Wintry Delights

Now in wintry delights, and long fireside meditation,'Twixt studies and routine paying due court to the Muses,My solace in solitude, when broken roads barricade meMudbound, unvisited for months with my merry children,Grateful t'ward Providence, and heeding a slander against meLess than a rheum, think of me to-day, dear Līonel, and takeThis letter as some account of Will Stone's versification.

We, whose first memories reach half of a century backward,May praise our fortune to have outliv'd so many dangers,--Faultiness of Nature's unruly machinery or man's--;For, once born, whatever 'tis worth, LIFE is to be held to,Its mere persistence esteem'd as rēal attainment,Its crown of silver reverenc'd as one promise of youthFruiting, of existence one needful purpose accomplish'd:And 'twere worth the living, howe'er unkindly bereft ofThose joys and comforts, throu' which we chiefly regard it:Nay,--set aside the pleasant unhinder'd order of our life,Our happy enchantments of Fortune, easy surroundings,Courteous acquaintance, dwelling in fair homes, the delight ofLong-plann'd excursions, the romance of journeying in landsHistoric, of sēeing their glory, the famous adornmentsGiv'n to memorial Earth by man, decorator of all-time,(--As wē saw with virginal eyes travelling to behold them,--)Her gorgeous palaces, vher tow'rs and stately cathedrals;Where the turrets and domes of pictured Tuscany slumber,Or the havoc'd splendours of Rome imperial, or whereGlare the fretted minarets and mosks of trespassing Islam,And old Nilus, amid the mummied suzerainty of Egypt,Glideth, a godly presence, consciously regardless of all things,Save his unending toil and ēternal recollections:--

Set these out of account, and with them too put away ART,Those ravishings of mind, those sensuous intelligences,By whose grace the elect enjoy their sacred aloofnessFrom Life's meagre affairs, in beauty's rēgenerate youthReading immortality's sublime revelation, adoringTheir own heav'nly desire; nor alone in worship assist they,But take, call'd of God, part and pleasure in crēationOf that beauty, the first of His first purposes extoll'd:--

Yea, set aside with these all NATURE'S beauty, the wildwood'sFlow'ry domain, the flushing, softcrowding loveliness of Spring,Lazy Summer's burning dīal, the serenely solemn spellsOf Sibylline Autumn, with gay-wing'd Plenty departing;All fair change, whether of seasons or bright recurrent day,Morning or eve; the divine night's wonderous empyrean;High noon's melting azure, his thin cloud-country, the landscapeMountainous or maritime, blue calms of midsummer Ocean,Broad corn-grown champaign goldwaving in invisible wind,Wide-water'd pasture, with shade of whispering aspen;All whereby Nature winneth our love, fondly appearingAs to caress her children, or all that in exaltationLifteth aloft our hearts to an unseen glory beyond her:--

Put these out of account; yea, more I say, banish alsoFrom the credit sŭm of enjoyment those simple AFFECTIONS,Whose common exercise informs our natural instinct;That, set in our animal flesh-fabric, of our very lifebloodDraw their subsistence, and even in ungenerous heartsRoot, like plants in stony deserts and 'neath pitiless snows.Yea, put away all LOVE, the blessings and pīetiesvof home,All delicate heart-bonds, vital tendernesses untold,Joys that fear to be named, feelings too holy to gaze on;And with his inviolate peace-trīumph his passionate warBe forgone, his mighty desire, thrilling ecstasies, ardoursOf mystic reverence, his fierce flame-eager emotions,Idolatrous service, blind faith and ritual of fire.

If from us all these things were taken away, (that is all artAnd all beauty whate'er, and all love's varied affection,)Yet would enough subsist in other concerns to suffice us,And feed intelligence, and make life's justification.What this is, if you should ask me, beyond or above the rejoicingIn vegetant or brute existence, answer is easy;'Tis the reflective effort of mind that, conscious of itself,Fares forth exploring nature for principle and cause,Keenly with all the cunning pleasure and instinct of a hunter,Who, in craft fashioning weapon and sly snare, tracketh afterHis prey fl[=y]ing afield, and that which his arm killeth eateth.

History and SCĪENCE our playthings are: what an untoldWealth of inexhaustive treasure is stored up for amusement!Shall the amass'd Earth-structure appeal to me less than in earlyChildhood an old fives-ball, whose wraps I wondering unwound,Untwining the ravel'd worsted, that mere rubbish and wasteOf leather and shavings had bound and moulded elasticInto a perfect sphere? Shall not the celestial earth-ballEqually entertain a mature enquiry, reward ourExamination of its contexture, conglomeratedOf layer'd débris, the erosion of infinite ages?Tho' I lack the wizard Darwin's scīentific insightOn the barren sea-beaches of East Patagonia gazing,I must wond'ring attend, nay learn myself to decipherTime's rich hīeroglyph, with vast elemental pencilScor'd upon Earth's rocky crust,--minute shells slowly collectingPress'd to a stone, uprais'd to a mountain, again to a fine sandWorn, burying the remains of an alien organic epoch,In the flat accretions of new sedimentary strata;All to be crush'd, crumpled, confused, contorted, abandon'd,Broke, as a child's puzzle is, to be recompos'd with attention;Nature's history-book, which shē hath torn as asham'd of;And lest those pictures onvher fragmentary pagesShould too lightly reveal frustrate Antiquity, hath laidRūin upon rūin, revolution upon revolution:Yet no single atom, no least insignificant grainBut, having order alike of fate, and faulty disorder,Holds a record of Time, very vestiges of the Creation;Which who will not attend scorns blindly the only commandmentsBy God's finger of old inscribed on table of earth-stone.

This for me wer' enough: yet confin'd Gēology's fieldCounts not in all Scīence more than the planet to the Cosmos;Where our central Sun, almighty material author,And sustainer, appears as a half-consumed vanishing spark,Bearing along with it, entangled in immensity's onwardSpiral eddies, the blacken'd dust-motes whirl'd off from around it.But tho' man's microscopical functions measure all thingsBy his small footprints, finger-spans and ticking of clocks,And thereby conceive the immense--such multiple extentAs to defy Idēas of imperative cerebration,--None the less observing, measuring, patiently recording,Hē mappeth out the utter wilderness of unlimited space;Carefully weigheth a weight to the sun, reckoneth for it its pathOf trackless travelling, the precise momentary placesOf the planets and their satellites, their annual orbits,Times, perturbations of times, and orbit of orbit.What was Alexander's subduing of Asia, or thatSheep-worry of Europe, when pigmy Napoleon enter'dHer sovereign chambers, and her kings with terror eclips'd?His footsore soldiers inciting across the ravag'd plains,Thro' bloody fields of death tramping to an ugly disaster?Shows any crown, set above the promise (so rudely accomplisht)Of their fair godlike young faces, a glory to compareWith the immortal olive that circles bold Galileo'sBrows, the laurel'd halovof Newton's unwithering fame?Or what a child's surmise, how trifling a journey ColumbusAdventur'd, to a land like that which he sail'd from arriving,If compar'd to Bessel's magic divination, awardingMagnificent Siriusvhis dark and invisible bride;Or when Adams by Cam, (more nearly Leverrier in France,)From the minutely measur'd vacillation of Uranus, augur'dWhere his mighty brother Neptune went wandering unnamed,And thro' those thousand-million league-darknesses of spaceDrew him slowly whene'er he pass'd, and slowly released him!Nil admirari! 'Tis surely a most shabby thinkerWho, looking on Nature, finds not the reflection appalling

And if these wonders we must with wonder abandon,Astronomy's Cosmos, the Immense, and those physical lawsThat link mind to matter, laws mutual in revelation,Which measure and analyse Nature's primordial orgasm,Lifegiving omnipotential LIGHT, its speed to determine,Untwist its rainbow of various earthcoloring rays,Counting strictly to each its own millionth-millimetredWave-length, and mapping out on fray'd diffraction of etherAll the adust elements and furnaced alchemy ofvheav'n;Laws which atone the disorder of infinit observationWith tyrannous numbers and abstract theory, closingProtean Nature with nets of principle exact;Her metamorphoses transmuting by correlation,All heat, all chemical concourse or electrical action,All force and all motion of all matter, or subtle or gross:--If we these wonders, I say, with wonder abandon,Nor can for mental heaviness their high study pursue,Yet no story of adventures or fabulous exploitOf famous'd heroes hath so rōmantic a discourse,As these growing annals of long heav'n-scaling achievementAnd far discoveries, which he whovidly neglectethIs but a boor as truly ridiculous as the village clown,In whose thought the pleasant sun-ball performeth a circuitDaily above mother earth, and resteth nightly beneath her.

Nor will a man, whose mind respects its own operations,Lightly resign himself to remain in darkness uninform'd,While any true scīence of fact lies easy within reachConcerning Nature's ēternal essential object,Self-matter, embodying substratum of ev'ry relationBoth of Time and Space, at once the machinery and stuffOf those Idēas; carrier, giver, only receiverOf such perceptions as arise in sensible organs.Now whether each element is a cōherency of equalStrictly symmetric atoms, or among themselves the atoms areLike animals in a herd, having each an identity distinct,--So that atoms of gold compar'd with sulphur or ironAre but as ancient Greeks compar'd with Chinamen and Turks;--Nor whether all elements are untransmutable offspringFrom one kind or more thro' endless eternity changing,Or whether invisibles claim rightly the name of immortals,I make novenquiry; matter minutely dividedShowing a like paradox, with ever-continuous extent,And, as Adam, the atom will pose as a naked assumption:--But since all the knowledge which man was born to attain toHath these only channels, (which must limit and qualifyvit,)We shall con the grammar, the material alphabet of life,Yea, ev'n more from error to preserve our inquisitive mind,Than to secure well-bēing against adversity and ill.Surely if all is a flux, 'tis well to look into the flūid,Inspect and question the apparent, shifty behaviour,Wherein lurketh alone our witness of all physical law,As we read the habits unchanging of invisible things,Their timeless chronicles, the unintelligent ethic of dust:In which dense labyrinth he who was guiding avised me,With caution saying 'Were this globe's area of landWholly cover'd from sight, pack'd close to the watery marginsWith mere empty vessels, I could myself put in each oneSome different substance, and write its formula thereon.'

Thus would speak the chemist; and Nature's superabundance,Her vast infinitude of waste vāriety untold,Asvher immense extent and inconceivable object,Squandering activities throughout ēternity, dwarfethMan's little aim and hour, his doubtful fancy: what are we?Our petty selfseekings, our speedily passing affections?Life having existed so extravagantly before us;Earth bearing so slight a regard or care for us; and allAfter us unconcern'd to remain, strange, beautiful as now.May not an idle echovof an antique pōetry haunt me,'Friendship is all feigning, yeavall loving is folly only'?--Yet doth not very mention of antique pōetry and loveQuickly recall to better motions my dispirited faith?And I see man's discontent as witness assertingHis moral idēal, that, born of Nature, is heir toHer children's titles, which nought may cancel or impugn;Not wer' of all her works man least, but ranking among themHighly or ev'n as best, he wrongs himself to imagineHis soul foe to her aim, or fromvher sanction an outlaw.Nay, but just as man should appear more fully accordantWith things not himself, would they rank withvhim as equals:Judging other creatures he sets them wholly beneath him;His disquīet among manifold and alien objectsBēing sure evidence, the effect of an understanding,And perception allow'd by Nature solely to himself.

Highly then is to be prais'd the resourceful wisdom of our time,That spunged out the written science and thēories of life,And, laying foundation of its knowledge in physical law,Gave it prēeminence o'er all enquiry, erectingSuperstructive of all, bringing ev'ry research to the object,Boldly a new scīence of MAN, from dreamy scholasticImprisoning set free, and inveterate divination,Into the light of truth, to the touch of history and fact.Since 'the proper study of mankind is man',--nor aforetimeWas the proverb esteem'd as a truism less than it is now,--'Tis strange that the method lay out of sight unaccomplisht,And that we, so late to arrive, should first set a valueOn the delusive efforts of human babyhood; and soWitnessing impatiently the rear of their disappearance,Upgathering the relics and vestiges of primitive man,Should ratifyvinstinct for scīence, look to the darknessFor light, find a knowledge where 'twas most groping or unknown:While civilization's advances mutely regardingTalk we of old scapegoats, discuss bloodrites, immolations,Worship of ancestors; explain complexities involvedOf tribal marriages, derivation of early religions,Priestly taboos, totems, archaic mysteries of trees,All the devils and dreams abhorr'd of barbarous ages.

And 'tis a far escape from wires, wheels and penny papersAnd the worried congestion of our Victorian era,Whose many inventions of world-wide luxury have changedLife's very face:--but enough wē hear of progress, enough haveOur conscious scīence and comforts trumpeted; altho'Hardly can I, who so many years eagerly frequentedBartholomew's fountain, not speak of things to awakenKind old HIPPOCRATES, howe'er hē; slumbereth, entomb'd'Neath the shatter'd winejars and rūined factories of Cos,Or where hē wander'd in Thessalian Larissa:For when his doctrine, which Rome had wisely adopted,Sank lost with the treasures ofvher deep-foundering empire,Novart or scīence grew so contemptible, order'dSo by mere folly, windy caprice, superstition and chance,As boastful MEDICINE, with humours fit for a madhouse,Save when some Sydenham, like Samson among the Philistines,Strode bond-bursting along with a smile of genial instinct.Nor when here and there some ray, in darkness arising,Hopefully seem'd to herald the coming dawn, (as when a LaennecOr Jenner invented his meed of worthy remembrance,)Did one mind foresee, one seer foretell the appearanceOf that unexpected daylight that arose upon our time.Who dream'd that living air poison'd our SURGERY, coatingAll our sheeny weapons with germs of an invisible death,Till he saw the sterile steel work with immunity, and saveQuickly as its warring scimitars of victory had slain?Saw what school-tradition for nature's kind method admir'd,--In those lifedraining slow cures and bedridden agues,--Forgotten, or condemn'd as want of care in a surgeon?Tho' MEDICINE makes not so plain an appeal to the vulgar,Yet she lags not a whit: her pregnant thēory touchesDeeper discoveries,vher more complete revolutionGives promise of wider benefits in larger abundance.Where she nam'd the disease she now separates the bacillus;Sets the atoms of offence, those blind and sickly bloodeaters,'Neath lens and daylight, forcing their foul propagations,Which had ever prosper'd in dark impunity unguest,Now to behave in sight, deliver their poisonous extractAnd their strange self-brew'd, self-slaying juice to be handled,Experimented upon, set aside and stor'd to oppose them.So novel and obscure a research, such hard revelationsOf Nature's cabinet,--tho' with fact amply accordant,And by hypothesis much dark difficulty resolving,Are not quickly receiv'd nor approv'd, and sensitive idlers,Venturing in the profound terrible penetralia of life,Are shock'd byva method that shuns not contaminationWith crūel Nature's most secret processes unmaskt.And yet in all mankind's disappointed history, now firstHavevhis scouts push'd surely withinvhis foul enemies' lines,And his sharpshooters descried their insidious foe,Those swarming parasites, that barely within the detectionOf manifold search-light, have bred, swimming unsuspectedThro' man's brain and limbs, slaying with loathly pollutionHis beauty's children,vhis sweet scīons of affection,In fev'rous torment and tears, his home desolatingOf their fair innocence, breakingvhis proud passionate heart,And his kindly belief in GOD'S good justice arraigning.With what wildly directed attack, what an armory illjudged,Has he, (alas, poor man,) with what cumbrous machinationSought to defend himself from their Lilliputian onslaught;Aye discharging around him, in obscure night, at a venture,Ev'ry missile whichvhis despair confus'dly imagin'd;His simples, compounds, specifics, chemical therapeutics,Juice of plants, whatever was nam'd in lordly Salerno'sHerbaries and gardens, vipers, snails, all animal filth,Incredible quackeries, the pretentious jugglery of knaves,Green electricities, saints' bones and priestly anointings.Fools! that oppose his one scīentific intelligent hope!Grant us an hundred years, and man shall hold in abeyanceThese foul distempers, and with this world's benefactorsShall PASTEUR obtain the reward of saintly devotion,His crown hēroic, who fought not destiny in vain.

'Tis success that attracts: 'twas therefore so many workersRan pellmell to the schools of Nature in our generation,While other employments have lack'd their genius and pined.Our fathers' likings wē thought semibarbarous, our artSelf-consciously sickens in qualms of an æsthetic aura,Noisily in the shallows splashing and disporting uninspir'd.Our famed vulgarities whether in speech, taste or amusement,Are not amended: Is it foolish, hoping for a rescue,First to appeal to the strong, for health to the healthy amongst us?--For the Sophists' doctrine that GRACE is dying of old ageI hold in derision, their inkpot thēories of man,Of his cradle of art, his deathbed of algebra;--and seeHow Scīence has wrought, since we went idling at Eton,One thing above surmise:--An' if I may dare to remind youHow Vergil praises your lov'd Lucretius, (of whomMy matter and metrevhave set you thinking, as I fear,)In that glory which ends 'et inexorabile fatumSubjecit pedibus strepitumque Acherontis avari':Sounded not most empty to us such boast of a pagan,Strangely to us tutor'd to believe, with faith mediæval,Torture everlasting to be justly the portion of all souls,Nor but by the elects' secret prēdestiny escaped?If you think to reply,--making this question in answer,--'Did the belief disturb for a moment our pleasure in life?'No.--And men gather in harvest on slopes of an activeVolcano: natheless the terror's ēnormity was there;Now 'tis away: Scīence has pierced man's cloudy common-sense,Dow'rd his homely vision with more expansive an embrace,And the rotten foundation of old superstition exposed.That trouble of Pascal, those vain paradoxes of Austin,Those Semitic parables of Paul, those tomes of Aquinas,All are thrown to the limbo of antediluvian idols,Only because we learn mankind's true history, and knowThat not at all from a high perfection sinfully man fell,But from baseness arose: We have with sympathy enter'dThose dark caves, his joyless abodes, where with ravening brutes,Bear or filthy hyena, he once disputed a shelter:--That was his Paradise, his garden of Eden,--abandon'dAges since to the drift and drip, the cementing accretionsWhence we now separate his bones buried in the stalagma,His household makeshifts, his hunting tools, his adornments,From the scatter'd skeletons of a lost prehistoric order,Its mammoth and woolly rhinoceros, the machairodos, and beastsWhose unnamed pastures the immense Atlantic inundates.In what corner of earth lie not dispersed the familiarFlinty relics of his old primitive stone-cutlery? what childKens not now the design, the adapted structure of each oneOf those hand-labor'd chert-flakes, whether axe, chisel, or knife,Spearhead, barb of arrow, rough plane or rudely serrate saw?Stones that in our grandsires' time told no sermon, (awaitingIndestructible, unnumber'd, on chary attention,)From their prēadamite pulpits now cry Revelation.Not to a Greek his chanted epic had mortal allurement,Conjuring old-world fancies of Ilium and of Olympus,As this story to me, this tale primæval of unsung,Unwritten, ancestral fate and adversity, this siegeOf courage and happiness protracted so many thousandThousand years in a slow persistent victory of brainAnd right hand o'er all the venom'd stings, sharpnesses of fangAnd dread fury whate'er Nature, tirelessly devising,Could develop with tooth, claw, tusk, or horn to oppose them.See now Herakles, who strangled snakes when an infantInvhis cradle alone; and nought but those petty stonechipsFor the battle: 'twas wonder above wonders his achievement:Yea, and since he thought as a child 'twas natural invhim,Meeting in existence with purposes antagonistic,Circumstances oppos'd to desire, vast activities, whichThwarted effort, to assume All-might as spiteful against him.Nay, as an artist born, impell'd to devise a religion,--So to relate himself idēally with the immortal,--This quarrel of reason with what displeas'd his affectionsWas not amiss. The desire and love of beauty possess man:Art is of all that beauty the best outwardly presented;Truth to the soul is merely the best that mind can imagine.No lover ēternal will hold to an older opinionIf but lovelier ideas, with Nature agrēeing,Are to his understanding offer'd.... But enough: 'tis an unsolv'dMystery.--Yet man dreams to flattervhis dēity saying'Beautiful is Nature!' rather 'tis various, endless,And her efforts fertile in error tho' grand in attainment.If wé, while praisingvher scheme and infinite order,Are compell'd to select, our choice condemns the remainder;Nor can wisdom honour those loathly polluting offences,Whose very names to the Muse are either accursèd or unknown.Nay, if such foul things thou deemest worthy, the fault wasMaking us, O Nature, thy judge and tearful accuser.Turn our thought for awhile to the symphonies of Beethoven,Or the rever'd preludes of mighty Sebastian; Is thereOne work of Nature's contrivance beautiful as these?Judg'd by beauty alone man wins, as sensuous artist;And for other qualities, the spirit's differentia, NatureScarce observes them at all: that keen unfaltering insight,Wherebyvearthly desire's roaming wildernesses are changedInto a garden a-bloom; its wandering impossible waysInto pillar'd avenues, alleys and fair-flow'ry terrac'd walks,(Where GOD talks with man, as once 'twas fancied of Eden;)That transcendental supreme interpreting of sense,Rendering intelligence passionate with mystery, linkingSympathy with grandeur, the reserve of dignity with play;Those soul-formalities, the balance held 'twixt the denīalAnd the betrayal of intention, whose masteries invite,Entice, welcome ever, meet, and with kindliness embrace;Those guarded floodgates of boundless, lovely resources,Whence nothing ill issues, no distraction nor abortionHindering enjoyment, but in easy security flow forthEcstasies of fitness, raptures and harmonies of heav'n.Surely before such work of man, so kindly attemper'd,Nature must be asham'd, had shē not this ready answer,'Fool, and who made thee?'--I shall not seem a deserter,Where in an idle essay my verse to a fancy abandon'dPraiseth others: rather while art and beauty delight us,While hope, faith and love are warm and lively in our hearts,Sweet our earthly desire and dear our human affection,We may, joyfully despising the pedantries of old age,Hold to the time, nor lose the delight of mortal attainment;Keenly rejoicing in all that wisdom approves, nor allowingOurselves at the challenge of younger craft to be outsailed;But trimming our old canvas in all change of weather and wind,Freely without fear urge o'erseas our good vessel onward,Piloting into the far, unmapp'd futurity.--Farewell.