now
everything
is still.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v27 - Wat to Zor
And we would leave
here also, for the generations which are rising up rapidly to fill
our places, some proof that we have endeavored to transmit the
great inheritance unimpaired; that in our estimate of public
principles and private virtue, in our veneration of religion and
piety, in our devotion to civil and religious liberty, in our regard
for whatever advances human knowledge or improves human hap-
piness, we are not altogether unworthy of our origin.
There is a local feeling connected with this occasion, too
strong to be resisted; a sort of genius of the place, which inspires
and awes us. We feel that we are on the spot where the first
scene of our history was laid; where the hearths and altars of
New England were first placed; where Christianity, and civiliza-
tion, and letters, made their first lodgment,- in a vast extent of
country, covered with a wilderness and peopled by roving bar-
barians. We are here at the season of the year at which the
## p. 15754 (#80) ###########################################
15754
DANIEL WEBSTER
even
event took place. The imagination irresistibly and rapidly draws
around us the principal features and the leading characters in
the original scene. We cast our eyes abroad on the ocean, and
we see where the little bark, with the interesting group upon its
deck, made its slow progress to the shore. We look around us,
and behold the hills and promontories where the anxious eyes of
our fathers first saw the places of habitation and of rest. We
feel the cold which benumbed, and listen to the winds which
pierced them. Beneath us is the Rock on which New England
received the feet of the Pilgrims. We seem
to behold
them, as they struggle with the elements, and with toilsome
efforts gain the shore. We listen to the chiefs in council; we
see the unexampled exhibition of female fortitude and resigna-
tion; we hear the whisperings of youthful impatience; and we
see, what a painter of our own has also represented by his pen-
cil, chilled and shivering childhood, - houseless but for a mother's
arms, couchless but for a mother's breast, — till our own blood
almost freezes. The mild dignity of Carver and of Bradford; the
decisive and soldier-like air and manner of Standish; the devout
Brewster; the enterprising Allerton: the general firmness and
thoughtfulness of the whole band; their conscious joy for dan-
gers escaped; their deep solicitude about dangers to come; their
trust in Heaven; their high religious faith, full of confidence and
anticipation, — all these seem to belong to this place, and to be
present upon this occasion, to fill us with reverence and admira-
tion.
The settlement of New England by the colony which landed
here on the twenty-second of December, sixteen hundred and
twenty, although not the first European establishment in what
now constitutes the United States, was yet so peculiar in its
causes and character, and has been followed and must still be
followed by such consequences, as to give it a high claim to last-
ing commemoration. On these causes and consequences, more
than on its immediately attendant circumstances, its importance
as an historical event depends. Great actions and striking oc-
currences, having excited a temporary admiration, often pass
a
away and are forgotten, because they leave no lasting results
affecting the prosperity and happiness of communities. Such is
frequently the fortune of the most brilliant military achieve-
ments. Of the ten thousand battles which have been fought, of
all the fields fertilized with carnage, of the banners which have
## p. 15755 (#81) ###########################################
DANIEL WEBSTER
15755
-
been bathed in blood, of the warriors who have hoped that they
had risen from the field of conquest to a glory as bright and as
durable as the stars, - how few that continue long to interest
mankind! The victory of yesterday is reversed by the defeat of
to-day; the star of military glory, rising like a meteor, like a
meteor has fallen; disgrace and disaster hang on the heels of
conquest and renown; victor and vanquished presently pass away
to oblivion; and the world goes on in its course, with the loss
only of so many lives and so much treasure.
But if this be frequently, or generally, the fortune of mili-
tary achievements, it is not always so. There are enterprises,
military as well as civil, which sometimes check the current
of events, give a new turn to human affairs, and transmit their
consequences through ages. We see their importance in their
results, and call them great because great things follow. There
have been battles which have fixed the fate of nations. These
come down to us in history with a solid and permanent interest,
not created by a display of glittering armor, the rush of adverse
battalions, the sinking and rising of pennons, the flight, the pur-
suit, and the victory: but by their effect in advancing or retard-
ing human knowledge, in overthrowing or establishing despotism,
in extending or destroying human happiness. When the traveler
pauses on the plain of Marathon, what are the emotions which
most strongly agitate his breast ? What is that glorious recollec-
tion which thrills through his frame and suffuses his eyes ? Not,
I imagine, that Grecian skill and Grecian valor were here most
signally displayed; but that Greece herself was here saved. It is
because to this spot, and to the event which has rendered it
immortal, he refers all the succeeding glories of the republic. It
is because, if that day had gone otherwise, Greece had perished.
It is because he perceives that her philosophers and orators, her
poets and painters, her sculptors and architects, her governments
and free institutions, point backward to Marathon, and that their
future existence seems to have been suspended on the contin-
gency whether the Persian or the Grecian banner should wave
victorious in the beams of that day's setting sun. And as his
imagination kindles at the retrospect, he is transported back to
the interesting moment: he counts the fearful odds of the con-
tending hosts; his interest for the result overwhelms him; he
trembles, as if it were still uncertain, and seems to doubt whether
## p. 15756 (#82) ###########################################
15756
DANIEL WEBSTER
(
»
6
he may consider Socrates and Plato, Demosthenes, Sophocles, and
Phidias as secure, yet, to himself and to the world.
"If we conquer,” said the Athenian commander on the morn-
ing of that decisive day,—“if we conquer, we shall make Ath-
ens the greatest city of Greece. ” A prophecy how well fulfilled!
"If God prosper us,” might have been the more appropriate
language of our fathers, when they landed upon this Rock, – if
God prosper us, we shall here begin a work which shall last for
ages: we shall plant here a new society, in the principles of the
fullest liberty and the purest religion; we shall subdue this wil-
derness which is before us; we shall fill this region of the great
continent, which stretches almost from pole to pole, with civil.
ization and Christianity; the temples of the true God shall rise
where now ascends the smoke of idolatrous sacrifice; fields and
gardens, the flowers of summer and the waving and golden har-
vest of autumn, shall extend over a thousand hills, and stretch
along a thousand valleys, never yet, since the creation, reclaimed
to the use of civilized man. We shall whiten this coast with
the canvas of a prosperous commerce; we shall stud the long and
winding shore with a hundred cities. That which we sow in
weakness shall be raised in strength. From our sincere but
houseless worship, there shall spring splendid temples to record
God's goodness; from the simplicity of our social union, there
shall arise wise and politic constitutions of government, full of
the liberty which we ourselves bring and breathe; from our zeal
for learning, institutions shall spring which shall scatter the light
of knowledge throughout the land, and in time, paying back
where they have borrowed, shall contribute their part to the great
aggregate of human knowledge; and our descendants, through
all generations, shall look back to this spot, and to this hour,
with unabated affection and regard. ”
The hours of this day are rapidly flying, and this occasion
will soon be passed. Neither we nor our children can expect to
behold its return. They are in the distant regions of futurity;
they exist only in the all-creating power of God, who shall stand
here a hundred years hence, to trace, through us, their descent
from the Pilgrims, and to survey, as we have now surveyed,
the progress of their country during the lapse of a century. We
would anticipate their concurrence with us in our sentiments of
deep regard for our common ancestors. We would anticipate and
## p. 15757 (#83) ###########################################
DANIEL WEBSTER
15757
partake the pleasure with which they will then recount the steps
of New England's advancement. On the morning of that day,
although it will not disturb us in our repose, the voice of accla-
mation and gtatitude, commencing on the Rock of Plymouth,
shall be transmitted through millions of the sons of the Pilgrims,
till it lose itself in the murmurs of the Pacific seas.
We would leave for the consideration of those who shall then
occupy our places, some proof that we hold the blessings trans-
mitted from our fathers in just estimation; some proof of our
attachment to the cause of good government, and of civil and
religious liberty; some proof of a sincere and ardent desire to
promote everything which may enlarge the understandings and
improve the hearts of men. And when, from the long distance
of a hundred years, they shall look back upon us, they shall
know at least that we possessed affections, which, running back-
ward and warming with gratitude for what our ancestors have
done for our happiness, run forward also to our posterity, and
meet them with cordial salutation, ere yet they have arrived on
the shore of being.
Advance, then, ye future generations! We would hail you, as
you rise in your long succession, to fill the places which we now
fill, and to taste the blessings of existence where we are passing,
and soon shall have passed, our own human duration. We bid
you welcome to this pleasant land of the fathers.
We bid you
welcome to the healthful skies and the verdant fields of New
England. We greet your accession to the great inheritance which
we have enjoyed. We welcome you to the blessings of good
government and religious liberty. We welcome you to the treas-
ures of science and the delights of learning.
We welcome you
to the transcendent sweets of domestic life, to the happiness of
kindred, and parents, and children. We welcome you to the
immeasurable blessings of rational existence, the immortal hope
of Christianity, and the light of everlasting truth!
## p. 15758 (#84) ###########################################
15758
JOHN WEBSTER
(EARLY IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY)
PITTLE is known of the life of Shakespeare's greatest pupil in
tragedy, John Webster. He began to write for the stage
about 1601: between 1601 and 1607 he made certain addi-
tions to Marston's (Malcontent,' and collaborated with Dekker in the
History of Sir Thomas Wyatt,' Northward Ho' and 'Westward Ho. ?
In 1612 Vittoria Corombona,' the most famous of his tragedies, was
published, and in 1623 "The Duchess of Malfi' appeared. Webster's
classical tragedy, Appius and Virginia,' was not published until 1654.
Besides these plays he wrote a tragi-comedy entitled “The Devil's
Law-Case,' and with Rowley the curious drama of A Cure for a
Cuckold. ' In his introduction to the Mermaid Edition of Webster's
plays, J. A. Symonds points out that there is little internal evidence
of this collaboration, for which the publisher Kirkman's word was the
authority. Mr. Edmund Gosse suggested that the little play within
this play might be the work of Webster; and acting on this sugges-
tion, the Hon. S. E. Spring-Rice detached the minor drama from A
Cure for a Cuckold,' and under the name of Love's Graduate had
it printed at the private press of Mr. Daniel. For two hundred years
after Webster lived, he was almost forgotten. The keen appreciation
of Charles Lamb rescued him from the strange oblivion which had
rested upon his remarkable if sinister genius. In his (Specimens
from the English Dramatic Poets,' he accords him the highest praise.
In 1830 the Rev. Alexander Dyce collected and edited the works of
Webster; bringing them for the first time within the reach of the
general reader, and securing the preservation of what are acknowl-
edged masterpieces of a certain order of tragedy.
The two Italian dramas, "The Duchess of Malfi' and Vittoria
Corombona; or The White Devil, belong to that strange genus, the
tragedy of blood,” which began with the extravagances of Kyd, a
predecessor of Shakespeare, and received its highest illustration by
the master himself in “Hamlet. Webster made a less plausible use
of this kind of tragedy than did Shakespeare, although he sometimes
approaches him in dramatic strength. His sinister imagination is
like the lightning of a midnight tempest, revealing the tormented
sky and the black fury of the storm. “No dramatist,” writes Mr.
Symonds, “showed more consummate ability in heightening terrific
((
## p. 15759 (#85) ###########################################
JOHN WEBSTER
15759
>
effects, in laying bare the inner mysteries of crime, remorse, and
pain;
he was drawn to comprehend and reproduce abnormal
elements of spiritual anguish. ” His men and women go out of life
in a black mist, as they pass through it in a red mist of crime.
Vittoria Corombona, the beautiful evil heroine of the play, cries out
when she is stabbed:
«My soul, like to a ship in a black storm,
Is driven, I know not whither. »
Her brother, Flamineo, holds to the cynicism of his reckless life
even amid the awful scenes of the last catastrophe.
“We cease to grieve, cease to be fortune's slaves,
Nay, cease to die, by dying. ”
Yet the humanity of these men and women of Webster's is not
disguised by their crimes. His insight into human nature is deep
and incisive, but he knew only its night side. He was in love with
agony and abnormal wickedness, and with the tortures of sin-haunted
sou He found fitting material for his uses in the stories of crime
furnished by the splendid, corrupt Italy of the sixteenth century.
The plots of Vittoria Corombona' and of the Duchess of Malfi are
both taken from this source. Viewed in the light of Italian Renais-
sance history, they cannot be called extravagant; but the sombre
genius of Webster has made the most of their terrors.
In his Roman play of Appius and Virginia' he has shown that
he could write calmly and dispassionately, and without the effects of
the terrible and the ghastly. It is a stately and quiet composition;
but it lacks those sudden flashes of illumination, those profound
and searching glimpses into the bottomless abyss of human misery,
which render the two Italian tragedies unique. ”
Webster's style is singularly well adapted to the spirit in which
he portrays human life. It is cutting, sententious, powerful. He has
the faculty of expressing an entire gamut of human emotions in a
few words, as when Ferdinand in the Duchess of Malfi' sees the
body of his twin-sister murdered by his orders, and exclaims —
«Cover her face: mine eyes dazzle; she dies young. ”
Webster's portions in the collaborated plays are inconsiderable,
and are not in any way characteristic of his peculiar genius.
## p. 15760 (#86) ###########################################
15760
JOHN WEBSTER
FROM "THE DUCHESS OF MALFI)
[The Duchess of Malfi, having secretly married her steward Antonio,
arouses thereby the wrath of her brother, Duke Ferdinand, the heir of her
great fortune had she died childless. She is forced to separate from her hus-
band, and by the order of her brother she and her children and her attendant
Cariola are put to death. ]
Scene : Room in the Duchess's Lodging. Enter Duchess and Cariola.
D
UCHESS What hideous noise was that?
Cariola-
'Tis the wild consort
Of madmen, lady, which your tyrant brother
Hath placed about your lodging: this tyranny,
I think, was never practiced till this hour.
Duchess — Indeed, I thank him: nothing but noise and folly
Can keep me in my right wits; whereas reason
And silence make me stark mad. Sit down;
Discourse to me some dismal tragedy.
Cariola — Oh, 'twill increase your melancholy.
Duchess -
Thou art deceived:
To hear of greater grief would lessen mine.
This is a prison ?
Cariola
Yes, but you shall live
To shake this durance off.
Duchess -
Thou art a fool:
The robin-redbreast and the nightingale
Never live long in cages.
Cariola -
Pray, dry your eyes.
What think you of, madam ?
Duchess –
Of nothing;
When I muse thus I sleep.
Cariola Like a madman, with your eyes open?
Duchess - Dost thou think we shall know one another
In the other world ?
Cariola
Yes, out of question.
Duchess — Oh that it were possible we might
But hold some two days' conference with the dead!
From them I should learn somewhat, I am sure,
I never shall know here. I'll tell thee a miracle:
I am not mad yet, to my cause of sorrow;
The heaven o'er my head seems made of molten brass,
The earth of flaming sulphur, yet I am not mad.
I am acquainted with sad misery
As the tanned galley-slave is with his oar:
## p. 15761 (#87) ###########################################
JOHN WEBSTER
15761
Necessity makes me suffer constantly,
And custom makes it easy. Who do I look like now?
Cariola — Like to your picture in the gallery,–
A deal of life in show, but none in practice;
. Or rather like some reverend monument
Whose ruins are even pitied.
Duchess
Very proper:
And fortune seems only to have her eyesight
To behold my tragedy:- How now!
What noise is that?
Enter Servant
Sertant
I am come to tell you
Your brother hath intended you some sport.
A great physician, when the Pope was sick
Of a deep melancholy, presented him
With several sorts of madmen, which wild object,
Being full of change and sport, forced him to laugh,
And so the imposthume broke: the selfsame cure
The duke intends on you.
Duchess –
Let them come in.
Servant — There's a mad lawyer; and a secular priest;
A doctor that hath forfeited his wits
By jealousy; an astrologian
That in his works said such a day o’ the month
Should be the day of doom, and failing o't,
Ran mad; an English tailor crazed i’ the brain
With the study of new fashions; a gentleman-usher
Quite beside himself with care to keep in mind
The number of his lady's salutations
Or “How do you” she employed him in each morning;
A farmer too, an excellent knave in grain,
Mad 'cause he was hindered transportation :
And let one broker that's mad loose to these,
You'd think the Devil were among them.
Duchess — Sit, Cariola. — Let them loose when you please,
For I am chained to endure all your tyranny.
Enter Madmen
(Here this song is sung to a dismal kind of music by a Madman. )
Oh, let us howl some heavy note,
Some deadly doggèd howl,
XXVII—986
## p. 15762 (#88) ###########################################
15762
JOHN WEBSTER
Sounding as from the threatening throat
Of beasts and fatal fowl!
As ravens, screech-owls, bulls, and bears,
We'll bell, and bawl our parts,
Till irksome noise have cloyed your ears
And corrosived your hearts.
At last, whenas our quire wants breath,
Our bodies being blest,
We'll sing, like swans, to welcome death,
And die in love and rest.
First Madman – Doomsday not come yet! I'll draw it nearer by
a perspective, or make a glass that shall set all the world on fire
upon the instant.
I cannot sleep, my pillow is stuffed with a litter
of porcupines.
Second Madman — Hell is a mere glass-house, where the devils are
continually blowing up women's souls on hollow irons, and the fire
never goes out.
First Madman - I have skill in heraldry.
Second Madman — Hast?
First Madman – You do give for your crest a woodcock's head
with the brains picked out on't; you are a very ancient gentleman.
Third Madman - -Greek is turned Turk: we are only to be saved
by the Helvetian translation.
First Madman - Come on, sir, I will lay the law to you.
Second Madman — Oh, rather lay a corrosive: the law will eat to
the bone.
Third Madman He that drinks but to satisfy nature is damned.
Fourth Madman — I have pared the Devil's nails forty times, roasted
them in ravens' eggs, and cured agues with them.
Third Madman — Get me three hundred milch bats, to make pos-
sets to procure sleep.
[Here a dance of Eight Madmen, with music answerable thereto; after
which Bosola, like an Old Man, enters. ]
Duchess — Is he mad too?
Servant
Pray, question him. I'll leave you.
[Exeunt Servant and Madmen.
## p. 15763 (#89) ###########################################
JOHN WEBSTER
15763
worms.
Bosola I am come to make thy tomb.
Duchess — Ha! my tomb!
Thou speak'st as if I lay upon my death-bed,
Gasping for breath: dost thou perceive me sick ?
Bosola — Yes, and the more dangerously, since thy sickness is in-
sensible.
Duchess - Thou art not mad, sure: dost know me?
Bosola Yes.
Duchess — Who am I?
Bosola —Thou art a box of worm-seed, at best but a salvatory of
green mummy. What's this flesh ? A little crudded milk, fantastical
puff-paste. Our bodies are weaker than those paper prisons boys use
to keep flies in; more contemptible, since ours is to preserve earth-
Didst thou ever see a lark in a cage ? Such is the soul in
the body: this world is like her little turf of grass; and the heaven
o'er our heads, like her looking-glass, only gives us a miserable
knowledge of the small compass of our prison.
Duchess — Am not I thy duchess ?
Bosola – Thou art some great woman, sure, for riot begins to sit
on thy forehead (clad in gray hairs) twenty years sooner than on a
merry milkmaid's.
Thou sleepest worse than if a mouse should be
forced to take up her lodging in a cat's ear: a little infant that
breeds its teeth, should it lie with thee, would cry out, as if thou
wert the more unquiet bedfellow.
Duchess – I am Duchess of Malfi still.
Bosola – That makes thy sleeps so broken:
Glories, like glow-worms, afar off shine bright,
But looked to near, have neither heat nor light.
Duchess — Thou art very plain.
Bosola — My trade is to flatter the dead, not the living: I am a
tomb-maker.
Duchess — And thou comest to make my tomb?
Bosola - Yes.
Duchess - Let me be a little merry:- of what stuff wilt thou
make it ?
Bosola — Nay, resolve me first, of what fashion ?
Duchess Why do we grow fantastical in our death-bed ? do we
affect fashion in the grave ?
Bosola Most ambitiously. Princes' images on their tombs do not
lie, as they were wont, seeming to pray up to heaven; but with their
hands under their cheeks, as if they died of the toothache: they are
not carved with their eyes fixed upon the stars; but as their minds
were wholly bent upon the world, the selfsame way they seem to
turn their faces.
## p. 15764 (#90) ###########################################
15764
JOHN WEBSTER
Duchess — Let me know fully therefore the effect
Of this thy dismal preparation,
This talk fit for a charnel.
Bosola —
Now I shall :
Enter Executioners, with a coffin, cords, and a bell
Here is a present from your princely brothers;
And may it arrive welcome, for it brings
Last benefit, last sorrow.
Duchess -
Let me see it:
I have so much obedience in my blood,
I wish it in their veins to do them good.
Bosola -- This is your last presence-chamber.
-
Cariola
O my sweet lady!
Duchess — Peace: it affrights not me.
Bosola -
I am the common bellman,
That usually is sent to condemned persons
The night before they suffer.
Duchess —
Even now thou said'st
Thou wast a tomb-maker.
Bosola -
'Twas to bring you
By degrees to mortification. Listen,
Hark!
now everything is still.
The screech-owl and the whistler shrill
Call upon our dame aloud,
And bid her quickly don her shroud!
Much you had of land and rent;
Your length in clay's now competent:
A long war disturbed your mind;
Here your perfect peace is signed.
Of what is't fools make such vain keeping ?
Sin their conception, their birth weeping,
Their life a general mist of error,
Their death a hideous storm of terror.
Strew your hair with powders sweet,
Don clean linen, bathe your feet,
And (the foul fiend more to check)
A crucifix let bless your neck:
'Tis now full tide 'tween night and day:
End your groan and come away.
Cariola — Hence, villains, tyrants, murderers! alas!
What will you do with my lady? — Call for help.
Duchess — To whom? to our next neighbors ? they are mad-folks.
Bosola - Remove that noise.
## p. 15765 (#91) ###########################################
JOHN WEBSTER
15765
Duchess -
Farewell, Cariola.
In my last will I have not much to give,-
A many hungry guests have fed upon me;
Thine will be a poor reversion.
Cariola -
I will die with her.
Duchess – I pray thee, look thou giv'st my little boy
Some syrup for his cold, and let the girl
Say her prayers ere she sleep.
(Cariola is forced out by the Executioners. ]
Now what you please :
What death ?
Bosola -
Strangling; here are your executioners.
Duchess – I forgive them:
The apoplexy, catarrh, or cough o' the lungs
Would do as much as they do.
Bosola – Doth not death fright you ?
Duchess ---
Who would be afraid on't,
Knowing to meet such excellent company
In the other world?
Bosola
Yet, methinks,
The manner of your death should much afflict you;
This cord should terrify you.
Duchess -
Not a whit:
What would it pleasure me to have my throat cut
With diamonds ? or to be smothered
With cassia ? or to be shot to death with pearls ?
I know death hath ten thousand several doors
For men to take their exits: and 'tis found
They go on such strange geometrical hinges,
You may open them both ways; any way, for Heaven sake,
So I were out of your whispering. Tell my brothers
That I perceive death, now I am well awake,
Best gift is they can give or I can take.
I would fain put off my last woman's-fault:
I'd not be tedious to you.
First Executioner –
We are ready.
Duchess — Dispose my breath how please you; but my body
Bestow upon my women, will you ?
First Executioner –
Yes.
Duchess — Pull, and pull strongly, for your able strength
Must pull down heaven upon me; —
Yet stay: heaven-gates are not so highly arched
As princes' palaces; they that enter there
## p. 15766 (#92) ###########################################
15766
JOHN WEBSTER
Must go upon their knees. [K'neels. ] Come, violent death,
Serve for mandragora to make me sleep! -
Go tell my brothers, when I am laid out,
They then may feed in quiet.
[The Executioners strangle the Duchess. ]
Bosola
Where's the waiting-woman?
Fetch her: some other strangle the children.
[Cariola and Children are brought in by the Executioners; who presently
strangle the Children. ]
Look you, there sleeps your mistress.
Cariola
Oh, you are damned
Perpetually for this! My turn is next-
Is't not so ordered ?
Bosola
Yes, and I am glad
You are so well prepared for't.
Cariola
You are deceived, sir:
I am not prepared for 't, I will not die;
I will first come to my answer, and know
How I have offended.
Bosola-
Come, dispatch her. -
You kept her counsel; now you shall keep ours.
Cariola I will not die, I must not; I am contracted
To a young gentleman.
First Executioner -
Here's your wedding-ring.
Cariola — Let me but speak with the duke: I'll discover
Treason to his person.
Bosola
Delays: throttle her.
First Executioner
She bites and scratches.
Cariola
If you kill me now,
I am damned: I have not been at confession
This two years.
[The Executioners strangle Cariola.
Bosola -
Bear her into the next room,
Let these lie still.
(Exeunt the Executioners with the body of Cariola. ]
## p. 15767 (#93) ###########################################
JOHN WEBSTER
15767
Enter Ferdinand
Ferdinand -
Bosola -
You'd have her.
Is she dead?
She is what
But here begin your pity:
[Shows the Children strangled. ]
Alas, how have these offended ?
Ferdinand -
The death
Of young wolves is never to be pitied.
Bosola — Fix your eye here.
Ferdinand -
Constantly.
Bosola –
Do you not weep ?
Other sins only speak; murder shrieks out:
The element of water moistens the earth,
But blood flies upwards and bedews the heavens.
Ferdinand —
Cover her face: mine eyes dazzle; she dies young.
Bosola I think not so: her infelicity
Seems to have years too many.
Ferdinand -
She and I were twins;
And should I die this instant, I had lived
Her time to a minute.
Bosola
It seems she was born first:
You have bloodily approved the ancient truth,
That kindred commonly do worse agree
Than remote strangers.
Ferdinand
Let me see her face
Again. Why didst not thou pity her? what
An excellent honest man mightst thou have been,
If thou hadst borne her to some sanctuary!
Or, bold in a good cause, opposed thyself,
With thy advanced sword above thy head,
Between her innocence and my revenge!
I bade thee, when I was distracted of my wits,
Go kill my dearest friend, and thou hast done 't.
For let me but examine well the cause :
What was the meanness of her match to me?
Only I must confess I had a hope,
Had she continued widow, to have gained
An infinite mass of treasure by her death:
And what was the main cause ? her marriage,
That drew a stream of gall quite through my heart.
## p. 15768 (#94) ###########################################
15768
JOHN WEBSTER
For thee,- as we observe in tragedies
That a good actor many times is cursed
For playing a villain's part,- I hate thee for 't;
And for my sake, thou hast done much ill well.
DIRGE FROM (VITTORIA COROMBONA
CALI
ALL for the robin-redbreast and the wren,
Since o'er shady groves they hover,
And with leaves and flowers do cover
The friendless bodies of unburied men.
Call unto his funeral dole
The ant, the field-mouse, and the mole,
To rear him hillocks that shall keep him warm,
And (when gay tombs are robbed) sustain no harm;
But keep the wolf far thence, that's foe to men,
For with his nails he'll dig them up again.
## p. 15769 (#95) ###########################################
15769
JOHN WEISS
(1818-1879)
OHN Weiss belonged to a class of writers, not uncommon
among the Transcendentalists of New England, whose works
are distinguished by epigrammatic brilliancy. He wrote of
great things in what might almost be called a clever way; some-
times hiding the bold, simple outlines of an idea under an elaborate
and striking tracery of words. Yet the genuineness of his endow-
ments is beyond question. He possessed the singularly strong and
daring intellect of that generation of New-Englanders which brought
forth Margaret Fuller and Theodore Parker. He possessed the
remarkable faculty of combining an almost mystical faith with
extreme devotion to science. His outlook seemed to be as broad as
heaven itself, yet his mind recorded only flash-light pictures of the
universe. He saw vividly; he wrote of what he saw, in an intense
epigrammatic manner.
He was born in Boston in 1818, was graduated from Harvard in
1837. Later he studied at Heidelberg, becoming subsequently a min-
ister of the Unitarian church. From 1859 to 1870 he was pastor of
the Unitarian church at Watertown, Massachusetts. At one time he
gave a series of brilliant lectures in New York on the Greek Myths;
he wrote for the Radical, for the Massachusetts Quarterly, for the
Atlantic Monthly. In 1842 appeared his first work, in which he had
performed the task of editor and translator. This was Henry of
Afterdingen,' by F. von Hardenberg. In 1845 he published a transla-
tion of the philosophical and æsthetic letters of Schiller; a year later
appeared an edition of the memoir of Fichte by William Smith; and
in 1864 one of his most noted works, Life and Correspondence of
Theodore Parker. Later he published a volume of essays bearing
the title American Religion, and a volume entitled, “Wit, Humor,
and Shakespeare. ' Besides these works, he was the author of a num-
ber of religious and political pamphlets. He died in 1879.
His creed forms a background to much that he has written. The
foremost of the radicals, he cared nothing for dogma, centring his
faith solely about the idea of God and the idea of immortality. For
these he contended with glittering weapons. But he was not a logi-
cian primarily: his thought was essentially poetical.
“When all my veins flow unobstructed, and lift to the level of
my eyes the daily gladness that finds a gate at every pore; when the
## p. 15770 (#96) ###########################################
15770
JOHN WEISS
roaming gifts come home from nature to turn the brain into a hive
of cells full of yellow sunshine, the spoil of all the chalices of the
earth beneath and the heaven above, — then I am the subject of a
Revival of Religion. ”
The style of Weiss is sometimes overladen with conceits and epi-
grams, is not always a sane and quiet style; but it expresses admira-
bly his peculiar type of mind, - a type which has perished perhaps
with the unusual circumstances producing it.
CONSTANCY TO AN IDEAL
From American Religion. Copyright 1871, by John Weiss
HE phrase
Takple, who suspect "it of excusing some immediate incapacity,
like that which would recommend clouds to the selectmen
for a new style of pavement, or a balloon's aimless whirling
instead of some direct and planted way of locomotion. There
may be an upper westward current; but in the mean time the
rail gets over the ground by all the points of the compass. The
Ideal will possibly carry a person off by some aerial route to
Paris; but if he would return to Boston he must alight. This
shrewdness is furthered too by the feeling that the phrase is
chiefly the property of poets, who are exercised only in expres-
sion, and cannot be counted on for work. The influence which
imaginative expression exerts upon a people is undervalued be.
cause it does not enrich the instant, but passes into the tempera-
ment by slow absorption, and appears at length in quality. Men
cannot wait for that. There is work on hand that is to be done
with what quality exists, or not at all. A man of business can-
not see that the poem which he read over-night affected, unless
to perturb, his next day's operations. He will do better with his
leisure next time by getting well posted from the commercial
columns. He rises more buoyantly upon stocks; the pathos that
.
wrings his heart is when they fall, and his streamers are no
longer gayly afloat. The expression of music and art serves him
only for enjoyment; and he has this advantage over the idealist,
that nobody can calculate the subtile orbit of influence, nor show
how the song and symphony make blood. It is only by accident
if one or two men in a generation have their heart or stomach
so exposed that the physicians can observe its function. But
## p. 15771 (#97) ###########################################
JOHN WEISS
15771
if every brain were unroofed, there is no Asmodeus skilled to
detect tones and colors jostling its atoms into more spiritual
companionship. One must be a part of the violin's grain to
know how the vibrations of the strings record themselves in the
dead wood of the instrument, - not dead, indeed, if it is capable
of assimilating rhythm.
But there are two kinds of the Ideal: one tends toward
expression; the other animates all kinds of labor, and secures
results. When a practical man says that he can do without the
Ideal, he does not understand his own business. When a prosaic
moralist says the same, and takes a contract to reform or to
establish, he throws up the material that he must work in. It is
intangible, but has a pressure of so many pounds to the inch,
and he stands drenched in it while he pretends he does not
breathe.
There is some ideal stimulus in every kind of work, none the
less definite because the worker appears to be unconscious of it.
A gang of men with sledge-hammers go fastening ties westward
toward Golden Gate. There is expectation in every stroke:
not a man of them but proposes to arrive somewhere by that
track on which he is hammering. Family bread, affection, inde-
pendence, enlargement: these invisible yearnings give the gold-
glimmer to his Sacramento. He is an idealist while he is faithful
to his work. And the country which hires his labor, and affects
only to be wanting to reach the Pacific thereby, is stimulated by
more than all the spices of the Orient. There is no such ideality
on earth as that which compels a nation to expand all its powers
of intelligence, and to reach eventually the Rights of Man.
Something is to be overcome wherever the ideal road is
traveled. The effort may be stamped with the coarsest realism;
but the ideality is in the effort. We do not know the outlets of
everything that we perform, nor the subtile connection between
our simplest acts and our loftiest attainments. It sometimes
seems a great way from the body to the soul; but a very slight
deed may bridge over the abyss of that ocular deception. The
soul is waiting close at hand to receive the benefit of our least
integrity. So that very ordinary things may be the essentials
to secure our spiritual advance,- begrimed and sturdy engineers
who rapidly pontoon for us a formidable-looking current, and let
us transport our whole splendid equipment to the opposite shore.
The Indian knows that a buffalo trail will take him surest to
## p. 15772 (#98) ###########################################
15772
JOHN WEISS
.
water. The American condescends to follow the Indian, and his
cities rise opposite to ferries and at the confluences of streams.
Then at length the buffalo pilots thither the silent steps of Re-
ligion and Liberty.
When Frederick the Great said he always noticed that Provi-
dence favored the heaviest battalion, he only stated in a sarcasm
what God in history states religiously: that he is on the side of
valor, foresight, self-control, wheresoever and on whatsoever ob.
jects these great qualities of an overcoming man are exercised.
God, having no human pride, does not regard the nature of the
object, but its intrinsic difficulties and its drift towards some
beauty. An ideal object is one, however material, that gives the
world a whole-souled man. And it is on this principle that nat-
ural forces seemn to have selected their men and nations through
the whole of history. It is the forecasting that molds and recon-
structs a raw popular material, till it is able to occupy, or to cre-
ate, some important position, to assert a truth, to breast a flood
of tyranny, to be caught in some way by the drift and amplitude
of the Divine order. If people have settled in spots toward
which the streams of the past converge in order to find the out-
let of civil and religious liberty, or if their ethical quality
slowly selects spots that invite either the friendship or hostility of
reigning ideas, and suggest rude engineering to arrange a battle-
field, they are certain to be subjected to the training which shall
best prepare them for their great effort. This training consists
in overcoming something, no matter how physical or how remote
in character from the future issue.
I know of nothing, for example, more striking than the way
in which the Dutch people were prepared to maintain liberty of
thought and worship. A poor Frisian race was selected and kept
for centuries up to its knees in the marshes through which the
Rhine emptied and lost itself. Here it lived in continual conflict
with the Northern Ocean, forced literally to hold the tide at
arm's length, while a few acres of dry land might yield a scanty
subsistence. Here circumstance kept them half submerged, till
instead of obeying a natural impulse to emigrate to solid and
more congenial land, they acquired a liking for their amphibious
position. The struggle piqued them into staying and seeing it
out. For centuries they appeared to be doing nothing but build-
ing and repairing dikes, when really they were constructing a
national will and persistency which was a dike for tyranny to
## p. 15773 (#99) ###########################################
JOHN WEISS
15773
lash in vain. By keeping out the water they trained themselves
to keep out the more insidious tide of bigotry and spiritual death.
What a homely and inglorious school for a great republic, that
taught her how to watch patiently by tending dikes and ditches;
how to close a breach against ruin by standing with succor in
the mid-tide when the sea-wall crumbled; how to convert almost
continual defeat into victory, by keeping hold of a drowned posi-
tion, cultivating acres that had just been drenched with salt, flow-
ing back again upon depopulated districts, and holding the old
line against the sea! All these stubborn traits appeared after-
ward clothed in noble forms of moral and mental life: still there
was the old breakwater running through the national temper,
and the will of the people was like one of the ancestral Frisians,
who could stand in a flood all day and not be chilled. The wis-
dom was vindicated which compelled them first to make a soil
for ideal liberty to flourish in. And as nations are prepared for
great destinies, so are men: the constitution must catch free and
vigorous movements in some mode of life fatal to indolence and
vulgarity, the will must be roused and learn how to handle the
helm, no matter how rude the objects of the voyage are.
The poets and men of expression have not then monopolized
the Ideal. We must be poetical enough to detect it in the moral
uses of the ordinary life we lead, that is so pathetic with the
struggles of constancy against physical and mental circumstances.
No matter how sensitive a young person's heart may be, like a
bare nerve in the weather, flattered by the soft touch of music
and colors, pared into gracious action by the chisel that builds
the statue's symmetry, twitched by the finger of tragedy till the
fount of tears is opened, - his ideal life does not begin till he
turns away from these to take up his own instrument of work,
to chip a conscience out of school-keeping, type-setting, engineer-
ing, cooking, and housework, to quarry some vital activity of
a free people. Because he himself is to become a poem, fairer
than any that was ever written, by overcoming indolence and a
bad disposition in favor of some immediate exigency. That is
the story of his siege of Troy, his wandering of Ulysses, his
Paradise Regained. The ideal of his constancy is the moral
sense, which some personal deficiency or poverty inflames till it
becomes his pillar of fire in the wilderness. It does not shape
him so much to remember the Odyssey, as it does to tie him-
self to his own mast and sail past the Sirens; or to go through
## p. 15774 (#100) ##########################################
15774
JOHN WEISS
Circe's den not only unsullied but a liberator of his comrades.
When we see the course of nature breeding in such schools its
human genius, we may know how closely allied are conscience
and superior talents. Underneath the slow grinding, suddenly a
facet flashes. It is true you may grind at a sea-shore pebble till
nothing comes of it but sand; but before you begin to grind, all
stones appear of similar texture. The real ideality is hid in
this persevering against the most humiliating and prosaic con-
ditions, such as the Creator maintained through chaos and his
scarcely less chaotic creatures of the early epochs. A million or
two years of coarse persistency vanquish matter, and Shakespeare
supplants the saurian. Why should he not in every man and
woman? for conscience can become Shakespearean underneath a
hod of mortar that mounts round by round to top the house.
Young people must learn that their creative and inspiring impulse
is not derived from high art, but from accommodation to low
requirements in a high vein to make them serve, to extort from
them such exquisite tones as the Russian did out of his bits of
wood cut from different trees, till he converted the forest into a
harmonicon; and that other obscure inventor, who coaxed a heap
of various stones to yield up its separate notes, and to fall into
place in perfect octaves.
We have all seen many persons who appear to us quite ruined.
Perhaps there is a better judge of that; but if it be true, the
fact is not so revolting to us as the shock is which it gives to
our natural preferences. The most deeply compromised person
will prefer to think that health has not become impossible for
him; he shares the instinct of nature which struggles desperately
to make its growth shapely under gnarled conditions. A man
clings to his share of a divine ideal of recuperation. No number
of damaged structures can vote down our feeling that supreme
Good aspires through man to become expressed and organized; it
shakes its signals of direction through the densest fog that we
can exhale. We see the light discolored, but do not mistake it
for darkness; we observe whence it comes, and trust to its hints
regarding our safety. On various principles of judgment, preach-
ers declare these men and those women to be abandoned. The
epithet remands God back to chaos. The poet grants us a bet-
ter glimpse of the hold on life than innocence possesses:
"I helped a man to die, some few weeks since,
Warped even from his go
art to one end-
## p. 15775 (#101) ##########################################
JOHN WEISS
15775
The living on princes' smiles, reflected from
A mighty herd of favorites. No mean trick
He left untried; and truly well-nigh wormed
All traces of God's finger out of him.
Then died, grown old: and just an hour before —
Having lain long with blank and soulless eyes —
He sate up suddenly, and with natural voice
Said that in spite of thick air and closed doors
God told him it was June; and he knew well,
Without such telling, harebells grew in June;
And all that kings could ever give or take
Would not be precious as those blooms to him. ”
Does not that precious cherishing snatch a new June from
the collapse of the body, as a wrecker disentangles a still living
babe from the last freezing strain of a drowned mother?
here also, for the generations which are rising up rapidly to fill
our places, some proof that we have endeavored to transmit the
great inheritance unimpaired; that in our estimate of public
principles and private virtue, in our veneration of religion and
piety, in our devotion to civil and religious liberty, in our regard
for whatever advances human knowledge or improves human hap-
piness, we are not altogether unworthy of our origin.
There is a local feeling connected with this occasion, too
strong to be resisted; a sort of genius of the place, which inspires
and awes us. We feel that we are on the spot where the first
scene of our history was laid; where the hearths and altars of
New England were first placed; where Christianity, and civiliza-
tion, and letters, made their first lodgment,- in a vast extent of
country, covered with a wilderness and peopled by roving bar-
barians. We are here at the season of the year at which the
## p. 15754 (#80) ###########################################
15754
DANIEL WEBSTER
even
event took place. The imagination irresistibly and rapidly draws
around us the principal features and the leading characters in
the original scene. We cast our eyes abroad on the ocean, and
we see where the little bark, with the interesting group upon its
deck, made its slow progress to the shore. We look around us,
and behold the hills and promontories where the anxious eyes of
our fathers first saw the places of habitation and of rest. We
feel the cold which benumbed, and listen to the winds which
pierced them. Beneath us is the Rock on which New England
received the feet of the Pilgrims. We seem
to behold
them, as they struggle with the elements, and with toilsome
efforts gain the shore. We listen to the chiefs in council; we
see the unexampled exhibition of female fortitude and resigna-
tion; we hear the whisperings of youthful impatience; and we
see, what a painter of our own has also represented by his pen-
cil, chilled and shivering childhood, - houseless but for a mother's
arms, couchless but for a mother's breast, — till our own blood
almost freezes. The mild dignity of Carver and of Bradford; the
decisive and soldier-like air and manner of Standish; the devout
Brewster; the enterprising Allerton: the general firmness and
thoughtfulness of the whole band; their conscious joy for dan-
gers escaped; their deep solicitude about dangers to come; their
trust in Heaven; their high religious faith, full of confidence and
anticipation, — all these seem to belong to this place, and to be
present upon this occasion, to fill us with reverence and admira-
tion.
The settlement of New England by the colony which landed
here on the twenty-second of December, sixteen hundred and
twenty, although not the first European establishment in what
now constitutes the United States, was yet so peculiar in its
causes and character, and has been followed and must still be
followed by such consequences, as to give it a high claim to last-
ing commemoration. On these causes and consequences, more
than on its immediately attendant circumstances, its importance
as an historical event depends. Great actions and striking oc-
currences, having excited a temporary admiration, often pass
a
away and are forgotten, because they leave no lasting results
affecting the prosperity and happiness of communities. Such is
frequently the fortune of the most brilliant military achieve-
ments. Of the ten thousand battles which have been fought, of
all the fields fertilized with carnage, of the banners which have
## p. 15755 (#81) ###########################################
DANIEL WEBSTER
15755
-
been bathed in blood, of the warriors who have hoped that they
had risen from the field of conquest to a glory as bright and as
durable as the stars, - how few that continue long to interest
mankind! The victory of yesterday is reversed by the defeat of
to-day; the star of military glory, rising like a meteor, like a
meteor has fallen; disgrace and disaster hang on the heels of
conquest and renown; victor and vanquished presently pass away
to oblivion; and the world goes on in its course, with the loss
only of so many lives and so much treasure.
But if this be frequently, or generally, the fortune of mili-
tary achievements, it is not always so. There are enterprises,
military as well as civil, which sometimes check the current
of events, give a new turn to human affairs, and transmit their
consequences through ages. We see their importance in their
results, and call them great because great things follow. There
have been battles which have fixed the fate of nations. These
come down to us in history with a solid and permanent interest,
not created by a display of glittering armor, the rush of adverse
battalions, the sinking and rising of pennons, the flight, the pur-
suit, and the victory: but by their effect in advancing or retard-
ing human knowledge, in overthrowing or establishing despotism,
in extending or destroying human happiness. When the traveler
pauses on the plain of Marathon, what are the emotions which
most strongly agitate his breast ? What is that glorious recollec-
tion which thrills through his frame and suffuses his eyes ? Not,
I imagine, that Grecian skill and Grecian valor were here most
signally displayed; but that Greece herself was here saved. It is
because to this spot, and to the event which has rendered it
immortal, he refers all the succeeding glories of the republic. It
is because, if that day had gone otherwise, Greece had perished.
It is because he perceives that her philosophers and orators, her
poets and painters, her sculptors and architects, her governments
and free institutions, point backward to Marathon, and that their
future existence seems to have been suspended on the contin-
gency whether the Persian or the Grecian banner should wave
victorious in the beams of that day's setting sun. And as his
imagination kindles at the retrospect, he is transported back to
the interesting moment: he counts the fearful odds of the con-
tending hosts; his interest for the result overwhelms him; he
trembles, as if it were still uncertain, and seems to doubt whether
## p. 15756 (#82) ###########################################
15756
DANIEL WEBSTER
(
»
6
he may consider Socrates and Plato, Demosthenes, Sophocles, and
Phidias as secure, yet, to himself and to the world.
"If we conquer,” said the Athenian commander on the morn-
ing of that decisive day,—“if we conquer, we shall make Ath-
ens the greatest city of Greece. ” A prophecy how well fulfilled!
"If God prosper us,” might have been the more appropriate
language of our fathers, when they landed upon this Rock, – if
God prosper us, we shall here begin a work which shall last for
ages: we shall plant here a new society, in the principles of the
fullest liberty and the purest religion; we shall subdue this wil-
derness which is before us; we shall fill this region of the great
continent, which stretches almost from pole to pole, with civil.
ization and Christianity; the temples of the true God shall rise
where now ascends the smoke of idolatrous sacrifice; fields and
gardens, the flowers of summer and the waving and golden har-
vest of autumn, shall extend over a thousand hills, and stretch
along a thousand valleys, never yet, since the creation, reclaimed
to the use of civilized man. We shall whiten this coast with
the canvas of a prosperous commerce; we shall stud the long and
winding shore with a hundred cities. That which we sow in
weakness shall be raised in strength. From our sincere but
houseless worship, there shall spring splendid temples to record
God's goodness; from the simplicity of our social union, there
shall arise wise and politic constitutions of government, full of
the liberty which we ourselves bring and breathe; from our zeal
for learning, institutions shall spring which shall scatter the light
of knowledge throughout the land, and in time, paying back
where they have borrowed, shall contribute their part to the great
aggregate of human knowledge; and our descendants, through
all generations, shall look back to this spot, and to this hour,
with unabated affection and regard. ”
The hours of this day are rapidly flying, and this occasion
will soon be passed. Neither we nor our children can expect to
behold its return. They are in the distant regions of futurity;
they exist only in the all-creating power of God, who shall stand
here a hundred years hence, to trace, through us, their descent
from the Pilgrims, and to survey, as we have now surveyed,
the progress of their country during the lapse of a century. We
would anticipate their concurrence with us in our sentiments of
deep regard for our common ancestors. We would anticipate and
## p. 15757 (#83) ###########################################
DANIEL WEBSTER
15757
partake the pleasure with which they will then recount the steps
of New England's advancement. On the morning of that day,
although it will not disturb us in our repose, the voice of accla-
mation and gtatitude, commencing on the Rock of Plymouth,
shall be transmitted through millions of the sons of the Pilgrims,
till it lose itself in the murmurs of the Pacific seas.
We would leave for the consideration of those who shall then
occupy our places, some proof that we hold the blessings trans-
mitted from our fathers in just estimation; some proof of our
attachment to the cause of good government, and of civil and
religious liberty; some proof of a sincere and ardent desire to
promote everything which may enlarge the understandings and
improve the hearts of men. And when, from the long distance
of a hundred years, they shall look back upon us, they shall
know at least that we possessed affections, which, running back-
ward and warming with gratitude for what our ancestors have
done for our happiness, run forward also to our posterity, and
meet them with cordial salutation, ere yet they have arrived on
the shore of being.
Advance, then, ye future generations! We would hail you, as
you rise in your long succession, to fill the places which we now
fill, and to taste the blessings of existence where we are passing,
and soon shall have passed, our own human duration. We bid
you welcome to this pleasant land of the fathers.
We bid you
welcome to the healthful skies and the verdant fields of New
England. We greet your accession to the great inheritance which
we have enjoyed. We welcome you to the blessings of good
government and religious liberty. We welcome you to the treas-
ures of science and the delights of learning.
We welcome you
to the transcendent sweets of domestic life, to the happiness of
kindred, and parents, and children. We welcome you to the
immeasurable blessings of rational existence, the immortal hope
of Christianity, and the light of everlasting truth!
## p. 15758 (#84) ###########################################
15758
JOHN WEBSTER
(EARLY IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY)
PITTLE is known of the life of Shakespeare's greatest pupil in
tragedy, John Webster. He began to write for the stage
about 1601: between 1601 and 1607 he made certain addi-
tions to Marston's (Malcontent,' and collaborated with Dekker in the
History of Sir Thomas Wyatt,' Northward Ho' and 'Westward Ho. ?
In 1612 Vittoria Corombona,' the most famous of his tragedies, was
published, and in 1623 "The Duchess of Malfi' appeared. Webster's
classical tragedy, Appius and Virginia,' was not published until 1654.
Besides these plays he wrote a tragi-comedy entitled “The Devil's
Law-Case,' and with Rowley the curious drama of A Cure for a
Cuckold. ' In his introduction to the Mermaid Edition of Webster's
plays, J. A. Symonds points out that there is little internal evidence
of this collaboration, for which the publisher Kirkman's word was the
authority. Mr. Edmund Gosse suggested that the little play within
this play might be the work of Webster; and acting on this sugges-
tion, the Hon. S. E. Spring-Rice detached the minor drama from A
Cure for a Cuckold,' and under the name of Love's Graduate had
it printed at the private press of Mr. Daniel. For two hundred years
after Webster lived, he was almost forgotten. The keen appreciation
of Charles Lamb rescued him from the strange oblivion which had
rested upon his remarkable if sinister genius. In his (Specimens
from the English Dramatic Poets,' he accords him the highest praise.
In 1830 the Rev. Alexander Dyce collected and edited the works of
Webster; bringing them for the first time within the reach of the
general reader, and securing the preservation of what are acknowl-
edged masterpieces of a certain order of tragedy.
The two Italian dramas, "The Duchess of Malfi' and Vittoria
Corombona; or The White Devil, belong to that strange genus, the
tragedy of blood,” which began with the extravagances of Kyd, a
predecessor of Shakespeare, and received its highest illustration by
the master himself in “Hamlet. Webster made a less plausible use
of this kind of tragedy than did Shakespeare, although he sometimes
approaches him in dramatic strength. His sinister imagination is
like the lightning of a midnight tempest, revealing the tormented
sky and the black fury of the storm. “No dramatist,” writes Mr.
Symonds, “showed more consummate ability in heightening terrific
((
## p. 15759 (#85) ###########################################
JOHN WEBSTER
15759
>
effects, in laying bare the inner mysteries of crime, remorse, and
pain;
he was drawn to comprehend and reproduce abnormal
elements of spiritual anguish. ” His men and women go out of life
in a black mist, as they pass through it in a red mist of crime.
Vittoria Corombona, the beautiful evil heroine of the play, cries out
when she is stabbed:
«My soul, like to a ship in a black storm,
Is driven, I know not whither. »
Her brother, Flamineo, holds to the cynicism of his reckless life
even amid the awful scenes of the last catastrophe.
“We cease to grieve, cease to be fortune's slaves,
Nay, cease to die, by dying. ”
Yet the humanity of these men and women of Webster's is not
disguised by their crimes. His insight into human nature is deep
and incisive, but he knew only its night side. He was in love with
agony and abnormal wickedness, and with the tortures of sin-haunted
sou He found fitting material for his uses in the stories of crime
furnished by the splendid, corrupt Italy of the sixteenth century.
The plots of Vittoria Corombona' and of the Duchess of Malfi are
both taken from this source. Viewed in the light of Italian Renais-
sance history, they cannot be called extravagant; but the sombre
genius of Webster has made the most of their terrors.
In his Roman play of Appius and Virginia' he has shown that
he could write calmly and dispassionately, and without the effects of
the terrible and the ghastly. It is a stately and quiet composition;
but it lacks those sudden flashes of illumination, those profound
and searching glimpses into the bottomless abyss of human misery,
which render the two Italian tragedies unique. ”
Webster's style is singularly well adapted to the spirit in which
he portrays human life. It is cutting, sententious, powerful. He has
the faculty of expressing an entire gamut of human emotions in a
few words, as when Ferdinand in the Duchess of Malfi' sees the
body of his twin-sister murdered by his orders, and exclaims —
«Cover her face: mine eyes dazzle; she dies young. ”
Webster's portions in the collaborated plays are inconsiderable,
and are not in any way characteristic of his peculiar genius.
## p. 15760 (#86) ###########################################
15760
JOHN WEBSTER
FROM "THE DUCHESS OF MALFI)
[The Duchess of Malfi, having secretly married her steward Antonio,
arouses thereby the wrath of her brother, Duke Ferdinand, the heir of her
great fortune had she died childless. She is forced to separate from her hus-
band, and by the order of her brother she and her children and her attendant
Cariola are put to death. ]
Scene : Room in the Duchess's Lodging. Enter Duchess and Cariola.
D
UCHESS What hideous noise was that?
Cariola-
'Tis the wild consort
Of madmen, lady, which your tyrant brother
Hath placed about your lodging: this tyranny,
I think, was never practiced till this hour.
Duchess — Indeed, I thank him: nothing but noise and folly
Can keep me in my right wits; whereas reason
And silence make me stark mad. Sit down;
Discourse to me some dismal tragedy.
Cariola — Oh, 'twill increase your melancholy.
Duchess -
Thou art deceived:
To hear of greater grief would lessen mine.
This is a prison ?
Cariola
Yes, but you shall live
To shake this durance off.
Duchess -
Thou art a fool:
The robin-redbreast and the nightingale
Never live long in cages.
Cariola -
Pray, dry your eyes.
What think you of, madam ?
Duchess –
Of nothing;
When I muse thus I sleep.
Cariola Like a madman, with your eyes open?
Duchess - Dost thou think we shall know one another
In the other world ?
Cariola
Yes, out of question.
Duchess — Oh that it were possible we might
But hold some two days' conference with the dead!
From them I should learn somewhat, I am sure,
I never shall know here. I'll tell thee a miracle:
I am not mad yet, to my cause of sorrow;
The heaven o'er my head seems made of molten brass,
The earth of flaming sulphur, yet I am not mad.
I am acquainted with sad misery
As the tanned galley-slave is with his oar:
## p. 15761 (#87) ###########################################
JOHN WEBSTER
15761
Necessity makes me suffer constantly,
And custom makes it easy. Who do I look like now?
Cariola — Like to your picture in the gallery,–
A deal of life in show, but none in practice;
. Or rather like some reverend monument
Whose ruins are even pitied.
Duchess
Very proper:
And fortune seems only to have her eyesight
To behold my tragedy:- How now!
What noise is that?
Enter Servant
Sertant
I am come to tell you
Your brother hath intended you some sport.
A great physician, when the Pope was sick
Of a deep melancholy, presented him
With several sorts of madmen, which wild object,
Being full of change and sport, forced him to laugh,
And so the imposthume broke: the selfsame cure
The duke intends on you.
Duchess –
Let them come in.
Servant — There's a mad lawyer; and a secular priest;
A doctor that hath forfeited his wits
By jealousy; an astrologian
That in his works said such a day o’ the month
Should be the day of doom, and failing o't,
Ran mad; an English tailor crazed i’ the brain
With the study of new fashions; a gentleman-usher
Quite beside himself with care to keep in mind
The number of his lady's salutations
Or “How do you” she employed him in each morning;
A farmer too, an excellent knave in grain,
Mad 'cause he was hindered transportation :
And let one broker that's mad loose to these,
You'd think the Devil were among them.
Duchess — Sit, Cariola. — Let them loose when you please,
For I am chained to endure all your tyranny.
Enter Madmen
(Here this song is sung to a dismal kind of music by a Madman. )
Oh, let us howl some heavy note,
Some deadly doggèd howl,
XXVII—986
## p. 15762 (#88) ###########################################
15762
JOHN WEBSTER
Sounding as from the threatening throat
Of beasts and fatal fowl!
As ravens, screech-owls, bulls, and bears,
We'll bell, and bawl our parts,
Till irksome noise have cloyed your ears
And corrosived your hearts.
At last, whenas our quire wants breath,
Our bodies being blest,
We'll sing, like swans, to welcome death,
And die in love and rest.
First Madman – Doomsday not come yet! I'll draw it nearer by
a perspective, or make a glass that shall set all the world on fire
upon the instant.
I cannot sleep, my pillow is stuffed with a litter
of porcupines.
Second Madman — Hell is a mere glass-house, where the devils are
continually blowing up women's souls on hollow irons, and the fire
never goes out.
First Madman - I have skill in heraldry.
Second Madman — Hast?
First Madman – You do give for your crest a woodcock's head
with the brains picked out on't; you are a very ancient gentleman.
Third Madman - -Greek is turned Turk: we are only to be saved
by the Helvetian translation.
First Madman - Come on, sir, I will lay the law to you.
Second Madman — Oh, rather lay a corrosive: the law will eat to
the bone.
Third Madman He that drinks but to satisfy nature is damned.
Fourth Madman — I have pared the Devil's nails forty times, roasted
them in ravens' eggs, and cured agues with them.
Third Madman — Get me three hundred milch bats, to make pos-
sets to procure sleep.
[Here a dance of Eight Madmen, with music answerable thereto; after
which Bosola, like an Old Man, enters. ]
Duchess — Is he mad too?
Servant
Pray, question him. I'll leave you.
[Exeunt Servant and Madmen.
## p. 15763 (#89) ###########################################
JOHN WEBSTER
15763
worms.
Bosola I am come to make thy tomb.
Duchess — Ha! my tomb!
Thou speak'st as if I lay upon my death-bed,
Gasping for breath: dost thou perceive me sick ?
Bosola — Yes, and the more dangerously, since thy sickness is in-
sensible.
Duchess - Thou art not mad, sure: dost know me?
Bosola Yes.
Duchess — Who am I?
Bosola —Thou art a box of worm-seed, at best but a salvatory of
green mummy. What's this flesh ? A little crudded milk, fantastical
puff-paste. Our bodies are weaker than those paper prisons boys use
to keep flies in; more contemptible, since ours is to preserve earth-
Didst thou ever see a lark in a cage ? Such is the soul in
the body: this world is like her little turf of grass; and the heaven
o'er our heads, like her looking-glass, only gives us a miserable
knowledge of the small compass of our prison.
Duchess — Am not I thy duchess ?
Bosola – Thou art some great woman, sure, for riot begins to sit
on thy forehead (clad in gray hairs) twenty years sooner than on a
merry milkmaid's.
Thou sleepest worse than if a mouse should be
forced to take up her lodging in a cat's ear: a little infant that
breeds its teeth, should it lie with thee, would cry out, as if thou
wert the more unquiet bedfellow.
Duchess – I am Duchess of Malfi still.
Bosola – That makes thy sleeps so broken:
Glories, like glow-worms, afar off shine bright,
But looked to near, have neither heat nor light.
Duchess — Thou art very plain.
Bosola — My trade is to flatter the dead, not the living: I am a
tomb-maker.
Duchess — And thou comest to make my tomb?
Bosola - Yes.
Duchess - Let me be a little merry:- of what stuff wilt thou
make it ?
Bosola — Nay, resolve me first, of what fashion ?
Duchess Why do we grow fantastical in our death-bed ? do we
affect fashion in the grave ?
Bosola Most ambitiously. Princes' images on their tombs do not
lie, as they were wont, seeming to pray up to heaven; but with their
hands under their cheeks, as if they died of the toothache: they are
not carved with their eyes fixed upon the stars; but as their minds
were wholly bent upon the world, the selfsame way they seem to
turn their faces.
## p. 15764 (#90) ###########################################
15764
JOHN WEBSTER
Duchess — Let me know fully therefore the effect
Of this thy dismal preparation,
This talk fit for a charnel.
Bosola —
Now I shall :
Enter Executioners, with a coffin, cords, and a bell
Here is a present from your princely brothers;
And may it arrive welcome, for it brings
Last benefit, last sorrow.
Duchess -
Let me see it:
I have so much obedience in my blood,
I wish it in their veins to do them good.
Bosola -- This is your last presence-chamber.
-
Cariola
O my sweet lady!
Duchess — Peace: it affrights not me.
Bosola -
I am the common bellman,
That usually is sent to condemned persons
The night before they suffer.
Duchess —
Even now thou said'st
Thou wast a tomb-maker.
Bosola -
'Twas to bring you
By degrees to mortification. Listen,
Hark!
now everything is still.
The screech-owl and the whistler shrill
Call upon our dame aloud,
And bid her quickly don her shroud!
Much you had of land and rent;
Your length in clay's now competent:
A long war disturbed your mind;
Here your perfect peace is signed.
Of what is't fools make such vain keeping ?
Sin their conception, their birth weeping,
Their life a general mist of error,
Their death a hideous storm of terror.
Strew your hair with powders sweet,
Don clean linen, bathe your feet,
And (the foul fiend more to check)
A crucifix let bless your neck:
'Tis now full tide 'tween night and day:
End your groan and come away.
Cariola — Hence, villains, tyrants, murderers! alas!
What will you do with my lady? — Call for help.
Duchess — To whom? to our next neighbors ? they are mad-folks.
Bosola - Remove that noise.
## p. 15765 (#91) ###########################################
JOHN WEBSTER
15765
Duchess -
Farewell, Cariola.
In my last will I have not much to give,-
A many hungry guests have fed upon me;
Thine will be a poor reversion.
Cariola -
I will die with her.
Duchess – I pray thee, look thou giv'st my little boy
Some syrup for his cold, and let the girl
Say her prayers ere she sleep.
(Cariola is forced out by the Executioners. ]
Now what you please :
What death ?
Bosola -
Strangling; here are your executioners.
Duchess – I forgive them:
The apoplexy, catarrh, or cough o' the lungs
Would do as much as they do.
Bosola – Doth not death fright you ?
Duchess ---
Who would be afraid on't,
Knowing to meet such excellent company
In the other world?
Bosola
Yet, methinks,
The manner of your death should much afflict you;
This cord should terrify you.
Duchess -
Not a whit:
What would it pleasure me to have my throat cut
With diamonds ? or to be smothered
With cassia ? or to be shot to death with pearls ?
I know death hath ten thousand several doors
For men to take their exits: and 'tis found
They go on such strange geometrical hinges,
You may open them both ways; any way, for Heaven sake,
So I were out of your whispering. Tell my brothers
That I perceive death, now I am well awake,
Best gift is they can give or I can take.
I would fain put off my last woman's-fault:
I'd not be tedious to you.
First Executioner –
We are ready.
Duchess — Dispose my breath how please you; but my body
Bestow upon my women, will you ?
First Executioner –
Yes.
Duchess — Pull, and pull strongly, for your able strength
Must pull down heaven upon me; —
Yet stay: heaven-gates are not so highly arched
As princes' palaces; they that enter there
## p. 15766 (#92) ###########################################
15766
JOHN WEBSTER
Must go upon their knees. [K'neels. ] Come, violent death,
Serve for mandragora to make me sleep! -
Go tell my brothers, when I am laid out,
They then may feed in quiet.
[The Executioners strangle the Duchess. ]
Bosola
Where's the waiting-woman?
Fetch her: some other strangle the children.
[Cariola and Children are brought in by the Executioners; who presently
strangle the Children. ]
Look you, there sleeps your mistress.
Cariola
Oh, you are damned
Perpetually for this! My turn is next-
Is't not so ordered ?
Bosola
Yes, and I am glad
You are so well prepared for't.
Cariola
You are deceived, sir:
I am not prepared for 't, I will not die;
I will first come to my answer, and know
How I have offended.
Bosola-
Come, dispatch her. -
You kept her counsel; now you shall keep ours.
Cariola I will not die, I must not; I am contracted
To a young gentleman.
First Executioner -
Here's your wedding-ring.
Cariola — Let me but speak with the duke: I'll discover
Treason to his person.
Bosola
Delays: throttle her.
First Executioner
She bites and scratches.
Cariola
If you kill me now,
I am damned: I have not been at confession
This two years.
[The Executioners strangle Cariola.
Bosola -
Bear her into the next room,
Let these lie still.
(Exeunt the Executioners with the body of Cariola. ]
## p. 15767 (#93) ###########################################
JOHN WEBSTER
15767
Enter Ferdinand
Ferdinand -
Bosola -
You'd have her.
Is she dead?
She is what
But here begin your pity:
[Shows the Children strangled. ]
Alas, how have these offended ?
Ferdinand -
The death
Of young wolves is never to be pitied.
Bosola — Fix your eye here.
Ferdinand -
Constantly.
Bosola –
Do you not weep ?
Other sins only speak; murder shrieks out:
The element of water moistens the earth,
But blood flies upwards and bedews the heavens.
Ferdinand —
Cover her face: mine eyes dazzle; she dies young.
Bosola I think not so: her infelicity
Seems to have years too many.
Ferdinand -
She and I were twins;
And should I die this instant, I had lived
Her time to a minute.
Bosola
It seems she was born first:
You have bloodily approved the ancient truth,
That kindred commonly do worse agree
Than remote strangers.
Ferdinand
Let me see her face
Again. Why didst not thou pity her? what
An excellent honest man mightst thou have been,
If thou hadst borne her to some sanctuary!
Or, bold in a good cause, opposed thyself,
With thy advanced sword above thy head,
Between her innocence and my revenge!
I bade thee, when I was distracted of my wits,
Go kill my dearest friend, and thou hast done 't.
For let me but examine well the cause :
What was the meanness of her match to me?
Only I must confess I had a hope,
Had she continued widow, to have gained
An infinite mass of treasure by her death:
And what was the main cause ? her marriage,
That drew a stream of gall quite through my heart.
## p. 15768 (#94) ###########################################
15768
JOHN WEBSTER
For thee,- as we observe in tragedies
That a good actor many times is cursed
For playing a villain's part,- I hate thee for 't;
And for my sake, thou hast done much ill well.
DIRGE FROM (VITTORIA COROMBONA
CALI
ALL for the robin-redbreast and the wren,
Since o'er shady groves they hover,
And with leaves and flowers do cover
The friendless bodies of unburied men.
Call unto his funeral dole
The ant, the field-mouse, and the mole,
To rear him hillocks that shall keep him warm,
And (when gay tombs are robbed) sustain no harm;
But keep the wolf far thence, that's foe to men,
For with his nails he'll dig them up again.
## p. 15769 (#95) ###########################################
15769
JOHN WEISS
(1818-1879)
OHN Weiss belonged to a class of writers, not uncommon
among the Transcendentalists of New England, whose works
are distinguished by epigrammatic brilliancy. He wrote of
great things in what might almost be called a clever way; some-
times hiding the bold, simple outlines of an idea under an elaborate
and striking tracery of words. Yet the genuineness of his endow-
ments is beyond question. He possessed the singularly strong and
daring intellect of that generation of New-Englanders which brought
forth Margaret Fuller and Theodore Parker. He possessed the
remarkable faculty of combining an almost mystical faith with
extreme devotion to science. His outlook seemed to be as broad as
heaven itself, yet his mind recorded only flash-light pictures of the
universe. He saw vividly; he wrote of what he saw, in an intense
epigrammatic manner.
He was born in Boston in 1818, was graduated from Harvard in
1837. Later he studied at Heidelberg, becoming subsequently a min-
ister of the Unitarian church. From 1859 to 1870 he was pastor of
the Unitarian church at Watertown, Massachusetts. At one time he
gave a series of brilliant lectures in New York on the Greek Myths;
he wrote for the Radical, for the Massachusetts Quarterly, for the
Atlantic Monthly. In 1842 appeared his first work, in which he had
performed the task of editor and translator. This was Henry of
Afterdingen,' by F. von Hardenberg. In 1845 he published a transla-
tion of the philosophical and æsthetic letters of Schiller; a year later
appeared an edition of the memoir of Fichte by William Smith; and
in 1864 one of his most noted works, Life and Correspondence of
Theodore Parker. Later he published a volume of essays bearing
the title American Religion, and a volume entitled, “Wit, Humor,
and Shakespeare. ' Besides these works, he was the author of a num-
ber of religious and political pamphlets. He died in 1879.
His creed forms a background to much that he has written. The
foremost of the radicals, he cared nothing for dogma, centring his
faith solely about the idea of God and the idea of immortality. For
these he contended with glittering weapons. But he was not a logi-
cian primarily: his thought was essentially poetical.
“When all my veins flow unobstructed, and lift to the level of
my eyes the daily gladness that finds a gate at every pore; when the
## p. 15770 (#96) ###########################################
15770
JOHN WEISS
roaming gifts come home from nature to turn the brain into a hive
of cells full of yellow sunshine, the spoil of all the chalices of the
earth beneath and the heaven above, — then I am the subject of a
Revival of Religion. ”
The style of Weiss is sometimes overladen with conceits and epi-
grams, is not always a sane and quiet style; but it expresses admira-
bly his peculiar type of mind, - a type which has perished perhaps
with the unusual circumstances producing it.
CONSTANCY TO AN IDEAL
From American Religion. Copyright 1871, by John Weiss
HE phrase
Takple, who suspect "it of excusing some immediate incapacity,
like that which would recommend clouds to the selectmen
for a new style of pavement, or a balloon's aimless whirling
instead of some direct and planted way of locomotion. There
may be an upper westward current; but in the mean time the
rail gets over the ground by all the points of the compass. The
Ideal will possibly carry a person off by some aerial route to
Paris; but if he would return to Boston he must alight. This
shrewdness is furthered too by the feeling that the phrase is
chiefly the property of poets, who are exercised only in expres-
sion, and cannot be counted on for work. The influence which
imaginative expression exerts upon a people is undervalued be.
cause it does not enrich the instant, but passes into the tempera-
ment by slow absorption, and appears at length in quality. Men
cannot wait for that. There is work on hand that is to be done
with what quality exists, or not at all. A man of business can-
not see that the poem which he read over-night affected, unless
to perturb, his next day's operations. He will do better with his
leisure next time by getting well posted from the commercial
columns. He rises more buoyantly upon stocks; the pathos that
.
wrings his heart is when they fall, and his streamers are no
longer gayly afloat. The expression of music and art serves him
only for enjoyment; and he has this advantage over the idealist,
that nobody can calculate the subtile orbit of influence, nor show
how the song and symphony make blood. It is only by accident
if one or two men in a generation have their heart or stomach
so exposed that the physicians can observe its function. But
## p. 15771 (#97) ###########################################
JOHN WEISS
15771
if every brain were unroofed, there is no Asmodeus skilled to
detect tones and colors jostling its atoms into more spiritual
companionship. One must be a part of the violin's grain to
know how the vibrations of the strings record themselves in the
dead wood of the instrument, - not dead, indeed, if it is capable
of assimilating rhythm.
But there are two kinds of the Ideal: one tends toward
expression; the other animates all kinds of labor, and secures
results. When a practical man says that he can do without the
Ideal, he does not understand his own business. When a prosaic
moralist says the same, and takes a contract to reform or to
establish, he throws up the material that he must work in. It is
intangible, but has a pressure of so many pounds to the inch,
and he stands drenched in it while he pretends he does not
breathe.
There is some ideal stimulus in every kind of work, none the
less definite because the worker appears to be unconscious of it.
A gang of men with sledge-hammers go fastening ties westward
toward Golden Gate. There is expectation in every stroke:
not a man of them but proposes to arrive somewhere by that
track on which he is hammering. Family bread, affection, inde-
pendence, enlargement: these invisible yearnings give the gold-
glimmer to his Sacramento. He is an idealist while he is faithful
to his work. And the country which hires his labor, and affects
only to be wanting to reach the Pacific thereby, is stimulated by
more than all the spices of the Orient. There is no such ideality
on earth as that which compels a nation to expand all its powers
of intelligence, and to reach eventually the Rights of Man.
Something is to be overcome wherever the ideal road is
traveled. The effort may be stamped with the coarsest realism;
but the ideality is in the effort. We do not know the outlets of
everything that we perform, nor the subtile connection between
our simplest acts and our loftiest attainments. It sometimes
seems a great way from the body to the soul; but a very slight
deed may bridge over the abyss of that ocular deception. The
soul is waiting close at hand to receive the benefit of our least
integrity. So that very ordinary things may be the essentials
to secure our spiritual advance,- begrimed and sturdy engineers
who rapidly pontoon for us a formidable-looking current, and let
us transport our whole splendid equipment to the opposite shore.
The Indian knows that a buffalo trail will take him surest to
## p. 15772 (#98) ###########################################
15772
JOHN WEISS
.
water. The American condescends to follow the Indian, and his
cities rise opposite to ferries and at the confluences of streams.
Then at length the buffalo pilots thither the silent steps of Re-
ligion and Liberty.
When Frederick the Great said he always noticed that Provi-
dence favored the heaviest battalion, he only stated in a sarcasm
what God in history states religiously: that he is on the side of
valor, foresight, self-control, wheresoever and on whatsoever ob.
jects these great qualities of an overcoming man are exercised.
God, having no human pride, does not regard the nature of the
object, but its intrinsic difficulties and its drift towards some
beauty. An ideal object is one, however material, that gives the
world a whole-souled man. And it is on this principle that nat-
ural forces seemn to have selected their men and nations through
the whole of history. It is the forecasting that molds and recon-
structs a raw popular material, till it is able to occupy, or to cre-
ate, some important position, to assert a truth, to breast a flood
of tyranny, to be caught in some way by the drift and amplitude
of the Divine order. If people have settled in spots toward
which the streams of the past converge in order to find the out-
let of civil and religious liberty, or if their ethical quality
slowly selects spots that invite either the friendship or hostility of
reigning ideas, and suggest rude engineering to arrange a battle-
field, they are certain to be subjected to the training which shall
best prepare them for their great effort. This training consists
in overcoming something, no matter how physical or how remote
in character from the future issue.
I know of nothing, for example, more striking than the way
in which the Dutch people were prepared to maintain liberty of
thought and worship. A poor Frisian race was selected and kept
for centuries up to its knees in the marshes through which the
Rhine emptied and lost itself. Here it lived in continual conflict
with the Northern Ocean, forced literally to hold the tide at
arm's length, while a few acres of dry land might yield a scanty
subsistence. Here circumstance kept them half submerged, till
instead of obeying a natural impulse to emigrate to solid and
more congenial land, they acquired a liking for their amphibious
position. The struggle piqued them into staying and seeing it
out. For centuries they appeared to be doing nothing but build-
ing and repairing dikes, when really they were constructing a
national will and persistency which was a dike for tyranny to
## p. 15773 (#99) ###########################################
JOHN WEISS
15773
lash in vain. By keeping out the water they trained themselves
to keep out the more insidious tide of bigotry and spiritual death.
What a homely and inglorious school for a great republic, that
taught her how to watch patiently by tending dikes and ditches;
how to close a breach against ruin by standing with succor in
the mid-tide when the sea-wall crumbled; how to convert almost
continual defeat into victory, by keeping hold of a drowned posi-
tion, cultivating acres that had just been drenched with salt, flow-
ing back again upon depopulated districts, and holding the old
line against the sea! All these stubborn traits appeared after-
ward clothed in noble forms of moral and mental life: still there
was the old breakwater running through the national temper,
and the will of the people was like one of the ancestral Frisians,
who could stand in a flood all day and not be chilled. The wis-
dom was vindicated which compelled them first to make a soil
for ideal liberty to flourish in. And as nations are prepared for
great destinies, so are men: the constitution must catch free and
vigorous movements in some mode of life fatal to indolence and
vulgarity, the will must be roused and learn how to handle the
helm, no matter how rude the objects of the voyage are.
The poets and men of expression have not then monopolized
the Ideal. We must be poetical enough to detect it in the moral
uses of the ordinary life we lead, that is so pathetic with the
struggles of constancy against physical and mental circumstances.
No matter how sensitive a young person's heart may be, like a
bare nerve in the weather, flattered by the soft touch of music
and colors, pared into gracious action by the chisel that builds
the statue's symmetry, twitched by the finger of tragedy till the
fount of tears is opened, - his ideal life does not begin till he
turns away from these to take up his own instrument of work,
to chip a conscience out of school-keeping, type-setting, engineer-
ing, cooking, and housework, to quarry some vital activity of
a free people. Because he himself is to become a poem, fairer
than any that was ever written, by overcoming indolence and a
bad disposition in favor of some immediate exigency. That is
the story of his siege of Troy, his wandering of Ulysses, his
Paradise Regained. The ideal of his constancy is the moral
sense, which some personal deficiency or poverty inflames till it
becomes his pillar of fire in the wilderness. It does not shape
him so much to remember the Odyssey, as it does to tie him-
self to his own mast and sail past the Sirens; or to go through
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Circe's den not only unsullied but a liberator of his comrades.
When we see the course of nature breeding in such schools its
human genius, we may know how closely allied are conscience
and superior talents. Underneath the slow grinding, suddenly a
facet flashes. It is true you may grind at a sea-shore pebble till
nothing comes of it but sand; but before you begin to grind, all
stones appear of similar texture. The real ideality is hid in
this persevering against the most humiliating and prosaic con-
ditions, such as the Creator maintained through chaos and his
scarcely less chaotic creatures of the early epochs. A million or
two years of coarse persistency vanquish matter, and Shakespeare
supplants the saurian. Why should he not in every man and
woman? for conscience can become Shakespearean underneath a
hod of mortar that mounts round by round to top the house.
Young people must learn that their creative and inspiring impulse
is not derived from high art, but from accommodation to low
requirements in a high vein to make them serve, to extort from
them such exquisite tones as the Russian did out of his bits of
wood cut from different trees, till he converted the forest into a
harmonicon; and that other obscure inventor, who coaxed a heap
of various stones to yield up its separate notes, and to fall into
place in perfect octaves.
We have all seen many persons who appear to us quite ruined.
Perhaps there is a better judge of that; but if it be true, the
fact is not so revolting to us as the shock is which it gives to
our natural preferences. The most deeply compromised person
will prefer to think that health has not become impossible for
him; he shares the instinct of nature which struggles desperately
to make its growth shapely under gnarled conditions. A man
clings to his share of a divine ideal of recuperation. No number
of damaged structures can vote down our feeling that supreme
Good aspires through man to become expressed and organized; it
shakes its signals of direction through the densest fog that we
can exhale. We see the light discolored, but do not mistake it
for darkness; we observe whence it comes, and trust to its hints
regarding our safety. On various principles of judgment, preach-
ers declare these men and those women to be abandoned. The
epithet remands God back to chaos. The poet grants us a bet-
ter glimpse of the hold on life than innocence possesses:
"I helped a man to die, some few weeks since,
Warped even from his go
art to one end-
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15775
The living on princes' smiles, reflected from
A mighty herd of favorites. No mean trick
He left untried; and truly well-nigh wormed
All traces of God's finger out of him.
Then died, grown old: and just an hour before —
Having lain long with blank and soulless eyes —
He sate up suddenly, and with natural voice
Said that in spite of thick air and closed doors
God told him it was June; and he knew well,
Without such telling, harebells grew in June;
And all that kings could ever give or take
Would not be precious as those blooms to him. ”
Does not that precious cherishing snatch a new June from
the collapse of the body, as a wrecker disentangles a still living
babe from the last freezing strain of a drowned mother?
