Library Notes Part 4

"He who would help himself and others," says Emerson, "should not be a subject of irregular and interrupted impulses of virtue, but a continent, persisting, immovable person,--such as we have seen a few scattered up and down in time for the blessing of the world; men who have in the gravity of their nature a quality which answers to the fly-wheel in a mill, which distributes the motion equally over all the wheels, and hinders it from falling unequally and suddenly in destructive shocks. It is better that joy should be spread over all the day in the form of strength, than that it should be concentrated into ecstasies, full of danger, and followed by reactions." "It only needs that a just man should walk in our streets, to make it appear how pitiful and inartificial a contrivance is our legislation. The man whose part is taken, and who does not wait for society in anything, has a power which society cannot choose but feel."

What a character was Sir Isaac Newton! He is described as modest, candid, and affable, and without any of the eccentricities of genius, suiting himself to every company, and speaking of himself and others in such a manner that he was never even suspected of vanity. "But this,"

says Dr. Pemberton, "I immediately discovered in him, which at once both surprised and charmed me. Neither his extreme great age, nor his universal reputation, had rendered him stiff in opinion, or in any degree elated." His modesty arose from the depth and extent of his knowledge, which showed him what a small portion of nature he had been able to examine, and how much remained to be explored in the same field in which he had himself labored. In a letter to Leibnitz, 1675, he observes, "I was so persecuted with discussions arising out of my theory of light, that I blamed my own imprudence for parting with so substantial a blessing as my quiet, to run after a shadow." Nearly a year after his complaint to Leibnitz, he uses the following remarkable expression in a communication to Oldenburg: "I see I have made myself a slave to philosophy; but if I get free of Mr. Linus's business, I will resolutely bid adieu to it eternally, excepting what I do for my private satisfaction, or leave to come out after me; for I see a man must either resolve to put out nothing new, or to become a slave to defend it." His a.s.sistant and amanuensis for five years (Humphrey Newton) never heard him laugh but once in all that time: "'Twas upon occasion of asking a friend, to whom he had lent Euclid to read, what progress he had made in that author, and how he liked him. He answered by desiring to know what use and benefit in life that study would be to him. Upon which Sir Isaac was very merry." He was once disordered with pains, at the stomach, which confined him for some days to his bed, but which he bore with a great deal of patience and magnanimity, seemingly indifferent either to live or to die. "He seeing me," said his a.s.sistant, "much concerned at his illness, bid me not trouble myself; 'For if I die,' said Sir Isaac, 'I shall leave you an estate,' which he then for the first time mentioned." Says Bishop Atterbury, "In the whole air of his face and make there was nothing of that penetrating sagacity which appears in his compositions. He had something rather languid in his look and manner, which did not raise any great expectations in those who did not know him." When Pope expressed a wish for "some memoirs and character of Newton, as a private man," he did "not doubt that his life and manners would make as great a discovery of virtue and goodness and rect.i.tude of heart, as his works have done of penetration and the utmost stretch of human knowledge." When Vigani told him "a loose story about a nun," he gave up his acquaintance; and when Dr. Halley ventured to say anything disrespectful to religion, he invariably checked him with the remark, "I have studied these things,--you have not." When he was asked to take snuff or tobacco, he declined, remarking "that he would make no necessities to himself." Bishop Burnet said that he "valued him for something still more valuable than all his philosophy,--for having the whitest soul he ever knew."

Slowly and modestly the great in all things is developed. "Though the mills of G.o.d grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small." Look at the Netherlands. "Three great rivers--the Rhine, the Meuse, and the Scheldt--had deposited their slime for ages among the dunes and sand-banks heaved up by the ocean around their mouths. A delta was thus formed, habitable at last for man. It was by nature a wide mora.s.s, in which oozy islands and savage forests were interspersed among lagoons and shallows; a district lying partly below the level of the ocean at its higher tides, subject to constant overflow from the rivers, and to frequent and terrible inundations by the sea. Here, within a half submerged territory, a race of wretched ichthyophagi dwelt upon mounds, which they had raised, like beavers, above the almost fluid soil. Here, at a later day, the same race chained the tyrant Ocean and his mighty streams into subserviency, forcing them to fertilize, to render commodious, to cover with a beneficent net-work of veins and arteries, and to bind by watery highways, with the farthest ends of the world, a country disinherited by nature of its rights. A region outcast of ocean and earth wrested at last from both domains their richest treasures. A race engaged for generations in stubborn conflict with the angry elements was unconsciously educating itself for its great struggle with the still more savage despotism of man."

In the central part of a range of the Andes, at an elevation of about seven thousand feet, on a bare slope, may be observed some snow-white projecting columns. These are petrified trees, eleven being silicified, and from thirty to forty converted into coa.r.s.ely crystallized white calcaraeous spar. They are abruptly broken off, the upright stumps projecting a few feet above the ground. The trunks measured from three to five feet each in circ.u.mference. They stood a little way apart from each other, but the whole formed one group. The volcanic sandstone in which the trees were imbedded, and from the lower part of which they must have sprung, had acc.u.mulated in successive thin layers around their trunks, and the stone yet retained the impression of the bark. "It required," says the eminent scientific man who visited the spot in 1835, "little geological practice to interpret the marvelous story which this scene at once unfolded. I saw the spot where a cl.u.s.ter of fine trees once reared their branches on the sh.o.r.es of the Atlantic, when that ocean, now driven back seven hundred miles, came to the foot of the Andes. I saw that they had sprung from a volcanic soil which had been raised above the level of the sea, and that subsequently this dry land, with its upright trees, had been let down into the depths of the ocean.

In these depths, the formerly dry land was covered by sedimentary beds, and these again by enormous streams of submarine lava--one such ma.s.s attaining the thickness of a thousand feet; and these deluges of molten stone and aqueous deposits five times alternately had been spread out.

The ocean which received such thick ma.s.ses must have been profoundly deep; but again the subterranean forces exerted themselves, and I now beheld the bed of that ocean, forming a chain of mountains more than seven thousand feet in height. Nor had those antagonist forces been dormant which are always at work, wearing down the surface of the land; the great piles of strata had been intersected by many wide valleys, and the trees, now changed into silex, were exposed projecting from the volcanic soil, now changed into rocks, whence formerly, in a green and budding state, they had raised their lofty heads."

"The world," said Goethe, "is not so framed that it can keep quiet; the great are not so that they will not permit misuse of power; the ma.s.ses not so that, in hope of a gradual amelioration, they will keep tranquil in an inferior condition. Could we perfect human nature, we might expect perfection everywhere; but as it is, there will always be this wavering hither and thither; one part must suffer while the other is at ease."

"It is with human things," says Froude, "as it is with the great icebergs which drift southward out of the frozen seas. They swim two thirds under water, and one third above; and so long as the equilibrium is sustained you would think that they were as stable as the rocks. But the sea water is warmer than the air. Hundreds of fathoms down, the tepid current washes the base of the berg. Silently in those far deeps the centre of gravity is changed; and then, in a moment, with one vast roll, the enormous ma.s.s heaves over, and the crystal peaks which had been glancing so proudly in the sunlight are buried in the ocean forever." "The secret which you would fain keep, as soon as you go abroad, lo! there is one standing on the door-step to tell you the same." The revolution is all at once ripe, and the bottom is at the top again. n.o.body and everybody is responsible. "It is seldom," says John Galt, in his life of Wolsey, "that any man can sway the current of national affairs; but a wide and earnest system of action never fails to produce results which resemble the preexpected effects of particular designs." At the gorgeous coronation of Napoleon, some one asked the republican general Augereau whether anything was wanting to the splendor of the scene. "Nothing," replied Augereau, "but the presence of the million of men who have died to do away with all this."

You remember the value, to the cause of civil liberty and Christianity, of the accidental epithet of "beggars," applied to the three hundred n.o.bles who pet.i.tioned Margaret of Parma for a stay of the edicts of Philip and the Inquisition, about to be terribly executed upon the rebellious Protestants under the leaders.h.i.+p of William of Orange.

Motley, in his Dutch Republic, gives a vivid account of it. The d.u.c.h.ess was agitated and irritated by the pet.i.tion. "The Prince of Orange addressed a few words to the d.u.c.h.ess, with the view of calming her irritation. He observed that the confederates were no seditious rebels, but loyal gentlemen, well-born, well-connected, and of honorable character. They had been influenced, he said, by an honest desire to save their country from impending danger,--not by avarice or ambition.

'What, madam,' cried Berlaymont in a pa.s.sion, 'is it possible that your highness can entertain fears of these beggars? Is it not obvious what manner of men they are? They have not had wisdom enough to manage their own estates, and are they now to teach the king and your highness how to govern the country? By the living G.o.d, if my advice were taken, their pet.i.tion should have a cudgel for a commentary, and we would make them go down the steps of the palace a great deal faster than they mounted them!' Afterward, as the three hundred gentlemen and n.o.bles pa.s.sed by the house of Berlaymont, that n.o.bleman, standing at his window in company with Count Aremberg, repeated his jest: 'There go our fine beggars again. Look, I pray you, with what bravado they are pa.s.sing before us!' 'They call us beggars,' said Brederode to the three hundred banqueting with him in the Calemburg mansion on that famous April night.

'Let us accept the name. We will contend with the Inquisition, but remain loyal to the king, even till compelled to wear the beggar's sack.' He then beckoned to one of his pages, who brought him a leathern wallet, such as was worn at that day by professional mendicants, together with a large wooden bowl, which also formed part of their regular appurtenances. Brederode immediately hung the wallet around his neck, filled the bowl with wine, lifted it with both hands, and drained it at a draught. 'Long live the beggars!' he cried, as he wiped his beard and set the bowl down. 'Long live the beggars!' Then for the first time from the lips of those reckless n.o.bles rose the famous cry, which was so often to ring over land and sea, amid blazing cities, on blood-stained decks, through the smoke and carnage of many a stricken field. The humor of Brederode was hailed with deafening shouts of applause. The count then threw the wallet round the neck of his nearest neighbor, and handed him the wooden bowl. Each guest, in turn, donned the mendicant's knapsack. Pus.h.i.+ng aside his golden goblet, each filled the beggar's bowl to the brim, and drained it to the beggars' health.

Roars of laughter and shouts of 'Long live the beggars!' shook the walls of the stately mansion, as they were doomed never to shake again. The s.h.i.+bboleth was invented. The conjuration which they had been anxiously seeking was found. Their enemies had provided them with a spell which was to prove, in after days, potent enough to start a spirit from palace or hovel, forest or wave, as the deeds of the 'wild beggars,' the 'wood beggars,' and the 'beggars of the sea' taught Philip at last to understand the nation which he had driven to madness."

Johnny Appleseed, by which name Jonathan Chapman was known in every log-cabin from the Ohio River to the Northern Lakes, is an interesting character to remember. Barefooted, and with scanty clothing, he traversed the wilderness for many years, planting appleseeds in the most favorable situations. His self sacrificing life made him a favorite with the frontier settlers--men, women, and especially children; even the savages treated him with kindness, and the rattlesnakes, it was said, hesitated to bite him. "During the war of 1812, when the frontier settlers were tortured and slaughtered by the savage allies of Great Britain, Johnny Appleseed continued his wanderings, and was never harmed by the roving bands of hostile Indians. On many occasions the impunity with which he ranged the country enabled him to give the settlers warning of approaching danger, in time to allow them to take refuge in their block-houses before the savages could attack them. An informant refers to one of these instances, when the news of Hull's surrender came like a thunderbolt upon the frontier. Large bands of Indians and British were destroying everything before them, and murdering defenseless women and children, and even the block-houses were not always a sufficient protection. At this time Johnny traveled day and night, warning the people of the impending danger. He visited every cabin and delivered this message: 'The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, and He hath anointed me to blow the trumpet in the wilderness, and sound an alarm in the forest; for behold, the tribes of the heathen are round about your doors, and a devouring flame followeth after them!' The aged man who narrated this incident said that he could feel even then the thrill that was caused by this prophetic announcement of the wild-looking herald of danger, who aroused the family on a bright moonlight midnight with his piercing cry. Refusing all offers of food, and denying himself a moment's rest, he traversed the border day and night until he had warned every settler of the impending peril. Johnny also served as colporteur, systematically leaving with the settlers chapters of certain religious books, and calling for them afterward; and was the first to engage in the work of protecting dumb brutes. He believed it to be a sin to kill any creature for food. No Brahman could be more concerned for the preservation of insect life, and the only occasion on which he destroyed a venomous reptile was a source of long regret, to which he could never refer without manifesting sadness. He had selected a suitable place for planting appleseeds on a small prairie, and in order to prepare the ground, he was mowing the long gra.s.s, when he was bitten by a rattlesnake. In describing the event he sighed heavily, and said, 'Poor fellow, he only just touched me, when I, in the heat of my unG.o.dly pa.s.sion, put the heel of my scythe in him, and went away. Some time afterward I went back, and there lay the poor fellow, dead!'" "He was a man, after all,"--Hawthorne might have exclaimed of him, too,--"his Maker's own truest image, a philanthropic man!--not that steel engine of the devil's contrivance--a philanthropist!"

John Brown, when he was twelve years old, from seeing a negro slave of his own age cruelly beaten, began to hate slavery and love the slaves so intensely as "sometimes to raise the question, Is G.o.d their Father?" At forty, "he conceived the idea of becoming a liberator of the Southern slaves;" at the same time "determined to let them know that they had friends, and prepared himself to lead them to liberty. From the moment that he formed this resolution, he engaged in no business which he could not, without loss to his friends and family, wind up in fourteen days." His favorite texts of Scripture were, "Remember them that are in bonds as bound with them;" "Whoso stoppeth his ear at the cry of the poor, he also shall cry himself, but shall not be heard;" "Whoso mocketh the poor reproacheth his Maker, and he that is glad at calamities shall not be unpunished;" "Withhold not good from them to whom it is due, when it is in the power of thine hand to do it." His favorite hymns were, "Blow ye the trumpet, blow!" and "Why should we start and fear to die?"

"I asked him," said a child, "how he felt when he left the eleven slaves, taken from Missouri, safe in Canada? His answer was, 'Lord, permit now thy servant to die in peace, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation. I could not brook the idea that any ill should befall them, or they be taken back to slavery. The arm of Jehovah protected us.'"

"Upon one occasion, when one of the ex-governors of Kansas said to him that he was a marked man, and that the Missourians were determined, sooner or later, to take his scalp, the old man straightened himself up, with a glance of enthusiasm and defiance in his gray eye. 'Sir,' said he, 'the angel of the Lord will camp round about me.'" On leaving his family the first time he went to Kansas, he said, "If it is so painful for us to part, with the hope of meeting again, how dreadful must be the separation for life of hundreds of poor slaves." "He deliberately determined, twenty years before his attack upon Harper's Ferry," says Higginson, "that at some future period he would organize an armed party, go into a slave State, and liberate a large number of slaves. Soon after, surveying professionally in the mountains of Virginia, he chose the very ground for the purpose. He said 'G.o.d had established the Alleghany Mountains from the foundation of the world that they might one day be a refuge for fugitive slaves. Visiting Europe afterward, he studied military strategy for this purpose, even making designs for a new style of forest fortifications, simple and ingenious, to be used by parties of fugitive slaves when brought to bay. He knew the ground, he knew his plans, he knew himself; but where should he find his men? Such men as he needed are not to be found ordinarily; they must be reared.

John Brown did not merely look for men, therefore; he reared them in his sons. Mrs. Brown had been always the sharer of his plans. 'Her husband always believed,' she said, 'that he was to be an instrument in the hands of Providence, and she believed it too.' 'This plan had occupied his thoughts and prayers for twenty years.' 'Many a night he had lain awake and prayed concerning it.'" "He believed in human brotherhood, and in the G.o.d of Battles; he admired Nat Turner, the negro patriot, equally with George Was.h.i.+ngton, the white American deliverer." "He secretly despised even the ablest antislavery orators. He could see 'no use in this talking,' he said. 'Talk is a national inst.i.tution; but it does no manner of good to the slave.'" The year before his attack, he uttered these sentences in conversation: "Nat Turner, with fifty men, held Virginia five weeks. The same number, well organized and armed, can shake the system out of the State." "Give a slave a pike, and you make him a man. Deprive him of the means of resistance, and you keep him down." "The land belongs to the bondsman. He has enriched it, and been robbed of its fruits." "Any resistance, however b.l.o.o.d.y, is better than the system which makes every seventh woman a concubine." "A few men in the right, and knowing they are, can overturn a king. Twenty men in the Alleghanies could break slavery to pieces in two years." "When the bondsmen stand like men, the nation will respect them. It is necessary to teach them this." About the same time he said, in another conversation, "that it was nothing to die in a good cause, but an eternal disgrace to sit still in the presence of the barbarities of American slavery." "Providence," said he, "has made me an actor, and slavery an outlaw." "Duty is the voice of G.o.d, and a man is neither worthy of a good home here, or a heaven, that is not willing to be in peril for a good cause." He scouted the idea of rest while he held "a commission direct from G.o.d Almighty to act against slavery." After his capture, and while he lay in blood upon the floor of the guard-house, he was asked by a bystander upon what principle he justified his acts?

"Upon the Golden Rule," he answered. "I pity the poor in bondage that have none to help them. That is why I am here; it is not to gratify any personal animosity, or feeling of revenge, or vindictive spirit. It is my sympathy with the oppressed and the wronged, that are as good as you, and as precious in the sight of G.o.d. I want you to understand, gentlemen, that I respect the rights of the poorest and weakest of the colored people, oppressed by the slave system, just as much as I do those of the most wealthy and powerful. That is the idea that has moved me, and that alone. We expected no reward except the satisfaction of endeavoring to do for those in distress--the greatly oppressed--as we would be done by. The cry of distress, of the oppressed, is my reason, and the only thing that prompted me to come here. I wish to say, furthermore, that you had better, all you people of the South, prepare yourselves for a settlement of this question. It must come up for settlement sooner than you are prepared for it, and the sooner you commence that preparation, the better for you. You may dispose of me very easily. I am nearly disposed of now; but this question is still to be settled--this negro question, I mean. The end of that is not yet." In his "last speech," before sentence was pa.s.sed upon him, he said, "This court acknowledges, as I suppose, the validity of the law of G.o.d. I see a book kissed here which I suppose to be the Bible, or, at least, the New Testament. That teaches me that all things 'whatsoever I would that men should do unto me I should do even so to them.' It teaches me further, to 'remember them that are in bonds as bound with them.' I endeavored to act up to that instruction. I say, I am yet too young to understand that G.o.d is any respecter of persons. I believe that to have interfered as I have done, as I have always freely admitted I have done, in behalf of his despised poor, was not wrong, but right. Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children, and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments--I submit: so let it be done." In a postscript to a letter to a half-brother, written in prison, he said, "Say to my poor boys never to grieve for one moment on my account; and should any of you live to see the time when you will not blush to own your relation to old John Brown, it will not be more strange than many things that have happened." In a letter to his old school-master, he said, "I have enjoyed much of life, as I was enabled to discover the secret of this somewhat early. It has been in making the prosperity and happiness of others my own; so that really I have had a great deal of prosperity." To another he wrote, "I commend my poor family to the kind remembrance of all friends, but I well understand that they are not the only poor in our world. I ought to begin to leave off saying our world." In his last letter to his family, he said, "I am waiting the hour of my public murder with great composure of mind and cheerfulness, feeling the strong a.s.surance that in no other possible way could I be used to so much advantage to the cause of G.o.d and of humanity, and that nothing that I or all my family have sacrificed or suffered will be lost. Do not feel ashamed on my account, nor for one moment despair of the cause, or grow weary of well-doing. I bless G.o.d I never felt stronger confidence in the certain and near approach of a bright morning and glorious day than I have felt, and do now feel, since my confinement here." In a previous letter to his family, he said, "Never forget the poor, nor think anything you bestow on them to be lost to you, even though they may be as black as Ebedmelech, the Ethiopian eunuch, who cared for Jeremiah in the pit of the dungeon, or as black as the one to whom Philip preached Christ.

'Remember them that are in bonds as bound with them.'" As he stepped out of the jail-door, on his way to the gallows, "a black woman, with a little child in her arms, stood near his way. The twain were of the despised race for whose emanc.i.p.ation and elevation to the dignity of the children of G.o.d he was about to lay down his life. His thoughts at that moment none can know except as his acts interpret them. He stopped for a moment in his course, stooped over, and with the tenderness of one whose love is as broad as the brotherhood of man, kissed it affectionately. As he came upon an eminence near the gallows, he cast his eye over the beautiful landscape, and followed the windings of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the distance. He looked up earnestly at the sun, and sky, and all about, and then remarked, 'This is a beautiful country. I have not cast my eyes over it before.'" "You are more cheerful than I am, Captain Brown," said the undertaker, who sat with him in the wagon.

"Yes," answered the old man, "I ought to be." "'Gentlemen, good-by,' he said to two acquaintances, as he pa.s.sed from the wagon to the scaffold, which he was first to mount. As he quietly awaited the necessary arrangements, he surveyed the scenery unmoved, looking princ.i.p.ally in the direction of the people, in the far distance. 'There is no faltering in his step, wrote one who saw him, 'but firmly and erect he stands amid the almost breathless lines of soldiery that surround him. With a graceful motion of his pinioned right arm he takes the slouched hat from his head and carelessly casts it upon the platform by his side. His elbows and ankles are pinioned, the white cap is drawn over his eyes, the hangman's rope is adjusted around his neck.' 'Captain Brown,' said the sheriff, 'you are not standing on the drop. Will you come forward?'

'I can't see you, gentlemen,' was the old man's answer, unfalteringly spoken; 'you must lead me.' The sheriff led his prisoner forward to the centre of the drop. 'Shall I give you a handkerchief,' he then asked, 'and let you drop it as a signal?' 'No; I am ready at any time; but do not keep me needlessly waiting.'"

"Give the corpse a good dose of a.r.s.enic, and make sure work of it!"

exclaimed a captain of Virginia militia.

"The saint, whose martyrdom will make the gallows glorious like the cross!" exclaimed the Ma.s.sachusetts sage and seer.

Froude's reflections upon the death of John Davis, the navigator, one of England's Forgotten Worthies, may well be applied to John Brown: "A melancholy end for such a man--the end of a warrior, not dying Epaminondas-like on the field of victory, but cut off in a poor brawl or ambuscade. Life with him was no summer holiday, but a holy sacrifice offered up to duty, and what his Master sent was welcome." It was "hard, rough, and th.o.r.n.y, trodden with bleeding feet and aching brow; the life of which the cross is the symbol; a battle which no peace follows, this side the grave; which the grave gapes to finish, before the victory is won; and--strange that it should be so--this is the highest life of man.

Look back along the great names of history; there is none whose life has been other than this. They to whom it has been given to do the really highest work in this earth, whoever they are, Jew or Gentile, Pagan or Christian, warriors, legislators, philosophers, priests, poets, kings, slaves--one and all, their fate has been the same: the same bitter cup has been given to them to drink."

"Whether on the scaffold high, Or in the battle's van, The fittest place where man can die Is where he dies for man."

V.

REWARDS.

The Bishop of Llandaff was standing in the House of Lords, in company with Lords Thurlow and Loughborough, when Lord Southampton accosted him: "I want your advice, my lord; how am I to bring up my son so as to make him get forward in the world?" "I know of but one way," replied the bishop; "give him parts and poverty." Poussin, being shown a picture by a person of rank, remarked, "You only want a little poverty, sir, to make you a good painter."

"The advantage of riches remains with him who procured them, not with the heir." Yet, says Froude, "The man who with no labor of his own has inherited a fortune, ranks higher in the world's esteem than his father who made it. We take rank by descent. Such of us as have the longest pedigree, and are therefore the farthest removed from the first who made the fortune and founded the family, we are the n.o.blest. The nearer to the fountain, the fouler the stream; and that first ancestor, who has soiled his fingers by labor, is no better than a parvenu."

Labor, curse though we call it, as things are, seems to be life's greatest blessing. "There is more fatigue," says Tom Brown, "and trouble in a lady than in the most laborious life; who would not rather drive a wheelbarrow with nuts about the streets, or cry brooms, than be a.r.s.ennus?" (a fine gentleman). When Sir Horace Vere died, it was asked what had occasioned his death; to which some one replied, "By doing nothing." "Too much idleness," said Burke, "fills up a man's time much more completely, and leaves him less his own master than any sort of employment whatsoever." What to do? how to do? become distressing questions to him, and he finds himself in as great extremity as the man in the story of the Persian poet: "I saw," says Saadi, "an Arab sitting in a circle of jewelers of Basrah, and relating as follows: 'Once on a time having missed my way in the desert, and having no provisions left, I gave myself up for lost; when I happened to find a bag full of pearls.

I shall never forget the relish and delight that I felt on supposing it to be fried wheat; nor the bitterness and despair which I suffered on discovering that the bag contained pearls.'"

In the executive chamber one evening, there were present a number of gentlemen, among them Mr. Seward. A point in the conversation suggesting the thought, the president said, "Seward, you never heard, did you, how I earned my first dollar?" "No," rejoined Mr. Seward. "Well," continued Lincoln, "I was about eighteen years of age; I belonged, you know, to what they call down South the 'scrubs;' people who do not own slaves are n.o.body there. But we had succeeded in raising, chiefly by my labor, sufficient produce, as I thought, to justify me in taking it down the river to sell. After much persuasion, I got the consent of mother to go, and constructed a little flat-boat, large enough to take a barrel or two of things that we had gathered, with myself and little bundle, down to New Orleans. A steamer was coming down the river. We have, you know, no wharves on the Western streams; and the custom was, if pa.s.sengers were at any of the landings, for them to go out in a boat, the steamer stopping and taking them on board. I was contemplating my new flat-boat, wondering whether I could make it stronger or improve it in any particular, when two men came down to the sh.o.r.e in carriages, with trunks, and looking at the different boats, singled out mine, and asked, 'Who owns this?' I answered, somewhat modestly, 'I do.' 'Will you,' said one of them, 'take us and our trunks out to the steamer?'

'Certainly,' said I. I was very glad to have the chance of earning something. I supposed that each of them would give me two or three bits.

The trunks were put on my flat-boat, the pa.s.sengers seated themselves on the trunks, and I sculled them out to the steamboat. They got on board, and I lifted up their heavy trunks, and put them on deck. The steamer was about to put on steam again, when I called out that they had forgotten to pay me. Each of them took from his pocket a silver half-dollar, and threw it on the floor of my boat. I could scarcely believe my eyes as I picked up the money. Gentlemen, you may think it was a very little thing, and in these days it seems to me a trifle; but it was a most important incident in my life. I could scarcely credit that I, a poor boy, had earned a dollar in less than a day,--that by honest work I had earned a dollar. The world seemed wider and fairer before me. I was a more hopeful and confident being from that time."

Only such persons interest us, it has been said, who have stood in the jaws of need, and have by their own wit and might extricated themselves, and made man victorious. Young and old, all of us, have been intensely interested in knowing what Robinson Crusoe was to do with his few small means. Wonderful Robert Burns! "While his youthful mother was still on the straw, the miserable clay cottage fell above her and the infant bard, who both narrowly escaped, first being smothered to death, and then of being starved by cold, as they were conveyed through frost and snow by night to another dwelling." While he was yet a child, the poverty of the family increased to wretchedness. The "cattle died, or were lost by accident; the crops failed, and debts were acc.u.mulating. To these buffetings of misfortune the family could oppose only hard labor and the most rigid economy. They lived so sparingly that butcher-meat was a stranger in their dwelling for years." "The farm proved a ruinous bargain," said the poet; "and to clinch the misfortune, we fell into the hands of a factor, who sat for the picture I have drawn of one in my tale of Twa Dogs. My indignation yet boils at the recollection of the scoundrel factor's insolent letters, which used to set us all in tears.

This kind of life--the cheerless gloom of a hermit, with the unceasing moil of a galley-slave--brought me to my sixteenth year; a little before which period I first committed the sin of rhyme.... My pa.s.sions, when once lighted up, raged like so many devils, till they got vent in rhyme; and then the conning over my verses, like a spell, soothed all into quiet."

Edmund Kean's early life was very wretched. It was after his marriage that we find him "strolling in the old misery, giving an entertainment at Dumfries to pay his lodging. One six-penny auditor alone came."

(Once, we are told, he absented himself from his home in Exeter for three days. To the question of where he had been, he replied, grandiloquently, "I have been doing a n.o.ble action; I have been drinking these three days with a brother actor who is leaving Exeter, to keep up his spirits.") After rehearsal, and before his appearance at Drury Lane, he exclaimed prophetically, "My G.o.d! if I succeed I shall go mad!" Drunk with delight, he rushed home, and with half-frenzied incoherency poured forth the story of his triumph. "The pit rose at me!" he cried. "Mary, you shall ride in your carriage yet!" "Charles," lifting the child from his bed, "shall go to Eton." Then his voice faltered, and he murmured, "If Howard (his recently deceased child) had but lived to see it!"

Among the companions of Reynolds, when he was studying his art at Rome, was a fellow-pupil of the name of Astley. They made an excursion, with some others, on a sultry day, and all except Astley took off their coats. After several taunts he was persuaded to do the same, and displayed on the back of his waistcoat a foaming waterfall. Distress had compelled him to patch his clothes with one of his own landscapes.

Henderson, the actor, after a simple reading of a newspaper, repeated such an enormous portion of it as seemed utterly marvelous. "If you had been obliged, like me," he said, in reply to the surprise expressed by his auditors, "to depend during many years for your daily bread on getting words by heart, you would not be so much astonished at habit having produced the facility." Amyot was a servant at college, and studied, like Ramus, by the light of burning charcoal from want of candles; but his translations earned him a mitre as well as renown.

Duchatel rose from being reader in a printing-office to be grand almoner of France; and was paid by the king to talk to him during his meals.

Excellence is not matured in a day, and the cost of it is an old story.

The beginning of Plato's Republic was found in his tablets written over and over in a variety of ways. It took Virgil, it is stated, three years to compose his ten short eclogues; seven years to elaborate his Georgics, which comprise little more than two thousand verses; and he employed more than twelve years in polis.h.i.+ng his aeneid, being even then so dissatisfied with it, that he wished before his death to commit it to the flames. Horace was equally indefatigable, and there are single odes in his works which must have cost him months of labor. Lucretius's one poem represents the toil of a whole life-time. Thucydides was twenty years writing his history, which is comprised in one octavo volume.

Gibbon wrote the first chapter of his work three times before he could please himself. Montesquieu, alluding in a letter to one of his works, says to his correspondent, "You will read it in a few hours, but the labor expended on it has whitened my hair." Henri Beyle transcribed his History of Painting in Italy seventeen times. Sainte-Beuve often spent a whole week on two or three octavo pages. Gray was so fastidious in polis.h.i.+ng and perfecting his Elegy, that he kept it nearly twenty years, touching it up and improving it. There is a poem of ten lines in Waller's works, which he himself informs us, took him a whole summer to put into shape. Malherbe would spoil half a quire of paper in composing and discomposing and recomposing a stanza. It is reckoned that during the twenty-five most prolific years of his life he composed no more than, on the average, thirty-three verses per annum. There is a good story told of him, which ill.u.s.trates amusingly the elaborate care he took with his poems. A certain n.o.bleman of his acquaintance had lost his wife, and was anxious that Malherbe should dedicate an ode to her memory, and condole with him in verse on the loss he had sustained.

Malherbe complied, but was so fastidious in his composition, that it was three years before the elegy was completed. Just before he sent it in, he was intensely chagrined to find that his n.o.ble friend had solaced himself with a new bride, and was, consequently, in no humor to be pestered with an elegy on his old one. When dying, his confessor, in speaking of the happiness in heaven, expressed himself inaccurately.

"Say no more about it," said Malherbe, "or your style will disgust me with it." Miss Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Hume, and Fox, have all recorded the trouble they took. Ta.s.so was unwearied in correcting; so were Pope and Boileau. The Cambridge ma.n.u.script of Milton's Lycidas shows numerous erasures and interlineations. Pascal spent twenty days in perfecting a single letter. The fables of La Fontaine were copied and re-copied over and over again. Alfieri was laboriously painstaking in composition. We are told that if he approved of his first sketch of a piece--after laying it by for some time, nor approaching it again until his mind was free of the subject--he submitted it to what he called "development"--writing out in prose the indicated scenes, with all the force at his command, but without stopping to a.n.a.lyze a thought or correct an expression. He then proceeded to verify at his leisure the prose he had written, selecting with care the ideas he thought best, and rejecting those which he deemed unworthy of a place. Nor did he even yet regard his work as finished, but incessantly polished it verse by verse, and made continual alterations. Moliere composed very slowly, although he liked the contrary to be understood, and many pieces supposed to have been written upon the spur of a royal command, had been prepared some time previously. He said to Boileau, "I have never done anything with which I am truly content." Sheridan, when urged by the publisher, Ridgeway, to finish his ma.n.u.script of The School for Scandal, declared that he had been nineteen years endeavoring to satisfy himself with the style of it, but had not succeeded. Joubert had a habit from his twentieth year to his seventieth, of jotting down with pencil the best issues of his meditation as they arose; and out of this chaos of notes was shaped, many years after his death, a full volume of Thoughts, "which," says the translator, "from their freshness and insight, their concise symmetry of expression, their pithiness, their variety, make a rich, enduring addition to the literature of France, and to all literature." Addison wore out the patience of his printer; frequently, when nearly a whole impression of a Spectator was worked off, he would stop the press to insert a new preposition. Lamb's most sportive essays were the result of most intense labor; he used to spend a week at a time in elaborating a single humorous letter to a friend. Tennyson is reported to have written Come into the Garden, Maud, more than fifty times over before it pleased him; and Locksley Hall, the first draught of which was written in two days, he spent the better part of six weeks, for eight hours a day, in altering and polis.h.i.+ng. d.i.c.kens, when he intended to write a Christmas story, shut himself up for six weeks, lived the life of a hermit, and came out looking as haggard as a murderer. His ma.n.u.scripts show that he wrote with the greatest care, and scrupulously revised his writing in order to render each sentence as perfect as might be. He made his alterations so carefully that it is difficult to trace the words which he had originally written. In many instances "the primary words have been erased so carefully that it is next to impossible to form an idea of how the pa.s.sages originally stood." Balzac, after he had thought out thoroughly one of his philosophical romances, and ama.s.sed his materials in a most laborious manner, retired to his study, and from that time until his book had gone to press, society saw him no more. When he appeared again among his friends, he looked, said his publisher, in the popular phrase, like his own ghost. The ma.n.u.script was afterward altered and copied, when it pa.s.sed into the hands of the printer, from whose slips the book was re-written for the third time. Again it went into the hands of the printer,--two, three, and sometimes four separate proofs being required before the author's leave could be got to send the perpetually re-written book to press at last, and so have done with it. He was literally the terror of all printers and editors. Moore thought it quick work if he wrote seventy lines of Lalla Rookh in a week. Kinglake's Eothen, we are told, was re-written five or six times, and was kept in the author's writing-desk almost as long as Wordsworth kept the White Doe of Rylstone, and kept like that to be taken out for review and correction almost every day. Buffon's Studies of Nature cost him fifty years of labor, and he re-copied it eighteen times before he sent it to the printer. "He composed in a singular manner, writing on large-sized paper, in which, as in a ledger, five distinct columns were ruled. In the first column he wrote down the first thoughts; in the second, he corrected, enlarged, and pruned it; and so on, until he had reached the fifth column, within which he finally wrote the result of his labor. But even after this, he would re-compose a sentence twenty times, and once devoted fourteen hours to finding the proper word with which to round off a period." John Foster often spent hours on a single sentence. Ten years elapsed between the first sketch of Goldsmith's Traveller and its completion. The poet's habit was to set down his ideas in prose, and, when he had turned them carefully into rhyme, to continue retouching the lines with infinite pains to give point to the sentiment and polish to the verse. La Rochefoucauld spent fifteen years in preparing his little book of Maxims, altering some of them, Segrais says, nearly thirty times. Rogers showed a friend a note to his Italy, which, he said, took him a fortnight to write. It consists of a very few lines. We all know how Sheridan polished his wit and finished his jokes, the same surprising things being found on different bits of paper, differently expressed. Not long before his death Adam Smith told Dugald Stewart that he wrote with just as much difficulty then as when he first began. The Benedictine editor of Bossuet's works stated that his ma.n.u.scripts were bleared over with such numerous interlineations that they were nearly illegible. Sterne was incessantly employed for six months in perfecting one very diminutive volume. Herrick was a painstaking elaborator: with minute and curious care he polished and strengthened his work: "his airy facility, his seemingly spontaneous melodies, as with Sh.e.l.ley, were earned by conscious labor; perfect freedom was begotten of perfect art."

It seems, no doubt, to many a reader of Macaulay's History, as if he wrote without effort, and as if the charms of his style were the gift of nature rather than the product of art, so spontaneously do they appear to flow from his pen. It was the general opinion of his literary friends that he wrote with great rapidity, and made few corrections in his ma.n.u.scripts. On the contrary, we are told by his nephew and biographer, that he never allowed a sentence to pa.s.s until it was as good as he could make it, and would often re-write paragraphs and whole chapters that he might gain even a slight improvement in arrangement or expression. After writing thus carefully, he corrected again remorselessly, and his ma.n.u.scripts were covered with erasures. He paid equal attention to proof-sheets. "He could not rest until the lines were level to a hair's breadth, and the punctuation correct to a comma; until every paragraph concluded with a telling sentence, and every sentence flowed like running water." To Napier, the editor of The Edinburgh Review, he wrote from Calcutta: "At last I send you an article of interminable length about Lord Bacon. I never bestowed so much care on anything that I have written. There is not a sentence in the latter half of the article which has not been repeatedly recast." Carlyle, Miss Martineau says, erred on the side of fastidiousness. "Almost every word was altered, and revise followed revise." Giardini, when asked how long it would take to learn to play on the violin, answered, "Twelve hours a day for twenty years together." Bulow is reported to have said, "If I stop practice for one day, I notice it in my playing; if I stop two days, my friends notice it; if I stop three days, the public notices it." Leonardo da Vinci would walk the whole length of Milan that he might alter a single tint in his picture of the Last Supper. t.i.tian, we are told, after laying his foundation with a few bold strokes, would turn the picture to the wall, and leave it there perhaps for months, turning it round again after a time to look at it carefully, and scan the parts as he would the face of his greatest enemy. If at this time any portion of it should appear to him to have been defective, he would set to work to correct it, applying remedies as a surgeon would apply them, cutting off excrescences here, superabundant flesh there, redressing an arm, adjusting or setting a limb, regardless of the pain which it might cause. In this way he would reduce the whole to a certain symmetry, put it aside, and return again a third or more times till the first quintessence had been covered over with its padding of flesh. Then came the finis.h.i.+ng, which was done at as many more different paintings, to say nothing of the innumerable last touches--with his fingers as well as with his brush--of which he is said to have been particularly fond.

It is a received opinion that Edmund Kean's acting was wholly spontaneous and unstudied; this is a mistake. A contemporary, writing of his earlier professional life, says, "He used to mope about for hours, walking miles and miles alone with his hands in his pockets, thinking intensely on his characters. No one could get a word from him; he studied and slaved beyond any actor I ever knew." Neither did he relax his labors when he had reached the highest pinnacle of fame. It is related of him, that when studying Maturin's Bertram, he shut himself up for two days to study the one line, "Bertram has kissed the child!" It made one of those electrical effects which from their vividness were supposed to be merely impulsive. His wife said her husband would often stand up all night before a pier gla.s.s in his chamber, endeavoring to acquire the right facial expression for some new part. John Kemble's new readings of Hamlet were many and strange, and excited much comment. "The performance was eminently graceful, calm, deep studied--during his life he wrote out the entire part forty times--but cold and unsympathetic."

As to orators, the greatest of antiquity were not ashamed to confess the industry of the closet. Demosthenes gloried in the smell of the lamp; and it is recorded of Cicero, that he not only so laboriously prepared his speeches, but even so minutely studied the effect of their delivery, that on one occasion, when he had to oppose Hortensius, the reiterated rehearsals of the night before so diminished his strength as almost to incapacitate him in the morning. Lord Erskine corrected and corrected his very eloquent orations, and Burke literally worried his printer into a complaint against the fatigue of his continual revises. Indeed, it is said, such was the fastidiousness of his industry, that the proof-sheet not unfrequently exhibited a complete erasure of the original ma.n.u.script. Whitefield's eloquence was a natural gift improved by diligent study; and Garrick said that each repet.i.tion of the same sermon showed a constant improvement,--as many as forty repet.i.tions being required before the discourse reached its full perfection. "I composed,"

says Lord Brougham, "the peroration of my speech for the queen, in the Lords, after reading and repeating Demosthenes for three or four weeks, and I composed it twenty times over at least, and it certainly succeeded in a very extraordinary degree, and far above any merits of its own." He says that Erskine wrote down word for word the pa.s.sage about the savage and his bundle of sticks. His mind having acquired a certain excitement and elevation, and received an impetus from the tone and quality of the matured and premeditated composition, retained that impetus, after the impelling cause had died away. Webster, it is said, was in the habit of writing and re-writing most of the fine pa.s.sages of his senatorial and forensic speeches, and sometimes prepared them, in order that they might afterward be introduced when occasion should offer. He was wont to say that the following pa.s.sage in his speech upon President Jackson's protest, in May, 1834, had been changed by him twelve times, before he reduced it to a shape that entirely met his approval. Perhaps it is not surpa.s.sed, for poetical beauty, by anything that ever fell from his eloquent lips. Speaking of resistance by the United States of the aggressions of Great Britain, he said: "They raised their flag against a power, to which, for the purposes of foreign conquest and subjugation, Rome, in the height of her glory, is not to be compared. A power which has dotted over the surface of the whole globe with her possessions and military posts--whose morning drum-beat following the sun, and keeping company with the hours, circles the earth daily with one continuous and unbroken strain of the martial airs of England."

As to compensation, it is stated that Goethe's works were not in his own time commercially successful. After his return from Italy, the edition of his collected works, which he had compared and revised with labor and with care, sold, as his publisher complained, only "very slowly."

Coleridge gained little or no money by his writings. He says, "I question whether there ever existed a man of letters so utterly friendless, or so unconnected as I am with the dispensers of contemporary reputation, or the publishers in whose service they labor."

When Newton lectured, a Lucasian professor, "so few went to hear him, that ofttimes he did, in a manner, for want of hearers, read to the walls." The Paradise Lost had a very limited sale, till, fifty years after its publication, it was brought into light by the criticisms of Addison. Campbell for years could not find a bookseller who would buy The Pleasures of Hope. In the first thirteen years after the publication of Boswell's Life of Johnson, less than four thousand copies were sold.

There were only forty-five copies of Hume's History sold in the first twelvemonth. Twelve years elapsed before the first five hundred copies of Emerson's Nature were purchased by the public. Was.h.i.+ngton Irving was nearly seventy years old before the sale of his works at home met the expenses of his simple life at Sunnyside. It has been related that while Madame t.i.tiens was receiving an ovation for her singing of Kathleen Mavourneen, the author of the song sat weeping in the audience, the poorest and obscurest man present. Willis, breakfasting at the Temple with a friend, met Charles and Mary Lamb. He mentioned having bought a copy of Elia the last day he was in America, to send as a parting gift to one of the most lovely and talented women in his country. "What did you give for it?" said Lamb. "About seven and six-pence." "Permit me to pay you that," said he; and with the utmost earnestness he counted out the money upon the table. "I never yet wrote anything that would sell,"

he continued. "I am the publishers' ruin."

Fortune, it has been truly said, has rarely condescended to be the companion of genius; others find a hundred by-roads to her palace; there is but one open, and that a very indifferent one, for men of letters.

Cervantes, the immortal genius of Spain, is supposed to have wanted bread; Le Sage was a victim of poverty all his life; Camoens, the solitary pride of Portugal, deprived of the necessaries of life, perished in a hospital at Lisbon. The Portuguese, after his death, bestowed on the man of genius they had starved the appellation of Great.

Vondel, the Dutch Shakespeare, to whom Milton was greatly indebted, after composing a number of popular tragedies, lived in great poverty, and died at ninety years of age; then he had his coffin carried by fourteen poets, who, without his genius, probably partook of his wretchedness. The great Ta.s.so was reduced to such a dilemma that he was obliged to borrow a crown from a friend to subsist through the week. He alludes to his dress in a pretty sonnet, which he addresses to his cat, entreating her to a.s.sist him, during the night, with the l.u.s.tre of her eyes, having no candle to see to write his verses. One day Louis the Fourteenth asked Racine what there was new in the literary world. The poet answered that he had seen a melancholy spectacle in the house of Corneille, whom he found dying, deprived even of a little broth.

Spenser, the child of Fancy, languished out his life in misery. Lord Burleigh, it is said, prevented the queen giving him a hundred pounds, thinking the lowest clerk in his office a more deserving person.

Sydenham, who devoted his life to a laborious version of Plato, died in a miserable spunging-house. "You," said Goldsmith to Bob Bryanton, "seem placed at the centre of fortune's wheel, and, let it revolve ever so fast, are insensible to the motion. I seem to have been tied to the circ.u.mference, and whirled disagreeably round, as if on a whirligig....

Oh G.o.ds! G.o.ds! here in a garret, writing for bread, and expecting to be dunned for a milk-score." To another, about the same time, he wrote, "I have been some years struggling with a wretched being--with all that contempt that indigence brings with it--with all those pa.s.sions which make contempt insupportable. What, then, has a jail that is formidable?

I shall at least have the society of wretches, and such is to me true society." Cervantes planned and commenced Don Quixote in prison. John Bunyan wrote the first part, at least, of Pilgrim's Progress in jail.

Both of these immortal works are the delight and solace of reading people wherever there is a literature. The latter is said to have been translated into a greater number of languages than any other book in the world, with two exceptions, the Bible and the Imitation of Christ. Sir James Harrington, author of Oceana, on pretense of treasonable practices, was put into confinement, which lasted until he became deranged, when he was liberated. Sir Roger L'Estrange was tried and condemned to death, and lay in prison nearly four years; constantly expecting to be led forth to execution. Ben Jonson, John Selden, Jeremy Taylor, and Edmund Waller were imprisoned. Sir Walter Raleigh, during his twelve years' imprisonment, wrote his best poems and his History of the World, a work accounted vastly superior to all the English historical productions which had previously appeared. "Written," says the historian Tytler, "in prison, during the quiet evening of a tempestuous life, we feel, in its perusal, that we are the companions of a superior mind, nursed in contemplation and chastened and improved by sorrow, in which the bitter recollection of injury and the asperity of resentment have pa.s.sed away, leaving only the heavenly lesson, that all is vanity." Old George Wither wrote his Shepherd's Hunting during his first imprisonment. The superiority of intellectual pursuits over the gratification of sense and all the malice of fortune, has never been more touchingly or finely ill.u.s.trated, it has been well said, than in this poem.

"Can anything be so elegant," asks Emerson, "as to have few wants and serve them one's self? It is more elegant to answer one's own needs than to be richly served; inelegant perhaps it may look to-day, and to a few, but it is an elegance forever and to all.... Parched corn, and a house with one apartment, that I may be free of all perturbations, that I may be serene and docile to what the mind shall speak, and girt and road-ready for the lowest mission of knowledge or good-will, is frugality for G.o.ds and heroes." Said Confucius, "With coa.r.s.e rice to eat, with water to drink, and my bended arm for a pillow,--I have still joy in the midst of these things." "For my own private satisfaction,"

said Bishop Berkeley, "I had rather be master of my own time than wear a diadem." "I would rather," said Th.o.r.eau, "sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than to be crowded on a velvet cus.h.i.+on.... If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes. All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be.

Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles. Our moulting season, like that of fowls, must be a crisis in our lives. The loon retires to solitary ponds to spend it. Thus also the snake casts its slough, and the caterpillar its wormy coat, by an internal industry and expansion; for clothes are but our outmost cuticle and mortal coil.... It is desirable that a man be clad so simply that he can lay his hands on himself in the dark, and that he live in all respects so compactly and preparedly, that, if an enemy take the town, he can, like the old philosopher, walk out the gate empty-handed without anxiety."

"You see in my chamber," said Goethe, near the close of his life, "no sofa; I sit always in my old wooden chair, and never, till a few weeks ago, have permitted even a leaning place for my head to be added. If surrounded by tasteful furniture, my thoughts are arrested, and I am placed in an agreeable, but pa.s.sive state. Unless we are accustomed to them from early youth, splendid chambers and elegant furniture had best be left to people who neither have nor can have any thoughts."