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. But such as we know him he is
ephemeral like the scenery which surrounds him, and does not
aspire to an enduring existence. When we come down into the
distant village, visible from the mountain-top, the nobler
inhabitants with whom we peopled it have departed, and left only
vermin in its desolate streets. It is the imagination of poets
which puts those brave speeches into the mouths of their heroes.
They may feign that Cato's last words were
"The earth, the air, and seas I know, and all
The joys and horrors of their peace and wars;
And now will view the Gods' state and the stars,"
but such are not the thoughts nor the destiny of common men.
What is this heaven which they expect, if it is no better than
they expect? Are they prepared for a better than they can now
imagine? Where is the heaven of him who dies on a stage, in a
theatre? Here or nowhere is our heaven.
"Although we see celestial bodies move
Above the earth, the earth we till and love."
We can conceive of nothing more fair than something which we have
experienced. "The remembrance of youth is a sigh." We linger in
manhood to tell the dreams of our childhood, and they are half
forgotten ere we have learned the language. We have need to be
earth-born as well as heaven-born, , as was said of
the Titans of old, or in a better sense than they. There have
been heroes for whom this world seemed expressly prepared, as if
creation had at last succeeded; whose daily life was the stuff of
which our dreams are made, and whose presence enhanced the beauty
and ampleness of Nature herself. Where they walked,
"Largior hic campos aether et lumine vestit
Purpureo: Solemque suum, sua sidera norunt."
"Here a more copious air invests the fields, and clothes with
purple light; and they know their own sun and their own stars."
We love to hear some men speak, though we hear not what they say;
the very air they breathe is rich and perfumed, and the sound of
their voices falls on the ear like the rustling of leaves or the
crackling of the fire. They stand many deep. They have the
heavens for their abettors, as those who have never stood from
under them, and they look at the stars with an answering ray.
Their eyes are like glow-worms, and their motions graceful and
flowing, as if a place were already found for them, like rivers
flowing through valleys.
