AN OPEN LETTER TO THEMOON

"As half-gods go,The gods arrive."

But in Ireland no clever half-god ever gets up to go, for the sake of any sequel.

Niecks, the biographer of Chopin, noting the extreme nationalism of Chopin's genius, would have us mark that the same force of patriotism in an Italian, Frenchman, German, or Englishman, could not have promoted a similar result. Poland is a realm, he tells us, where racial traits remain intact, and uninfluenced from without: she is more esoterical than any state can be which is on the highway of Continental progress, in touch with to-morrow; and therefore her expression in the arts is sure to be more individual, distinct, and striking. Ireland is such another spiritually isolated country. Her best utterance, or her least, is alike betrayingly hers, to be scented among a thousand. And this homogeneity, in her case, is quite unaccountable, unless we accept as its explanation, the magnetic and absorbent quality in the strange isle itself, whichhas blended a dozen alien strains in one, and made of Scythian, Erse, Norse, Iberian, the Norman, the Dane, the English of the Pale, the Huguenot, and the horde of Elizabethan and Cromwellian settlers, something "more Irish than the Irish." And in Poland, again, the aristocracy, though malcontent and impoverished, for honor's sake, maintains its own traditions in its own station, as the feudal vassals maintain theirs. But the genuine Irish gentry is extinct, or utterly transformed, on its ancient acres. The original peasant stock has all but perished from famines and immigrations. Most significant of all, what remains of the two, blends as in no other European territory. The peasants were long ago driven from the estate of free clansmen; the gentry, who would neither conform nor flee, were crushed into the estate of peasants, by the penal laws of the Protestant victor, which made education treason; by the most hateful code, as Lord Chief Justice Coleridge named it, framed since the beginning of the world: and one class impacted on the other, as mortar among stones, becameindistinguishable in a generation. Time, which was expected to bring about No Ireland, has in reality engendered a national life more intense than ever. The physical strength, the patience and passion, of the common people; the grace, loyalty, and play of thought of gentlemen, have in that national life come together. Unique patrician wit, delicacy of feeling, knightly courtesy, have run out of their allotted conduits, and they color the speech of beggars. Distinction of all sorts sprouts in the unlikeliest places. Violent Erin produces ever and anon the gentlest philosopher; recluse Erin sends forth the consummate cosmopolitan; hunted and jealous Erin holds up on its top stalk the open lily of liberality,

——"courteous, facile, sweet,Hating that solemn vice of greatness, pride."

Ireland is at work in every department of every civilization: it is a seed-shedding, an aroma, intangible as April. No pioneer post, no remote wave, no human enterprise from Algiers to Peru, but can answer for it, ill or well. Yet none knowwhether Ireland itself is at this hour a mere menace of terrible import, like Samson, or ready, another Odysseus, to throw off disguises, and draw, at home, "in Tara's halls," the once familiar bow. Its own future, in its own altered valleys, is hidden. The tragic cloud hangs there. Foreboding, unrest, are stamped on the very water and sky, and on proud sensitive faces. It was on a day in spring, in sight of Wicklow headlands, the Golden Spears of long ago;—a day when primroses and celandine and prodigal furze splashed the hillsides, down to the rocks where fishers sat mending nets, and stitching tawny sails; when there was a sense of overhanging heights, and green inlands, and ruined abbeys whose stone warriors sleep in hearing of the surf, and of huge cromlech, fairy rath, and embattled wall, long and low, looking sadly down; when the shadows in that cold enchanted air at sea, fringing every sapphire bay, chased from silver through carmine to purple, and back again;—on such a day of caprice and romance, the true day of the Gael, a woman beautiful as the youngDeirdre said to a stranger, walking the cliff-path at her side: "No: we have never been conquered: we are unconquerable. But we are without hope."

1889.

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“To the Celestial and my Soul’s Idol, the Most Beautified”—

IT might appear to us an imperative, though agreeable duty, most high and serene Madame, to waft towards you, occasionally, a transcript of our humble doings on this nether planet, were we not sure, in the matter of friendly understanding, that we opened correspondence long ago. You were one of our earliest familiars. You stood in that same office to our fathers and mothers, back to your sometime contemporary, Adam of the Garden; and while we are worried into acquiescence with the inevitable design of age, we are more pleased than envious to discover that you grow never old to the outward eye, and that you appear the same "lovesome ladie bright," as whenwe first stared at you from a babe's pillow. You are acquainted, not by hearsay, but by actual evidence, with the family history, having seen what sort of figure our ancestors cut, and being infinitely better aware of the peculiarities of the genealogical shrub than we can ever be. Therefore we make no reference to a matter so devoid of novelty. But we do mean to free our minds frankly on the subject of your Ladyship's own behavior. We take this resolve to be no breach of that exalted courtesy which befits us, no less than you, in your skyey station.

We have in part, lost our ancient respect for you: a sorry fact to chronicle. There were once various statements floating about our cradle, complimentary to your supposed virtues. You were Phœbe, twin to Phœbus: a queen, having a separate establishment, coming into a deserted court by night, and kindling it into more than daytime revelry. You were an enchantress, the tutelary divinity of water-sprites and greensward fairies. Your presence was indispensable for felicitous dreams. To be moonstruck, then, meant to be charmed inexpressibly, to be lifted off our feet.

Now, we allow that you have suffered by misrepresentation, or else are we right in detecting your arts; for, by all your starry handmaidens, you are not what we took you to be! We are informed (our quondam faith in you beshrews the day we learned to read!) that you are a timid dependent only of the sun, afraid to show yourself while he is on his peregrinations; that you slyly steal the garb of his splendor as he lays it aside, and blaze forthwith in your borrowed finery. That you are no friend to innocent goblins, but abettor to housebreakers; conspirator in many direful deeds, attending base nocturnal councils, and tacitly arraigning yourself against the law. "Let us be Diana's foresters, gentlemen of the shade, ... governed, as the sea is, by our noble and chaste mistress, the moon, under whose countenance we—steal." That your gossip is the ominous owl, and not Titania. Your inconstancy, to come on delicate ground, shineth above your other characteristics. Since we have seen your color come and go, we surmise that there is no dearth of intrigue and repartee up there; and in a red or a grey veil, you masquerade periodically, at unseasonable hours. Of painting your complexion we are disposed to acquit you; yet it is a severe blow to us to learn, from the most trustworthy sources, that you wax.

Selene, Artemis! you are worldly beyond worldlings. We hear that you have quarters, and that you jingle them triumphantly in the ears of Orion, who is nobody but a poor hunter. Beware of the exasperation of the lower classes! whose awakening is what we call below a French Revolution. Who, indeed, that hath a mote in his eye, cannot still discern a huge beam in yours? Have you no resident missionary? for you persist in obstinate schisms, and flaunt that exploded Orientalism, the crescent, in the teeth of Christendom. You are much more distant and reserved, O beguiler! than you pretend. Your temper is said to be volcanic.

You that were Diana! who is the Falstaffian, Toby Belchian, Kriss Kringlish person to be seen about your premises? He hangeth his great ruddy comfortable phiz out of your casements, and holdeth it sidewise with a wink or a leer, having never yet found his rhyming way toNorwich. We look on him as an officious rascal. He peereth where you only, by privilege, have permission to enter. He hath the evil eye. He thinketh himself a proper substitute for you, and King of the Illuminari; he reproduceth your smile, and scattereth your largesses; he maketh faces (we say it shudderingly) at your worshippers below. Frequently hath he appropriated kisses that were blown to you personally, or consigned to you for delivery, from one sweetheart to another.

O Lady, O Light-dispenser, think, we hereby beseech you, of the danger of his being taken for you! Picture the discomfiture of your minstrel, who, intoning a rapturous recital of your charms, and casting about for a sight of your delectable loveliness, is confronted, instead, with that broad ingenuous vagabond! In some such despairing rage as the minstrel's, must have been the inventor of the German tongue, who discarded all other chances of observation after once beholding this thing, ycleped your Man, and angrily insisted on "Der Mond,"—the Moon, he—as the proper mode of speech. I cite you this from old JohnLyly: "There liveth none under the sunne that know what to make of the man in the moon." We clamor at you from the throats of the five races: Abolish him, or at least, depose the present incumbent, and get you straightway some acceptable minion, one of more chivalric habit, of more spare and ascetic exterior! Your credit and our comfort demand it. "Pray you, remember."

What scenes, Cosmopolite, Circumnavigator, Universalist, have you beheld: what joy, what plenty, what riot and desolation! You are the arch-spectator. Death sees not half so widely. He lurketh like an anxious thief in the crowd, seeking what he may take away. But your bland leisurely eye looketh down disinterestedly on all. Caravans rested thrice a thousand years ago beneath you in the desert; Assyrian shepherds chanted to you with their long-hushed voices; the south wind, while the infant world fell into its first slumber, leaped up and played with you in Paradise. You have known the chaos before man, and yet we saw you laugh upon last April's rain. Are there none for whom you are lonely throughthe ages? Are there not centuries of old delight in your memory, unequalled now? faces fairer than the lilies, on whose repose you still yearn to shine? Do you miss the smoke of altars? Have you forgotten the beginners of the "star-ypointing pyramid"? Can you not tell us a tale of the Visigoth? How sang Blondel against the prison door? How brawny was Bajazet? How fair was Helen; Semiramis, how cruel? Moon! where be the treasures of the doughty Kidd?

You, Cynthia and Hecate, sweet Lady of Ghosts and guardian of the underworld, have been fed upon the homage of mortal lips: you have had praises from the poets exquisite as calamus and myrrh. Many a time have we rehearsed before you such as we recall, from the sigh of Enobarbus:—

"O sovereign mistress of true melancholy!"

to the hymnal

"Orbèd maiden, with white fire laden,"

of the noble salutation of a mirthful-mournful spirit:

"Oh! thou art beautiful, howe'er it be,Huntress or Dian, or whatever named;And he the veriest pagan, that first framedHis silver idol, and ne'er worshipped thee."

Have we not sung oft that strophe of Ben Jonson's, full of inexpressible music to our ear?

"Lay thy bow of pearl apartAnd thy crystal shining quiver;Give unto the flying hartSpace to breathe, how short soever,Thou that mak'st a day of night,Goddess excellently bright!"

and the beloved rhymeless cadence of old Jasper Fisher's drama, beginning:—

"Thou queen of Heaven, commandress of the deep,Lady of lakes, regent of woods and deer."

Sidney, Drummond, Milton, glorified your wanderings. And your truest votary, one John Keats, spake out boldly that

——"the oldest shade midst oldest treesFeels palpitations when thou lookest in."

You are an incorrigible charmer: but as he reports you likewise as

——"a reliefTo the poor, patient oyster, where he sleepsWithin his pearly house,"

we infer, with pleasurable surprise, that you have set up as a humanitarian.

Now, we venture to assert that you remember compliments meant to be of the same Orphic strain, and inscribed to you, of which we are not wholly guiltless. We have all but knelt to you, with the Libyan. The primeval heathen has stirred within us. We have been under the witchery of Isis. We aspire to be a Moonshee, rather than any potentate of this universe. Have we not followed you, O "planet of progression!" all our bright, volatile, restless, tide-like days? We wound you not with the analytic eye, nor startle you with telescopes. The scepticisms of astronomy enter not into our rubric. Are you not comely? Do you not spiritualize the darkness with one touch of your pale garment? Then what are they to us, your dimensions and your distances? Gross vanity of knowledge! Mere abuse of privilege!

If we affect the abusive, shy of more ceremonious forms of address, forgive us, Luna. We make recantation, and disown our banter. We extend the hand of cordiality even to your month-old Man.How blithe and beauteous he is! He is embodied Gentility. We bow to him as your anointed Viceroy, your illustrious Nuncio. You know our immemorial loyalty, nor shall our rogueries teach you so late to doubt it.

"Da Lunæ propere novæ,Da noctis mediæ, da, puer!"

Forgive us, benignant, peaceful, affable, propitious Moon. Poet are we not, nor lunatic, nor lover; "but that we love thee best, O Most Best! believe it."

1885.

leaf

WHAT a pity a memoir cannot be written without regard to its alleged incidents! Annalists are naturally the slaves of what happens; and that glows between them and the eternal, like gorgeous-colored minster glass, a spurious man-made heaven. A written Life may be true to fact and false to law, even as a lived life may be so. It is utterly impossible for the most philosophic among us to know, to judge, or even to speculate, in behalf of any but himself. A word, a risk, a blunder, the breadth of a hair, the difference betwixt the two Kings of Brentford, lifts the obscure into apparent greatness, or forbids the potentially greater to descend to that table-land where there is no mist, where human senses come into play, and where he may become a subject for the approbation of history. In whatsoever degree a creature is burdenedwith conscience and stiffened with will, his course must be continuously deflected by countless little secret interior collisions and readjustments, which have final cumulative influence on what we call his character and his achievement. The means to this end are nowhere discoverable, unless in a perfect autobiography, and under the eye of the perfect reader. Fate must have her joke sometimes, as well as the least of us, and she suffers cheap energy to fill the newspapers for a lustrum, and genius to await identification at the morgue. These are truisms, but here is truth: in nine hundred and ninety-nine instances out of a thousand, it is folly to name any success or failure as such; for either is a mystery, and the fairest evidences by which we can form an opinion of it are altogether and irremediably fallacious.

Now, what has often used up and ended a man's vital force, is some constraint much more significant than that of early death, a constraint sought and willingly undergone. His own moral weakness stopped Coleridge; but Erasmus might have uttered with Sidney:

"My life melts with too much thinking."

Socrates, it will be remembered, "corrupted the Athenian youth." Not one of them he moulded or breathed upon, except the transient pupil Alcibiades, turned his hand cordially to the practical, or ramped in the civic china-shop. What ghost is it which certain minds see upon the way, and which lessens their destined momentum? Something extra-rational, we may be sure: something with an august enchantment. They act under the impulse of an heroic fickleness, and forsake a known and very good result for "the things that are more excellent." The spectators can only wonder; the crucial third act has passed swiftly and in silence behind the curtain, and the rest of the drama sounds perverted and confused. A mere secular enthusiasm may have the power to draw a career to itself, absorb and devour it, and keep it shut forever from the chance of distinction in selfish and pleasant ways. But what shall be said for those who have become impassioned of the supernatural, beholding it in amaze, as Hubert the hunter beheld the holy sign between the antlered brows in the Aquitanian forest: a sight enough tostay them and carry them out of themselves, and change what was their prospect, because "the former things are passed away?" What of the allegiance to a cause, the espousal of hunger and thirst, the wilderness, and the scaffold, in the hope, never ultimately in vain, of awakening and bettering the world? "If the law require you to be the agent of injustice to another," wrote Thoreau, in his good manful essay on John Brown, "then I say to you, break the law. Let your life be a friction to stop the machine." Even thus have many gone under, of whom no audiences have heard, but whose love and wisdom feed the race, century after century. In our reckoning of the saints, we lose sight of half their meaning; for we cannot guess accurately which of them has lost most, humanly and æsthetically, nor how much any one individual has lost, by his chosen concentration on matters in which there is no general competition, and where there can be no established canons of criticism. Some saints, in a double sense, follow their vocations; they attain their only legitimate development in the cloister. But others aresaints at a sacrifice. An infinite number of men and women, painfully approximating moral perfection, lose, either gradually, or at once and forever, in that supreme compensation, their aptitude for common affairs. "Ejiciebas eas, et intrabas pro eis, omne voluptate dulcior," says the son of Monica's tears, himself gloriously stricken out from the pagan roll of honor.

Such as these have outgrown their own existence; they become impalpable to the general apprehension; they have sold the mess of pottage again for the birthright of the sons of God. And God, in the audacious old phrase, has "destroyed" them. What they bade fair to be, or what they could have done, before they were crippled by vigils and visions, rolls back into the impossible and the unimagined. We have no clue to alienated souls: we can compute with those solely, who, as we say, get along and amount to something; and we seldom perceive what purely fortuitous reputations, what mere bright flotsam and jetsam, accidentally uppermost, are those whom we set first in a fixed place, and cry up as exemplars in art,trade, and policy. For what might have been is not this crass world's concern: her absent have no rights. The spiritual man is likely to be possessed of a divine indolence; would he strive, he is hampered and thwarted by the remembrance, or the forecast, of whiter ideals in Paradise. It is sometimes urged as a reproach against the courteous Latin nations that they lag behind in modern progressiveness; that they do not, like the Border lads, "march forward in order." The reproach is, at bottom, a delicate and exquisite compliment. With genius in their blood, and beauty never far from their hand, what wonder if they continue to be careless about rapid transit?

"I have seen higher, holier things than these,And therefore must to these refuse my heart."

The endearing fable of elf-shot or bewitched children, little goose-girls waylaid on the hillside by fairies in green and silver, and enticed away, and set free after a while, though with the dream and the blight ever upon them, is, like most fables, deep as immortality. The mystic has already gone too far, and seen toomuch; he is useless at the plough: he is, as it were, one citizen less. The fine lines just quoted are from an expert in inaction, the poet who, among all others with an equal equipment in English letters, may be named pre-eminently as a failure: Arthur Hugh Clough. Let his lovers proclaim as much with gentle irony. Most poets, it may be, are heroes spoiled; they know somewhat of the unknown, and suffer from it; the usual measure of their esoteric worth must still be the measure of their mundane impracticability: like Hamlet, they have seen spirits, and forswear deeds for phrases. Artists and thinkers, in fact, must outwardly follow the profession of the queen bee, not as yet with honor, nor by general request. But they are omens; they are, let us hope, the type and the race, the segregated non-cohesive thing, the protest which counts. The noblest of them is least in love with civilization and its awards; but what they have not hoarded for themselves, strangers hoard for them; and because success is most truly to them a thing foregone, therefore they prevail forever. If they have not "made a living," they have, in the opinion of a young Governor of Massachusetts, a philosopher not of the Franklin breed,—"made a life."

1893.

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IF one had to try his hand at the eternal parallel of London and Paris (next weariest, in the scale of human comparisons, to that between D——s and T——y), or, indeed, of London with any city of known size, it might be said, in a word, that the chief variance between them is a variance of sound: and that under this, and expressed by it,—"alas, how told to them who felt it never?" as Dante sighs over the abstruse sweetness of his lady,—is a profound spiritual difference. Whatever tradition may say of

——"the chargeable noise of this great town,"

its instructed inhabitant knows it by strange whispers, meek undertones. Conceive anything more diverting than that a monstrous awe-engendering institution like the 'bus should be almost as deft and as still as a humming-bird! Monosyllables, andpipe-smoke, and sciential collecting of fares make up the rolling van masculine; ever and anon the less certain step and the swish of a skirt on the lurching stair, announce to the heroes of the serene height that

"Helen is come upon the wall to see."

With perfect skill, with masterful rapidity, the wheels slide over surfaces smooth as an almond-shell, in a mere ballroom jingle and rustle. Cabs are dragon-flies by day, and glowworms by night: they dart, noiseless, from north to west. Even the tuft-footed dray-horses vanish with such reverberation as might follow Cinderella's coach. Exquisite voices of children, soft and shy, fall like the plash of water on the open paths of the Parks. In the viscid openings of alleys off the Strand, in the ancient astonishing tinkerdom of Leather Lane, where villainous naphtha torches light up the green lettuce on peddler's carts, the pawnbroker's golden balls significant above, and a knot of Hogarth faces in the Saturday evening flare,—there also, are the cockney gamins with honey-bright hair: profiles which corroborate Millais' brush, and illustrate a lovely phrase of Mistral inMirèio, "couleur de joue;" flushed little legs in ragged socks, which have piteously set out on the dark thoroughfares of life; voices, above all, which have often a low harp-like tone not to be heard elsewhere out of drawing-rooms. It is as if tremendous London, her teeming thoughts troubling her, said "Hush!" in the ear of all her own. Hyde Park orators are seldom brawlers; immense crowds, out for sight-seeing, are controlled by the gentlest of police, who say "Please," and are obeyed. Few stop to salute or exchange a word at the shelters. This is no experimental or villageous world: one man's affairs are in India, another's on the deep sea, and a third's in a cradle three stories up. Sidneys and pickpockets intermingle, each on a non-communicated errand. Here whisks a Turk, in his extraordinary unnoticed dress; and yonder, a sprout of a man who might have been bow-legged, had he any legs at all: nothing new goes at its value, nothing strange begets comment. The long-distance ironies, or intelligential buzz of street-life in New York, where folk gotwo and two, are here foreign and transatlantic indeed. The even pavements drink in all that might mean concussion, the soft golden air deadens it, the preoccupied seriousness of the human element contradicts and forbids it. An awful, endearing, melancholy stillness broods over the red roofs of High Holborn, and hangs, like a pale cloud, on the spires of the Strand, and the yellow-lustred plane tree of Cheapside: gigantic forces seem trooping by, like the boy-god Harpocrates, finger on lip. The hushing rain, from a windless sky, falls in sheets of silver on gray, gray on violet, violet on smouldering purple, and anon makes whole what it had hardly riven: the veil spun of nameless analogic tints, which brings up the perspective of every road, the tapestry of sun-shot mist which Théophile Gautier admired once with all his eye. The town wears the very color of silence. No one can say of S. Paul's that it is a talking dome, despite the ironic accident of the whispering gallery in the interior. Like Wordsworth upon Helvellyn, in Haydon's odd memorable portrait, it sees with drooped eyes, and exhortswith grand reticences and abstractions. Mighty stone broods above, on either hand, its curiously beautiful draperies of soot furled over the brow, in the posture of the speechless martyrs of Attic tragedy. There is an alchemic atmosphere in London, which interdicts one's perception of ugliness. At the angles of the grimiest places, choked with trade, we stumble on little old bearded graveyards, pools of ancestral sleep; or low-lying leafy gardens where monks and guildsmen have had their dream: closes inexpressibly pregnant with peace, the cæsural pauses of our loud to-day. Nothing in the world is so remote, so pensive, so musty-fragrant of long ago, as the antique City churches where the dead are the only congregation; where the effigies of Rahere the founder, Sir Nicholas Throgmorton, John Gower, and our old friend Stow are awake, in their scattered neighborhoods, to make the responses; and where the voices of the daily choir, disembodied by the unfilled space about, breathe ghostly four-part Amens, to waver like bubbles up and down the aisles. And to go thence into the highway creates no great jar. The tide there is always atthe flood, and frets not. The perfectly ordered traffic, its want of blockade and altercation, the sad-colored, civil-mannered throng, the dim light and the wet gleam, make it as natural to be absent-minded at Charing Cross as in the Abbey. Shelley must have found it so; else whence his simile,

"The City's voice itself is soft like Solitude's."

There is no congestion of the populace; yet the creeks and coves of that ancient sea remain brimmed with mortality, hour after hour, century after century, as if in subjection to a fixed moon. It is the very poise of energy, the aggregation of so much force that all force is at a standstill; the miraculous moment, indefinitely prolonged, when achieved fruition becalms itself at the full, and satiety hesitates to set in. A subdued mighty hum, as of "the loom of time," London lacks not; but a crass explosion never breaks it. The imponderable quiet of the vast capital completes her inscrutable charm. She has the effect of a muted orchestra on ears driven mad with the horrible din of new America. As still as her deep history onlibrary shelves, so still are her pace and her purpose to-day: her grave passing, would, like Lincoln in camp, discourage applause. Everywhere is the acoustically perfect standpoint. The cosmic currents ripple audibly along.

"Therein I hear the Parcæ reelThe threads of life at the spinning-wheel,The threads of life and power and pain."

Coal-smoke and river-fog are kind to the humanist. They build his priory cell, where he can sit and work on his illuminations, and know that he lays his colors true. "The man, sir, who is tired of London," said the great Doctor, in one of his profound generalities, "is tired of life."

At certain hours, the City is tenantless, and sunrise or sunset, touching the vidual tower of All Hallows Staining, gives it the pearl and carmine tints of a shell. At such a time you may wander in the very luxury of loneliness, from London Bridge to Lambeth, watching the long yards swing at their moorings by the palace wall, and Thames running tiger-coated to sea; and from the Gray's Inn limes pass onto an unvisited and noble old bronze of an inconsiderable Stuart, lustrous from the late shower, beyond whom are the forgotten water-stairs of Whitehall, above whom is his own starlit weather-vane, with "the Protestant wind still blowing." Where the Boar's Head was, where the Roman Baths are, in strange exchanges of chronology, where, in a twinkle, the merchants and journalists shall be, are the depopulated presence-halls in which you are

"In dreams a king, but waking, no such matter."

All that was temporal in them has been swallowed by the wave of the generations of men who are no more. Poet by poet, from the beginning, has known the look of London's void heart at night, and has had, next it, his keenest gust of sovereignty, on jealous marches when his own footfall is soft as a forest creature's, for fear of man and of mortal interruption. The living are gone for the moment: the dead and their greatness are "nearer than hands and feet." The divinest quality of this colossal calm, "mirk miles broad," is that, to the sensitive mind, it is a magic glass for musings. In such amysterious private depth Narcissus saw himself, and died of his own beauty. The few who have had eternity most in mind, have worshipped London most; and their passion, read of in biographies, has expanded, insensibly, the imagination of the many. The terror of the vast town lies on any thoughtful spirit; but without some touch or other of golden casuistry, of neo-Platonism, none can sincerely adore her. For the adorable in her is man's old adoration itself, breathed forth and crystallized. That indeed, is the everlasting delight: London has nothing so simple in her bosom as instinctive charm. She is the dear echo, the dear mirror, of humanity. The Charles Lamb who was wont to relieve his tender overburdened spirit by a plunge in the surging crowd, and who was not ashamed that he had wept there, "for fulness of joy at so much life," might be the first to apply to the majestic and bitter mother who bred him, the illumining line of Alfred de Musset:

"Car sa beauté pour nous, c'est notre amour pour elle."

She gives us freedom, recollection, reverence; and we attribute to her the sweetness of our own dispositions at her knee. Blessing us with her silence, the glad incredible thing, she lets us believe we have discovered it, as a fresh secret between lover and lover.

On Sundays, too, the dreary English Sundays of old complaint, what idyllic opportunity wastes itself at the door! Hampstead and Blackheath are efflorescent with the populace, but dark London wears her troth-plight ring of meditation. Her church-bells, indeed, speak: there is a new one at every turning, like the succession of perfumes as you cross a conservatory, and felt as a discord no more than these. Good to hear are the chimes of S. Giles Cripplegate, the aged bells of S. Helen, with their grace-notes and falling thirds, the great octave-clash of Wren's cathedral, which booms and sprays like the sea on the chalk-cliffs almost within its sight. And the ghosts are out again under the eaves of Little Britain and Soho. It is usually on Sundays, or at night, that you may view the young Cowley (curled up, among the geraniums, on the window-ledge of the Elizabethan house next S. Dunstan's-in-the-West) readingSpenser, his light bronze curls curtaining the folio page; and a figure of uncontemporaneous look, coming heavily from the Temple gateway, almost opposite, with a black band on his sleeve, is saying brokenly to himself: "Poor Goldy was wild, very wild; but he is so no more."

The elective London of choicest companionship, of invited sights and sounds, of imperial privacy, is always open to the explorer: "London small and white and clean," walled and moated, fairer than she ever was at any one time, warless, religious, pastoral, where hares may course along the friendly highway, and swans breast the unpolluted Fleet. Like the gods, you may, if you will, apprehend all that has ever been, at a glance, and out of that all, seize the little which is perfect and durable, and live in it: "in the central calm at the heart of agitation." By so much as London and her draggled outer precincts are bulging and vile, and her mood stupid, cruel, and senseless, victory is the larger for having found here a spiritual parterre of perpetual green. And it is, perhaps, owing to respect towards those who yet believe in her, whose presence imposesupon her, in romantic tyranny, the remembrance of what she has been to her saints, that she does, in reality, walk softly, speak low, as if her life-long orgies were fabulous, and wear, to her faithful lover, the happy innocent look becoming the young Republic of Selected Peace. Donne's subtly beautiful cry is ever in his ear:

"O stay heere! for to theeEngland is only a worthy gallerieTo walk in Expectation: till from thenceOur greatest King call thee to His presènce."

O stay here! Who would not be such a city's citizen?

1890.

leaf

THE lions at the Zoo "bring sad thoughts to the mind": they chiefly, for they are the most impressive figures among our poor hostages. The pretty moons of color, cream or bronze, pulsating along their tawny sides, seem but so many outer ripples of a heart-ache subtle enough to move your own. Couchant, with a droop of the bearded chest, or erect, with an eternal restless four steps and back again, they drag through, in public, their defeated days. It is inconceivable that we should attach the idea of depravity to a lion. Surely, it is no count against him that he can kill those of us who are adjacent, and juicy! In the roomy name of reciprocity, why not? Yet what he can do, he leaves undone. A second glance at him corrects inherited opinion:

"I trow that countenance cannot lie."

Benignity sits there, and forbearance; else we know not what such things mean. Those golden eyes, pools of sunlit water, make one remember no blood-curdling hap; but rather the gracious legendry of long ago: how a lion buried the Christian penitent in the lone Egyptian sands, and another gambolled in the thronged Coliseum, kissing the feet of the Christian youth, when the task laid upon him, in his hunger, was to rend his body in twain. Something about the lion reminds one of certain sculptured Egyptian faces. This great intellectual mildness, when blended with enormous power (power which in him must be expressed physically, or we were too dull to feel it), appears to some merely sly and sinister. Incredible goodness we label as hypocrisy. For the ultimate quality in the expression of the lion is its sweetness. He may be, as one hears him called, the king of brutes, but the gentleman among brutes he is, beyond a doubt. He has tolerance, dignity, and an oak-leaf cleanliness. With passing accuracy, Landor or William Morris, is often described as "leonine"; but the real lion-men of England are the thinand mild dynamos: Pitt, Newman, Nelson. In these are the long austere lines of the cheek, the remote significant gaze, the look of inscrutable purpose and patience. As Theseus says, smiling upon his Hippolyta, of the lion in the masque of theMidsummer Night's Dream: "A very gentle beast, and of a good conscience."

Year after year, so long as the splendid creatures are cheapened "to make a Roman holiday," they move not so much under protest as with black sullen fatalism. We have all seen them rise to the lash in the hands of a spangled circus female, who must end, forsooth, by inserting her pomatumed head in their too-enduring jaws; and it is not unusual for them to spring at the just-closed door, with the fell strength of that soft and terrible left fore-paw. Their action is, of course, perfunctory; and since they are notoriously brave, and not to be cowed, obedience in them has a strange pathos. They are trained to sit up, and roll barrels, and fire cannon, and jump hoops; yes, even to scowl and swear, to the terror of "men, women and Herveys," between the scenes of their bitter comedy; yet theclown's circumstance cannot touch a hair of those mournful magnific heads. Their sleep is broken with poked umbrellas, and a patter of foolish nuts and cookies; and, from a dream of the fragrant jungles and the torrents of home, they come anew upon the cyclorama of human faces, and the babble of foreign tongues. They live no longer from hand to mouth, as they do in their native haunts; their needs, nay, their whims, are studied and gratified; they serve painters, naturalists, schoolboys; they give employment; they call forth thought, love, courage. And many sympathizers and well-wishers are shortsighted enough to congratulate caged animals, and think them happily circumstanced. Your point of view depends, perhaps, on how much passion for out-of-doors, for solitude, is in your own blood; and on your sense of the lengths to which human interference may go with the works of God. We give these lives subjected to our laudable curiosity, strange exchanges: for moss knee-deep, and the dews and aroma of the woody ground, a raised sawdust floor; and for an outlook through craggy glens,

"Chamber from chamber parted with wavering arras of leaves,"

a whitewashed wall nine feet high, a stucco sky which has not the look of Nubia, nor Barbary, nor Arabia, any more.

Our father Adam is said to have dwelt in peace with all the beasts in his Garden. And there is no evidence in the Mosaic annals that it was they who became perverted, and broke faith with man! Marry, man himself, in the birth of his moral ugliness, set up the hateful division, estranged these inestimable friends, and then, unto everlasting, pursues, maligns, subjugates, and kills the beings braver, shrewder, and more innocent than he. He has wrested from its beautiful meaning his "dominion over them." Power made him tyrannous, and tyranny bred in its victims hate and revenge and fear, and from the footfall of man all creation flees away, unless, indeed, as in Swift's most telling allegory, where the cultured Houyhnhnms may succeed in subjecting the Yahoos. For man alone is the fallen angel of the lower order:

"The King, from height of all his painted glory,"

has sunk into vulgar dreams of coercion, breathing dual impiety against his Maker and his mates. Save him, there is no other perverted animal; not one clad otherwise, or minded otherwise, than his archetype. Men in sealskins; women in swansdown, with heron-aigrettes; children in cocoon-spun silk, their hands and feet in strange sheathings torn from the young of the goat and the cow;—what are these but ludicrous violators of the decencies of the universe? If there be beasts in Heaven "with eye down-dropt" upon the temperate and polar zones, they cannot lack diversion. It is, moreover, part of our plot to deny them immortality, and to attempt to interpose our jurisdiction, in such abstruse matters, between them and their Author, towards whom they yet bear an unshamed front. For man the animal is but a beggarly lump. He has never shown himself so provident as the ant, so ingenious as the beaver, so faithful as the dove, so forgiving as the hound. His senses are eternally below par; his artistic faculties are befogged. The humblest thrush is an architect and musician by eldest family tradition,while it takes him a thousand years to conceive an ogee arch and a viol d'amore. And having driven from his pestilential company the whole retinue of dear esquires, he began shamefacedly to reclaim them to his service. The horse came back, generously hiding his apprehensions; the pig and the hen mechanically, at the prospect of free bed and board; the dog with his glad conciliation, the cat with her aristocrat reserves. These abide with us, suffer through us, are persuasive and voluble, and endeavor to reconcile us with the great majority of wild livers, from whom we are divorced. In vain do they so press upon us our own lack of logic. We address them individually: "You, O immigrant, are personally pleasing unto me; but your fellows, your blood-relations, your customs in your own country,—ach Himmel!" Our popular speech insults them at every turn: "as silly as a goose," "as vain as a peacock," "as ugly as a rat," "as obstinate as a mule," "as cross as a bear," "as dirty as a dog," "as sick as a dog," "to be hanged like a dog," "a dog's life," "Cur!" "Puppy!" Surely, no class of creatures, unless Jews in the twelfth century, have ever undergone such groundless contumely. Every word of Shylock's famous plea stands good for them, as also its close. "If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and, if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that." When we hear of a writer who advises the practice of "courtesy" towards animals, and of a little girl who hoarded up wisdom from the speech of a turtle, our memories couple them as Alice—and Sir Arthur Helps—in Wonderland. If it be inUtopiaalone that murderous "sport" is impossible, and that only there it breeds rational pity when after a day's run, "a harmless and fearfull Hare should be devour'd by strong, fierce, and cruell Dogges," how far are we not from the time when modern conscientiousness shall make us just even to the exiles pent in a menagerie? Our laws deal with these in a spirit of the most flagrant injustice. While every jury allows for reprisals, when dealing with human crime, no biped else, and no quadruped, with however blameless a record,under whatever provocation, can be allowed an instant's hearing, when so much as suspected of a transgression. A leopard here at the Zoo revolts, perhaps for no specific cause. He is tired of being enslaved, and would resume sincerity. He offends; he is executed, leaving ineradicable influences among the cages, as if their Danton had gone by, audible again: "Que mon nom soit flétri; que la France soit libre!" Or the keeper abominably abuses a certain elephant, a very saint for patience, a genius for cleverness, a hero for humor; and six years after, the same elephant, in another duchy, spies his old tormentor, winds his lithe proboscis about his waist, and neatly cracks him against a wall. A dozen influential persons plead, as defence for the assassin, his unparalleled nobleness of character; but the public blood is up: he has to die. To some reforms we shall never come, for thought about them is deadened in us by the operation of our accursed generic pride. Our codes approximate too painfully to the largeness of the universal plan. We have, indeed, conceived of other suns, other systems, than ours; but the hope is slight thatwe can ever admit beasts, not to certain terms of equality with our own esteemed species, but even to the personal pronoun, and a place in the divine economy. Arrogance is bad for us, and bad for them. The very bliss of power is to protect and forbear; could we learn it, we might, perhaps, inspire it in the shark, the jackal, and the butcher-bird. Meanwhile, in the maintenance of penal laws against our Ishmaels, it can at least be urged that, as yet, we know no better. As we are drowned in ignorance, it is inconceivable that we shall be hanged for sacrilege! Could we analyze the impressions of uncultivated persons, received from the centaurs in the Parthenon frieze, or the Sphinx of elder Egypt, we should probably discover that these are looked upon as mere monsters: a compound of man and horse, or of woman and lioness, the conception of which is abhorrent and distressing to the mind. (It is to be hoped that there are "stuck-up" horses and lionesses to adopt the corresponsive view). But the artists of the race, from the world's beginning, souls of a benign fancy, have gone on creating these mythic "monsters."Long-eared fauns abound, and mermaids with silver and vermilion scales, and angels borne on vast white gull-like wings: dear non-anatomical shapes, for the most part, full of odd charm, and of a spiritual application which will last out until we are humble and humorous enough to read it. Nor, on second thought, can we fail to see gravest changes adumbrating the subject. The Latin nations lag behind in conciliations, and England leads. There were not many, long ago, who passed the fraternal word to beasts: those who did so, Sidney, More, Vaughan, were the flower of their kind, and not without suspicion of "queerness." Lord Erskine, less than three generations back, suffered great obloquy for his championship of what we are almost ready to concede as the "rights" of animals. Coleridge was well laughed at for saluting the ass's little foal as his brother. But Burns was not laughed at for his field-mouse, nor Blake for his fly. And there is no single characteristic of modern life so novel, so significant, as the yearning affectionateness with which our youngest poets allude to fauna, and so adorn a moral. The habithas grown with them, until every Pan's pipe breathes sweet pieties to the less articulate world. A line of Celia Thaxter, addressed to a mussel on the stormy Maine strand, has been their unconscious key-note.

"Thou thought of God! ... what more than thou am I!"

For Darwin has come and gone, and cut our boast from under us.

On their own part, how benevolent are the estranged allies far away! how ready to resume "the league of heart to heart" with some soul a little primal! Any one, indeed, may tame a wild thing by no deeper necromancy than a succession of suppers and of kind words. Animals are disinterested also, and ready to serve without rewards. Ravens are gentle marketers for Elijah; the lions purr about the prophet Daniel; the shyest fish swim into Thoreau's hand; S. Francis, in the tenderest of folk-tales, goes out to the hills, and reasons with the wicked wolf who sacks the Umbrian villages. He offers him free and ample maintenance, promises him immunity from the hunters, and brings himdown among the women and children, to pledge himself to better behavior on his apologetic paw. S. Francis was not a very great fool: he was only Adam sane again, and interharmonized with the physical universe. The majority of infants still show pleasure at the sight of a beetle, or a toad. Of course, their grasp kills it; but that is not voluntary, as the pleasure is. The fatuous parents, however, are certain to change all that: toads, be it known, produce warts, and beetles sting. A lizard on a tree-trunk, a mink in the creek, a delicate gray squirrel on the stone wall, (charming persons exclusively minding their own business,) are at all times providentially provided for our sweet little boys to kill. Strange that, whereas, by Tigris and Euphrates, we creatures had our communications with creatures in one kindly language, we should now roam over the face of the earth, everywhere accosting our demonstrable superiors with a gun! Mr. Bryan, candidate for the Presidency of the United States, went into the forest, the other day, for rest and recreation, and had a stroke of luck: he shot something. It was a beautiful doe. We learn fromthe newspapers that she had "stood looking at him, without any fear." Here is your typical high treason in these nice matters. Who will say but that the doe was about to give some sign?Ça donne furieusement à penser.Blind bullies, sodden usurpers that we are! It is our dense policy to rebuff the touching advances of our old allies and kindred. Not Rhœcus only instinctively bruises the ambassador bee, and stifles the immortal message.

If the Oriental religions have any mission to discharge in our behalf, let them teach us speedily, through any gracious superstition whatsoever, their grave respect for animal life. When we are thoroughly converted, we shall not only cease to vivisect, but manumit our slaves of the exhibition-hall and the Zoo: we shall hear no longer from the lion-house the fell foreboding sound, as of Vercingetorix, Jugurtha, Zenobia, all together, imploring the gods for vengeance upon Rome. The captives have borne their fate, yet not quite dispassionately. They lose, behind bars, day by day, something of themselves hard to part with; and they know it: but theyare no atheists. Outside is the hateful city, but the sun also, bringing strange fancies to them as it crosses the threshold. So much lies back of them, in that cell of humiliation, where they were not born! What if there should be freedom again for them, beyond death? Some thought as profound surges this morning in a vast antiphonal cry among the tanks and cages, and shakes, in passing, the soul of man.

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