” I feel as if I had struck a new mine, or were a privileged traveler into regions hitherto unknown, where there is every variety of natural and cultivated growth, where there are ever recurring contrasts of scenery, and where even the rocks are not barren, but glittering with veins of precious ore. How much better these “thinking books” are than any “sensation books” of any kind, prose or poetry! They are the true intellectual companions. One does not read them, and put them by on the shelf, to be read again one of these days, perhaps,—but they are wanted close at hand, and often.
“No spring nor summer beauty has such grace
As I have seen in an Autumnal face.”
The poet Donne wrote so of the mother of “holy George Herbert.” It is so true! and I have seen the same. It would be worth while to live long, to suffer much, to struggle and to endure, if one might have such spiritual beauty blossom out of furrows and wrinkles as has been made visible in aged human faces. Such countenances do not preach,—they are poetry, and music, and irresistible eloquence.
Christmas, 1860. Two or three books I have read lately. Mrs. Jameson’s “Legends of the Madonna” is full of that fine appreciation of the deepest beauty, even in the imperfect creations of art, where the creation had in it the breath of spirit life, so peculiar to this gifted woman. If I were going to travel in Europe, I should want, next to a large historical knowledge, an intimate acquaintance with the writings of Mrs. Jameson, to appreciate the treasures of mediÆval art.
Whittier’s “Home Ballads,” dear for friendship’s sake, though not directly a gift from him, as were some of the former volumes. I wonder if that is what makes me like the songs in the “Panorama,”—some of them—better than anything in this new volume, although I know that this is more perfect as poetry. I doubt if he will ever write anything that I shall like so well as the “Summer by the Lakeside,” in that volume: it is so full of my first acquaintance with the mountains, and the ripening of my acquaintance with him, my poet-friend. How many blessings that friendship has brought me!—among them, a glimpse into a true home, a realizing of such brotherly and sisterly love as is seldom seen outside of books,—and best of all, the friendship of dear Lizzie, his sole home-flower, the meek lily blossom that cheers and beautifies his life. Heaven spare them long to each other, and their friendship to me!
But the “Ballads” are full of beauty and of a strong and steady trust, which grows more firmly into his character and poetry, as the years pass over him. “My Psalm,” with its reality, its earnest depth of feeling, makes other like poems, Longfellow’s “Psalm of Life,” for instance, seem weak and affected. I like, too, the keenness and kindness of the Whitefield poem, in which he has preserved the memory of a Sabbath evening walk I took with him.
Dr. Croswell’s poems contain many possibilities of poetry, and some realities; but there always seems to me a close air, as if the church windows were shut, in reading anything written by a devout Episcopalian. Still, there was true Christianity in the man, and it is also in the book.
December 27. To-night the telegraph reports the evacuation of Fort Moultrie by the Federal troops by order of the Executive, and the burning of the fort. There’s something of the “spirit of ’76” in the army, surely; South Carolina having declared herself a foe to the Union, how could those soldiers quietly give up one of the old strongholds to the enemy, even at the President’s command?
But what will the end be? Is this secession-farce to end with a tragedy? The South will suffer, by insurrection and famine; there is every prospect of it; the way of transgressors is hard, and we must expect it to be so. God grant that, whatever must be the separate or mutual sufferings of North and South, these convulsions may prove to be the dying struggles of slavery, and the birth-throes of liberty.
It is just about a year since “Brown of Ossawatomie” was hung in the South, for unwise interference with slavery. He was not wholly a martyr; there were blood-stains on his hands, though no murder was in his heart. He was a brave man and a Christian, and his blood, unrighteously shed, still cries to heaven from the ground. Who knows but this is the beginning of the answer? But that judicial murder was not the only wrong for which the slaveholding South is now bringing herself before the bar of judgment, before earth and heaven. The secret things of darkness are coming to light, and the question will be decided rightly, I firmly believe. And the South is to be pitied, as all hardened and blinded wrong-doers should be! I believe the North will show herself a noble foe, if foe the South determines to make her.
