was so enamoured of the spiritual beauty that he held all actual written poems in very light esteem in the comparison. He admired Eschylus and Pindar; but, when some one was commending them, he said that Eschylus and the Greeks, in describing Apollo and Orpheus, had given no song, or no good one. They ought not to have moved trees, but to have chanted to the gods such a hymn as would have sung all their old ideas out of their heads, and new ones in." His own verses were often rude and defective. The gold does not yet run pure, is drossy and crude. The thyme and marjoram are not yet honey. But if he want lyric fineness and technical merits, if he have not the poetic temperament, he never lacks the casual thought, showing that his genius was better than his talent. He knew the worth of the Imagination for the uplifting and consolation of human life, and liked to throw every thought into a symbol. The fact you tell is of no value, but only the impression. For this reason his presence was poetic, always piqued the curiosity to know more deeply the secrets of his mind. He had many reserves, an unwillingness to exhibit to profane eyes what was still sacred in his own, and knew well how to throw a poetic veil over his experience. All readers of "Walden" will remember his mythical record of his disappointments : "I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse and a turtledove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travellers I have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks, and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who have heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud; and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they ad lost them themselves." 1 His riddles were worth the reading, and I confide t if at any time I do not understand the expression, is yet just. Such was the wealth of his truth, that it was not worth his while to use words in vain. His poem entitled "Sympathy" reveals the tenderness under that triple steel of stoicism, and the intellectual 1 Walden; p. 20. subtlety it could animate. His classic poem on "Smoke" suggests Simonides, but is better than any poem of Simonides. His biography is in his verses. His habitual thought makes all his poetry a hymn to the Cause of causes, the Spirit which vivifies and controls his own : "I hearing get, who had but ears, And sight who had but eyes before; And truth discern, who knew but learning's lore." And still more in these religious lines:— "Now chiefly is my natal hour, Which not my worth or want have bought, Whilst he used in his writings a certain petulance of remark in reference to churches or churchmen, he was a person of a rare, tender and absolute religion, a person incapable of any profanation, by act or by thought. Of course, the same isolation which belonged to his original thinking and living detached him from the social -religious forms. This is neither to be censured nor regretted. Aristotle long ago explained it, when he said, One who surpasses his fellow-citizens in virtue is no longer a part of the city. Their law is not for him since he is a law to himself." Thoreau was sincerity itself, and might fortify th convictions of prophets in the ethical laws by his holy living. It was an affirmative experience which refuse to be set aside. A truth-speaker he, capable of to most deep and strict conversation; a physician to wounds of any soul; a friend, knowing not only secret of friendship, but almost worshipped by th he few persons who resorted to him as their confes and prophet, and knew the deep value of his mind great heart. He thought that without religion devotion of some kind nothing great was ever acc plished: and he thought that the bigoted secta an had better bear this in mind. m d *SS His virtues, of course, sometimes ran into extremes. It was easy to trace to the inexorable demand on all for exact truth that austerity which made this willing hermit more solitary even than he wished. Himself of a perfect probity, he required not less of others. He had a disgust at crime, and no worldly success would cover it. He detected paltering as readily in dignified and prosperous persons as in beggars, and with equal scorn. Such dangerous frankness was in his dealing that his admirers called him "that terrible Thoreau,' as if he spoke when silent, and was still present when he had departed. I think the severity of his ideal interfered to deprive him of a healthy sufficiency of human society. The habit of a realist to find things the reverse of their appearance inclined him to put every statement in a paradox. A certain habit of antagonism defaced his earlier writings,—a trick of rhetoric not quite outgrown in his later, of substituting for the obvious word and thought its diametrical opposite. He praised wild mountains and winter forests for their domestic air, in snow and ice he would find sultriness, and commended the wilderness for resembling Rome and Paris. 'It was so dry, that you might call it wet." The tendency to magnify the moment, to read all he laws of Nature in the one object or one combination nder your eye, is of course comic to those who do not hare the philosopher's perception of identity. To him glere was no such thing as size. The pond was a small ocean; the Atlantic, a large Walden Pond. He rerred every minute fact to cosmical laws. Though he pant to be just, he seemed haunted by a certain Ponic assumption that the science of the day preded completeness, and he had just found out that savants had neglected to discriminate a particular anical variety, had failed to describe the seeds or nt the sepals. "That is to say," we replied, "the ckheads were not born in Concord; but who said и were? It was their unspeakable misfortune to De born in London, or Paris, or Rome; but, poor fellows, they did what they could, considering that they never saw Bateman's Pond, or Nine-Acre Corner, or Becky Stow's Swamp. Besides, what were you sent into the world for, but to add this observation ? " Had his genius been only contemplative, he had been fitted to his life, but with his energy and practical ability he seemed born for great enterprise and for command; and I so much regret the loss of his rare powers of action, that I cannot help counting it a fault in him that he had no ambition. Wanting this, instead of engineering for all America, he was the captain of a huckleberry party. Pounding beans is good to the end of pounding empires one of these days; but, if, at the end of years, it is still only beans! But these foibles, real or apparent, were fast vanishing in the incessant growth of a spirit so robust and wise, and which effaced its defeats with new triumphs. His study of Nature was a perpetual ornament to him, and inspired his friends with curiosity to see the world through his eyes, and to hear his adventures. They possessed every kind of interest. He had many elegancies of his own, whilst he scoffed at conventional elegance. Thus, he could not bear to hear the sound of his own steps, the grit of gravel; and therefore never willingly walked in the road, but in the grass, on mountains and in woods. His senses were acute, and he remarked that by night every dwellinghouse gives out bad air, like a slaughter - house. He liked the pure fragrance of melilot. He honoured certain plants with special regard, and, over all, the pondlily, then, the gentian, and the Mikania scandens, and "life-everlasting," and a bass-tree which he visited every year when it bloomed, in the middle of July. He thought the scent a more oracular inquisition than the sight, more oracular and trustworthy. The scent, of course, reveals what is concealed from the other senses. By it he detected earthiness. He delighted in echoes, and said they were almost the only kind of kindred voices that he heard. He loved Nature so well, was so happy in her solitude, that he became very jealous of cities and the sad work which their refinements and SAADI AND PERSIAN LITERATURE.1 WHILS HILST the Journal of the Oriental Society attests the presence of good Semitic and Sanskrit scholars in our colleges, no translator of an Eastern poet has yet appeared in America. Of the two hundred Persian bards of whose genius Von Hammer Purgstall has given specimens to Germany, we have had only some fragments collected in journals and anthologies. There are signs that this neglect is about to be retrieved. In the interval, whilst we wait for translations of our own, the publishers have wished to give this old book, which now for six hundred years has had currency in other countries, a popular form for the American public. Of three respectable English translations, that of Gladwin has been preferred, for its more simple and forcible style; and the Essay of Mr. James Ross, on the Life and Genius of Saadi, has been prefixed. Mr. Gladwin has not thought fit to turn into rhyme the passages of verse with which the Gulistan is interspersed. It is the less important, that these verses are seldom more than a metrical repetition of the sentiment of the paragraph. The slowness to import these books into our libraries -mainly owing, no doubt, to the forbidding difficulty of the original languages-is due also in part to some repulsion in the genius of races. At first sight, the Oriental rhetoric does not please our Western taste. Life in the East wants the complexity of European and American existence; and in their writing a certain monotony betrays the poverty of the landscape, and of social conditions. We fancy we are soon familiar with all their images. Majnun and Laila, rose and nightingale, parrots and tulips; mosques and dervishes; desert, caravan, and robbers; peeps at the harem; bags of gold dinars; slaves, horses, camels, sabres, 1 Preface to a reprint of Gladwin's translation of the Gulistan published at Boston, 1865. |