There is no just and serene criticism as yet. Nothing is
considered simply as it lies in the lap of eternal beauty, but
our thoughts, as well as our bodies, must be dressed after the
latest fashions. Our taste is too delicate and particular. It
says nay to the poet's work, but never yea to his hope. It
invites him to adorn his deformities, and not to cast them off by
expansion, as the tree its bark. We are a people who live in a
bright light, in houses of pearl and porcelain, and drink only
light wines, whose teeth are easily set on edge by the least
natural sour. If we had been consulted, the backbone of the
earth would have been made, not of granite, but of Bristol spar.
A modern author would have died in infancy in a ruder age. But
the poet is something more than a scald, "a smoother and polisher
of language"; he is a Cincinnatus in literature, and occupies no
west end of the world. Like the sun, he will indifferently
select his rhymes, and with a liberal taste weave into his verse
the planet and the stubble.
In these old books the stucco has long since crumbled away, and
we read what was sculptured in the granite. They are rude and
massive in their proportions, rather than smooth and delicate in
their finish. The workers in stone polish only their chimney
ornaments, but their pyramids are roughly done. There is a
soberness in a rough aspect, as of unhewn granite, which
addresses a depth in us, but a polished surface hits only the
ball of the eye. The true finish is the work of time, and the
use to which a thing is put. The elements are still polishing
the pyramids. Art may varnish and gild, but it can do no more.
A work of genius is rough-hewn from the first, because it
anticipates the lapse of time, and has an ingrained polish, which
still appears when fragments are broken off, an essential quality
of its substance. Its beauty is at the same time its strength,
and it breaks with a lustre.
The great poem must have the stamp of greatness as well as its
essence. The reader easily goes within the shallowest
contemporary poetry, and informs it with all the life and promise
of the day, as the pilgrim goes within the temple, and hears the
faintest strains of the worshippers; but it will have to speak to
posterity, traversing these deserts, through the ruins of its
outmost walls, by the grandeur and beauty of its proportions.
- - - - - - - -
But here on the stream of the Concord, where we have all the
while been bodily, Nature, who is superior to all styles and
ages, is now, with pensive face, composing her poem Autumn, with
which no work of man will bear to be compared.
In summer we live out of doors, and have only impulses and
feelings, which are all for action, and must wait commonly for
the stillness and longer nights of autumn and winter before any
thought will subside; we are sensible that behind the rustling
leaves, and the stacks of grain, and the bare clusters of the
grape, there is the field of a wholly new life, which no man has
lived; that even this earth was made for more mysterious and
nobler inhabitants than men and women. In the hues of October
sunsets, we see the portals to other mansions than those which we
occupy, not far off geographically, -
"There is a place beyond that flaming hill,
From whence the stars their thin appearance shed,
A place beyond all place, where never ill,
Nor impure thought was ever harbored."
Sometimes a mortal feels in himself Nature, not his Father but
his Mother stirs within him, and he becomes immortal with her
immortality. From time to time she claims kindredship with us,
and some globule from her veins steals up into our own.
I am the autumnal sun,
With autumn gales my race is run;
When will the hazel put forth its flowers,
Or the grape ripen under my bowers?
When will the harvest or the hunter's moon,
Turn my midnight into mid-noon?
I am all sere and yellow,
And to my core mellow.
The mast is dropping within my woods,
The winter is lurking within my moods,
And the rustling of the withered leaf
Is the constant music of my grief.
To an unskilful rhymer the Muse thus spoke in prose:
The moon no longer reflects the day, but rises to her absolute
rule, and the husbandman and hunter acknowledge her for their
mistress. Asters and golden-rods reign along the way, and the
life-everlasting withers not. The fields are reaped and shorn of
their pride, but an inward verdure still crowns them. The
thistle scatters its down on the pool, and yellow leaves clothe
the vine, and naught disturbs the serious life of men. But
behind the sheaves, and under the sod, there lurks a ripe fruit,
which the reapers have not gathered, the true harvest of the
year, which it bears forever, annually watering and maturing it,
and man never severs the stalk which bears this palatable fruit.
Men nowhere, east or west, live yet a _natural_ life, round which
the vine clings, and which the elm willingly shadows. Man would
desecrate it by his touch, and so the beauty of the world remains
veiled to him. He needs not only to be spiritualized, but
_naturalized_, on the soil of earth. Who shall conceive what
kind of roof the heavens might extend over him, what seasons
minister to him, and what employment dignify his life! Only the
convalescent raise the veil of nature. An immortality in his
life would confer immortality on his abode. The winds should be
his breath, the seasons his moods, and he should impart of his
serenity to Nature herself.
