The festival was to last seven
days, and the King defrayed the expenses of every one of his
guests.
days, and the King defrayed the expenses of every one of his
guests.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v19 - Oli to Phi
"
Translation of Thomas Davidson.
## p. 11116 (#332) ##########################################
11116
PARMENIDES
THOUGHT AND EXISTENCE
ONE
NE and the same are thought and that whereby there is think-
ing;
Never apart from existence, wherein it receiveth expression,
Shalt thou discover the action of thinking; for naught is or shall be
Other besides or beyond the Existent; for Fate hath determined
That to be lonely and moveless, which all things are but a name
for,-
Things that men have set up for themselves, believing as real,-
Birth and decay, becoming and ceasing, to be and to not-be,
Movement from place to place, and change from color to color.
But since the uttermost limit of Being is ended and perfect,
Then it is like to the bulk of a sphere well rounded on all sides,
Everywhere distant alike from the centre: for never there can be
Anything greater or anything less, on this side or that side;
Yea, there is neither a non-existent to bar it from coming
Into equality, neither can Being be different from Being,
More of it here, less there, for the All is inviolate ever.
Therefore, I ween, it lies equally stretched in its limits on all sides.
Translation of Thomas Davidson.
KOSMOS
TH
HEN thou shalt know the ethereal nature and each of its tokens
Each of the signs in the ether, and all the invisible workings
Wrought by the blemishless sun's pure lamp, and whence they
have risen;
Then thou shalt hear of the orb-eyed moon's circumambient work-
ings,
And of her nature, and likewise discern the heaven that surrounds
them,
Whence it arose, and how by her sway Necessity bound it
Firm, to encircle the bounds of the stars.
Translation of Thomas Davidson.
[These three passages are reprinted by permission from the Journal of
Speculative Philosophy, Vol. iv. ]
## p. 11117 (#333) ##########################################
11117
-
THOMAS WILLIAM PARSONS
(1819-1892)
HE poetry of Thomas W. Parsons has in its best examples a
classic perfection conjoined with a deep feeling, which gives
it distinction. He was a scholar who worked with a cer-
tain austerity and aloofness, yet with an underlying perception of
humor which saved his work from flatness or turgidity even when it
did not appear on the surface. Dr. Parsons was thoroughly impreg-
nated with Dante and the influence of Italian literature. Literature
indeed, in this aspect of it, was to him a vocation and a passion.
He served the Muse with a full sense of the sacredness of song.
He was born in Boston, August 18th, 1819; was the son of a physi-
cian of that city, and was destined for the same profession,— taking
a degree at the Harvard Medical School, and for some time prac-
ticing dentistry. Boston was his home when he was in the United
States; but he traveled and resided much abroad. In his leisure
hours he wrote his verses and worked on his English renderings of
the master poet of Italy. So early as 1843 he published a translation
of the first ten cantos of the 'Inferno,' and a revision with seven
more cantos followed in 1867. He made a version of the great epic
a life labor, the translation in its final form appearing in 1893.
(
Dr. Parsons was never eager for publication, and some of his vol-
umes of verse were printed privately for circulation among friends.
Several collections of his poems were published: one entitled 'Ghetto
di Roma' in 1854, The Magnolia' in 1867, The Shadow of the Obe-
lisk' in 1872, Circum Præcorda' in 1892; and a final selection in
1893, after his death. This last book contains-excepting his trans-
lation of Dante- the bulk of the work his admirers would wish to
see preserved. There are lyrics in this volume as perfect in their
kind as anything done by a contemporaneous poet.
The opening
poem, On a Bust of Dante,' is as noble a tribute as the Italian has
received in our tongue. Many lines and passages in the different
lyrics have a quotableness which means fine thought married to fit
expression. In the tribute to Daniel Webster, for example, occurs the
stanza:
"Kings have their dynasties, but not the mind:
Cæsars leave other Cæsars to succeed;
But Wisdom dying, leaves no heir behind. "
## p. 11118 (#334) ##########################################
11118
THOMAS WILLIAM PARSONS
And the poem closes with these lovely words:-
"We have no high cathedral for his rest,
Dim with proud banners and the dust of years;
All we can give him is New England's breast
To lay his head on- and his country's tears. "
There is something inevitable in the perfection of this, from 'The
Birthday of Robert Burns': —
"For flowers will grow, and showers will fall,
And clouds will travel o'er the sky;
And the great God who cares for all,
He will not let his darlings die. "
The man who can strike out things like these - and he wrote
whole poems which keep this level-deserves, and doubtless will get,
permanent recognition as a lyric singer. Parsons's range is not wide,
nor is his accomplishment varied. But in his individual way and
within his compass, he struck a very pure, fine note, which will give
lasting pleasure.
Dr. Parsons died at Scituate, Massachusetts, September 3d, 1892.
[The following selections are all made from the 'Poems of Thomas William
Parsons. Copyright 1893, by Houghton, Mifflin & Co. ]
MARY BOOTH
shall we do now, Mary being dead,
Or say or write that shall express the half?
What can we do but pillow that fair head,
And let the Springtime write her epitaph? —
WHAT
As it will soon, in snowdrop, violet,
Wind-flower and columbine and maiden's-tear;
Each letter of that pretty alphabet
That spells in flowers the pageant of the year.
She was a maiden for a man to love;
She was a woman for a husband's life;
One that has learned to value, far above
The name of love, the sacred name of wife.
Her little life-dream, rounded so with sleep,
Had all there is of life, except gray hairs:
Hope, love, trust, passion and devotion deep;
And that mysterious tie a mother bears.
## p. 11119 (#335) ##########################################
THOMAS WILLIAM PARSONS
11119
She hath fulfilled her promise and hath passed:
Set her down gently at the iron door!
Eyes look on that loved image for the last:
Now cover it in earth- her earth no more.
A DIRGE
LOWLY tread and gently bear
One that comes across the wave,
From the oppression of his care,
To the freedom of the grave;
S
From the merciless disease,
Wearing body, wasting brain,
To the rest beneath the trees,-
The forgetting of all pain;
From the delicate eye and ear,
To the rest that shall not see
To the sleep that shall not hear
Nor feel, the world's vulgarity.
Bear him, in his leaden shroud,
In his pall of foreign oak,
To the uncomplaining crowd
Where ill word was never spoke.
from life's broken sleep-
Dreams of pleasure, dreams of pain,
Hopes that tremble, joys that weep,
Loves that perish, visions vain
Bear
To the beautiful repose
Where he was before his birth;
With the ruby, with the rose,
With the harvest, earth in earth!
Bring him to the body's rest,
After battle, sorely spent,
Wounded, but a welcome guest
In the Chief's triumphal tent.
## p. 11120 (#336) ##########################################
11120
THOMAS WILLIAM PARSONS
EPITAPH ON A CHILD
HIS little seed of life and love
Just lent us for a day,
Came like a blessing from above,—
Passed like a dream away.
THIS
And when we garnered in the earth
The foison that was ours,
We felt that burial was but birth
To spirits, as to flowers.
And still that benediction stays,
Although its angel passed;
Dear God! thy ways, if bitter ways,
We learn to love at last.
But for the dream,-it broke indeed,
Yet still great comfort gives:
What was a dream is now our creed,-
We know our darling lives.
S
TO FRANCESCA
ING Waller's lay,
"Go, lovely rose," or some old song,
That should I play
Feebly, thy voice may make me strong
With loving memories cherished long.
Sing "Drink to me,"
Or "Take, oh take those lips away;'
Some strain to be-
When I am gone and thou art gray-
Remembered of a happier day.
-
A solemn air,
A melody not loud but low,
Suits whitening hair;
And when the pulse is beating slow,
The music's measure should move so.
The song most sweet
Is that which lulls, not thrills, the ear;
So, love, repeat
For one who counteth silence dear,
That which to silence is most near.
## p. 11121 (#337) ##########################################
THOMAS WILLIAM PARSONS
III2I
XIX-696
PILGRIM'S ISLE
HERE fell a charm upon the deep,
A spell upon the silent shore;
The boats, like lily-pads asleep,
Lay round me upon ocean's floor.
THE
O weary world of noise and strife!
O cities full of gold and guile!
How small a part ye make of life
To one that walks on Pilgrim's Isle!
I watched the Gurnet's double star,
Like Jove and Venus side by side,
And on the smooth waves gleaming far
Beheld its long reflection ride.
My days of youth are almost flown,
And yet, upon a night like this,
Love will not let my heart alone;
Back comes the well-remembered bliss.
Oft in thy golden locks a gleam
Of other days illumes my brain,
And in thy hand's soft touch I seem
To feel my boyhood born again.
Ah, dearest, all will soon be o'er!
I see my sunset in thy smile;
It lingers longest on the shore,
Th' enchanted shore, of Pilgrim's Isle.
PARADISI GLORIA
"O frate mio! ciascuna e cittadina
D'una vera città — »
THE
HERE is a city, builded by no hand,
And unapproachable by sea or shore,
And unassailable by any band
Of storming soldiery for evermore.
There we no longer shall divide our time
By acts or pleasures,― doing petty things
Of work or warfare, merchandise or rhyme;
But we shall sit beside the silver springs
## p. 11122 (#338) ##########################################
III22
THOMAS WILLIAM PARSONS
That flow from God's own footstool, and behold
Sages and martyrs, and those blessed few
Who loved us once and were beloved of old,
To dwell with them and walk with them anew,
In alternations of sublime repose,
Musical motion, the perpetual play
Of every faculty that Heaven bestows,
Through the bright, busy, and eternal day.
## p. 11123 (#339) ##########################################
11123
JAMES PARTON
(1822-1891)
AMES PARTON, though in thought and feeling an American of
the Americans, was born in Canterbury, England, February
9th, 1822; coming to New York with his widowed mother
when he was about five years old. He went to a classical school in
Westchester County, New York, passed some years in Europe, and
then set up a school of his own in Philadelphia. He had a passion.
for Greek, and when he was a lad urged his mother to let him be-
come a barber, that he might have time enough between customers
to study the language: but Willis, whom he
knew, had set the fashion of being liter-
ary, and Parton followed it by contribut-
ing to the Home Journal; becoming in time
assistant editor of that paper, and marry-
ing "Fanny Fern" (Sara Payson Willis
Eldridge), Willis's sister.
JAMES PARTON
His first book, a 'Life of Horace Gree-
ley,' appeared in 1855. He had spent infi-
nite pains upon it, and had chosen a typical
American for his subject, with the result of
producing the portrait of a living man; not
a eulogy nor an invective, but a picture,
vivid, entertaining, abounding in anecdote.
The book made, as Greeley described it,
"mighty interesting reading," and it sold at the rate of thirty thou-
sand copies in the first year or two. After this we hear no more
of Greek. In a few years Parton had become one of the best-known
writers in America; the most eminent example, perhaps, of what can
be attained in letters with an innate love of literature, adaptability,
inexhaustible industry, and a painter's eye to effect. Always a de-
scriptive writer rather than a deep-searching historian, he could draw
most impressive pictures, brilliant in coloring and dramatic in set-
ting, while no man better knew the journalist's business of striking
while the iron was hot; sending in his lives and biographies when
the public demanded them. At the same time he had, in common
with Hazlitt and De Quincey, the fashion of defending the under
dog, who never wanted a friend when Parton was present: not for
## p. 11124 (#340) ##########################################
11124
JAMES PARTON
the reason that incited Hazlitt, because he was combative, but from
a love of fair play and a natural independence; and perhaps because
the advocate was first of all a journalist, inspired with the journal-
ist's curiosity to see both sides.
He held the theory that it is the good in a man that goes astray,
and that ought to alarm and warn his fellows; and that vice, after
all, is an excess of a virtue. With none of the pugnacity of a parti-
san, he shows a certain adroitness in confessing the weaknesses of
his heroes, that makes a direct appeal to the generosity of the reader.
Moreover, by taking the stand that all religions are of human origin,
and that the religion of the future will be founded on the love of
man for man, without regard to prevailing theologic conceptions of
the Deity, he wrote in a comfortable and tolerant state of philosophic
skepticism. With these qualities and characteristics, with enormous
powers of industry and application, he sent out from his study a long
list of books, which became the most popular series of biographies in
America.
The life of Greeley was followed three years later by that of
Aaron Burr. In this book Parton chose the period most interesting
in the history of the United States,-that after the Revolution. Old
things had passed away; the conquering Democratic party had arisen;
the States had become America, and the strange contradictory figure
who had helped to make them so had passed by, rising in glory and
setting in mysterious gloom. This life of Burr, vivid, picturesque,
and swift-moving, is as entertaining to-day as when it appeared in
1858.
His 'Jefferson' and 'Andrew Jackson' are in a way quite as inter-
esting, although the task of writing them was perhaps not so congen-
ial; for Parton, heart and soul a Democrat, had no occasion to use
therein that peculiar talent for defense which is so conspicuous in
his lives of Burr and Voltaire. Both the 'Jefferson' and 'Jackson,'
though pieces of special pleading, have the picturesqueness and event-
fulness of well-constructed fiction, while they are never consciously
untrue to fact. Their chief value, however, lies less perhaps in
their literary quality, or in their erudition, than in their contribution
of much curious information and personal anecdote gathered from
out-of-the-way sources, and put before the reader in an entertaining
form. No man was ever freer from what Macaulay calls the "disease
of admiration"; but on the other hand, none knew better how not to
belittle great deeds and noble aspirations. His respect for success
never chilled his sympathy with failure, and he had an instinct for
discerning the causes of both failure and success.
In 1877 appeared his 'Caricature and other Comic Art,' a book
showing much study, keen humor, and the historic sense. Indeed, the
## p. 11125 (#341) ##########################################
JAMES PARTON
11125
book, though seeming to exhibit a deviation from his familiar path,
is really a contribution to political history.
In 1881 appeared Parton's life of Voltaire, on which he had spent
more than twenty years of study. His admiration for his hero was
unbounded; and his accumulation of facts, anecdotes, and letters
throwing light upon the time is amazing. It is true that Parton
had reasoned out no philosophy of history that prompted him to
portray a system of morals or politics. He did not concern himself
with theories of objective or subjective influences. Yet whatever this
biography may lack, it remains, as an eminent English critic has
declared, a genuine life of Voltaire, and not a critique upon his
life and character like the works of Strauss and Morley. It is a
life which makes the English and American public for the first time
acquainted with the great Frenchman, somewhat in the same sense
in which they have long been acquainted with Johnson or Scott.
This book, a labor of love, was Parton's last serious production, though
his busy pen was never laid aside during his lifetime; and his name
appears on the title-page of several compilations, collections of brief
biographies, and essays. He died at Newburyport, Massachusetts,
October 16th, 1891.
FROM THE LIFE OF ANDREW JACKSON ›
Copyright 1860, by Mason Brothers. Reprinted here with the approval of
Houghton, Mifflin and Co. , publishers
HERE are certain historical facts which puzzle and disgust
those whose knowledge of life and men has been chiefly
derived from books. To such it can with difficulty be made
clear that the award is just which assigns to George Washington
a higher place than Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson,-
higher honor to the executing hand than to the conceiving head.
If they were asked to mention the greatest Englishman of this
age, it would never occur to them to name the Duke of Well-
ington, a man of an understanding so limited as to be the nat-
ural foe of everything liberal and progressive. Yet the Duke of
Wellington was the only Englishman of his generation to whom
every Englishman took off his hat. And these men of books
contemplate with mere wonder the fact that during a period
when Webster, Clay, Calhoun, Wirt, and Preston were on the
public stage, Andrew Jackson should have been so much the idol
## p. 11126 (#342) ##########################################
11126
JAMES PARTON
of the American people, that all those eminent men united could
not prevail against him in a single instance.
It is pleasant to justify the ways of man to man. The in-
stinctive preferences of the people must be right. That is to
say, the man preferred by the people must have more in him of
what the people most want than any other of his generation.
The more intimately we know the men who surrounded General
Washington, the clearer to us does his intrinsic superiority be-
come, and the more clearly we perceive his utter indispensable-
ness. Washington was the only man of the Revolution who did
for the Revolution what no other man could have done. And if
ever the time comes when the eminent contemporaries of Andrew
Jackson shall be as intimately known to the people as Andrew
Jackson now is, the invincible preference of the people for him
will be far less astonishing than it now appears. Clay was the
only man of the four leading spirits whose character will bear
a comparison with our fiery, faulty hero. Clay was indeed a
princely man; it is impossible not to love him: but then, his
endowments were not great, and his industry was limited. How
often when the country wanted statesmanship, he had nothing to
give it but oratory!
Besides, suppose Washington had not fought the battle of
Trenton, and not restored the Revolution when it was about to
perish. Suppose England had lost the battle of Waterloo, and
given the fellest-because the ablest-of tyrants another lease of
power. Suppose the English had sacked New Orleans, and no-
peace had come to check their career of conquest! By indulging
this turn of reflection, we shall perceive that the Washingtons,
the Wellingtons, and the Jacksons of a nation are they who pro-
vide or preserve for all other gifts, talents, and virtues, their
opportunity and sphere. How just, therefore, is the gratitude of
nations toward those who, at the critical moment, DO the great
act that creates or defends them!
What man supremely admires in man is manhood. The val-
iant man alone has power to awaken the enthusiastic love of
us all. So dear to us is valor, that even the rudest manifesta-
tions of it in the pugilistic ring excite, for a moment, a universal
interest. Its highest manifestation, on the martyr's cross, be-
comes the event from which whole races date their after history.
Every great career, whether of a nation or of an individual, dates
from a heroic action, and every downfall from a cowardly one
## p. 11127 (#343) ##########################################
JAMES PARTON
11127
To dare, to dare again, and always to dare, is the inexorable
condition of every signal and worthy success, from founding a
cobbler's stall to promulgating a nobler faith. In barbarous ages,
heroes risked their lives to save their self-respect; in civilized
periods, they risk what it is harder to risk, their livelihood, their
career.
It is not for nothing that nature has implanted in her darling
the instinct of honoring courage before all other qualities. What
a delicate creature was man to be tossed upon this planet, and
sent whirling through space, naked, shelterless, and untaught;
wild beasts hungering to devour him; the elements in league
against him; compelled instantly to begin the "struggle for life,"
which could never cease until life ceased. What but heroic valor
could have saved him for a day? Man has tamed the beasts, and
reduced the warring elements to such subjection that they are
his untiring servants. His career on earth has been, is, will ever
be, a fight; and the ruling race in all ages is that one which has
produced the greatest number of brave men. Men truly brave.
Men valiant enough to die rather than do, suffer, or consent to,
wrong. To risk life is not all of courage, but it is an essential
part of it.
There are things dearer to the civilized man than
life. But he who cannot calmly give up his life rather than live
unworthily comes short of perfect manhood; and he who can do
so, has in him at least the raw material of a hero.
In the eternal necessity of courage, and in man's instinctive
perception of its necessity, is to be found perhaps the explana-
tion of the puzzling fact, that in an age which has produced so
many glorious benefactors of their species, such men as Welling-
ton and Jackson are loved by a greater number of people than
any others.
The spiritualized reader is not expected to coincide
in the strict justice of this arrangement. His heroes are of an-
other cast. But the rudest man and the scholar may agree in this,
that it is the valor of their heroes which renders them effect-
ive and admirable. The intellect, for example, of a discoverer of
truth excites our wonder; but what rouses our enthusiasm is the
calm and modest valor with which he defies the powerful animos-
ity of those who thrive by debauching the understanding of man.
It was curious that England and America should both, and
nearly at the same time, have elevated their favorite generals to
the highest civil station. Wellington became prime minister in
1827; Jackson, President in 1829. Wellington was tried three
## p. 11128 (#344) ##########################################
11128
JAMES PARTON
years, and found wanting, and driven from power, execrated by
the people. His carriage, his house, and his statue were pelted
by the mob. Jackson reigned eight years, and retired with his
popularity undiminished. The reason was, that Wellington was
not in accord with his generation, and was surrounded by men
who were if possible less so; while Jackson, besides being in
sympathy with the people, had the great good fortune to be
influenced by men who had learned the rudiments of statesman-
ship in the school of Jefferson.
Yes, autocrat as he was, Andrew Jackson loved the people, the
common people, the sons and daughters of toil, as truly as they
loved him, and believed in them as they believed in him.
He was in accord with his generation. He had a clear per-
ception that the toiling millions are not a class in the community,
but are the community. He knew and felt that government
should exist only for the benefit of the governed; that the strong
are strong only that they may aid the weak; that the rich are
rightfully rich only that they may so combine and direct the
labors of the poor as to make labor more profitable to the laborer.
He did not comprehend these truths as they are demonstrated
by Jefferson and Spencer, but he had an intuitive and instinctive
perception of them. And in his most autocratic moments he
really thought that he was fighting the battle of the people, and
doing their will while baffling the purposes of their representa-
tives. If he had been a man of knowledge as well as force, he
would have taken the part of the people more effectually, and
left to his successors an increased power of doing good, instead
of better facilities for doing harm. He appears always to have
meant well. But his ignorance of law, history, politics, science,
of everything which he who governs a country ought to know,
was extreme. Mr. Trist remembers hearing a member of the
General's family say that General Jackson did not believe the
world was round. His ignorance was as a wall round about
him-high, impenetrable. He was imprisoned in his ignorance,
and sometimes raged round his little dim inclosure like a tiger
in his den.
## p. 11129 (#345) ##########################################
JAMES PARTON
II129
FROM THE LIFE OF VOLTAIRE›
Copyright 1881, by James Parton. Reprinted here by consent of Houghton,
Mifflin & Co. , publishers
A
FTER this interesting experience of court life in a foreign
country, where the king was king, he [Voltaire] was to
become a courtier at Versailles, where the man who gov-
erned the king's mistress was king.
Again it was the Duke de Richelieu, First Gentleman of the
Chamber, who broke in upon the elevated pursuits of Cirey, and
called him to lower tasks and less congenial scenes. The royal
children were coming of age. The marriage of the Dauphin to
the Infanta of Spain, long ago agreed upon, was soon to be
celebrated, the prince having passed his sixteenth year; and it
devolved upon the First Gentleman to arrange the marriage fes-
tival. This was no light task; for Louis XIV. had accustomed
France to the most elaborate and magnificent fêtes. Not content
with such splendor as mere wealth can everywhere procure, that
gorgeous monarch loved to enlist all the arts and all the talents;
exhibiting to his guests divertisements written by Molière, per-
formed with original music, and with scenery painted by artists.
Several of his festivals have to this day a certain celebrity in
France, and have left traces still noticeable. There is a public
ground in Paris, opposite the Tuileries, which is called the Place
of the Carousal. It was so named because it was the scene of
one of this King's fêtes, in which five bodies of horsemen -or
quadrilles, as they were called-took part. One of these bodies
were dressed and equipped as Roman knights, and they were
led by the King in person. His brother, the Duke of Orleans,
commanded a body of Persian cavalry; the Prince of Condé, a
splendid band of Turks; the Duke of Guise, a company of Peru-
vian horse; and a son of Condé shone at the head of East-Indian
horsemen in gorgeous array. Imagine these five bodies of horse
galloping and manoeuvring, entering and departing, charging
and retreating, like circus riders in an extremely large and splen-
did tent; and in the midst, on a lofty platform, three queens
in splendid robes,-the mother of Louis, the wife of Louis,
and the widow of Charles I. , who lived and died the guest of
the King of France. There were grand doings at this festival.
There were tournaments, games of skill and daring, stately pro-
cessions, concerts, plays, and buffooneries, with a ball at the
close.
## p. 11130 (#346) ##########################################
11130
JAMES PARTON
That pageant, splendid as it was, was "effaced," as the French
say, by one which the King gave only two years after at Ver-
sailles, probably the most sumptuous thing of the kind ever seen.
On the 5th of May, the most beautiful month of the year in
France, the King rode out to Versailles with all his court, which
then included six hundred persons, each attended by retainers
and servants, the whole numbering more than two thousand
individuals and as many horses.
The festival was to last seven
days, and the King defrayed the expenses of every one of his
guests. In the park and gardens of Versailles, miracles had been
wrought. Theatres, amphitheatres, porticoes, pavilions, seemed
to have sprung into being at the waving of an enchanter's wand.
On the first day there was a kind of review, or march-past, of
all who were to take part in the games and tourneys. Under
a triumphal arch the three queens appeared again, resplendent,
each attended by one hundred ladies, who were attired in the
brilliant manner of the period; past these marched heralds,
pages, squires, carrying the devices and shields of the knights, as
well as banners upon which verses were written in letters of gold.
The knights followed in burnished armor and bright plumes; the
King at their head in the character of Roger, a famous knight
of old. All the crown diamonds glittered upon his coat and
the trappings of his horse. Both he and the animal sparkled and
blazed in the May sun; and we can well imagine that a hand-
some young man, riding with perfect grace the most beautiful of
horses, must have been a very pretty spectacle, despite so much
glitter. When this procession of squires and knights had passed
and made their obeisance to the queens, a huge car followed,
eighteen feet high, fifteen wide, and twenty-four long, represent-
ing the Car of the Sun,- an immense vehicle, all gilding and
splendor. Behind this car came groups exhibiting the Four
Ages,- of Gold, of Silver, of Brass, and of Iron; and these were
followed by representations of the celestial signs, the seasons,
and the hours. All this, the spectators inform us, was admirably
performed to the sound of beautiful music; and now and then
persons would step from the procession, and the music would.
cease while they recited poems, written for the occasion, before
the queens. Imagine shepherds, blacksmiths, farmers, harvesters,
vine-dressers, fauns, dryads, Pans, Dianas, Apollos, marching by,
and representing the various scenes of life and industry!
The procession ends at last. Night falls. With wondrous
rapidity four thousand great torches are lighted in an inclosure
## p. 11131 (#347) ##########################################
JAMES PARTON
11131
fitted up as a banqueting-place.
a banqueting-place. Two hundred of the persons.
who had figured in the procession now bring in various articles.
of food: the seasons, the vine-dressers, the shepherds, the har-
vesters, each bear the food appropriate to them; while Pan and
Diana advance upon a moving mountain, and alight to super-
intend the distribution of the exquisite food which had been
brought in. Behind the tables was an orchestra of musicians, and
when the feast was done the pleasures of the day ended with a
ball. For a whole week the festival continued; the sports varied
every day. There were tourneys, pageants, hunts, shooting at a
mark, and spearing the ring. Four times the King gained the
prize, and offered it to be competed for again. There were a
great number of court fools at this festival, as we still find
clowns at a circus. Indeed, when we attend a liberally appointed
circus, we are looking upon a show resembling in many particu-
lars the grand doings in the park of Versailles when Louis XIV.
entertained his court and figured as chief of the riders.
were
Most of the performances could have been procured by money
lavishly spent; and in order to reproduce them, the Duke de
Richelieu needed little assistance from the arts. But there were
items of the programme which redeemed the character of this
festival, and caused it to be remembered by the susceptible peo-
ple of France with pride. Molière composed for it a kind of
show play, called the 'Princesse d'Elide'; a vehicle for music,
ballet, and costume, with here and there a spice of his comic
talent. A farce of his, the 'Forced Marriage,' was also played;
and the first three acts of his 'Tartuffe - the greatest effort of
French dramatic genius in that age, if not in any age-
performed for the first time. There was only one man in France
who could help a "First Gentleman" to features of the coming
fête at all resembling these; and to him that First Gentleman
applied. Voltaire entered into the scheme with zeal. In April
1744, Cirey all blooming with flowers and verdure, he began to
write his festive divertisement, the Princesse de Navarre,' the
hero of which was a kind of Spanish Duke de Richelieu. "I am
making," he wrote, "a divertisement for a Dauphin and Dau-
phiness whom I shall not divert; but I wish to produce some-
thing pretty, gay, tender, worthy of the Duke de Richelieu,
director of the fête. " It was his chief summer work, and he
labored at it with an assiduity that would have sufficed to pro-
duce three new tragedies. He very happily laid the scene of
―
## p. 11132 (#348) ##########################################
11132
JAMES PARTON
his play in an ancient château close to the borders of the Span-
ish province of Navarre; an expedient which enabled him to
group upon the stage both Frenchmen and Spaniards, with their
effective contrasts of costume, and to present to the Spanish
bride and her court, pleasing traits of their own countrymen.
The poet and the First Gentleman arranged the processions, the
ballets, the tableaux, the fête within a fête; exchanging many
long letters, and pondering many devices. There is good comic
writing in this piece; and there are two characters a rustic
Spanish baron and his extremely simple-minded daughter- that
are worthy of a better kind of play and occasion.
―――――
This was the year in which the King of France first braved the
hardships of the field, accompanied by his mistress, the Duchesse
de Châteauroux, and attended by that surprising retinue of cour-
tiers and comedians often described. I need not pause to relate
how, after being present at warlike operations, he fell dangerously
sick of a fever; how the mistress and the First Gentleman took
possession of the King's quarters, and barred the door against
priests and princes; how, as the King grew worse, the alarmed
mistress tried to come to a compromise with the royal confessor,
the keeper of the King's conscience, saying to him in substance,
"Let me go away without scandal,- that is, without being sent
away, and I will quietly let you into the King's chamber;" how
the cautious Jesuit contrived to get through a long interview
without saying either yes or no to this proposal; how at length,
when the King seemed near his end, she was terrified into yield-
ing, and the King, fearing to lose his absolution and join some of
the bad kings in the other world, sent her a positive command
to depart, as if she had been, what the priest officially styled her,
a concubine; how the King, having recovered, humbly courted
her return, calling upon her in person at her house; and how,
while she affected to hesitate, and dictated terms of direst ven-
geance, even the exile of every priest, courtier, and minister who
had taken the least part in her disgrace, she died of mingled
rage, mortification, and triumph, leaving both the King and the
First Gentleman perfectly consolable.
The impressive fact is, that none of these things impaired
the spell of the King's divinity. During the crisis of his fever
all France seemed panic-stricken; and when he recovered, the
manifestations of joy were such as to astonish the King himself,
inured as he was to every form and degree of adulation from his
-
## p. 11133 (#349) ##########################################
JAMES PARTON
11133
childhood. "What have I done," cried the poor man, "to be
loved so? " It was at this time that he received his name of
Louis the Well-Beloved, by which it was presumed that he would
go to posterity, along with Louis the Fat and Philip the Long,
-titles so helpful to childish memory. On his return to Paris
in September 1744, "crowned with victory," and recovered from
the borders of the tomb, the fêtes were of such magnitude and
splendor that Madame du Châtelet came to Paris to witness
them, with her poet in her train. He brought his 'Princesse de
Navarre' with him, however, and was soon in daily consultation.
with composer, ministers, First Gentleman, and friends, as to the
resources of an extemporized theatre.
A curious street adventure befell madame and himself on the
night of the grand fireworks, which they rode in from a châ-
teau near the city to witness. They found all the world in the
streets. Voltaire gave an account of their night's exploits to
the President Hénault, whose visit to Cirey they now returned
in an unusual manner:-"There were two thousand backing car-
riages in three files; there were the outcries of two or three hun-
dred thousand men, scattered among those carriages; there were
drunkards, fights with fists, streams of wine and tallow flow-
ing upon the people, a mounted police to augment the embro-
glio; and by way of climax to our delights, his Royal Highness
[Duke de Chartres] was returning peacefully to the Palais-Royal
with his great carriages, his guards, his pages: and all this un-
able to go back or advance until three in the morning. I was with
Madame du Châtelet. Her coachman, who had never before
been in Paris, was about boldly to break her upon the wheel.
Covered as she was with diamonds, she alighted, calling upon
me to follow, got through the crowd without being either plun-
dered or hustled, entered your house [Rue St. Honoré], sent for
some roast chicken at the corner restaurant, and drank your
health very pleasantly in that house to which every one wishes
to see you return. "
It was a busy time with him during the next six months,
arranging the details of the fête, with Rameau the composer,
with scene-painters, with the Duke de Richelieu and the Marquis
d'Argenson. We see him cutting down eight verses to four,
and swelling four verses to eight, to meet the exigencies of the
music. We see him deep in converse with Richelieu upon the
complicated scenes of his play,-suggesting, altering, abandoning,
curtailing numberless devices of the stage manager.
## p. 11134 (#350) ##########################################
11134
JAMES PARTON
On this occasion also, as before going to Prussia, he took care
to secure some compensation in advance. It was not his inten-
tion to play courtier for nothing. He was resolved to improve
this opportunity, and to endeavor so to strengthen himself at
court that henceforth he could sleep in peace at his abode, in
Paris, or in the country, fearless of the Ane of Mirepoix. To
get the dull, shy, sensualized King on his side was a material
point with him. He wrote a poem on the 'Events of the Year'
(1744), in which the exploits of the King upon the tented field,
and his joyful recovery from sickness, were celebrated in the true
laureate style. He also took measures to have this poem shown
to the King by the Cardinal de Tencin, "in a moment of good-
humor. " He made known to two of his friends in the ministry,
M. Orry and the Marquis d'Argenson, precisely what he wanted.
He wanted an office which would protect him against confessors,
bishops, and Desfontaines,-say, for example, gentleman-in-ordi-
nary of the king's chamber; a charge of trifling emolument, less
duty, and great distinction. He would then be a member of the
King's household, not to be molested on slight pretext by a Mire-
poix, nor to be calumniated with impunity by a journalist. But
since such offices were seldom vacant, he asked to be appointed
at once writer of history (historiographe) to the King, at a nomi-
nal salary of four hundred francs a year.
M. Orry thought this very modest and suitable; the Marquis
d'Argenson was of the same opinion: and both engaged to aid in
accomplishing his wishes. If he could add to these posts an
arm-chair in the French Academy, which in good time he also
meant to try for, he thought he might pursue his natural voca-
tion in his native land without serious and constant apprehension.
But first, the fête! That must succeed as a preliminary. In
January 1745 he took up his abode at Versailles to superintend
the rehearsals, conscious of the incongruity of his employment.
"I am here," he wrote to Thierot, "braving Fortune in her own
temple; at Versailles I play a part similar to that of an atheist
in a church. " To Cideville, also:-"Do you not pity a poor
devil who at fifty is a king's buffoon, and who is more embar-
rassed with musicians, decorators, actors, singers, and dancers
than the eight or nine electors will soon be in making a German
Cæsar? I rush from Paris to Versailles; I compose verses in
the postchaise; I have to praise the King highly, Madame the
Dauphiness delicately, the royal family sweetly. I must satisfy
the court, and not displease the city. "
## p. 11135 (#351) ##########################################
JAMES PARTON
11135
In the very crisis of the long preparation, February 18th,
1745, seven days before the festival, Voltaire's Jansenist of a
brother, the "Abbé Arouet," Receiver-of-Fees to the Chamber of
Accounts, died at Paris, aged two months less than sixty years.
The brothers, as we know, had been long ago estranged, and
had rarely met of late years. The parish register, still accessible,
attests that the funeral was attended, February 19th, by "François-
Marie Arouet de Voltaire, bourgeois of Paris"; not yet gentleman-
in-ordinary. The receiver-of-fees died, as he had lived, in what
was called the odor of sanctity; presenting to the view of young
and old that painful caricature of goodness which has for some
centuries, in more than one country, made virtue more difficult
than it naturally is. From his will, which also exists, we learn
that if he did not disinherit his brother, he came as near it as
a French brother could without doing violence to the sentiment
and custom of his country. After giving legacies to cousins,
friends, and servants, he leaves one half the bulk of his estate
to his nephew and nieces, and the other half to his brother; but
with a difference. Voltaire was to enjoy his half "in usufruct
only," the capital to fall finally "to his nephew and nieces afore-
said. " He took care also to prevent his brother from gaining
anything by the decease of any of the heirs. As the receiver-of-
fees, besides bequeathing his valuable office to a relative, died
worth, as French investigators compute, about two hundred
thousand francs, Voltaire received an increase to his income of
perhaps six thousand francs a year.
From his brother's grave, without waiting to learn these par-
ticulars, he was obliged to go post-haste to Versailles, towards
which all eyes were now directed. The marriage festival, a
tumult of all the splendors, began February 23d, 1745. The
'Princess of Navarre' succeeded to admiration. A vast and
beautiful edifice had risen, at the command of Richelieu, in the
horse-training ground near the palace of Versailles, so con-
structed that it could serve as a theatre on one evening and a
ball-room on the next, both equally magnificent and complete.
The stage was fifty-six feet in depth; and as the boxes were so
arranged as to exhibit the audience to itself in the most effective
and brilliant manner, the words spoken on the stage could not
be always perfectly heard. But this was not so important, since
the play was chiefly designed as a vehicle for music, dancing,
costume, and picture. At six in the evening the King entered
## p. 11136 (#352) ##########################################
11136
JAMES PARTON
and took the seat prepared for him in the middle of the theatre,
followed in due order by his family and court, arrayed in the
gorgeous fashion of the time. These placed themselves around
him, a splendid group, in the midst of a great theatre filled with
the nobility of the kingdom, all sumptuous and glittering. The
author of the play about to be performed was himself thrilled
by the picturesque magnificence of the spectacle which the audi-
ence presented; and he regretted that a greater number of the
people of France could not have been present to behold the
superb array of princes and princesses, noble lords and ladies,
adorned by masterpieces of decorative art, which the beauty of
the ladies "effaced. " He wished that more people could observe
the noble and becoming joy that filled every heart and beamed
in all those lovely eyes.
But since nothing can be perfect, not even in France, this
most superb audience was so much elated with itself that it
could not stop talking. There was a buzz and hum of conver-
sation, reminding the anxious author of a hive of bees humming
and buzzing around the queen. The curtain rose; but still they
talked. The play, however, being a mélange of poetry, song,
music, ballet, and dialogue, everything was enjoyed except the
good verses here and there, which could scarcely be caught by
distant ears. Every talent in such a piece meets its due of
approval except that of the poet, who imagines the whole before
any part of it exists. At half-past nine the curtain fell upon the
closing scene; when the audience, retiring to the grounds with-
out, found the entire façade of the palace and adjacent structures
illuminated. All were enchanted. The King himself, the hardest
man in Europe to amuse, was so well pleased that he ordered
the play to be repeated on another evening of the festival. "The
King is grateful to me," wrote Voltaire to his guardian angel,
D'Argental. "The Mirepoix cannot harm me. What more do I
need ? »
He was exhausted with the long strain upon his nervous sys-
tem. "So tired am I," he wrote to Thierot, "that I have neither
hands, feet, nor head, and write to you by the hand of another. "
But he soon had the consolation of receiving the King's promise
of the next vacancy among the gentlemen-in-ordinary, and his
immediate appointment as writer of history at an annual salary
of two thousand francs. Thus the year consumed in these courtly
toils, he thought, was not without its compensations. Nor did he
## p. 11137 (#353) ##########################################
JAMES PARTON
11137
relax his vigilance, nor give ministers peace, until these offices
were securely his by letters patent and the King's signature.
When he accepted the office of historiographer, he was far
from anticipating an increase of labor through it. But in truth,
no poet laureate ever won his annual pipe of sack by labors
so arduous as those by which Voltaire earned this salary of
two thousand francs. Several volumes of history attest his dili-
gence. During the first two or three years of his holding the
place he was historiographer, laureate, writer of royal letters and
ministerial dispatches, complimenter of the royal mistress, and
occasionally court dramatist and master of the revels.
The marriage festivities at Versailles drew to a close, and all
that brilliant crowd dispersed. From the splendors of the court
he was suddenly called away to attend the son of Madame du
Châtelet through the small-pox. He assisted to save the future
Duke du Châtelet for the guillotine, applying to his case his own.
experience of the two hundred pints of lemonade. That duty
done and his forty days of quarantine fulfilled, he returned to
court, where the minister for foreign affairs had a piece of work
for his pen. Elizabeth, Empress of Russia, had offered her me-
diation to the King of France, and the task of writing the King's
reply, accepting the offer, was assigned to Voltaire, who per-
formed it in the loftiest style of sentimental politics. If Louis
XV. took the trouble to glance over this composition, he must
have been pleased to find himself saying that "kings can aspire
to no other glory than that of promoting the happiness of their
subjects," and swearing that he "had never taken up arms except
with a view to promote the interests of peace. It was an ami-
able, effusive letter, in the taste of the period,- being written
by the man who made the taste of the period. Later in the sum-
mer he drafted a longer dispatch to the government of Holland,
remonstrating against its purpose of sending aid to the King
of England against the Pretender. It was he also who wrote
the manifesto to be published in Great Britain on the landing
of the French expedition under the Duke de Richelieu, in aid
of the Pretender. Whenever, indeed, during 1745, 1746, and
1747, the ministry had occasion for a skillful pen, Voltaire was
employed. We perceive in this part of his correspondence the
mingled horror and contempt that war excited in his mind.
"Give us peace, monseigneur," is the burden of his cry to the
XIX-697
## p. 11138 (#354) ##########################################
11138
JAMES PARTON
Marquis d'Argenson in confidential notes; and we see him, with
his usual easy assurance, suggesting such marriages for the royal
children as would "render France happy by a beautiful peace,
and your name immortal despite the fools. "
Whatever philosophers may think of war, few citizens can
resist the contagious delirium of victory after national defeat
and humiliation. The King of France again, in 1745, was posed
by his advisers in the part of conqueror. From a hill, he and
the Dauphin looked on while Marshal Saxe won the decisive and
fruitful victory of Fontenoy, over the English Duke of Cumber-
land and the forces of the allies, with a loss of eight thousand
men on each side. Voltaire received the news at Paris, late in
the evening, direct from D'Argenson, who was with the King in
the field. He dashed upon paper a congratulatory note to the
minister: "Ah! the lovely task for your historian! In three hun-
dred years the kings of France have done nothing so glorious. I
am mad with joy! Good-night, monseigneur! "
His poem 'Fontenoy,' of three hundred lines or more, was
scattered over the delirious city damp from the press, and in a
few days was declaimed in every town of the kingdom. Edition.
after edition was sold. "Five editions in ten days! " The author,
as his custom was, added, erased, altered, corrected; offending
some by omitting their names, offending others by inserting
names odious to them; working all one night to make the poem
a less imperfect expression of the national joy; not forgetting to
dedicate it to the King, and to get a copy placed in his hands.
"The King deigns to be content with it," he wrote. Thousands
of copies were sold in the first month, and there were two bur-
lesques of the poem in the second.
In the very ecstasy of the general enthusiasm, he still repeats,
in a private note to D'Argenson, "Peace, monseigneur, peace,
and you are a great man, even among the fools! "
He was
now in high favor, even with the King, who had
said to Marshal Saxe that the Princesse de Navarre' was above
criticism. The marshal himself gave Madame du Châtelet this
agreeable information. "After that," said the author, "I must
regard the King as the greatest connoisseur in his kingdom. "
He renewed his intimacy with his early patron, the Duchesse du
Maine, who still held court at the château of Sceaux near by.
By great good luck, too, as doubtless he regarded it at the time,
he was acquainted with the new mistress, Pompadour, before she
## p. 11139 (#355) ##########################################
JAMES PARTON
11139
was Pompadour. He knew her when she was only the most
bewitching young wife in France, cold to her rich and amorous.
young husband, and striving by every art that such women know
to catch the King's eye as he hunted in the royal forest near her
abode. Already, even while the King was sleeping on histrionic
straw on the field near Fontenoy, it was settled that the dream
of her life was to be realized. She was to be Petticoat III.
This summer, during the King's absence at the seat of war,
Voltaire was frequently at her house, and had become established
in her favor. She was a gifted, brilliant, ambitious woman, of
cold temperament, who courted this infamy as men seek honor-
able posts which make them conspicuous, powerful, and envied.
In well-ordered nations, accomplished men win such places by
thirty years' well-directed toil in the public service. She won her
place, and kept it nineteen years, by amusing the least amusable
of men.
She paid a high price. In return, she governed France,
enriched her family, promoted her friends, exiled her enemies,
owned half a dozen châteaux, and left an estate of thirty-six
millions of francs.
With such and so many auxiliaries supporting his new posi-
tion, the historiographer of France, if he had been a younger
man, might have felt safe. But he knew his ground. Under
personal government nations usually have two masters, the king
and the priest, between whom there is an alliance offensive and
defensive. He had gained some favor with the King, the King's
ministers, and the King's mistress. But the priest remained hos-
tile. The King being a coward, a fit of the colic might frighten
him into turning out the mistress and letting in the confessor;
and suppose the colic successful, instantly a pious and bigoted
Dauphin became king, with a Mirepoix as chief priest! Moreover,
to depend upon the favor of either king or mistress is worse than
basing the prosperity of an industrial community upon a change-
able fraction in a tariff bill.
Revolving such thoughts in an anxious mind, Voltaire con-
ceived a notable scheme for going behind the Mirepoix, and
silencing him forever by capturing the favor of the Pope. Bene-
dict XIV. was a scholar, a gentleman of excellent temper, and
no bigot. He owed his election to his agreeable qualities. When
the cardinals were exhausted by days and nights of fruitless
balloting, he said, with his usual gayety and good-humor, "Why
waste so much time in vain debates and researches ?
Do you
## p. 11140 (#356) ##########################################
11140
JAMES PARTON
want a saint? elect Gotti. A politician? Aldovrandi. A good
fellow? take me. " And they took him.
It was soon after the close of the fête at Versailles that
Voltaire consulted the Marquis d'Argenson, minister for foreign
affairs, upon his project of getting, as he expressed it, "some
mark of papal benevolence that could do him honor both in this.
- world and the next. " The minister shook his head. He said
it was scarcely possible to mingle in that way things celestial
and political. Like a true courtier of the period, the poet betook
himself to a lady, Mademoiselle du Thil, a connection of Madame
du Châtelet, and extremely well disposed toward himself. She
had a friend in the Pope's household, the Abbé de Tolignan
whom she easily engaged in the cause. D'Argenson also bore
the scheme in mind when he wrote to the French envoy at
Rome. Voltaire meanwhile read the works of his Holiness, of
which there are still accessible fifteen volumes, and in various
ways "coquetted" with him, causing him to know that the cele-
brated Voltaire was one of his readers.
Translation of Thomas Davidson.
## p. 11116 (#332) ##########################################
11116
PARMENIDES
THOUGHT AND EXISTENCE
ONE
NE and the same are thought and that whereby there is think-
ing;
Never apart from existence, wherein it receiveth expression,
Shalt thou discover the action of thinking; for naught is or shall be
Other besides or beyond the Existent; for Fate hath determined
That to be lonely and moveless, which all things are but a name
for,-
Things that men have set up for themselves, believing as real,-
Birth and decay, becoming and ceasing, to be and to not-be,
Movement from place to place, and change from color to color.
But since the uttermost limit of Being is ended and perfect,
Then it is like to the bulk of a sphere well rounded on all sides,
Everywhere distant alike from the centre: for never there can be
Anything greater or anything less, on this side or that side;
Yea, there is neither a non-existent to bar it from coming
Into equality, neither can Being be different from Being,
More of it here, less there, for the All is inviolate ever.
Therefore, I ween, it lies equally stretched in its limits on all sides.
Translation of Thomas Davidson.
KOSMOS
TH
HEN thou shalt know the ethereal nature and each of its tokens
Each of the signs in the ether, and all the invisible workings
Wrought by the blemishless sun's pure lamp, and whence they
have risen;
Then thou shalt hear of the orb-eyed moon's circumambient work-
ings,
And of her nature, and likewise discern the heaven that surrounds
them,
Whence it arose, and how by her sway Necessity bound it
Firm, to encircle the bounds of the stars.
Translation of Thomas Davidson.
[These three passages are reprinted by permission from the Journal of
Speculative Philosophy, Vol. iv. ]
## p. 11117 (#333) ##########################################
11117
-
THOMAS WILLIAM PARSONS
(1819-1892)
HE poetry of Thomas W. Parsons has in its best examples a
classic perfection conjoined with a deep feeling, which gives
it distinction. He was a scholar who worked with a cer-
tain austerity and aloofness, yet with an underlying perception of
humor which saved his work from flatness or turgidity even when it
did not appear on the surface. Dr. Parsons was thoroughly impreg-
nated with Dante and the influence of Italian literature. Literature
indeed, in this aspect of it, was to him a vocation and a passion.
He served the Muse with a full sense of the sacredness of song.
He was born in Boston, August 18th, 1819; was the son of a physi-
cian of that city, and was destined for the same profession,— taking
a degree at the Harvard Medical School, and for some time prac-
ticing dentistry. Boston was his home when he was in the United
States; but he traveled and resided much abroad. In his leisure
hours he wrote his verses and worked on his English renderings of
the master poet of Italy. So early as 1843 he published a translation
of the first ten cantos of the 'Inferno,' and a revision with seven
more cantos followed in 1867. He made a version of the great epic
a life labor, the translation in its final form appearing in 1893.
(
Dr. Parsons was never eager for publication, and some of his vol-
umes of verse were printed privately for circulation among friends.
Several collections of his poems were published: one entitled 'Ghetto
di Roma' in 1854, The Magnolia' in 1867, The Shadow of the Obe-
lisk' in 1872, Circum Præcorda' in 1892; and a final selection in
1893, after his death. This last book contains-excepting his trans-
lation of Dante- the bulk of the work his admirers would wish to
see preserved. There are lyrics in this volume as perfect in their
kind as anything done by a contemporaneous poet.
The opening
poem, On a Bust of Dante,' is as noble a tribute as the Italian has
received in our tongue. Many lines and passages in the different
lyrics have a quotableness which means fine thought married to fit
expression. In the tribute to Daniel Webster, for example, occurs the
stanza:
"Kings have their dynasties, but not the mind:
Cæsars leave other Cæsars to succeed;
But Wisdom dying, leaves no heir behind. "
## p. 11118 (#334) ##########################################
11118
THOMAS WILLIAM PARSONS
And the poem closes with these lovely words:-
"We have no high cathedral for his rest,
Dim with proud banners and the dust of years;
All we can give him is New England's breast
To lay his head on- and his country's tears. "
There is something inevitable in the perfection of this, from 'The
Birthday of Robert Burns': —
"For flowers will grow, and showers will fall,
And clouds will travel o'er the sky;
And the great God who cares for all,
He will not let his darlings die. "
The man who can strike out things like these - and he wrote
whole poems which keep this level-deserves, and doubtless will get,
permanent recognition as a lyric singer. Parsons's range is not wide,
nor is his accomplishment varied. But in his individual way and
within his compass, he struck a very pure, fine note, which will give
lasting pleasure.
Dr. Parsons died at Scituate, Massachusetts, September 3d, 1892.
[The following selections are all made from the 'Poems of Thomas William
Parsons. Copyright 1893, by Houghton, Mifflin & Co. ]
MARY BOOTH
shall we do now, Mary being dead,
Or say or write that shall express the half?
What can we do but pillow that fair head,
And let the Springtime write her epitaph? —
WHAT
As it will soon, in snowdrop, violet,
Wind-flower and columbine and maiden's-tear;
Each letter of that pretty alphabet
That spells in flowers the pageant of the year.
She was a maiden for a man to love;
She was a woman for a husband's life;
One that has learned to value, far above
The name of love, the sacred name of wife.
Her little life-dream, rounded so with sleep,
Had all there is of life, except gray hairs:
Hope, love, trust, passion and devotion deep;
And that mysterious tie a mother bears.
## p. 11119 (#335) ##########################################
THOMAS WILLIAM PARSONS
11119
She hath fulfilled her promise and hath passed:
Set her down gently at the iron door!
Eyes look on that loved image for the last:
Now cover it in earth- her earth no more.
A DIRGE
LOWLY tread and gently bear
One that comes across the wave,
From the oppression of his care,
To the freedom of the grave;
S
From the merciless disease,
Wearing body, wasting brain,
To the rest beneath the trees,-
The forgetting of all pain;
From the delicate eye and ear,
To the rest that shall not see
To the sleep that shall not hear
Nor feel, the world's vulgarity.
Bear him, in his leaden shroud,
In his pall of foreign oak,
To the uncomplaining crowd
Where ill word was never spoke.
from life's broken sleep-
Dreams of pleasure, dreams of pain,
Hopes that tremble, joys that weep,
Loves that perish, visions vain
Bear
To the beautiful repose
Where he was before his birth;
With the ruby, with the rose,
With the harvest, earth in earth!
Bring him to the body's rest,
After battle, sorely spent,
Wounded, but a welcome guest
In the Chief's triumphal tent.
## p. 11120 (#336) ##########################################
11120
THOMAS WILLIAM PARSONS
EPITAPH ON A CHILD
HIS little seed of life and love
Just lent us for a day,
Came like a blessing from above,—
Passed like a dream away.
THIS
And when we garnered in the earth
The foison that was ours,
We felt that burial was but birth
To spirits, as to flowers.
And still that benediction stays,
Although its angel passed;
Dear God! thy ways, if bitter ways,
We learn to love at last.
But for the dream,-it broke indeed,
Yet still great comfort gives:
What was a dream is now our creed,-
We know our darling lives.
S
TO FRANCESCA
ING Waller's lay,
"Go, lovely rose," or some old song,
That should I play
Feebly, thy voice may make me strong
With loving memories cherished long.
Sing "Drink to me,"
Or "Take, oh take those lips away;'
Some strain to be-
When I am gone and thou art gray-
Remembered of a happier day.
-
A solemn air,
A melody not loud but low,
Suits whitening hair;
And when the pulse is beating slow,
The music's measure should move so.
The song most sweet
Is that which lulls, not thrills, the ear;
So, love, repeat
For one who counteth silence dear,
That which to silence is most near.
## p. 11121 (#337) ##########################################
THOMAS WILLIAM PARSONS
III2I
XIX-696
PILGRIM'S ISLE
HERE fell a charm upon the deep,
A spell upon the silent shore;
The boats, like lily-pads asleep,
Lay round me upon ocean's floor.
THE
O weary world of noise and strife!
O cities full of gold and guile!
How small a part ye make of life
To one that walks on Pilgrim's Isle!
I watched the Gurnet's double star,
Like Jove and Venus side by side,
And on the smooth waves gleaming far
Beheld its long reflection ride.
My days of youth are almost flown,
And yet, upon a night like this,
Love will not let my heart alone;
Back comes the well-remembered bliss.
Oft in thy golden locks a gleam
Of other days illumes my brain,
And in thy hand's soft touch I seem
To feel my boyhood born again.
Ah, dearest, all will soon be o'er!
I see my sunset in thy smile;
It lingers longest on the shore,
Th' enchanted shore, of Pilgrim's Isle.
PARADISI GLORIA
"O frate mio! ciascuna e cittadina
D'una vera città — »
THE
HERE is a city, builded by no hand,
And unapproachable by sea or shore,
And unassailable by any band
Of storming soldiery for evermore.
There we no longer shall divide our time
By acts or pleasures,― doing petty things
Of work or warfare, merchandise or rhyme;
But we shall sit beside the silver springs
## p. 11122 (#338) ##########################################
III22
THOMAS WILLIAM PARSONS
That flow from God's own footstool, and behold
Sages and martyrs, and those blessed few
Who loved us once and were beloved of old,
To dwell with them and walk with them anew,
In alternations of sublime repose,
Musical motion, the perpetual play
Of every faculty that Heaven bestows,
Through the bright, busy, and eternal day.
## p. 11123 (#339) ##########################################
11123
JAMES PARTON
(1822-1891)
AMES PARTON, though in thought and feeling an American of
the Americans, was born in Canterbury, England, February
9th, 1822; coming to New York with his widowed mother
when he was about five years old. He went to a classical school in
Westchester County, New York, passed some years in Europe, and
then set up a school of his own in Philadelphia. He had a passion.
for Greek, and when he was a lad urged his mother to let him be-
come a barber, that he might have time enough between customers
to study the language: but Willis, whom he
knew, had set the fashion of being liter-
ary, and Parton followed it by contribut-
ing to the Home Journal; becoming in time
assistant editor of that paper, and marry-
ing "Fanny Fern" (Sara Payson Willis
Eldridge), Willis's sister.
JAMES PARTON
His first book, a 'Life of Horace Gree-
ley,' appeared in 1855. He had spent infi-
nite pains upon it, and had chosen a typical
American for his subject, with the result of
producing the portrait of a living man; not
a eulogy nor an invective, but a picture,
vivid, entertaining, abounding in anecdote.
The book made, as Greeley described it,
"mighty interesting reading," and it sold at the rate of thirty thou-
sand copies in the first year or two. After this we hear no more
of Greek. In a few years Parton had become one of the best-known
writers in America; the most eminent example, perhaps, of what can
be attained in letters with an innate love of literature, adaptability,
inexhaustible industry, and a painter's eye to effect. Always a de-
scriptive writer rather than a deep-searching historian, he could draw
most impressive pictures, brilliant in coloring and dramatic in set-
ting, while no man better knew the journalist's business of striking
while the iron was hot; sending in his lives and biographies when
the public demanded them. At the same time he had, in common
with Hazlitt and De Quincey, the fashion of defending the under
dog, who never wanted a friend when Parton was present: not for
## p. 11124 (#340) ##########################################
11124
JAMES PARTON
the reason that incited Hazlitt, because he was combative, but from
a love of fair play and a natural independence; and perhaps because
the advocate was first of all a journalist, inspired with the journal-
ist's curiosity to see both sides.
He held the theory that it is the good in a man that goes astray,
and that ought to alarm and warn his fellows; and that vice, after
all, is an excess of a virtue. With none of the pugnacity of a parti-
san, he shows a certain adroitness in confessing the weaknesses of
his heroes, that makes a direct appeal to the generosity of the reader.
Moreover, by taking the stand that all religions are of human origin,
and that the religion of the future will be founded on the love of
man for man, without regard to prevailing theologic conceptions of
the Deity, he wrote in a comfortable and tolerant state of philosophic
skepticism. With these qualities and characteristics, with enormous
powers of industry and application, he sent out from his study a long
list of books, which became the most popular series of biographies in
America.
The life of Greeley was followed three years later by that of
Aaron Burr. In this book Parton chose the period most interesting
in the history of the United States,-that after the Revolution. Old
things had passed away; the conquering Democratic party had arisen;
the States had become America, and the strange contradictory figure
who had helped to make them so had passed by, rising in glory and
setting in mysterious gloom. This life of Burr, vivid, picturesque,
and swift-moving, is as entertaining to-day as when it appeared in
1858.
His 'Jefferson' and 'Andrew Jackson' are in a way quite as inter-
esting, although the task of writing them was perhaps not so congen-
ial; for Parton, heart and soul a Democrat, had no occasion to use
therein that peculiar talent for defense which is so conspicuous in
his lives of Burr and Voltaire. Both the 'Jefferson' and 'Jackson,'
though pieces of special pleading, have the picturesqueness and event-
fulness of well-constructed fiction, while they are never consciously
untrue to fact. Their chief value, however, lies less perhaps in
their literary quality, or in their erudition, than in their contribution
of much curious information and personal anecdote gathered from
out-of-the-way sources, and put before the reader in an entertaining
form. No man was ever freer from what Macaulay calls the "disease
of admiration"; but on the other hand, none knew better how not to
belittle great deeds and noble aspirations. His respect for success
never chilled his sympathy with failure, and he had an instinct for
discerning the causes of both failure and success.
In 1877 appeared his 'Caricature and other Comic Art,' a book
showing much study, keen humor, and the historic sense. Indeed, the
## p. 11125 (#341) ##########################################
JAMES PARTON
11125
book, though seeming to exhibit a deviation from his familiar path,
is really a contribution to political history.
In 1881 appeared Parton's life of Voltaire, on which he had spent
more than twenty years of study. His admiration for his hero was
unbounded; and his accumulation of facts, anecdotes, and letters
throwing light upon the time is amazing. It is true that Parton
had reasoned out no philosophy of history that prompted him to
portray a system of morals or politics. He did not concern himself
with theories of objective or subjective influences. Yet whatever this
biography may lack, it remains, as an eminent English critic has
declared, a genuine life of Voltaire, and not a critique upon his
life and character like the works of Strauss and Morley. It is a
life which makes the English and American public for the first time
acquainted with the great Frenchman, somewhat in the same sense
in which they have long been acquainted with Johnson or Scott.
This book, a labor of love, was Parton's last serious production, though
his busy pen was never laid aside during his lifetime; and his name
appears on the title-page of several compilations, collections of brief
biographies, and essays. He died at Newburyport, Massachusetts,
October 16th, 1891.
FROM THE LIFE OF ANDREW JACKSON ›
Copyright 1860, by Mason Brothers. Reprinted here with the approval of
Houghton, Mifflin and Co. , publishers
HERE are certain historical facts which puzzle and disgust
those whose knowledge of life and men has been chiefly
derived from books. To such it can with difficulty be made
clear that the award is just which assigns to George Washington
a higher place than Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson,-
higher honor to the executing hand than to the conceiving head.
If they were asked to mention the greatest Englishman of this
age, it would never occur to them to name the Duke of Well-
ington, a man of an understanding so limited as to be the nat-
ural foe of everything liberal and progressive. Yet the Duke of
Wellington was the only Englishman of his generation to whom
every Englishman took off his hat. And these men of books
contemplate with mere wonder the fact that during a period
when Webster, Clay, Calhoun, Wirt, and Preston were on the
public stage, Andrew Jackson should have been so much the idol
## p. 11126 (#342) ##########################################
11126
JAMES PARTON
of the American people, that all those eminent men united could
not prevail against him in a single instance.
It is pleasant to justify the ways of man to man. The in-
stinctive preferences of the people must be right. That is to
say, the man preferred by the people must have more in him of
what the people most want than any other of his generation.
The more intimately we know the men who surrounded General
Washington, the clearer to us does his intrinsic superiority be-
come, and the more clearly we perceive his utter indispensable-
ness. Washington was the only man of the Revolution who did
for the Revolution what no other man could have done. And if
ever the time comes when the eminent contemporaries of Andrew
Jackson shall be as intimately known to the people as Andrew
Jackson now is, the invincible preference of the people for him
will be far less astonishing than it now appears. Clay was the
only man of the four leading spirits whose character will bear
a comparison with our fiery, faulty hero. Clay was indeed a
princely man; it is impossible not to love him: but then, his
endowments were not great, and his industry was limited. How
often when the country wanted statesmanship, he had nothing to
give it but oratory!
Besides, suppose Washington had not fought the battle of
Trenton, and not restored the Revolution when it was about to
perish. Suppose England had lost the battle of Waterloo, and
given the fellest-because the ablest-of tyrants another lease of
power. Suppose the English had sacked New Orleans, and no-
peace had come to check their career of conquest! By indulging
this turn of reflection, we shall perceive that the Washingtons,
the Wellingtons, and the Jacksons of a nation are they who pro-
vide or preserve for all other gifts, talents, and virtues, their
opportunity and sphere. How just, therefore, is the gratitude of
nations toward those who, at the critical moment, DO the great
act that creates or defends them!
What man supremely admires in man is manhood. The val-
iant man alone has power to awaken the enthusiastic love of
us all. So dear to us is valor, that even the rudest manifesta-
tions of it in the pugilistic ring excite, for a moment, a universal
interest. Its highest manifestation, on the martyr's cross, be-
comes the event from which whole races date their after history.
Every great career, whether of a nation or of an individual, dates
from a heroic action, and every downfall from a cowardly one
## p. 11127 (#343) ##########################################
JAMES PARTON
11127
To dare, to dare again, and always to dare, is the inexorable
condition of every signal and worthy success, from founding a
cobbler's stall to promulgating a nobler faith. In barbarous ages,
heroes risked their lives to save their self-respect; in civilized
periods, they risk what it is harder to risk, their livelihood, their
career.
It is not for nothing that nature has implanted in her darling
the instinct of honoring courage before all other qualities. What
a delicate creature was man to be tossed upon this planet, and
sent whirling through space, naked, shelterless, and untaught;
wild beasts hungering to devour him; the elements in league
against him; compelled instantly to begin the "struggle for life,"
which could never cease until life ceased. What but heroic valor
could have saved him for a day? Man has tamed the beasts, and
reduced the warring elements to such subjection that they are
his untiring servants. His career on earth has been, is, will ever
be, a fight; and the ruling race in all ages is that one which has
produced the greatest number of brave men. Men truly brave.
Men valiant enough to die rather than do, suffer, or consent to,
wrong. To risk life is not all of courage, but it is an essential
part of it.
There are things dearer to the civilized man than
life. But he who cannot calmly give up his life rather than live
unworthily comes short of perfect manhood; and he who can do
so, has in him at least the raw material of a hero.
In the eternal necessity of courage, and in man's instinctive
perception of its necessity, is to be found perhaps the explana-
tion of the puzzling fact, that in an age which has produced so
many glorious benefactors of their species, such men as Welling-
ton and Jackson are loved by a greater number of people than
any others.
The spiritualized reader is not expected to coincide
in the strict justice of this arrangement. His heroes are of an-
other cast. But the rudest man and the scholar may agree in this,
that it is the valor of their heroes which renders them effect-
ive and admirable. The intellect, for example, of a discoverer of
truth excites our wonder; but what rouses our enthusiasm is the
calm and modest valor with which he defies the powerful animos-
ity of those who thrive by debauching the understanding of man.
It was curious that England and America should both, and
nearly at the same time, have elevated their favorite generals to
the highest civil station. Wellington became prime minister in
1827; Jackson, President in 1829. Wellington was tried three
## p. 11128 (#344) ##########################################
11128
JAMES PARTON
years, and found wanting, and driven from power, execrated by
the people. His carriage, his house, and his statue were pelted
by the mob. Jackson reigned eight years, and retired with his
popularity undiminished. The reason was, that Wellington was
not in accord with his generation, and was surrounded by men
who were if possible less so; while Jackson, besides being in
sympathy with the people, had the great good fortune to be
influenced by men who had learned the rudiments of statesman-
ship in the school of Jefferson.
Yes, autocrat as he was, Andrew Jackson loved the people, the
common people, the sons and daughters of toil, as truly as they
loved him, and believed in them as they believed in him.
He was in accord with his generation. He had a clear per-
ception that the toiling millions are not a class in the community,
but are the community. He knew and felt that government
should exist only for the benefit of the governed; that the strong
are strong only that they may aid the weak; that the rich are
rightfully rich only that they may so combine and direct the
labors of the poor as to make labor more profitable to the laborer.
He did not comprehend these truths as they are demonstrated
by Jefferson and Spencer, but he had an intuitive and instinctive
perception of them. And in his most autocratic moments he
really thought that he was fighting the battle of the people, and
doing their will while baffling the purposes of their representa-
tives. If he had been a man of knowledge as well as force, he
would have taken the part of the people more effectually, and
left to his successors an increased power of doing good, instead
of better facilities for doing harm. He appears always to have
meant well. But his ignorance of law, history, politics, science,
of everything which he who governs a country ought to know,
was extreme. Mr. Trist remembers hearing a member of the
General's family say that General Jackson did not believe the
world was round. His ignorance was as a wall round about
him-high, impenetrable. He was imprisoned in his ignorance,
and sometimes raged round his little dim inclosure like a tiger
in his den.
## p. 11129 (#345) ##########################################
JAMES PARTON
II129
FROM THE LIFE OF VOLTAIRE›
Copyright 1881, by James Parton. Reprinted here by consent of Houghton,
Mifflin & Co. , publishers
A
FTER this interesting experience of court life in a foreign
country, where the king was king, he [Voltaire] was to
become a courtier at Versailles, where the man who gov-
erned the king's mistress was king.
Again it was the Duke de Richelieu, First Gentleman of the
Chamber, who broke in upon the elevated pursuits of Cirey, and
called him to lower tasks and less congenial scenes. The royal
children were coming of age. The marriage of the Dauphin to
the Infanta of Spain, long ago agreed upon, was soon to be
celebrated, the prince having passed his sixteenth year; and it
devolved upon the First Gentleman to arrange the marriage fes-
tival. This was no light task; for Louis XIV. had accustomed
France to the most elaborate and magnificent fêtes. Not content
with such splendor as mere wealth can everywhere procure, that
gorgeous monarch loved to enlist all the arts and all the talents;
exhibiting to his guests divertisements written by Molière, per-
formed with original music, and with scenery painted by artists.
Several of his festivals have to this day a certain celebrity in
France, and have left traces still noticeable. There is a public
ground in Paris, opposite the Tuileries, which is called the Place
of the Carousal. It was so named because it was the scene of
one of this King's fêtes, in which five bodies of horsemen -or
quadrilles, as they were called-took part. One of these bodies
were dressed and equipped as Roman knights, and they were
led by the King in person. His brother, the Duke of Orleans,
commanded a body of Persian cavalry; the Prince of Condé, a
splendid band of Turks; the Duke of Guise, a company of Peru-
vian horse; and a son of Condé shone at the head of East-Indian
horsemen in gorgeous array. Imagine these five bodies of horse
galloping and manoeuvring, entering and departing, charging
and retreating, like circus riders in an extremely large and splen-
did tent; and in the midst, on a lofty platform, three queens
in splendid robes,-the mother of Louis, the wife of Louis,
and the widow of Charles I. , who lived and died the guest of
the King of France. There were grand doings at this festival.
There were tournaments, games of skill and daring, stately pro-
cessions, concerts, plays, and buffooneries, with a ball at the
close.
## p. 11130 (#346) ##########################################
11130
JAMES PARTON
That pageant, splendid as it was, was "effaced," as the French
say, by one which the King gave only two years after at Ver-
sailles, probably the most sumptuous thing of the kind ever seen.
On the 5th of May, the most beautiful month of the year in
France, the King rode out to Versailles with all his court, which
then included six hundred persons, each attended by retainers
and servants, the whole numbering more than two thousand
individuals and as many horses.
The festival was to last seven
days, and the King defrayed the expenses of every one of his
guests. In the park and gardens of Versailles, miracles had been
wrought. Theatres, amphitheatres, porticoes, pavilions, seemed
to have sprung into being at the waving of an enchanter's wand.
On the first day there was a kind of review, or march-past, of
all who were to take part in the games and tourneys. Under
a triumphal arch the three queens appeared again, resplendent,
each attended by one hundred ladies, who were attired in the
brilliant manner of the period; past these marched heralds,
pages, squires, carrying the devices and shields of the knights, as
well as banners upon which verses were written in letters of gold.
The knights followed in burnished armor and bright plumes; the
King at their head in the character of Roger, a famous knight
of old. All the crown diamonds glittered upon his coat and
the trappings of his horse. Both he and the animal sparkled and
blazed in the May sun; and we can well imagine that a hand-
some young man, riding with perfect grace the most beautiful of
horses, must have been a very pretty spectacle, despite so much
glitter. When this procession of squires and knights had passed
and made their obeisance to the queens, a huge car followed,
eighteen feet high, fifteen wide, and twenty-four long, represent-
ing the Car of the Sun,- an immense vehicle, all gilding and
splendor. Behind this car came groups exhibiting the Four
Ages,- of Gold, of Silver, of Brass, and of Iron; and these were
followed by representations of the celestial signs, the seasons,
and the hours. All this, the spectators inform us, was admirably
performed to the sound of beautiful music; and now and then
persons would step from the procession, and the music would.
cease while they recited poems, written for the occasion, before
the queens. Imagine shepherds, blacksmiths, farmers, harvesters,
vine-dressers, fauns, dryads, Pans, Dianas, Apollos, marching by,
and representing the various scenes of life and industry!
The procession ends at last. Night falls. With wondrous
rapidity four thousand great torches are lighted in an inclosure
## p. 11131 (#347) ##########################################
JAMES PARTON
11131
fitted up as a banqueting-place.
a banqueting-place. Two hundred of the persons.
who had figured in the procession now bring in various articles.
of food: the seasons, the vine-dressers, the shepherds, the har-
vesters, each bear the food appropriate to them; while Pan and
Diana advance upon a moving mountain, and alight to super-
intend the distribution of the exquisite food which had been
brought in. Behind the tables was an orchestra of musicians, and
when the feast was done the pleasures of the day ended with a
ball. For a whole week the festival continued; the sports varied
every day. There were tourneys, pageants, hunts, shooting at a
mark, and spearing the ring. Four times the King gained the
prize, and offered it to be competed for again. There were a
great number of court fools at this festival, as we still find
clowns at a circus. Indeed, when we attend a liberally appointed
circus, we are looking upon a show resembling in many particu-
lars the grand doings in the park of Versailles when Louis XIV.
entertained his court and figured as chief of the riders.
were
Most of the performances could have been procured by money
lavishly spent; and in order to reproduce them, the Duke de
Richelieu needed little assistance from the arts. But there were
items of the programme which redeemed the character of this
festival, and caused it to be remembered by the susceptible peo-
ple of France with pride. Molière composed for it a kind of
show play, called the 'Princesse d'Elide'; a vehicle for music,
ballet, and costume, with here and there a spice of his comic
talent. A farce of his, the 'Forced Marriage,' was also played;
and the first three acts of his 'Tartuffe - the greatest effort of
French dramatic genius in that age, if not in any age-
performed for the first time. There was only one man in France
who could help a "First Gentleman" to features of the coming
fête at all resembling these; and to him that First Gentleman
applied. Voltaire entered into the scheme with zeal. In April
1744, Cirey all blooming with flowers and verdure, he began to
write his festive divertisement, the Princesse de Navarre,' the
hero of which was a kind of Spanish Duke de Richelieu. "I am
making," he wrote, "a divertisement for a Dauphin and Dau-
phiness whom I shall not divert; but I wish to produce some-
thing pretty, gay, tender, worthy of the Duke de Richelieu,
director of the fête. " It was his chief summer work, and he
labored at it with an assiduity that would have sufficed to pro-
duce three new tragedies. He very happily laid the scene of
―
## p. 11132 (#348) ##########################################
11132
JAMES PARTON
his play in an ancient château close to the borders of the Span-
ish province of Navarre; an expedient which enabled him to
group upon the stage both Frenchmen and Spaniards, with their
effective contrasts of costume, and to present to the Spanish
bride and her court, pleasing traits of their own countrymen.
The poet and the First Gentleman arranged the processions, the
ballets, the tableaux, the fête within a fête; exchanging many
long letters, and pondering many devices. There is good comic
writing in this piece; and there are two characters a rustic
Spanish baron and his extremely simple-minded daughter- that
are worthy of a better kind of play and occasion.
―――――
This was the year in which the King of France first braved the
hardships of the field, accompanied by his mistress, the Duchesse
de Châteauroux, and attended by that surprising retinue of cour-
tiers and comedians often described. I need not pause to relate
how, after being present at warlike operations, he fell dangerously
sick of a fever; how the mistress and the First Gentleman took
possession of the King's quarters, and barred the door against
priests and princes; how, as the King grew worse, the alarmed
mistress tried to come to a compromise with the royal confessor,
the keeper of the King's conscience, saying to him in substance,
"Let me go away without scandal,- that is, without being sent
away, and I will quietly let you into the King's chamber;" how
the cautious Jesuit contrived to get through a long interview
without saying either yes or no to this proposal; how at length,
when the King seemed near his end, she was terrified into yield-
ing, and the King, fearing to lose his absolution and join some of
the bad kings in the other world, sent her a positive command
to depart, as if she had been, what the priest officially styled her,
a concubine; how the King, having recovered, humbly courted
her return, calling upon her in person at her house; and how,
while she affected to hesitate, and dictated terms of direst ven-
geance, even the exile of every priest, courtier, and minister who
had taken the least part in her disgrace, she died of mingled
rage, mortification, and triumph, leaving both the King and the
First Gentleman perfectly consolable.
The impressive fact is, that none of these things impaired
the spell of the King's divinity. During the crisis of his fever
all France seemed panic-stricken; and when he recovered, the
manifestations of joy were such as to astonish the King himself,
inured as he was to every form and degree of adulation from his
-
## p. 11133 (#349) ##########################################
JAMES PARTON
11133
childhood. "What have I done," cried the poor man, "to be
loved so? " It was at this time that he received his name of
Louis the Well-Beloved, by which it was presumed that he would
go to posterity, along with Louis the Fat and Philip the Long,
-titles so helpful to childish memory. On his return to Paris
in September 1744, "crowned with victory," and recovered from
the borders of the tomb, the fêtes were of such magnitude and
splendor that Madame du Châtelet came to Paris to witness
them, with her poet in her train. He brought his 'Princesse de
Navarre' with him, however, and was soon in daily consultation.
with composer, ministers, First Gentleman, and friends, as to the
resources of an extemporized theatre.
A curious street adventure befell madame and himself on the
night of the grand fireworks, which they rode in from a châ-
teau near the city to witness. They found all the world in the
streets. Voltaire gave an account of their night's exploits to
the President Hénault, whose visit to Cirey they now returned
in an unusual manner:-"There were two thousand backing car-
riages in three files; there were the outcries of two or three hun-
dred thousand men, scattered among those carriages; there were
drunkards, fights with fists, streams of wine and tallow flow-
ing upon the people, a mounted police to augment the embro-
glio; and by way of climax to our delights, his Royal Highness
[Duke de Chartres] was returning peacefully to the Palais-Royal
with his great carriages, his guards, his pages: and all this un-
able to go back or advance until three in the morning. I was with
Madame du Châtelet. Her coachman, who had never before
been in Paris, was about boldly to break her upon the wheel.
Covered as she was with diamonds, she alighted, calling upon
me to follow, got through the crowd without being either plun-
dered or hustled, entered your house [Rue St. Honoré], sent for
some roast chicken at the corner restaurant, and drank your
health very pleasantly in that house to which every one wishes
to see you return. "
It was a busy time with him during the next six months,
arranging the details of the fête, with Rameau the composer,
with scene-painters, with the Duke de Richelieu and the Marquis
d'Argenson. We see him cutting down eight verses to four,
and swelling four verses to eight, to meet the exigencies of the
music. We see him deep in converse with Richelieu upon the
complicated scenes of his play,-suggesting, altering, abandoning,
curtailing numberless devices of the stage manager.
## p. 11134 (#350) ##########################################
11134
JAMES PARTON
On this occasion also, as before going to Prussia, he took care
to secure some compensation in advance. It was not his inten-
tion to play courtier for nothing. He was resolved to improve
this opportunity, and to endeavor so to strengthen himself at
court that henceforth he could sleep in peace at his abode, in
Paris, or in the country, fearless of the Ane of Mirepoix. To
get the dull, shy, sensualized King on his side was a material
point with him. He wrote a poem on the 'Events of the Year'
(1744), in which the exploits of the King upon the tented field,
and his joyful recovery from sickness, were celebrated in the true
laureate style. He also took measures to have this poem shown
to the King by the Cardinal de Tencin, "in a moment of good-
humor. " He made known to two of his friends in the ministry,
M. Orry and the Marquis d'Argenson, precisely what he wanted.
He wanted an office which would protect him against confessors,
bishops, and Desfontaines,-say, for example, gentleman-in-ordi-
nary of the king's chamber; a charge of trifling emolument, less
duty, and great distinction. He would then be a member of the
King's household, not to be molested on slight pretext by a Mire-
poix, nor to be calumniated with impunity by a journalist. But
since such offices were seldom vacant, he asked to be appointed
at once writer of history (historiographe) to the King, at a nomi-
nal salary of four hundred francs a year.
M. Orry thought this very modest and suitable; the Marquis
d'Argenson was of the same opinion: and both engaged to aid in
accomplishing his wishes. If he could add to these posts an
arm-chair in the French Academy, which in good time he also
meant to try for, he thought he might pursue his natural voca-
tion in his native land without serious and constant apprehension.
But first, the fête! That must succeed as a preliminary. In
January 1745 he took up his abode at Versailles to superintend
the rehearsals, conscious of the incongruity of his employment.
"I am here," he wrote to Thierot, "braving Fortune in her own
temple; at Versailles I play a part similar to that of an atheist
in a church. " To Cideville, also:-"Do you not pity a poor
devil who at fifty is a king's buffoon, and who is more embar-
rassed with musicians, decorators, actors, singers, and dancers
than the eight or nine electors will soon be in making a German
Cæsar? I rush from Paris to Versailles; I compose verses in
the postchaise; I have to praise the King highly, Madame the
Dauphiness delicately, the royal family sweetly. I must satisfy
the court, and not displease the city. "
## p. 11135 (#351) ##########################################
JAMES PARTON
11135
In the very crisis of the long preparation, February 18th,
1745, seven days before the festival, Voltaire's Jansenist of a
brother, the "Abbé Arouet," Receiver-of-Fees to the Chamber of
Accounts, died at Paris, aged two months less than sixty years.
The brothers, as we know, had been long ago estranged, and
had rarely met of late years. The parish register, still accessible,
attests that the funeral was attended, February 19th, by "François-
Marie Arouet de Voltaire, bourgeois of Paris"; not yet gentleman-
in-ordinary. The receiver-of-fees died, as he had lived, in what
was called the odor of sanctity; presenting to the view of young
and old that painful caricature of goodness which has for some
centuries, in more than one country, made virtue more difficult
than it naturally is. From his will, which also exists, we learn
that if he did not disinherit his brother, he came as near it as
a French brother could without doing violence to the sentiment
and custom of his country. After giving legacies to cousins,
friends, and servants, he leaves one half the bulk of his estate
to his nephew and nieces, and the other half to his brother; but
with a difference. Voltaire was to enjoy his half "in usufruct
only," the capital to fall finally "to his nephew and nieces afore-
said. " He took care also to prevent his brother from gaining
anything by the decease of any of the heirs. As the receiver-of-
fees, besides bequeathing his valuable office to a relative, died
worth, as French investigators compute, about two hundred
thousand francs, Voltaire received an increase to his income of
perhaps six thousand francs a year.
From his brother's grave, without waiting to learn these par-
ticulars, he was obliged to go post-haste to Versailles, towards
which all eyes were now directed. The marriage festival, a
tumult of all the splendors, began February 23d, 1745. The
'Princess of Navarre' succeeded to admiration. A vast and
beautiful edifice had risen, at the command of Richelieu, in the
horse-training ground near the palace of Versailles, so con-
structed that it could serve as a theatre on one evening and a
ball-room on the next, both equally magnificent and complete.
The stage was fifty-six feet in depth; and as the boxes were so
arranged as to exhibit the audience to itself in the most effective
and brilliant manner, the words spoken on the stage could not
be always perfectly heard. But this was not so important, since
the play was chiefly designed as a vehicle for music, dancing,
costume, and picture. At six in the evening the King entered
## p. 11136 (#352) ##########################################
11136
JAMES PARTON
and took the seat prepared for him in the middle of the theatre,
followed in due order by his family and court, arrayed in the
gorgeous fashion of the time. These placed themselves around
him, a splendid group, in the midst of a great theatre filled with
the nobility of the kingdom, all sumptuous and glittering. The
author of the play about to be performed was himself thrilled
by the picturesque magnificence of the spectacle which the audi-
ence presented; and he regretted that a greater number of the
people of France could not have been present to behold the
superb array of princes and princesses, noble lords and ladies,
adorned by masterpieces of decorative art, which the beauty of
the ladies "effaced. " He wished that more people could observe
the noble and becoming joy that filled every heart and beamed
in all those lovely eyes.
But since nothing can be perfect, not even in France, this
most superb audience was so much elated with itself that it
could not stop talking. There was a buzz and hum of conver-
sation, reminding the anxious author of a hive of bees humming
and buzzing around the queen. The curtain rose; but still they
talked. The play, however, being a mélange of poetry, song,
music, ballet, and dialogue, everything was enjoyed except the
good verses here and there, which could scarcely be caught by
distant ears. Every talent in such a piece meets its due of
approval except that of the poet, who imagines the whole before
any part of it exists. At half-past nine the curtain fell upon the
closing scene; when the audience, retiring to the grounds with-
out, found the entire façade of the palace and adjacent structures
illuminated. All were enchanted. The King himself, the hardest
man in Europe to amuse, was so well pleased that he ordered
the play to be repeated on another evening of the festival. "The
King is grateful to me," wrote Voltaire to his guardian angel,
D'Argental. "The Mirepoix cannot harm me. What more do I
need ? »
He was exhausted with the long strain upon his nervous sys-
tem. "So tired am I," he wrote to Thierot, "that I have neither
hands, feet, nor head, and write to you by the hand of another. "
But he soon had the consolation of receiving the King's promise
of the next vacancy among the gentlemen-in-ordinary, and his
immediate appointment as writer of history at an annual salary
of two thousand francs. Thus the year consumed in these courtly
toils, he thought, was not without its compensations. Nor did he
## p. 11137 (#353) ##########################################
JAMES PARTON
11137
relax his vigilance, nor give ministers peace, until these offices
were securely his by letters patent and the King's signature.
When he accepted the office of historiographer, he was far
from anticipating an increase of labor through it. But in truth,
no poet laureate ever won his annual pipe of sack by labors
so arduous as those by which Voltaire earned this salary of
two thousand francs. Several volumes of history attest his dili-
gence. During the first two or three years of his holding the
place he was historiographer, laureate, writer of royal letters and
ministerial dispatches, complimenter of the royal mistress, and
occasionally court dramatist and master of the revels.
The marriage festivities at Versailles drew to a close, and all
that brilliant crowd dispersed. From the splendors of the court
he was suddenly called away to attend the son of Madame du
Châtelet through the small-pox. He assisted to save the future
Duke du Châtelet for the guillotine, applying to his case his own.
experience of the two hundred pints of lemonade. That duty
done and his forty days of quarantine fulfilled, he returned to
court, where the minister for foreign affairs had a piece of work
for his pen. Elizabeth, Empress of Russia, had offered her me-
diation to the King of France, and the task of writing the King's
reply, accepting the offer, was assigned to Voltaire, who per-
formed it in the loftiest style of sentimental politics. If Louis
XV. took the trouble to glance over this composition, he must
have been pleased to find himself saying that "kings can aspire
to no other glory than that of promoting the happiness of their
subjects," and swearing that he "had never taken up arms except
with a view to promote the interests of peace. It was an ami-
able, effusive letter, in the taste of the period,- being written
by the man who made the taste of the period. Later in the sum-
mer he drafted a longer dispatch to the government of Holland,
remonstrating against its purpose of sending aid to the King
of England against the Pretender. It was he also who wrote
the manifesto to be published in Great Britain on the landing
of the French expedition under the Duke de Richelieu, in aid
of the Pretender. Whenever, indeed, during 1745, 1746, and
1747, the ministry had occasion for a skillful pen, Voltaire was
employed. We perceive in this part of his correspondence the
mingled horror and contempt that war excited in his mind.
"Give us peace, monseigneur," is the burden of his cry to the
XIX-697
## p. 11138 (#354) ##########################################
11138
JAMES PARTON
Marquis d'Argenson in confidential notes; and we see him, with
his usual easy assurance, suggesting such marriages for the royal
children as would "render France happy by a beautiful peace,
and your name immortal despite the fools. "
Whatever philosophers may think of war, few citizens can
resist the contagious delirium of victory after national defeat
and humiliation. The King of France again, in 1745, was posed
by his advisers in the part of conqueror. From a hill, he and
the Dauphin looked on while Marshal Saxe won the decisive and
fruitful victory of Fontenoy, over the English Duke of Cumber-
land and the forces of the allies, with a loss of eight thousand
men on each side. Voltaire received the news at Paris, late in
the evening, direct from D'Argenson, who was with the King in
the field. He dashed upon paper a congratulatory note to the
minister: "Ah! the lovely task for your historian! In three hun-
dred years the kings of France have done nothing so glorious. I
am mad with joy! Good-night, monseigneur! "
His poem 'Fontenoy,' of three hundred lines or more, was
scattered over the delirious city damp from the press, and in a
few days was declaimed in every town of the kingdom. Edition.
after edition was sold. "Five editions in ten days! " The author,
as his custom was, added, erased, altered, corrected; offending
some by omitting their names, offending others by inserting
names odious to them; working all one night to make the poem
a less imperfect expression of the national joy; not forgetting to
dedicate it to the King, and to get a copy placed in his hands.
"The King deigns to be content with it," he wrote. Thousands
of copies were sold in the first month, and there were two bur-
lesques of the poem in the second.
In the very ecstasy of the general enthusiasm, he still repeats,
in a private note to D'Argenson, "Peace, monseigneur, peace,
and you are a great man, even among the fools! "
He was
now in high favor, even with the King, who had
said to Marshal Saxe that the Princesse de Navarre' was above
criticism. The marshal himself gave Madame du Châtelet this
agreeable information. "After that," said the author, "I must
regard the King as the greatest connoisseur in his kingdom. "
He renewed his intimacy with his early patron, the Duchesse du
Maine, who still held court at the château of Sceaux near by.
By great good luck, too, as doubtless he regarded it at the time,
he was acquainted with the new mistress, Pompadour, before she
## p. 11139 (#355) ##########################################
JAMES PARTON
11139
was Pompadour. He knew her when she was only the most
bewitching young wife in France, cold to her rich and amorous.
young husband, and striving by every art that such women know
to catch the King's eye as he hunted in the royal forest near her
abode. Already, even while the King was sleeping on histrionic
straw on the field near Fontenoy, it was settled that the dream
of her life was to be realized. She was to be Petticoat III.
This summer, during the King's absence at the seat of war,
Voltaire was frequently at her house, and had become established
in her favor. She was a gifted, brilliant, ambitious woman, of
cold temperament, who courted this infamy as men seek honor-
able posts which make them conspicuous, powerful, and envied.
In well-ordered nations, accomplished men win such places by
thirty years' well-directed toil in the public service. She won her
place, and kept it nineteen years, by amusing the least amusable
of men.
She paid a high price. In return, she governed France,
enriched her family, promoted her friends, exiled her enemies,
owned half a dozen châteaux, and left an estate of thirty-six
millions of francs.
With such and so many auxiliaries supporting his new posi-
tion, the historiographer of France, if he had been a younger
man, might have felt safe. But he knew his ground. Under
personal government nations usually have two masters, the king
and the priest, between whom there is an alliance offensive and
defensive. He had gained some favor with the King, the King's
ministers, and the King's mistress. But the priest remained hos-
tile. The King being a coward, a fit of the colic might frighten
him into turning out the mistress and letting in the confessor;
and suppose the colic successful, instantly a pious and bigoted
Dauphin became king, with a Mirepoix as chief priest! Moreover,
to depend upon the favor of either king or mistress is worse than
basing the prosperity of an industrial community upon a change-
able fraction in a tariff bill.
Revolving such thoughts in an anxious mind, Voltaire con-
ceived a notable scheme for going behind the Mirepoix, and
silencing him forever by capturing the favor of the Pope. Bene-
dict XIV. was a scholar, a gentleman of excellent temper, and
no bigot. He owed his election to his agreeable qualities. When
the cardinals were exhausted by days and nights of fruitless
balloting, he said, with his usual gayety and good-humor, "Why
waste so much time in vain debates and researches ?
Do you
## p. 11140 (#356) ##########################################
11140
JAMES PARTON
want a saint? elect Gotti. A politician? Aldovrandi. A good
fellow? take me. " And they took him.
It was soon after the close of the fête at Versailles that
Voltaire consulted the Marquis d'Argenson, minister for foreign
affairs, upon his project of getting, as he expressed it, "some
mark of papal benevolence that could do him honor both in this.
- world and the next. " The minister shook his head. He said
it was scarcely possible to mingle in that way things celestial
and political. Like a true courtier of the period, the poet betook
himself to a lady, Mademoiselle du Thil, a connection of Madame
du Châtelet, and extremely well disposed toward himself. She
had a friend in the Pope's household, the Abbé de Tolignan
whom she easily engaged in the cause. D'Argenson also bore
the scheme in mind when he wrote to the French envoy at
Rome. Voltaire meanwhile read the works of his Holiness, of
which there are still accessible fifteen volumes, and in various
ways "coquetted" with him, causing him to know that the cele-
brated Voltaire was one of his readers.
