any wrong construction as to my motive in doing so. Nothing but the profoundest respect would have induced me to take the liberty I have. Believing you to be a man as well as a gentleman, that you can come down to the level of working-men, and understand them (a rare qualification nowadays in one in the class that circumstances have placed you), all working-men think it so much the more valuable to have your advice and assistance. May it long be continued! I do not complain that we have not the sympathy of the upper classes. I believe we have; but there is not one in fifty that can come down to our circumstances, to the bond of our common nature-to comprehend that although the mechanic and the artisan of this country are deep thinkers, yet they often stand in need of advice and the assistance that education gives. We have their good wishes and pecuniary assistance thanks for it--but sometimes a little kindly advice would do far more. It is this difference that makes us feel we could grasp you by the hand as a brother in the cause of progress of the nation. Would that there were more such! How much more would true religion, morals, and sound intellect be brought out! No fear then of the Pope or the devil. Believe me, sir, I am very respectfully yours. Letters from October, 1849, to December, 1850. XXXIX. October 17, 1849. I have just finished "Feats on the Fiord." Miss Martineau's graphic powers are uncommon. I seem to see a fiord, like a valley spread with water into the land; the vast flocks of wild fowl; the sun only dipping in summer below the horizon; the outline of the reindeer on the mountain cut against the sky, and the Lapp slyly running off with the cheese laid on the mountainridge as an offering to Nipen. A Lapp's hut must, I think, resemble an alp for filth, and be somewhat like it altogether. An alp is a Tyrolese herdsman's hut. On the mountains there are patches of vegetation among the pine-forests; these in winter are covered with snow, but in the summer months afford pasture for cattle. The herdsmen ascend, having under their charge the cows of several lowland farmers. Each superintends the cattle of many farms. They milk them, make cheese, and at the end of the season each farmer receives a number of cheeses, in proportion to the number of cows that he contributes. I never knew what filth was until I tried to breakfast, when chamois-hunting, in an alp. I had taken bread with me, and endeavored to improve it by the addition of cream, butter, and cheese; but the room was nearly ankle-deep in dirt, the human beings in it scarcely tolerable within six yards; the cream black and white in about equal proportions, from the soot which had fallen in; the butter kneaded up with hair, as mortar sometimes is; and the cheese yielded to scarcely any thing less violent than a hatchet. I fancy the four-feet-high Lapps would feel quite at home in an alp. What I like in Miss Martineau, too, is her genial heart-her willingness to "live and let live." She feels the falsehood and the injury of religious superstitions. She has no false sentiment about their romantic beauty. They take the manhood from the breast, the self-reliance and the trust in God-leaving behind a restless attempt to propitiate fickle, capricious, malicious beings, whose only superiority lies in power. The worship of power singly is always a degrading worship; submission to caprice is always demoralizing-submission producing trickiness, subtlety, and trust in cunning rather than in rectitude. All this Miss Martineau sees; yet, whether it be heathen or Christian superstition, she nearly always has a healthy and just allowance for the necessary admixture of error with all that is human, and sees that not by anathemas, but by gradual enlightenment, such errors are to be expelled. In short, she sees the difference between pernicious error and willful vice. I began that book at sunrise, and finished it a little after breakfast-time. It gave me a healthy glow of feeling, a more cheerful view of life. I believe the writer of that book would rejoice that she had soothed and invigorated one day of a wayworn, tired being in his path to the still country, where the heaviest-laden lays down his burden at last, and has rest. Yet, thank God! there is rest-many an interval of saddest, sweetest rest -even here, when it seems as if evening breezes from that other land, laden with fragrance, played upon the cheeks and lulled the heart. There are times, even on the stormy sea, when a gentle whisper breathes softly as of heaven, and sends into the soul a dream of ecstasy which can never again wholly die, even amidst the jar and whirl of waking life. How such whispers make the blood stop and the very flesh creep with a sense of mysterious communion! How singularly such moments are the epochs of life-the few points that stand out prominently in the recollection after the flood of years has buried all the rest, as all the low shore disappears, leaving only a few rock-points visible at high tide! XL. October 18, 1849. I have been pondering over your question as to the probable effect of tragedies such as “Phèdre," etc., upon the mind. Now Aristotle's deep view of the end of the tragic drama is this: that it aims, through the medium of two feelings which it represents in action-terror and fear—to refine those very feelings in the spectators. To refine, of course, means to take off the rudeness and painfulness of such emotions, and make them almost pleasing sensations. That is, the terrible and pathetic in real life are painful things to witness; but in the mimic representation the worst part is taken away by the consciousness that it is unreal, at the same time that it is sufficiently like life to produce an impression somewhat similar to that which would be called forth by reality. The feeling thus made faint becomes pleasurable, just as warmth is enjoyment, though heat be intolerable. Of course it is plain that this refinement of feeling unrealizes it, unfits for the contemplation of the terrible and pathetic in real life, substitutes the mimic emotion which is useless-a merely artificial production-for the true one which the Creator has appointed to rise in the bosom in such circumstances for the express purpose of leading to action, exciting sympathy, hardening against danger, and so on. A person who is refined by high-wrought scenes in novels is necessarily sure to shrink from such scenes in real life, because in the mimic case he had all the excitement without the pain, and he will turn aside from circumstances where excitement can not be had without pain. And such a one is sure to be found wanting when true feeling is required for use, because the feelings have got the habit of being roused, without leading to exertion. They have got this habit in the unreal, and they will keep to it in the real. They will rise at the sight of distress or pain, but they have never been trained to pass promptly into the work of sympathizing and relieving; and accordingly such persons seem and come to be looked upon as callous amidst the trials of others over which they wept in the romance. This, I fancy, is Aristotle's "refinement" of feeling, and this must be the danger in all refinement of society. The tragedy and the romance, therefore, only begin to appear when the mind of a large portion of the nation is at leisure to cultivate hot-house feelings, which are always feeble monstrosities. The bull-fight and the amphitheatre only begin when war and the chase have ended. The emotions which found in these a healthy exercise once, get their unhealthy repast by seeing without any call for acting. It is plain to me that in this way all such reading is injurious to the generality. All the feeling we can command we want for acting. When we come to act, the feeling is not there to make acting easy; and what we have to do we must either leave undone, or do with a cold heart, simply from having been accustomed to train the feelings to refinement, and not to action. I wish that nature could do her own healthy work upon all our hearts. I could conceive a marvellously healing power to come from opening the soul like a child's, to receive spontaneously, without effort, the impressions of the unliving--and yet how living!-world around us with all the awe that accompanies them. One impulse from a vernal wood Will teach you more of man, Than all the sages can. Also I suspect that speculative philosophy is not good to read, however interesting; at all events, not alone. It has too little of a basis of proved fact to rest upon, and depends for its truth too much upon feeling. Positive science, such as chemistry, natural philosophy, mineralogy, and geology, rests on facts, and the effect of certainty which it produces on the mind is always a healthy feeling. Here, again, it is as I said above. The cure is to come in contact with Nature and with Fact, instead of exhausting strength by mighty blows struck at random on the yielding air, in the region of conjecture and bewildering mystery. I love that region; it is indeed the region of Faith, but it requires a brain practised much on more earthly precipices to avoid being dizzy and lost in the immense abyss. XLI. October 19. I am convinced there is a deep truth in the strict view which many take of the observance of Sunday. I am certain that their arguments are wrong: that the Sabbath is not a perpetual obligation; that it was Jewish, and that it passed away with Christianity, which made all days and places holy. Nevertheless, I am more and more sure by experience that the reason for the observance of the Sabbath lies deep in the everlasting necessities of human nature; and that as long as man is man, the blessedness of keeping it, not as a day of rest only, but as a day of spiritual rest, will never be annulled. Almost every thing may become an object of doubt; but, in the midst of a wilderness of shadows, broken and distorted in every way, of one thing I am certain: one thing is real-the life of God in the soul of man. I am quite sure that there is One who is seeking us rather than sought by us, that He will seek and find the earnest; and I am sure that this hidden communion may become an object of actual experience as soon as the seeking is reciprocal. If I have not yet acted on it, I know that not with the intellect, but with the spirit, man finds God; in other words, by that which is allied to God in our souls we touch Him. The Jews required "a sign," that is, something that would prove God to their sensuous nature. The Greeks sought after wisdom; that is, by reason and mental tension they expected to realize the Divine; but St. Paul's conviction was, that the spiritual man alone-that is, the man who sought with his spirit-could understand the things of God. By the spirit, I suppose, he means that which I called above the part in our nature which is allied to God, which shows itself, not in cleverness and nimbleness of apprehension, but in devotion, in the submissive heart, in gentleness, humbleness, and love. I fancy that Sunday has lost its meaning unless this part of our being is called into energy. I have been beating the air in vain with investigation. The true way was much nearer. Not by soaring high or diving low do we get the Anointer, but by something very near to us-trusting. Is not that the substance of those verses which so many people find difficu, Romans x. 6, 7, 8, 9? I could not quite satisfy myself with the desolate feeling which instinctively I feel as often as you talk of resolving to fix your heart on God alone. Is not this that which ought to make me supremely happy? But as I was walking in the town to-day in a back street and musing over this, I detected the reason of it not doing so at once. God is life, not death: He is not to be found, as the legion-haunted tried to find Him, among the tombs. I do think that the spirit in which you sometimes despondingly speak of living for Him alone, really means nothing more than the burial alive of a nun who is taking the black veil, and thinking to become thus the spouse of Christ. You speak of living for God and with God, as if it were dying to all that is bright, and cheering, and beautiful, and blessed. You speak as one would speak of going into a parish union, which is good only when there is nothing else to do. No wonder that, involuntarily and almost without a distinct analysis of the feeling, I feel a kind of shudder and a vague cheerlessness when you talk so. No; be vouée if you will, but it must be au blanc, with more cheerful and more grateful tones-not as if to serve God and to hear the eternal prisondoors clank behind you were identical. Serve Him, love Him, live to Him, and you will be bright, and full of hope, and noble. They shall renew their strength." The heart vainly pants "for some celestial fruit, forbidden to our wants. Yes, but how unjust and unreasonable to complain if our expectations are not fulfilled! A sailor, I fancy, would not have a right to count himself of a superior order of beings, if he sat dripping on a rock, and pined for wings instead of sails. Sails are not so swift as wings, and are much more coarse; but there is nothing for it but to patiently content himself with his limitations, and humbly follow in the wake of the laws of nature, making such use of wind and steam as the constitution of his being permits, and not look up envying the sea-birds in the air. That will not get him on many knots an hour, I fancy. And besides, even with wings, they will live and die gulls; whereas the very limits that cramp him call out the energies of a day-by-day diviner manhood. XLII. 66 MY DEAR -A woman's position is one of subjection, mythically described as a curse in the Book of Genesis. Well, but I ween that all curses are blessings in disguise. Labor among thorns and thistles-man's best health. Woman's subjection? What say you to His? "Obedient," a "servant;" wherefore God also hath highly exalted Him. Methinks a thoughtful, high-minded woman would scarcely feel degraded by a lot which assimilates her to the divinest Man: "He came not to be ministered unto, but to minister." I have always conceived that you had learned to count that ministry the sublimest life which the world has seen, and its humiliation and subjection precisely the features which were most divine. The Greeks at Corinth wanted that part to be left out, and it was exactly that part which Paul would not leave out-Jesus Christ, but Jesus Christ crucified, which the Evangelicals rob of all its beauty. Trust me, a noble woman laying on herself the duties of her sex while fit for higher things, the world has nothing to show more like the Son of Man than that. Do you remember Wordsworth's beautiful lines to Milton? Thy soul was as a star, and dwelt apart; Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea: I do not know any thing of Alfieri's "Life." By whom is it written? The misfortunes of genius, its false direction, its misery, I suppose rise partly from the fact of the life of genius being that which is chiefly given to the world. Many a soldier died as bravely and with as much suffering as Sir John Moore at Corunna, but every soldier had not a Wolfe to write his deathsong. Many an innocent victim perished-yes, by hundreds of thousandson the scaffolds of France, and in the dungeous of the robber-barons, but they died silently. A few aristocrats whose shriek was loud have filled the world with pity at the tale of their suffering. Many a mediocre boy have I seen spoiled at school, many a commonplace destiny has been marred in life, only these things are not matters of history. Peasants grow savage with domestic troubles, and washerwomen pine under brutal treatment; but the former are locked up for burying their misery in drunkenness, the latter die of a broken heart, with plenty of unwritten poetry lost among the soapsuds. I fancy the inarticulate sorrows are far more pitiable than those of an Alfieri, who has a tongue to utter them. Carlyle in this respect seems to me to hold a tone utterly diverse from that of the Gospel. The worship of the hero, that is his religion, condescension to the small and unknown, that was His! A little plan which I have found serviceable in past years is to put down every night the engagements and duties of the next day, arranging the hours well. The advantages of this are several. You get more done than if a great part of each day is spent in contriving and considering "what next?" A healthful feeling pervades the whole of life. There is a feeling of satisfaction at the end of the day on finding that, generally, the greater part of what is planned has been accomplished. This is the secret of giving dignity to trifles. As units they are insignificant; they rise in importance when they become parts of a plan. Besides this-and I think the most important thing of all -there is gained a consciousness of Will, the opposite of that which is the sense of impotency. The thought of time, to me at least, is a very overpowering and often a very annihilating one for energy: Time rushing on, unbroken, irresistible, hurrying the worlds and the ages into being, and out of it, and making our "noisy years seem moments in the being of the eternal Silence.' The sense of powerlessness which this gives is very painful. But I have felt that this is neutralized by such a little plan as that. You feel that you do control your own course; you are borne on, but not resistlessly. Down the rapids you go, certainly, but you are steering and trimming your own raft, and making the flood of Time your vassal, and not your conqueror. I first I think, began this plan after reading a valuable little book, and a sunny, cheerful one, Abbott's "Way to do Good." It has been omitted for years, but I have begun it again these last few days. "There is nothing in the drudgery of domestic duties to soften❞—you quote that. No, but a great deal to strengthen with the sense of duty done, self-control and power. Besides, you can not calculate how much corroding rust is kept off-how much of disconsolate, dull despondency is hindered. Daily use is not the jeweller's mercurial polish; but it will keep your little silver pencil from tarnishing. I have been interrupted by the visit of a lady of my congregation, who came to take leave; one, it appears, who has been warmly attached to the instruction given there. She told me the delight, the tears of gratitude, which she had witnessed in a poor girl to whom, in passing, I gave a kind look on going out of church on Sunday. What a lesson! How cheaply happiness can be given! What opportunities we miss of doing an angel's work! I remember doing it, full of sad feelings, passing on, and thinking no more about it; and it gave an hour's sunshine to a human life, and lightened the load of life to a human heart-for a time! 8* |