No More Learning

The beasts
delighted in dashing furiously through our file, which, being
colligated, was thrown each time into the greatest confusion.
And whenever we were observed smoking, we were cursed aloud
for infidels and idolaters.
Looking back at El Zaribah, soon after our departure, I saw
a heavy nimbus settle upon the hilltops, a sheet of rain being
stretched between it and the plain. The low grumbling of
thunder sounded joyfully in our ears. We hoped for a shower,
but were disappointed by a dust-storm, which ended with a few
heavy drops. There
a report that the Bedouins had
attacked a party of Meccans with stones, classical Arabian mis-
siles,- and the news caused men to look exceeding grave.
At
5 P. M.
we entered the wide bed of the fiumara, down
which we were to travel all night. Here the country falls rapidly
towards the sea, as the increasing heat of the air, the direction
of the watercourses, and signs of violence in the torrent-bed
show. The fiumara varies in breadth from 150 feet to three-
quarters of a mile; its course, I was told, is towards the south-
west, and it enters the sea near Jeddah. The channel is a
coarse sand, with here and there masses of sheet rock and
patches of thin vegetation.
At about half-past 5 P. M. we entered a suspicious-looking
place. On the right was a stony buttress, along whose base the
stream, when there is one, flows; and to this depression was our
road limited by the rocks and thorn-trees, which filled the other
half of the channel. The left side was a precipice, grim and
barren, but not so abrupt as its brother. Opposite us the way
seemed barred by piles of hills, crest rising above crest into the
far blue distance. Day still smiled upon the upper peaks, but
the lower slopes and the fiumara bed were already curtained
with gray sombre shade.
A damp seemed to fall upon our spirits as we approached this
Valley Perilous. I remarked with wonder that the voices of the
women and children sank into silence, and the loud Labbaykas
of the pilgrims were gradually stilled. Whilst still speculating
upon the cause of this phenomenon, it became apparent. A small
V--182


## p. 2898 (#470) ###########################################

2898
SIR RICHARD F. BURTON
curl of smoke, like a lady's ringlet, on the summit of the right-
hand precipice, caught my eye, and simultaneous with the echo-
ing crack of the matchlock a high-trotting dromedary in front of
me rolled over upon the sands. A bullet had split his heart,
throwing his rider a goodly somerset of five or six yards.
Ensued terrible confusion; women screamed, children shrieked,
and men vociferated, each one striving with might and main to
urge his animal out of the place of death. But the road being
narrow, they only managed to jam the vehicles in a solid immov-
able mass.
At every matchlock shot a shudder ran through the
huge body, as when the surgeon's scalpel touches some
sensitive nerve. The irregular horsemen, perfectly useless, gal-
loped up and down over the stones, shouting to and ordering
one another. The Pacha of the army had his carpet spread at
the foot of the left-hand precipice, and debated over his pipe
with the officers what ought to be done. No good genius whis-
pered "Crown the heights. ”
Then it was that the conduct of the Wahhabis found favor in
my eyes. They came up, galloping their camels,
more
«Torrents less rapid and less rash,
with their elf-locks tossing in the wind, and their flaring matches
casting a strange lurid light over their features. Taking up a
position, one body began to fire upon the Utaybah robbers,
whilst two or three hundred, dismounting, swarmed up the hill
under the guidance of the Sherif Zayd. I had remarked this
nobleman at El Medinah as a model specimen of the pure Arab.
Like all Sherifs, he is celebrated for bravery, and has killed
many with his own hand. When urged at E1 Zaribah to ride
into Meccah, he swore that he would not leave the caravan till
in sight of the walls; and fortunately for the pilgrims, he kept
his word. Presently the firing was heard far in our rear - the
robbers having fled; the head of the column advanced, and the
dense body of the pilgrims opened out. Our forced halt was
now exchanged for a flight. It required much management to
steer our desert-craft clear of danger; but Shaykh Masud was
equal to the occasion. That many were lost was evident by the
boxes and baggage that strewed the shingles. I had no means
of ascertaining the number of men killed and wounded: reports
were contradictory, and exaggeration unanimous. The robbers
were said to be 150 in number; their object was plunder, and


## p. 2899 (#471) ###########################################

SIR RICHARD F. BURTON
2899
they would eat the shot camels. But their principal ambition
was the boast “We, the Utaybah, on such and such a night
stopped the Sultan's mahmal one whole hour in the pass. "
At the beginning of the skirmish I had primed my pistols,
and sat with them ready for use. But soon seeing that there
was nothing to be done, and wishing to make an impression, -
nowhere does Bobadil now go down but in the East, I
called aloud for my supper. Shaykh Nur, exanimate with fear,
could not move.
The boy Mohammed ejaculated only an «Oh,
sir! ” and the people around exclaimed in disgust, “By Allah! he
eats! Shaykh Abdullah, the Meccan, being a man of spirit,
was amused by the spectacle. «Are these Afghan manners,
Effendim ? ” he inquired from the shugduf behind me. "Yes,” I
replied aloud, in my country we always dine before an attack of
robbers, because that gentry is in the habit of sending men to
bed supperless. ” The Shaykh laughed aloud, but those around
him looked offended. I thought the bravado this time mal placé;
but a little event which took place on my way to Jeddah proved
that it was not quite a failure.
As we advanced our escort took care to fire every large dry
asclepias, to disperse the shades which buried us. Again the
scene became wondrous wild:
«Full many a waste I've wander'd o'er,
Clomb many a crag, cross'd many a shore,
But, by my halidome,
A scene so rude, so wild as this,
Yet so sublime in barrenness,
Ne'er did my wandering footsteps press,
Where'er I chanced to roam. ”
On either side were ribbed precipices, dark, angry, and tower-
ing above, till their summits mingled with the glooms of night;
and between them formidable looked the chasm, down which our
host hurried with shouts and discharges of matchlocks. The
torch-smoke and the night-fires of flaming asclepias formed a
canopy, sable above and livid red below, which hung over our
heads like a sheet, and divided the cliffs into two equal parts.
Here the fire flashed fiercely from a tall thorn, that crackled and
shot up showers of sparks into the air; there it died away in
1urid gleams, which lit up a truly Stygian scene. As usual, how-
ever, the picturesque had its inconveniences. There
was
no


## p. 2900 (#472) ###########################################

2900
SIR RICHARD F. BURTON
path. Rocks, stone-banks, and trees obstructed our passage. The
camels, now blind in darkness, then dazzled by a flood of light,
stumbled frequently; in some places slipping down a steep
descent, in others sliding over a sheet of mud.
There were
furious quarrels and fierce language between camel-men and their
hirers, and threats to fellow-travelers; in fact, we were united in
discord. I passed that night crying «Hai! Hai! » switching the
camel, and fruitlessly endeavoring to fustigate Masud's nephew,
who resolutely slept upon the water-bags. During the hours of
darkness we made four or five halts, when we boiled coffee and
smoked pipes, but man and beasts were beginning to suffer from
a deadly fatigue.
Dawn found us still traveling down the fiumara, which here is
about one hundred yards broad. The granite hills on both sides
were less precipitous, and the borders of the torrent-bed became
natural quays of stiff clay, which showed a water-mark of from
twelve to fifteen feet in height. In many parts the bed was
muddy, and the moist places, as usual, caused accidents.
I hap-
pened to be looking back at Shaykh Abdullah, who was then
riding in old Ali bin Ya Sin's fine shugduf; suddenly the camel's
four legs disappeared from under him, his right side flattening
the ground, and the two riders were pitched severally out of the
smashed vehicle. Abdullah started up furious, and, abused the
Bedouins, who were absent, with great zest. Feed these Arabs,”
he exclaimed, quoting a Turkish proverb, "and they will fire at
Heaven! ” But I observed that, when Shaykh Masud came up,
the citizen was only gruff.
We then turned northward, and sighted El Mazik, more gen-
erally known as Wady Laymun, the Valley of Limes. On the
right bank of the fiumara stood the Meccan Sherif's state pavil.
ion, green and gold: it was surrounded by his attendants, and
prepared to receive the Pacha of the caravan. We advanced half
a mile, and encamped temporarily in a hill-girt bulge of the fiu-
mara bed. At 8 A. M. we had traveled about twenty-four miles
from El Zaribah, and the direction of our present station was
S. W. 50°
Shaykh Masud allowed us only four hours' halt; he wished to
precede the main body. After breaking our fast joyously upon
limes, pomegranates, and fresh dates, we sallied forth to admire
the beauties of the place. We are once more on classic ground,
the ground of the ancient Arab poets:-


## p. 2901 (#473) ###########################################

SIR RICHARD F. BURTON
2901
"Deserted is the village - waste the halting place and home
At Mina; o'er Rijam and Ghul wild beasts unheeded roam;
On Rayyan hill the channel lines have left a naked trace,
Time-worn, as primal Writ that dints the mountain's flinty face;" —
and this wady, celebrated for the purity of its air, has from
remote ages been a favorite resort of the Meccans. Nothing can
be more soothing to the brain than the dark-green foliage of the
limes and pomegranates; and from the base of the southern
hill bursts a bubbling stream, whose
«Chiare, fresche e dolci acque
At 2 P. M. ,
flow through the garden, filling them with the most delicious of
melodies, and the gladdest sound which nature in these regions
knows.
Exactly at noon Masud seized the halter of the foremost
camel, and we started down the fiumara. Troops of Bedouin
girls looked over the orchard walls laughingly, and children came
out to offer us fresh fruit and sweet water.
travel-
ing southwest, we arrived at a point where the torrent-bed turns
to the right, and quitting it, we climbed with difficulty over a
steep ridge of granite. Before three o'clock we entered a hill-
girt plain, which my companions called "Sola. ” In some places
were clumps of trees, and scattered villages warned us that we
were approaching a city. Far to the left rose the blue peaks of
Taif, and the mountain road, a white thread upon the nearer
heights, was pointed out to me. Here I first saw the tree, or
rather shrub, which bears the balm of Gilead, erst so celebrated
for its tonic and stomachic properties. I told Shaykh to break
off a twig, which he did heedlessly. The act was witnessed by
our party with a roar of laughter, and the astounded Shaykh
was warned that he had become subject to an atoning sacrifice.
Of course he denounced me as the instigator, and I could not
fairly refuse assistance. The tree has of late years been care-
fully described by many botanists; I will only say that the bark
resembled in color a cherry-stick pipe, the inside was a light
yellow, and the juice made my fingers stick together.
At 4 P. M. we came to a steep and rocky pass, up which we
toiled with difficulty. The face of the country was rising once
more, and again presented the aspect of numerous small basins
divided and surrounded by hills. As we jogged on were
passed by the cavalcade of no less a personage than the Sherif
we


## p. 2902 (#474) ###########################################

2902
SIR RICHARD F. BURTON
of Meccah. Abd el Muttalib bin Ghalib is a dark, beardless old
man with African features, derived from his mother. He was
plainly dressed in white garments and a white muslin turban,
which made him look jet-black; he rode an ambling mule, and
the only emblem of his dignity was the large green satin
umbrella borne by an attendant on foot. Scattered around him
were about forty matchlock-men, mostly slaves. At long inter-
vals, after their father, came his four sons, Riza Bey, Abdullah,
Ali, and Ahmed, the latter still a child. The three elder
brothers rode splendid dromedaries at speed; they were young
men of light complexion, with the true Meccan cast of features,
showily dressed in bright-colored silks, and armed, to denote
their rank, with sword and gold-hilted dagger.
We halted as evening approached, and strained our eyes, but
all in vain, to catch sight of Meccah, which lies in a winding
valley. By Shaykh Abdullah's direction I recited, after the
usual devotions, the following prayer. The reader is forewarned
that it is difficult to preserve the flowers of Oriental rhetoric in
a European tongue.
“O Allah! verily this is thy safeguard (Amn) and thy Sanc-
tuary (Haram)! Into it whoso entereth becometh safe (Amin).
So deny (Harrim) my flesh and blood, my bones and skin, to
hell-fire. O Allah! Save me from thy wrath on the day when
thy servants shall be raised from the dead. I conjure thee by
this that thou art Allah, besides whom is none (thou only), the
merciful, the compassionate. And have mercy upon- our lord
Mohammed, and upon the progeny of our lord Mohammed, and
upon his followers, one and all! ” This was concluded with the
« Talbiyat," and with an especial prayer for myself.
We again mounted, and night completed our disappointment.
About 1 A. M. I was aroused by general excitement. «Meccah!
Meccah! ” cried some voices. «The Sanctuary! O the Sanctuary!
exclaimed others; and all burst into loud Labbayk,” not unfre-
quently broken by sobs. I looked out from my litter, and saw
by the light of the southern stars the dim outlines of a large
city, a shade darker than the surrounding plain. We were pass-
ing over the last ridge by a winding path” flanked on both
sides by watch-towers, which command the Darb el Maala," or
road leading from the north into Meccah. Thence we passed
into the Maabidah (northern suburb), where the Sherif's palace
is built. After this, on the left hand, came the deserted abode
1


## p. 2903 (#475) ###########################################

SIR RICHARD F. BURTON
2903
Op-
of the Sherif bin Aun, now said to be a haunted house. ” *
posite to it lies the Jannat el Maala, the holy cemetery of Mec-
cah. Thence, turning to the right, we entered the Sulaymaniyah
or Afghan quarter. Here the boy Mohammed, being an inhabi-
tant of the Shamiyah or Syrian ward, thought proper to display
some apprehension. These two are on bad terms; children never
meet without exchanging volleys of stones, and men fight furi-
ously with quarter-staves. Sometimes, despite the terrors of
religion, the knife and sabre are drawn. But these hostilities
have their code. If a citizen be killed, there is a subscription
for blood-money.
An inhabitant of one quarter, passing singly
through another, becomes a guest; once beyond the walls, he is
likely to be beaten to insensibility by his hospitable foes.
At the Sulaymaniyah we turned off the main road into a
by-way, and ascended by narrow lanes the rough heights of
Jebel Hindi, upon which stands a small whitewashed and crenel-
lated building called a “fort. ” Thence descending, we threaded
dark streets, in places crowded with rude cots and dusky figures,
and finally at 2 A. M. we found ourselves at the door of the boy
Mohammed's house.
We arrived on the morning of Sunday the 7th Zu'l Hijjah
(11th September, 1853), and had one day before the beginning of
the pilgrimage to repose and visit the Haram. From El Medinah
to Meccah the distance, according to my calculation, was 248
English miles, which was accomplished in eleven marches.
*I cannot conceive what made the accurate Niebuhr fall into the strange
error that apparitions are unknown in Arabia. ” Arabs fear to sleep alone,
to enter the bath at night, to pass by cemeteries during dark, and to sit
amongst ruins, simply for fear of apparitions. And Arabia, together with
Persia, has supplied half the Western World - Southern Europe — with its
ghost stories and tales of angels, demons, and fairies. To quote Milton, the
land is struck «with superstition as with a planet. ”


## p. 2904 (#476) ###########################################

2904
ROBERT BURTON
(1577-1640)
as
HERE are some books of which every reader knows the names,
but of whose contents few know anything, excepting as the
same may have come to them filtered through the work of
others. Of these, Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy) is one of the
most marked instances. It is a vast storehouse from which subse-
quent authors have always drawn and continue to draw, even
Burton himself drew from others,—though without always giving the
credit which with him was customary. Few would now have the
courage to read it through, and probably
fewer still could say with Dr. Johnson that
it was the only book that ever took him
out of bed two hours sooner than he wished
to rise. ”
Of Robert Burton himself very little is
known. He was born in 1577, a few years
later than Shakespeare,- probably at Lind-
ley, in Leicestershire; and died at Oxford
in 1640. He had some schooling at Sutton
Coldfield in Warwickshire, and was sent to
Brasenose College at Oxford in 1593; was
elected a student at Christ Church College
in 1599, and took his degree or B. D. in
ROBERT BURTON
1614. He was then thirty-seven years of
age. Why he should have been so long in reaching his degree, does
not appear.
Two years later he was presented by the Dean and
Chapter of Christ Church to the vicarage of St. Thomas in the sub-
urbs of Oxford. To this, about 1630, through presentation by George,
Lord Berkeley, was added the rectory of Segrave in Leicestershire,
and he retained both livings until his death. This is about the sum
and substance of his known history. Various legends remain regard-
ing him; as, that he was very good and jolly company, a most learned
scholar, very ready in quotations from the poets and classical authors,
- and indeed no reader of the Anatomy could imagine otherwise.
Yet was he of a melancholy disposition, and it is said that "he com-
posed this book with a view of relieving his own melancholy, but
increased it to such a degree that nothing could make him laugh but
going to the foot-bridge and hearing the ribaldry of the bargemen,

1
2


## p. 2905 (#477) ###########################################

ROBERT BURTON
2905
He says:
which rarely failed to throw him into a violent fit of laughter. He
says himself, “I write of melancholy, by being busie, to avoid melan-
choly. ” He was expert in the calculation of nativities, and cast his
own horoscope; having determined in which, the time at which his
death should occur, it was afterward shrewdly believed that he took
measures to insure the fulfillment of the prophecy.
His life was almost wholly spent in his study at Oxford. He was
a wide and curious reader, and the book to the composition of which
he devoted himself quotes authorities without end. All was fish
which came to his net: divines, poets, astrologists, doctors, philoso-
phers, men of science, travelers, romancers he draws from the
whole range of literature; and often page after page — scores and
hundreds of pages,- is filled with quotations, sometimes of two or
three words only, sometimes translated and sometimes not, an almost
inextricable network of facts, of fancies, and of phrases.
«As those old Romans rob'd all the cities of the world, to set out
their bad-sited Rome, we skim off the cream of other men's wits,
pick the choice flowers of their till'd gardens to set out our own
steril plots. ”
Yet when he sets about it, his handling is steady and assured,
and he has distinctly the literary touch, as well as the marks of
genius; having a very great quaintness withal. The title of his
famous book is 'The Anatomy of Melancholy. What It Is, with All
the Kinds, Causes, Symptoms, Prognostics, and several Cures of it.
In three Partitions. With their several Sections, Members, and Sub-
sections, Philosophically, Medically, Historically Opened and Cut Up.
By Democritus Junior. The first edition appears to have been
issued in 1621.
He continued to modify and enlarge it from time to
time throughout his life; and for the sixth edition, which appeared
some years after his death, he prepared a long address to the reader,
describing his student life, accounting for his choice of subject, and
full of quaint fancies and scathing criticisms of the ill habits and
weaknesses of mankind.
“Melancholy means with Burton Melancholia, but it means also
all sorts of insanity, and apparently all affections of the mind or
spirit, sane or insane. On the one hand he heaps up, in page after
page and chapter after chapter, all the horrid ills to which flesh is
heir, or which it cultivates for itself, and paints the world as a very
pandemonium of evil and outrage. And anon the air blows soft and
sweet, the birds sing, both brotherly love and domestic happiness
are possible, and
“God's in his heaven, all's right with the world. ”
To the first volume is prefixed “The Author's Abstract of Melan-
choly,' beginning :-


## p. 2906 (#478) ###########################################

2906
ROBERT BURTON
“When I go musing all alone,
Thinking of divers things foreknown,
When I build castles in the ayr,
Void of sorrow and void of feare
Pleasing myself with phantasms sweet,
Methinks the time runs very fleet.
All my joys to this are folly,
Naught so sweet as melancholy. ”
It does not need an expert to tell, after reading this, whence
Milton drew the suggestion of "L'Allegro' and 'Il Penseroso. '
CONCLUSIONS AS TO MELANCHOLY
GEN
ENERALLY thus much we may conclude of melancholy: that
it is most pleasant at first, I say, mentis gratissimus error,
a most delightsome humor, to be alone, dwell alone, walk
alone, meditate, lie in bed whole days, dreaming awake as it
were, and frame a thousand phantastical imaginations unto them-
selves. They are never better pleased than when they are so
doing; they are in Paradise for the time, and cannot well endure
to be interrupt; with him in the Poet:-
«- pol! me occidistis, amici,
Non servâstis, ait: »
He may
you have undone him, he complains, if you trouble him: tell him
what inconvenience will follow, what will be the event, all is one,
canis ad vomitum, 'tis so pleasant he cannot refrain.
thus continue peradventure many years by reason of a strong
temperature, or some mixture of business, which may divert
his cogitations: but at the last lasa imaginatio, his phantasy is
crazed, & now habituated to such toys, cannot but work still
like a fate; the Scene alters upon a sudden; Fear and Sorrow
supplant those pleasing thoughts, suspicion, discontent, and per-
petual anxiety succeed in their places; so little by little, by that
shoeing-horn of idleness, and voluntary solitariness, Melancholy
this feral fiend is drawn on, et quantum vertice ad auras Æthe-
reas, tantum radice in Tartara tendit; "extending up, by its
branches, so far towards Heaven, as, by its roots, it does down
towards Tartarus; it was not so delicious at first, as now it is
bitter and harsh: a cankered soul macerated with cares and dis-
contents, tædium vitæ, impatience, agony, inconstancy, irresolu.
tion, precipitate them unto unspeakable miseries. They cannot
»
1


## p. 2907 (#479) ###########################################

ROBERT BURTON
2907
endure company, light, or life itself, some unfit for action, and
the like. Their bodies are lean and dried up, withered, ugly;
their looks harsh, very dull, and their souls tormented, as they are
more or less entangled, as the humor hath been intended, or
according to the continuance of time they have been troubled.
To discern all which symptoms the better, Rhasis the Arabian
makes three degrees of them. The first is falsa cogitatio, false
conceits and idle thoughts: to misconstrue and amplify, aggravat-
ing everything they conceive or fear: the second is falso cogitata
loqui, to talk to themselves, or to use inarticulate incondite voices,
speeches, obsolete gestures, and plainly to utter their minds and
conceits of their hearts, by their words and actions, as to laugh,
weep, to be silent, not to sleep, eat their meat, &c. ; the third is
to put in practice that which they think or speak. Savanarola,
Rub. ii, Tract. 8, cap. 1, de ægritudine, confirms as much: when
he begins to express that in words, which he conceives in his heart,
or talks idly, or goes from one thing to another, which Gordonius
calls nec caput habentia nec caudam [having neither head nor
tail], he is in the middle way: but when he begins to act it like-
wise, and to put his fopperies in execution, he is then in the ex-
tent of melancholy, or madness itself. This progress of melancholy
you shall easily observe in them that have been so affected, they
go smiling to themselves at first, at length they laugh out; at
first solitary, at last they can endure no company, or if they do,
they are now dizzards, past sense and shame, quite moped, they
care not what they say or do; all their actions, words, gestures,
are furious or ridiculous. At first his mind is troubled, he doth
not attend what is said, if you tell him a tale, he cries at last,
What said you ? but in the end he mutters to himself, as old
women do many times, or old men when they sit alone; upon a
sudden they laugh, whoop, halloo, or run away, and swear they
see or hear Players, Devils, Hobgoblins, Ghosts, strike, or strut,
&c. , grow humorous in the end: like him in the Poet, sæpe
ducentos sæpe decem servos [he often keeps two hundred slaves,
often only ten], he will dress himself, and undress, careless at
last, grows insensible, stupid or mad. He howls like a wolf,
barks like a dog, and raves like Ajax and Orestes, hears Music
and outcries which no man else hears.
Who can sufficiently speak of these symptoms, or prescribe
rules to comprehend them? As Echo to the painter in Ausonius,
vane, quid affectas, &c. — foolish fellow, what wilt ? if you must


## p. 2908 (#480) ###########################################

2908
ROBERT BURTON
air,
as
SO
needs paint me, paint a voice, et similem si vis pingere, pinge
sonum; if you will describe melancholy, describe a phantastical
conceit, a corrupt imagination, vain thoughts and different, which
who can do? The four-and-twenty letters make no more variety
of words in divers languages, than melancholy conceits produce
diversity of symptoms in several persons. They are irregular,
obscure, various, so infinite, Proteus himself is not so diverse;
you may as well make the Moon a new coat, as a true character
of a melancholy man; as soon find the motion of a bird in the
the heart of man, a melancholy man. They are
confused, I say, diverse, intermixt with other diseases. As the
species be confounded (which I have shewed) so are the symp-
toms; sometimes with headache, cachexia, dropsy, stone, (as you
may perceive by those several examples and illustrations, collected
by Hildesheim, spiccl. 2, Mercurialis, consil. 118, cap. 6 et 11), with
headache, epilepsy, priapismus (Trincavellius, consil. 12, lib. 1, con-
sil. 49), with gout, caninus appetitus (Montanus, consil. 26, &c. , 23,
234, 249), with falling-sickness, headache, vertigo, lycanthropia,
&c. (J. Cæsar Claudinus, consult. 4, consult. 89 et 116), with
gout, agues, hæmrods, stone, &c. Who can distinguish these
melancholy symptoms so intermixt with others, or apply them to
their several kinds, confine them into method ? 'Tis hard I con-
fess, yet I have disposed of them as I could, and will descend to
particularize them according to their species. For hitherto I have
expatiated in more general lists or terms, speaking promiscuously
of such ordinary signs, which occur amongst writers. Not that
they are all to be found in one man, for that were to paint a
Monster or Chimæra, not a man; but some in one, some in
another, and that successively, or at several times.
Which I have been the more curious to express and report, not
to upbraid any miserable man, or by way of derision (I rather pity
them), but the better to discern, to apply remedies unto them;
and to shew that the best and soundest of us all is in great
danger; how much we ought to fear our own fickle estates,
remember our miseries and vanities, examine and humiliate our-
selves, seek to God, and call to him for mercy, that needs not
look for any rods to scourge ourselves, since we carry them in
our bowels; and that our souls are in a miserable captivity, if
the light of grace and heavenly truth doth not shine continually
upon us; and by our discretion to moderate ourselves, to be more
circumspect and wary in the midst of these dangers.


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2909
HORACE BUSHNELL
(1802-1876)
BY THEODORE T. MUNGER
BORACE BUSHNELL was born in 1802 in Litchfield, Connecticut,
and reared in New Preston, a hamlet near by.
He was
graduated at Yale College in 1827, and after a year of
editorial service on the Journal of Commerce in New York he
became tutor in Yale College, studied theology at the same time,
and in 1833 was settled in the ministry over a Congregational church
in Hartford, Connecticut. He resigned his charge in 1853 on account
of ill health, but lived till 1876, filling the years to the last with
arduous study and authorship. He pub-
lished three volumes of sermons, two of
essays and addresses, a treatise on Wo-
men's Suffrage, under the title A Reform
against Nature, and five treatises of a
theological character. Each of the latter
was a distinct challenge to the prevailing
thought of his day, and involved him in
suspicion and accusation that well-nigh cost
him his ecclesiastical standing. It is now
generally acknowledged that he led the
way into the new world of theological
thought which has since opened so widely,
and thereby rendered great and enduring HORACE BUSHNELL
service to the Christian faith.
It is enough to say of his work in this respect that it was char-
acterized by a mingling of the thought of the first three centuries,
and of the modern spirit which had found its way from Germany
into England through Coleridge. The two did not always agree
well, and the latter is the predominating feature in all his writings.
He was the first theologian in New England to admit fully into his
thought the modern sense of Nature, as it is found in the literature
of the early part of the century, and notably in Wordsworth and
Coleridge. Dr. Bushnell was not a student of this literature beyond
a thorough and sympathetic study of The Aids to Reflection,' but
through this open door the whole spirit of that great thought move-
ment entered his mind and found a congenial home. The secret of
this movement was a spiritual interpretation of nature. It was a step
in the evolution of human thought; and appearing first in literature,



## p. 2910 (#482) ###########################################

2910
HORACE BUSHNELL
its natural point of entrance, it was sure to reach all forms of
thought, as in time to come it will reach all forms of social life.
The thing that the world is rapidly learning is, that not only is the
world God's but that God is in his world. Bushnell was by nature
immensely open to this thought, and its undertone can be heard in
almost every page of his writings. It was this that gave value to
his works and made them exceptional in his day and place. Each
of his great treatises is, with more or less distinctness, an effort to
put natural things and divine things into some sort of relevance and
oneness.
He took the path by which superior minds have always found
their way into new realms of truth. They do not pass from one
school to another, but instead rise into some new or some larger
conception of nature and start afresh. All gains in philosophy and
religion and civilization have been made by further inroads into
nature, and never in any other way. Dr. Bushnell, with the unerr-
ing instinct of a discoverer, struck this path and kept it to the end.
At the bottom of all his work lies a profound sense of nature, of its
meaning and force in the realm of the spirit. He did not deny a
certain antithesis between nature and the supernatural, but he so
defined the latter that the two could be embraced in the one cate-
gory of nature when viewed as the ascertained order of God in crea-
tion. The supernatural is simply the realm of freedom, and it is as
natural as the physical realm of necessity. Thus he not only got
rid of the traditional antinomy between them, but led the way into
that conception of the relation of God to his world which more and
more is taking possession of modern thought. In his essay on Lan-
guage he says (and the thought is always with him as a governing
principle):–«The whole universe of nature is a perfect analogon
of the whole universe of thought or spirit. Therefore, as nature
becomes truly a universe only through science revealing its universal
laws, the true universe of thought and spirit cannot sooner be con-
ceived. " Thus he actually makes the revelation of spiritual truth
wait on the unfolding of the facts and laws of the world of nature.
There is something pathetic in the attitude of this great thinker sit-
ting in the dark, waiting for disclosures in nature that would sub-
stantiate what he felt was true in the realm of the spirit. A
generation later he would have seen the light for which he longed -
a light that justifies the central point of all his main contentions.
His first and most important work, Christian Nurture,' contended
that the training of children should be according to nature, - not in
the poor sense of Rousseau, but that it should be divinely natural.
So Nature and the Supernatural,' whatever place may be accorded
to the book to-day, was an effort to bring the two terms that were


## p. 2911 (#483) ###########################################

HORACE BUSHNELL
2911
held as opposite and contradictory, into as close relation as God is to
his laws in nature. So in "The Vicarious Sacrifice his main pur-
pose was to take a doctrine that had been dwarfed out of its proper
proportions, and give to it the measure of God's love and the man-
ner of its action in human life. Dr. Bushnell may or may not have
thought with absolute correctness on these themes, but he thought
with consummate ability, he wrote with great eloquence and power,
and he left many pages that are to be cherished as literature, while
theologically they “point the way we are going. ”
One of the most characteristic and interesting things about Dr.
Bushnell is the method he took to find his way between this spiritual
view of things and that world of theological orthodoxy where he
stood by virtue of his profession. It was a very hard and dry world, -
a world chiefly of definitions, but it covered vital realities, and so
must have had some connection with the other world. Dr. Bushnell
bridged the chasm by a theory of language which he regarded as
original with himself. It was not new, but he elaborated it in an
original way and with great ability. In its main feature it was sim-
ply a claim to use in theology the symbolism of poetry; it regarded
language as something that attempts to make one feel the inexpress-
ible truth, rather than a series of definitions which imply that it can
be exactly stated in words; it held that truth is larger than any form
which attempts to express it; it images and reflects truth instead of
defining it.
This theory might be assumed without so long explication as he
gave, but it was greatly needed in the theological world, which at
that time was sunk in a sea of metaphysical definition, and consumed
with a lust for explaining everything in heaven and earth in terms
of alphabetic plainness. Dr. Bushnell was not only justified by the
necessity of his situation in resorting to his theory, but he had the
right which every man of genius may claim for himself. Any one
whose thought is broader than that about him, whose feeling is
deeper, whose imagination is loftier, is entitled to such a use of lan-
guage as shall afford him fullest expression; for he alone knows just
how much of thought, feeling, and imagination, how much of him-
self, he puts into his words; they are coin whose value he himself
has a right to indicate by his own stamp. There is no pact with
others to use language in any given way, except upon some very
broad basis as to the main object of language. The first object is
not to secure definite and comprehensive understanding, but to give
expression, and to start thought which may lead to full understand-
ing - as the parable hides the thought until you think it out.
Dr. Bushnell's theory did not blind the ordinary reader. No writer
is more easily apprehended by the average mind if he has any sym-
pathy with the subjects treated; but it was an inconvenient thing


## p. 2912 (#484) ###########################################

2912
HORACE BUSHNELL
for his theological neighbors to manage. While they insisted on
«the evident meaning of the words," – a mischievous phrase, - he
was breathing his meaning into attentive souls by the spirit which
he had contrived to hide within his words. It is a way that genius
has, -as Abt Vogler says: --
“But God has a few of us whom he whispers in the ear:
The rest may reason and welcome: 'tis we musicians know. ”
The first thing that brought Dr. Bushnell out of the world of
theology into the world of literature was his oration before the Phi
Beta Kappa Society at Harvard College in 1848. He had achieved a
reputation as a preacher of remarkable insight for such as had ears
to hear, and he was already in the thick of theological controversy;
but his fine power of expression and breadth of thought had not been
specially noticed. This oration introduced him into the world of
Mr. J. T. Fields — the most discerning critic of the day-
said to the writer that the oration was heard with surprise and
delight, and that it gave the speaker an assured place in the ranks
of literature. That he should have been so readily welcomed by the
literary guild is not strange, for the title of his oration —'Work and
Play) — led the way into a discussion of the secret that underlies all
works of genius. For once, the possessor of the divine gift heard its
secret revealed and himself explained to himself; his work was set
before him as the full play of his spirit. Beginning with nature,
where our author always began, and finding there a free and sportive
element, he carries it into human life; making the contention that its
aim should be, and that its destiny will be, to free itself from the
constraint of mere work and rise into that natural action of the
faculties which may be called play — a moral and spiritual process.
His conclusion is that -
<if the world were free,- free, I mean, of themselves; brought up, all, out of
work into the pure inspiration of truth and charity,- new forms of personal
and intellectual beauty would appear, and society itself reveal the Orphic
movement. No more will it be imagined that poetry and rhythm are acci-
dents or figments of the race, one side of all ingredient or ground of nature.
But we shall know that poetry is the real and true state of man; the proper
and last ideal of souls, the free beauty they long for, and the rhythmic flow
of that universal play in which all life would live. ”
The key to Dr. Bushnell is to be found in this passage, and it is
safe to say of him that in hardly a page of a dozen volumes is he
false to it. He is always a poet, singing out of the pure inspiration
of truth and charity,” and keeping ever in mind that poetry and
rhythm are not figments outside of nature, but the real and true
state of man and the proper and last ideal of souls.


## p. 2913 (#485) ###########################################

HORACE BUSHNELL
2913
The centrality of this thought is seen in his style.
It is a
remarkable style, and is only to be appreciated when the man is
understood. It is made up of long sentences full of qualifying
phrases until the thought is carved into perfect exactness; or — chang-
ing the figure — shade upon shade is added until the picture and
conception are alike. But with all this piling up of phrases, he
not only did not lose proportion and rhythm, but so set down his
words that they read like a chant and sound like the breaking of
waves upon the beach. Nor does he ever part with poetry in the
high sense in which he conceived it. I will not compare his style,
as to merit, with that of Milton and Jeremy Taylor and Sir Thomas
Browne, but he belongs to their class; he has the same majestic
swing, and like them he cannot forbear singing, whatever he may
have to say.
His theme may be roads, or city plans, or agriculture,
or emigration, or the growth of law; yet he never fails of lifting his
subject into that higher world of the imagination where the real
truth of the subject is to be found, and is made to appear as poetry.
It would be unjust to identify him so thoroughly with the poets if it
should lead to the thought that he was not a close and rigorous
thinker. It should not be forgotten that all great prose-writers,
from Plato down to Carlyle and Emerson, stand outside of poetry
only by virtue of their form and not by virtue of their thought;
indeed, poet and thinker are interchangeable names. Dr. Bushnell
wrote chiefly on theology, and the value and efficacy of his writings
lie in the fact that imagination and fact, thought and sentiment,
reason and feeling, are each preserved and yet so mingled as to
make a single impression.
This combination of two realms or habits of thought appears on
every page. He was, as Novalis said of Spinoza, “A God-intoxicated
man, but it was God as containing humanity in himself. His
theology was a veritable Jacob's ladder, on which the angels of God
ascend and descend; and if in his thought they descended before
they ascended, it was because he conceived of humanity as existing
in God before it was manifest in creation; and if his head was among
the stars, his feet were always firmly planted on the earth. This
twofoldness finds a curious illustration in the sub-titles of several of
his books. "The Vicarious Sacrifice does not spring alone out of
the divine nature, but is ‘Grounded in Principles of Universal Obli-
gation. Nature and the Supernatural — the great antithesis in
theology — constitute “The One System of God. "Women's Suffrage'
is “The Reform against Nature'— the best book, I must be permitted
to say, on either side of this much-debated question.
It is a popular impression of Dr. Bushnell that he was the sub-
ject of his imagination, and that it ran away
with him in the
V-183


## p. 2914 (#486) ###########################################

2914
HORACE BUSHNELL
treatment of themes which required only severe thought: the impres-
sion is a double mistake: theology does not call for severe thought,
alone nor mainly; but first and chiefly for the imagination, and the
seeing and interpreting eye that usually goes with it; its object is to
find spirit under form, to discover what the logos expresses. For this
the imagination is the chief requisite. It is not a vagrant and
irresponsible faculty, but an inner eye whose vision is to be trusted
like that of the outer; it has in itself the quality of thought, and is
not a mere picture-making gift. Dr. Bushnell trained his imagina-
tion to work on certain definite lines, and for a definite end-
namely, to bring out the spiritual meaning hidden within the external
form. He worked in the spirit of Coleridge's words:
“I had found
That outward forms the loftiest, still receive
Their finer influence from the Life within. ”
No analysis or recapitulation of his works can be given in these
preliminary words. Perhaps his most influential book is the first,
(Christian Nurture); while a treatise for the household, it was
surcharged with theological opinions which proved to be revolu-
tionary and epoch-making. (The Vicarious Sacrifice' has most
affected the pulpit. Nature and the Supernatural,' the tenth
chapter of which has become a classic, has done great service in
driving out the extreme dualism that invested the subject of God's
relation to creation. His ablest essay is the treatise on Language;
the most literary is that on “Work and Play'; the most penetrating
in its insight is 'Our Gospel a Gift to the Imagination'; the most
personal and characteristic is “The Age of Homespun. His best
sermon is always the one last read; and they are perhaps his most
representative work.
The sermon is not usually ranked as belonging
to literature, but no canon excludes those preached by this great
They are timeless in their truth, majestic in their diction,
comm
manding in their moral tone, penetrating in their spirituality,
and pervaded by that quality without which a sermon is not one —
the divine uttering itself to the human. There is no striving and
crying in the streets, no heckling of saints nor dooming of sinners,
no petty debates over details of conduct, no dogmatic assumption,
no logical insistence, but only the gentle and mighty persuasions of
truth, coming as if breathed by the very spirit of God.
Language was to him “the sanctuary of thought," and these
sermons are the uttered worship in that temple where reason and
devotion are one.
man.
22. hungen


## p. 2915 (#487) ###########################################

HORACE BUSHNELL
2915
WORK AND PLAY
From (Work and Play)
ET
L
a
man
me call to my aid, then, some thoughtful spirit in my
audience: not a poet, of necessity, or a man of genius, but
of large meditation, one who is accustomed to
observe, and, by virtue of the warm affinities of a living heart,
to draw out the meanings that are hid so often in the humblest
things. Returning into the bosom of his family in some interval
of care and labor, he shall come upon the very unclassic and
certainly unimposing scene,- his children and a kitten playing
on the floor together; and just there, possibly, shall meet him
suggestions more fresh and thoughts of higher reach concerning
himself and his race, than the announcement of a new-discovered
planet or the revolution of an empire would incite.
He surveys
with a meditative feeling this beautiful scene of muscular play,
— the unconscious activity, the exuberant life, the spirit of glee,–
and there rises in his heart the conception that possibly he is
here to see the prophecy or symbol of another and higher kind
of play,
which is the noblest exercise and last end of man
himself. Worn by the toils of years, perceiving with a sigh
that the unconscious joy of motion here displayed is spent in
himself, and that now he is effectually tamed to the doom of a
working creature, he may yet discover, in the lively sympathy
with play that bathes his inward feeling, that his soul is playing
now,- enjoying, without the motions, all it could do in them;
manifold more than it could if he were down upon the floor
himself, in the unconscious activity and lively frolic of childhood.
Saddened he may be to note how time and work have changed
his spirit and dried away the playful springs of animal life in his
being; yet he will find, or ought, a joy playing internally over
the face of his working nature, which is fuller and richer as it is
more tranquil; which is to the other as fulfillment to prophecy,
and is in fact the prophecy of a better and far more glorious
fulfillment still.
Having struck in this manner the great world-problem of
AND PLAY, his thoughts kindle under the theme, and he
pursues it. The living races are seen at a glance to be offering
in their history everywhere a faithful type of his own. They
show him what he himself is doing and preparing - all that he
WORK


## p. 2916 (#488) ###########################################

2916
HORACE BUSHNELL
finds in the manifold experience of his own higher life. They
have, all, their gambols; all, their sober cares and labors. The
lambs are sporting on the green knoll; the anxious dams are
bleating to recall them to their side. The citizen beaver is
building his house by a laborious carpentry; the squirrel is lifting
his sail to the wind on the swinging top of the tree. In the
music of the morning, he hears the birds playing with their
voices, and when the day is up, sees them sailing round in
circles on the upper air, as skaters on a lake, folding their wings,
dropping and rebounding, as if to see what sport they can make
of the solemn laws that hold the upper and lower worlds
together. And yet these play-children of the air he sees again
descending to be carriers and drudges; fluttering and screaming
anxiously about their nest, and confessing by that sign that not
even wings can bear them clear of the stern doom of work. Or,
passing to some quiet shade, meditating still on this careworn
life, playing still internally with ideal fancies and desires unreal-
ized, there returns upon him there, in the manifold and
spontaneous mimicry of nature, a living show of all that is
transpiring in his own bosom; in every flower some bee hum-
ming over his laborious chemistry and loading his body with the
fruits of his toil; in the slant sunbeam, populous nations of
motes quivering with animated joy, and catching, as in play, at
the golden particles of the light with their tiny fingers. Work
and play, in short, are the universal ordinance of God for the
living races; in which they symbolize the fortune and interpret
the errand of man. No creature lives that must not work and
may not play.
Returning now to himself and to man, and meditating yet
more deeply, as he is thus prepared to do, on work and play,
and play and work, as blended in the compound of our human
life; asking again what is work and what is play, what are the
relations of one to the other, and which is the final end of all,
he discovers in what he was observing round him a sublimity
of import, a solemnity even, that is deep as the shadow of
eternity.
I believe in a future age yet to be revealed, which is to be
distinguished from all others as the godly or godlike age,- an
age not of universal education simply, or universal philanthropy,
or external freedom, or political well-being, but a day of reci-
procity and free intimacy between all souls and God. Learning


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HORACE BUSHNELL
2917
and religion, the scholar and the Christian, will not be divided
as they have been. The universities will be filled with a pro-
found spirit of religion, and the bene orasse will be a fountain of
inspiration to all the investigations of study and the creations of
genius.
I raise this expectation of the future, not because some
prophet of old time has spoken of a day to come when the
streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in the
streets thereof” (for I know not that he meant to be so inter-
preted), but because I find a prophecy of play in our nature
itself which it were a violation of all insight not to believe will
sometime be fulfilled. And when it is fulfilled it will be found
that Christianity has at last developed a new literary era, the
era of religious love.
Hitherto the passion of love has been the central fire of the
world's literature. The dramas, epics, odes, novels, and even
histories, have spoken to the world's heart chiefly through this
passion, and through this have been able to get their answer.
For this passion is a state of play, wherein the man loses him-
self in the ardor of a devotion regardless of interest, fear, care,
prudence, and even of life itself. Hence there gathers round the
lover a tragic interest, and we hang upon his destiny as if some
natural charm or spell were in it. Now this passion of love,
which has hitherto been the staple of literature, is only a crude
symbol in the life of nature, by which God designs to interpret,
and also to foreshadow, the higher love of religion,- nature's
gentle Beatrice, who puts her image in the youthful Dante, by
that to attend him afterwards in the spirit-flight of song, and be
his guide up through the wards of Paradise to the shining mount
of God. What then are we to think, but that God will some-
time bring us up out of the literature of the lower love, into
that of the higher ? — that as the age of passion yields to the age
of reason, so the crude love of instinct will give place to the
loftier, finer, more impelling love of God? And then around
that nobler love, or out of it, shall arise a new body of litera-
ture, as much more gifted as the inspiration is purer and more
intellectual. Beauty, truth, and worship; song, science, and duty,
will all be unfolded together in this common love.