"That loves to come at night,To make you wonder in the morn,What made the earth so bright."
"That loves to come at night,To make you wonder in the morn,What made the earth so bright."
His pillow became a pillar and he said, "This is the gate of heaven. The heart sanctifies the place." Like any boy, egged on by curiosity I have stood just inside the door and seen the Israelites shuffling about with their hats on and the Rabbi reading the evening service, all being in motion, in imitation probably of the forty years' travel to Canaan. The command of a prophet to the people was distinctly "Take off thy shoes for this is holy ground." There was no command to take off the hat. They were to respect their contact with the location. It is the spot set apart by the deep experience that becomes hallowed. If a struggle, be it physical or moral, is victorious the place is consecrated by it forever.
The entire planet is redeemed by such a dedication of the many revered localities in it.
There is the rock of all rocks in the western world. It has done the most for our ideals, for the tone and character of our institutions. Poets, like Mrs. Hemans, and orators like Webster and Choate have glorified it and cannot stay their praise. It is ever new, it is ever old. Its hold is upon one's imagination. In its undivided influence, yet in its already cloven form, ever perfect in its detached pieces it is ever living in its broken body. Many representatives from many states were once gathered at Plymouth Rock to put forth their Burial Hill confession. "Standing by the ..." they say. The place is an inspiration. It is tonic. It gives an uplift. It lends elevation. "We do now declare our adherence ... we declare that the experience...." It has stood the test. It has worked. All honor for well-located facts. They are well grounded. In this is their solidity.
A visit is not required of us, yet most of us have taken part in so pious a duty. America's foremost shrine is Mt. Vernon. With more vividness than by any other method we can almost see the form of him twice elected unanimously to the Presidency, whose character is America's greatest gift to the world. Plymouth is a close second, as a Mecca for willing pilgrim feet. Baptized into the Puritan spirit and versed in Pilgrim lore, in no other way can a lover of their annals so clearly discern the real Pilgrims as by inhabiting for a brief period their haunts. One of the patriarchs built "there" an altar because "there" he had an affecting experience. In all statements of the deeper life specific use is made of the adverb of place, making the plain implication that the location is immortalized. It has entered for keeps into his life.
Each of us stands in a peculiar relation to a holy land. It includes a shrine. "We have just the right morning light in which to see it. Well, now look, my dear, the curtain is up. Before us are the white houses set in emerald green. Is not that a pretty picture?" There is a sepulchre in this garden. Adjacent to the town, in the burial ground, where the esteemed forefathers of the hamlets sleep, is the early grave of my angel mother. Our hearts glow with a burning gratitude to the local authorities for their affectionate, guardian care over that sacred enclosure. What varied pages have been written in history and in the book of life by the sleepers here. It is a spot further removed from perdition and nearer to paradise than any other in all the world. "My mother, mother, mother." The meaning of the word deepens just in proportion as one's nature is developed. Repetition is a form of emphasis. And such a mother! Her affection was her diadem. In her excess of tenderness she caused her hand to rest upon my head in blessing as she taught me to say after her, sentence by sentence, the Lord's prayer, the most precious item of instruction in the religious history of our race.
"Oh for the touch of a vanished handAnd the sound of a voice that is still."
"Oh for the touch of a vanished handAnd the sound of a voice that is still."
I stand in life's Holy of Holies. There are hours which the heart would still leave in silence. They have given me an emotion of indescribable tenderness towards her. I will tell you a tale of tears. Before the iron had entered into my soul, before my memory had a tomb in it, before it became the cemetery, the Greenwood, the Mt. Auburn of the soul, my first grief here set me out alone, like one set apart by sorrow. The scene one can no more leave behind him than he can leave his own soul. My spirit is joined with her spirit. Feeling that I had visited the place to honor her and do reverence to the spot I felt like speaking, "Mother, we are here." The incense from her dear heart has perfumed my existence. The odor of the ointment that once filled the house now fills the little world in which she moved. Is this praising my mother? I do not wish to praise her but to describe her.
I give a deep interpretation to a custom used in many countries at funerals where a violin is played at the head of the coffin, and questions are addressed to the deceased in the course of which it is customary to ask pardon for having injured or offended the departed one during life. My questions are all framed and have been, lo these many years. The dead past has not buried its dead. Memory makes the present sacred with a light, like that of the stars which has been many years on its way. Nothing that ever enters into the field of experience is left unrecorded. There the record lies and I am testifying touching the place and the hour at which it is blazoned forth. It is at the spot where you point and say "There the mortal put on immortality." Her spirit hovers near us, to awaken in us, a motive to reflect back certain qualities in a remote degree upon her, in respect and blessing. In pictures we often see a pilgrim, home from his wanderings, leaning upon a staff, at such a grave. As I write of it and think of the occasion my heart swells in gratitude for receiving the impulse to revisit the earth. It is well-worthwhile for one to travel far to sit for a few moments in his early home with only God and his mother. An appeal is made to reverence, which is a very much needed address. I wish we could learn from Europe the noble and beautiful use it makes of those who have gone down to their windowless homes by keeping their graves and memories green and imperishable and particularly by transferring their virtues into the daily life of the community. The ancient Egyptians blended with the actual present, current, daily life a galaxy of characters whose influence they would not willingly let die. The ancient Romans made their daily paths, near just such memorial places, as we can show with pride, in a garden of graves. So many monuments are scattered through these busy years of a laborious life, that I cannot enter each sanctuary of sorrow nor pause to read each inscription. The statues, those calm and majestic intelligences, make up an impressive congregation of the silent, and exert a magic influence upon the soul.
A mother in heaven can be brought to view and a heavenly childhood reinstated when visiting the spot where sacred dust is buried. This is the place that faithful fantasy most frequently portrays.
"Oft, in the stilly night,Ere Slumber's chain has bound me,Fond Memory brings the lightOf other days around me;The smiles, the tears,Of boyhood's years,The words of love then spoken;The eyes that shone,Now dimmed and gone,The cheerful hearts now broken!"
"Oft, in the stilly night,Ere Slumber's chain has bound me,Fond Memory brings the lightOf other days around me;The smiles, the tears,Of boyhood's years,The words of love then spoken;The eyes that shone,Now dimmed and gone,The cheerful hearts now broken!"
I hold the sentiment of him who said, "My heart melts with compassion for the motherless affectionate lonesome boy who suffers for the want of intelligent sympathy, for someone who marks his little sorrows, binds up his wounds, wipes off his tears, and kisses him as he goes to bed." Our deepest feelings require a foothold on the earth. Like Antaeus they get strength by touching the soil. There must be certain spots around which patriotic feeling and family feeling and religious feeling can rally, like Bunker Hill and Lexington and Concord and Appomattox and Yorktown and Independence Hall and the old home and the old church. Where feeling is wide-spread it needs certain locations and community centers to give it points of contact with the solid, visible, tangible earth. The influence of a family would be deplorably weakened if once for all it should be detached from any specific habitation that it could claim as a home. Home, home, there is no place like it. "A charm from the skies seems to hallow us there."
At Torwood two ministers met and spent a day in high spiritual communion. Later one of them, Mr. Kidd, of Queen's Ferry parish, having sore trial and depression of spirits, sent a note to his friend, the minister at Culross, informing him of his troubles and dejection of spirits and desiring a visit. "I cannot go," was the reply, "but tell Mr. Kidd to remember Torwood." The answer was effective. That was a place. It had its atmosphere that could be recalled. The Pilgrim in his progress believes in what he sees from the mountain. When on low ground he cannot quite discern the celestial city, he keeps his course, staking everything upon the experience at an earlier well-remembered place.
When revisiting the earth surprise was expressed that we carried so much feeling into the pilgrimage. Said a business man, "You have very many old residenters where you live. They have some beautiful graveyards in Boston. When any one dies here, why he's dead. He's just dead. We mustn't expect anything more from him because the man is dead. We try to get someone to take his place. That poor fellow is dead." Marshall Field is dead in Chicago; Phillips Brooks, in Boston; Edward Payson, in Portland; and Johns Hopkins, in Baltimore; Peter Cooper, in New York, yet in their cities they are an active force and even in their ashes live their wonted fires. Meade and Howard and Sickles and Pickett and Longstreet and Lee live evermore. A visit to the best marked monumental field in the world makes you feel afresh the grandeur of their achievement.
"Death may rob us of the painterBut his works to us belong,He may steal from us the singer,But he cannot seize the song.And, though he may take the lives thatMean our share of joy, yet heMay not rob us of the treasureOf a single memory!"
"Death may rob us of the painterBut his works to us belong,He may steal from us the singer,But he cannot seize the song.And, though he may take the lives thatMean our share of joy, yet heMay not rob us of the treasureOf a single memory!"
"If you wound the tree in its youth," we read in the story of an African farm, "the bark will cover over the gash, but when the tree is very old, peeling the bark off and looking carefully you will see the scar there still. All that is buried is not dead." And that is a fact too. I bow my head now and grieve over certain acts or rebukes or injustices or humiliations or wounds. They all come in review, they are all there; I come upon them on occasion. Someone has told us that the pearls of life and of home, like the pearls of the deep sea, grow around wounds and are the costly burials of pain.
Returning from voluntary exile, to my father's house, not as a prodigal son, to make confession of sins, or of wasted patrimony or of wasted life, but to gain impressions from early places, where any boy gets the most important part of his education, seeing that it is in our youth that we lay the foundation of whatever character, position, or usefulness we later attain, I was most deeply stirred at those places that directly touch my interior life. "There is a story lodged in a room here," said Bushnell in speaking of Yale College, "that I pray God his recording angel may never suffer to be effaced." I removed my hat and bowed alone in silence standing before a place hallowed by a neighbor. He had everybody's sympathy on account of his bereavements. Adjacent to our garden was his barn, which he used as a devotional closet and like Daniel, as we infer, prayed aloud. When his voice broke the silence with spontaneous, vital prayer and grew tremulous with emotion and earnestness, there was a power and pathos in it, that penetrated the center of my soul and woke to life all the slumbering feeling of my better nature. A sense of awe took entire possession of me. My deference would have been less if I had been bowed, and with him, hearing the several petitions. But as it was I was conscious only of his communion and thought all the time of the two persons concerned in it.
It is the early life that makes the after life. As every little brook, rivulet, and stream give depth and volume to the broad after current so in sailing up a river. As we make a journey to a birthplace we keep meeting the rills and tributaries to which we are so much indebted. One of them is named Example, a gentle effective teacher, who, it is said, lays his hand on your shoulder and remarks, This is the way to do it. In revisiting the earth by a singular discovery we find we are closely drawn where we took the hard lessons taught by Experience. This is the teacher that is said to throw us into the deep pool, exclaiming briskly: Now, swim. Human existence is rarely a great prairie stretching monotonously onward to the great river. Blessings and misfortunes meet us in disguise. Just as in the world's history, and in the history of invention, and in our political annals, we have our great days so we do in our personal experience, when destiny turns on a pivot. If one will give a recital of the ten most memorable days of his life the rest of it would be a matter of easy inference by his hearers. The time between them, and all its events, seem compressed into the narrowest space, verily a hand's breadth. Hidden forces have been at work, progress has been made with painstaking, untold influences meanwhile have not been idle, and upon a day all unforeseen springs of action are touched, concentrated power is let loose and a resistless energy awakes to action.
Our great days are the fruit of past toil. To count time only by sunrises and sunsets omits, in the reckoning, the human equation. Where daily wages and yearly dividends are concerned, it is a very convenient system, but it is no measure of our real life. Noah's ark answered to float lazily and safely on the old flood, but steam and electricity are internal powers. These forces enable a navigator to steer right out into the teeth of a storm.
Distinguished natural historians have given us a fine classification of the animal kingdom. But to put men in rows, and to put days into the orders shown in the calendars does not make them tally with what we know of them by observation and experience. Even a plant is a distinct individual. No other one is just like it. Yet it reveals its type. Species cannot be confounded, a briar will clasp a solid trunk of a tree and weave its tendrils and leaves through the branches of the pine to its top, but the briar was briar in every thorn and leaf and the pine was itself in all its green needles of which Nature makes her sweetest wind harp in the world. We are alike in the general features and attributes of body and soul. We are under similar laws, have similar wants, have a similar origin, common sympathies, and a common destiny, yet no two of us are alike. Nature never repeats itself. It has been shown that there is little difference in man's bodily stature. A fathom, or thereabouts, a little more or a little less is the ordinary elevation of the human family. Should a man add a cubit to his stature, he is followed along the streets as a prodigy; should he fall very far short of it, people pay money for a sight of him as a great curiosity. But were there any exact measurements of mental statures, we should be struck by an amazing diversity. It is obvious also that on certain days we are more alive and capable than on others, yet we are the same persons with the same education, with the same capabilities, and antecedents. On occasion, from causes of which at the time we were somewhat unconscious, our ideas and resolves were awaked and become effective. Some new energies, we did not know we had, were unlocked and came into play, and life was transfigured, on that spot, and that is the locality we long to revisit.
"I am a Part of All that I have Seen"
The place where any event in our history has occurred becomes a memorial of the feelings which that event excited in us. When one comes back to those places, it is as when one reads old letters or meets old friends. Byron affirms that after the most careful recollection of his experience, he could recall only eleven days of happiness, which he could wish to live over again. Memory hits the high places. Only relatively do the others come up into recognition. Mr. James Russell Lowell, standing upon the Alps, turned toward Italy, and raising his hat, exclaimed, "Glories of the past, I salute you." We express a like salutation. Grave ideas, movements, and reforms have their birthplace and their cradle, and we cannot fail to be interested in them. Long afterward, tender recollections come back to us like the murmurs of a distant hymn, and it is a great pleasure to listen to such voices.
One day we have full view of the delectable mountains, on another day we are mired in the slough of despond. There is a joyful holiday for the human intellect, which it will not soon forget, when the light blazes on us, and then come days of drudgery,—who cannot respond to this!—when our powers are shut up and will not come forth. Some of our best days seem reserved for celestial visitants. In others we "grunt and sweat under a weary life." There are many toilsome days of monotonous travel that we would gladly exchange for the single spectacle of Vesuvius in the plenitude of its eruptive power.
Those ideal days, in which we visited Mt. Washington, the loftiest object in our Atlantic country, made more grand with our greatest name, or in which we saw Niagara, the most remarkable waterfall in the world's scenery, or in which we heard the Messiah, or Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, perhaps the grandest piece of music ever composed by man, would stand in a succession of days and yet stand apart from them in our memory. So in the pulpit. Robert Hall was for fifty years the Prince of Preachers. His first three efforts had been failures. One day distinguished him. He did not know that the Princess Charlotte was dead till he entered his church and the sermon he preached then was the richest and most eloquent of all the hundreds delivered in the realm.
Dole out to a person six minutes and tell him to take them and go back and use them simply for what they would be worth, at different times, in his career and he could probably revolutionize his whole life. Many men could thus easily have made themselves rich, others could have made themselves happy. Sleeping crimes, that awake at unexpected times and produce an awkward situation, could have been omitted. Many a man has become little in a trice. The rudder of principle was caught by a swift current from his grasp, and he became ship-wrecked when near a safe port, where sails might have been furled in peace, and golden opinions won. All things would be a matter of only six minutes. The issue of a single day may change all the schemes of the most ambitious. A family of aristocrats may be prominent in government for seven centuries and in a specified day an armistice is signed wherein their kind of a world comes to its end. We are cleansed as by fire. We undergo a regeneration. We find a new world. Former things are past away. The slate is wiped clean. A leaf is turned. The pen is dipped for the rewriting of history. We have new lines of thought; we have a new map of Europe. To put that country back into its former dismal environment would be like attempting to force an eagle back into its long discarded shell. Men have dreamed of a brighter day approaching and lo, the dream comes true. Events were once showing a new trend when Dr. Charles Hodge and Dr. Musgrave were walking out together—both old men—when Dr. Musgrave said: "Charley, this train is moving, and if you are going to get aboard you had better hurry." A new spirit has now gone abroad which no walls can bound or circumscribe. The unforgettable picture, drawn by Mary Antin, of the immigrant Jew, leading the procession of his children into the schoolroom with reverence, as though it were the Lord's temple, bowing before the teacher, as the high Priestess of the one true God, and offering his homage, in impossible English, exhibits the act of one morning, for which an unseen agency had prepared the way. Yet it is the event that signalizes the place and makes the day so impressive.
One of the outstanding features of revisiting the earth was to find, in the banks and stores, in the professional and political offices, the sons of women, full of thought, who used to magnetize me by their presence and character. I have a passion for tracing the indebtedness of successful sons to their fine mothers. In visiting the Studebakers' wagon ware-rooms in Chicago it starts a sensation to sit in the chariot presented by the government to Lafayette, but it was more affecting to see in their counting room a large portrait of their mother. These honorable and phenomenally successful men recognize the source of their power. Now and then a speaking likeness seemed to us in our early years so scenic that it is indelibly stamped upon us. This was true of the words under the picture of an old man and a boy playing checkers, which adorned the impressive, never to be forgotten, first page of The Child's Own Book.
"To teach his grandson draughtsHis time he did employUntil at last the old manWas beaten by the boy."
"To teach his grandson draughtsHis time he did employUntil at last the old manWas beaten by the boy."
The unlooked-for element in the case came from the infusion of a high quality and ability which were a mental inheritance that the lad gained from his mother. Like Rizpah, like the mother of the Gracchi, mothers seem to feel themselves selected for their high office. Their turn of mind is to acquit themselves well in it and with all their hearts to try to rise to a level with their responsibilities.
They look right after the future of their boys. That welcome, resplendent orb, the day-star, fades only at the rising of the sun. The mother of Zebedee's children thought there was no position too commanding for her boys. Nothing would be too good. It did not occur to her that either of them would be inadequate for an exalted position. She had not a moment's hesitation in seeking to have her boys well-placed in life. Such confidence in them is inspirational and makes the boys themselves look up. If there is a dispute between a boy and his teacher he feels that his side of the case is not considered and he takes the matter home to his mother. "She understands." She believes in her boy and this helps him to believe in himself. She does not believe he was wrong in his intention.
Nothing so stirs the mother-spirit as a closed door. In fact it seems to develop curiosity in any woman to know what is behind it. When she reads, No Admittance to the Public, over an entrance it seems to arouse a determination to get in at any price. No matter what is inside she is ready to die to get there. There may be an exclusive social set in the place where she lives. The society is probably not as good as that which she already enjoys but shut a door in her face or against her children
"And there is not a high thing out of heavenHer pride o'ermastereth not."
"And there is not a high thing out of heavenHer pride o'ermastereth not."
Without realizing why they do it the woman's club trades on this principle. If the number that would naturally join the organization is two hundred and seventy-five the limit of the membership is set at two hundred and fifty and the waiting list is crowded with impatient applicants. The reflex influence is felt by all who have already joined and this greatly enhances the privilege of those who are already members. We sometimes see a fence post standing on nothing. The earth of a bank has all slidden away from it but the fence was fastened to it and held it up. This, sometimes the family does for a boy. Such a mother will go without new gloves and up-to-the-minute costumes while her son is being educated. Knowing all the traditions of his school days it is plain that the teaching in school did less for him than the influence of his mother at home. She would cause him to see factors and movements in a great world of which her own active mind had caught glimpses.
I do not care what later delights may be in store for a neglected child, there will be a void, a sin of omission, a cheat, a missing factor in his composition, a loneliness, if the mother element was absent in his development. In this was the safety of Samuel in the poisoned air of Hophni and Phinehas, Eli's sons. The environment was exactly the same for the boys of both families but one boy, as compared with the bad lot, was so enveloped by the mother influence that he was kept pure amid surroundings which were charged with temptations. I used to be greatly impressed with the vast amount of what the Chinamen called the By and By there is in the life of one of these mothers. No day is self-contained. Her happiness depends upon a succession of futures. Intersect her career at what point you will and you find her mind taken up with coming events. The harvest of her struggles is to be reaped later. Life's deferred gains bulk up largely in her life. She reminded me of Washington's campaigns which were not usually immediately fruitful. McKinley's mother or Moody's mother or Garfield's mother, like Bunyan's Pilgrim, was in heaven before she had come at it by the consummation of glory in the life of her son. All her wishes and prayers were more than met. But there was the day by day life that had to be lived while this fruition was in a very remote future. I visited the home of a mother who said her happiness would be complete if she could only see her son fitted for life and well settled in it.
The slogan "Back to the land" carries a meaning a little obscured until one recalls the conditions of a generation ago when the people lived closer to nature than they do now. We can only go back to a place where we were. It implies an earlier connection with land that we can go back to it. It may have been a family connection. This spirit of association is seen in that singular expression, "Thou hast been our dwelling place" (How a residence for us?) "In all generations." We must then have lived in what has gone before, if we had our dwelling place in former generations.
In the generation just gone a mother wanted her son to have a better educational equipment and suggested, no matter what the sacrifice, that they leave the land and move to town to put the boy into a higher grade of schools. Her husband opened a general country store of the old type for the sale of anything the people needed and if he did not have it he would get it. He sold everything from needles to nails, from harvesters to quinine capsules, from ready-made boots to dried codfish. It was a convenience to have the post office boxes in a front corner of the store which was a place of general resort. I recall the frequent sight, a farmer's wife, paying for postage stamps by handing out eggs from a basket up to any number the postmaster might indicate. I once saw an article lying upon the counter that I desired to buy and said to the storekeeper that I would take it. The woman put out her hand deprecatingly and said, "I am trading for it." Now this is what she meant,—the country merchant had fixed the price on his wares. Then when farm produce is offered in exchange he presumes to fix the price on that also. One of the parties to the transaction is left out of the account. "If you fix the price on yours ought I not to fix the price on mine?" He cannot live without the store and the store cannot live without the customer. A basis of agreement must be reached. Cannot you give me a little better trade? We speak of a storekeeper as in trade in a large city. The expression has come with the people from their earlier homes. One of the causes of the high price of living is the use of the telephone in ordering supplies hastily from the store which are paid for, in the lump, without visiting the stores and stalls and considering the relative value of the commodities in view of all the facts. Any one knows that on visiting the market and seeing the great variety of supplies offered for sale he used his money in a different way from what he expected. In Washington, where Daniel Webster used to go to market with a basket on his arm, the people are finding themselves benefited by the free open air in going to the tempting remarkable markets.
The general store in our town was a landmark. It was central to the community. In it gathered each evening the men of the place and questions of the day were discussed around the old drum stove. Store haunting developed into a habit in winter when there was little to do. Here men played checkers through long evenings and tried to reach the king row. This place of merchandise was a political hotbed. It filled a place that even the church could not supply, also in exposing evil doers to scorn. Skulduddery would here get some body blows. Public opinion is police, ever on the alert, without pay in a small town. "Opinion is the queen of the world." It is feared and is the chief deterrent. Both men and women are saved by it, which is very much more active and a better recognized agency in small places than in great. It pretty nearly rules the town. People bow to it. Town talk has an unequalled power to regulate, restrain and actually govern conduct. In small communities the real ruler can be rightfully named the Public.
The store was the place for the born story-teller. A man with thrilling adventures in the seven seas found in this "senate" a responsive auditory. A woman knew where her husband could be found if any one called and wanted to see him.
Ibsen represents the Master Builders as oppressed by a strange fear. He hears the young knocking at the door and he fears that the young will enter in and dispossess him. A mother, with nobleness of nature and sweetness of disposition, is too magnanimous for such an apprehension. In my visit no one needed to inquire who was the mother of one man whom I met, his success and the honors paid him bore testimony to her worth. Providence was kind to him. I remember the mother so revered by the son, as fragile yet dignified, and the fineness of the feminine element imparted gentility to her boy. Watch the expression on such a face, keep your gaze fixed on it and you will learn a lesson for life. A man's nature when submitted to tests turns on its quality. He was sought in society and was the life of many a company. "Did you ever meet his mother?" was asked. "No." "Well, if you had you would understand him. He is what she made him." To these sons the mothers reveal themselves. To them, the mothers are no more alike than fair women are alike in the eyes of their worshippers. A mother's love has a peculiar carrying quality. The real significance of her patience is not seen at once. It is like orders given to a sea commander, not to be opened until he gets into a certain latitude. "What I do thou knowest not now." After-meanings are disclosed with touching beauty.
In determining what kind of women these mothers were we are to compare their standards, not with ours now, but with the standards of the times in which they lived.
When revisiting the earth the ordinary life of the people had in it a great fascination. I wonder that the pleasures of memory and association are not more vividly realized in connection with the people we have known. The lessons are very salutary. With the hope of having my ideas more nearly approach my ideals I resolved increasingly to cultivate admiration. If called upon off-hand to cite one of the most striking impressions it would be that a pure, beautiful, intelligent, and well-bred woman "is the most attractive object of vision and contemplation in the world." I thought that nature had lavished her gifts about equally without and again within the human family. It is not a question of six of one and half a dozen of the other, but of half a dozen and a dozen. There is no answer to the question, What will God give us when he takes the sea? It is its only parallel. Without detracting from it there is also a world of beauty in an amazing river, always arriving, always departing; its banks wondrously deeply colored with green and gold. The mountains and the canyon and the waterfall have commanding attractions. These are without the human race, but for objects of study and enthusiasm and deference I turn to those made but little lower than the angels and crowned with glory and honor.
Let me add another recollection of the moment, that my eyes, my ears, my whole soul seemed sometimes to be just opening upon what appeared to me a new fact that such a mother of charming character, such as I used to see, was the day-star of that apotheosis of mother which reached its climax in the last year of the German war. A nation does not know what it has until it comes to exhibit it.
The son of such a mother who became philanthropic looked benevolent. The commercialized look their part. Business men are in the saddle. Sons succeed sires as we pass into trade. The teachers and accountants and the scholars looked somewhat bookish. The boys had been making faces. Each man had made his. I never knew a man equally transfigured with one I saw. It is not guessing, it is not flattery, it is exact truth. It is not to be discussed under general rules. It is a real case with a particular history. It is a confirmed expression. It has atmosphere, almost a dim remote shade of halo. This is labeled on him for the townspeople to read. It fell to me thus to take a few short lessons in heredity. On returning to the homes of these people I remembered the pictures they had upon their walls that were all new and different to boyhood's eyes and seemed a real part of the make-up of the town. I now turn to the belief that they had their influence on the families. The religious portrayal of the child Samuel and so of others were silent evangelists and remained right there till they fixed an impression. I remember that mothers held their boys up to these pictures and encouraged them to talk to them, which they did, and now they report the conversation. Queenly mothers! Blessed among women shall they be!
"All my fears are laid aside,If I but remember onlySuch as these have lived and died!"
"All my fears are laid aside,If I but remember onlySuch as these have lived and died!"
You may think that children cannot understand or don't care. They can understand and they do care. It is not a matter of the mind only but of the instinct. Mother's chair and father's Bible make a place for themselves in the family history. In one year, 1782, there were born in four families residing in three different states Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun, Lewis Cass, and Martin Van Buren. The families were undistinguished as such from the multitude of others about them. Not so, however, with the sons, for just the reason that has now come under our observation.
The woman who stands in her humble doorway and waves her tearless adieu to her brave enlisted son is no less a hero than he. She remains to keep the home fires burning and suffers a thousand deaths through her affections and fears. She makes the larger sacrifice for she would give many lives for the boy who has but one to lose.
A mother with a baby lying across her knees was asked, "Do you love it?" She looking up, her face radiant, with the light indescribable, said, taking a very deep breath, "I love it so that if Christ had not gone to Calvary to give my boy life eternal, if by so doing I could secure life eternal for him, I would go to hell that he might go to heaven."
A soldier, returning home, was telling a mother about her son found dying on the field after a battle. Said she, "I wish I had been there." "You were there all right," was the rejoinder, "you came first to the boy's mind. He had your name on his lips when he died." The mother has first place when the boy is in the stress of life. Ambulance men and nurses find her in sweet companionship when they reach the wounded boy. These were his passions, love of mother, home, and country. We had the evidences on the surface of the life that was lived within.
If Archimedes had a station on which to rest his lever he could move the world. The world had been moved by a power unknown to him. Our country is the station where the lever rested.
Never before in all the history of our world have so many deaths occurred from war in so short a time. The very gates of death would seem to have been literally crowded by such multitudes passing through them. The soldiers have given to the world "a new death." Fresh inspiration was imparted to the French heart by the soldier at Verdun, a mere lad, who, wounded, called upon the dead to rise and fight the Germans. There is a spiritual partnership between dead heroes and living patriots. The Kaiser, in addressing his troops, made this utterance, "No mercy will be shown, no prisoners will be taken. The Huns, under King Attila, made a name for themselves which is still mighty in traditions and legends today." He omitted from his thought that part of the "traditions and legends" on which our minds are dwelling. The old chroniclers relate that Peter and Paul appeared to Attila in camp and terrified him with threats, a visit immortalized by Raphael. This factor that a governor of Judea had not reckoned with, was suggested to Pilate's wife. A woman's intuitions do not ask to have a cautionary signal repeated. She does not mean to invite tragedy and go spell-bound to destruction. An acknowledged leader in modern art, Kaulbach, so depicts character and so sees it in action and situation as to take a spectator by storm. With great power he reveals the spirits of the Huns and Romans who perished under the walls of the eternal city as renewing the combat in the air. A characteristic trait of the Germans appears by displaying the ruler of the Huns as an equal with the figure of the Teutonic "Gott." The Huns who destroyed seventy cities in Greece and barbarously murdered eleven thousand virgins, whose bones are preserved in the church of St. Ursula in Cologne, found that angel forces were against them. Those whom they had slain reappeared so that they had to encounter an immortal assemblage which had been mustered to resist them.
"Alas, my master, how shall we do?" said the servant of Elisha in terror, when, his eyes being opened, he saw the mountains full of horses and chariots of fire. Our soldiers with rapturous joy testified that guardian spirits watched over them. The Scriptures abound with allusions to invisible benefactors. Shakespeare, to whom no side of human nature was unknown, with splendid genius, having to deal with the irresolute temper of Hamlet, calls to his aid a factor from the militant hosts of heaven. "Look! my lord! It comes." It was his father's spirit in arms. "Lend thy serious hearing to what I shall unfold, list, list, oh list." It is often stated that the great Charlemagne is not dead but on occasions places himself at the head of the nation, to lead it forward again to victory and glory. The world does not fight its battles for nothing. It would be just as erroneous to speak lightly of Marathon or Waterloo or Bunker Hill, or Vicksburg, or the third Battle of Piave which ended the German war by removing Austria-Hungary from the field and creating an indefensible Bavarian front, as it would be to underrate the significance of our recent national awakening. On revisiting the earth I felt in every place a great ground swell of national feeling. War is the last thing in the world to go according to program. This keeps people guessing and wakeful and interesting to others because they are themselves so interested. The whole country had become a great university for the study of folks in their elemental character. We can get a helpful vision when we take a straight look at people, elevated in feeling so preoccupied as to be unconscious of the self-revelation they are making. Shakespeare is right when he makes love control the destinies of his heroines. They may aspire reasonably but they were never meant to trample upon their own hearts and the hearts of others. We believe there are few men whose ambition has not been at some time during their lives the very slave of their affections. The great yearning of old and young in affections as well as intellect is to be appreciated. We are sure that there is a friend or lover for us somewhere, a companion for every thought and wish.
The mother has come to her own as a by-product of the war. Such is her elevation that you will explore the pages of history and read the annals of mankind in vain to find anything that is a parallel to it. And now comes Governor Coolidge of Massachusetts stating by proclamation that when Lincoln's mother, "a wonderful woman, faded away in his tender years from her death bed in humble poverty, she dowered her son with greatness. There can be no proper observance of a birthday which forgets the mother." It has been a profoundly moving thought, when crossing the ocean, that two miles underneath there lay the live Atlantic telegraph cord stretching from one shore to the other. Vitalized with living messages of love and welfare, with the speed of lightning, on Mother's Day, the mysterious current communicated to the country the number of letters and the weight of the mail in tons that were on their way to gladden the mother who was keeping the home fires burning. Some women who are mothers started a wave of moral power which will never cease to roll until it has enveloped the earth. "Thy son liveth" is an assurance that, with a new accent, is now given when a boy makes the supreme sacrifice. His life hitherto has been but preparative. The separation of the living and the dead is less complete than formerly. The voters in Baldwin, Maine, paid tribute to the only boy that, from that town, died in the service, by standing, one hundred and fifty of them, in silence with their heads bowed. It is reported that the lips of three or four of the veterans moved as though uttering a prayer for the lad. Thus a new attitude is taken by many people toward death and towards the departed. Some say they feel as close as ever to those who, though they have turned a leaf in their biography, are characters in a story that still goes on. The feature of the war has been "the thinning of the veil between life and death." Forever living, incapable of death, seems the new verdict touching those promising young men who while they paid the price, bequeathed to those who survived, the glory and the honor.
It is believed that we have lived to see the meting out of some divine awards. "Germany's collapse is the most dramatic judgment in the history of the world." In all the growth of Christianity, no such certitude has been so universally and emphatically expressed, touching the continuance of human personality. It is the diapason of a new literature produced by the war. It colors correspondence. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle feels that death has not robbed him of his son's companionship. The family feeling seems to continue unimpaired. "We are seven" is the sentiment, when "we are not all here," but "some are in the church-yard laid."
"All houses wherein men had lived and diedAre haunted houses. Through the open doorsThe harmless phantoms on their errands glide,With feet that make no sound upon the floors.We meet them at the doorway, on the stair,Along the passages they come and go;Impalpable impressions on the air,A sense of something moving to and fro."
"All houses wherein men had lived and diedAre haunted houses. Through the open doorsThe harmless phantoms on their errands glide,With feet that make no sound upon the floors.
We meet them at the doorway, on the stair,Along the passages they come and go;Impalpable impressions on the air,A sense of something moving to and fro."
There are three things which every man persuades himself he can do better than anyone else: poke the fire, handle the reins, and tell a story. Unless the poker is hidden, the next man will take it and give the embers two or three additional touches. This is a universal trait. In case of peril, it is instinct in a man, to make motions in reaching out to take the lines. If a story is known to another person, it is pure nature in him on hearing it told, to show how some detail might have been better rendered. I add a fourth thing that a person wants to improve upon no matter who is handling it. If my splendid teacher were again instructing me out of a book showing the difference between memory and recollection I would have to bite my tongue to compel it to silence. I should indeed of all men be the most miserable unless I could bear testimony. You say the miracle of memory has been the theme of your study. That for a summer was mine. It is common for scholars, taking what they call a palimpsest, an ancient manuscript and applying chemical process to so renovate it as to enable them to plainly read it. The effusions of later profane poets and the recent chronicles of monks have been over-spread upon the precious parchments. The orations of Cicero and precious versions of the New Testament have been over-laid and were regarded as lost. The early inscriptions were supposed to be effaced from our own memories.
But a magician, in an instant, seemed to touch, with a sponge, the whole surface of the memory, and things that had been invisible were found to be well embalmed and made immortal. All that had become dim was found to be stereotyped forever. Thus every stage of one's existence leaves him some memorial of its presence in the life of today. I did not know what large deposits I had once been making in the bank of memory. This is occasioned by the fact that a boy lives his first years more keenly alive, to the things about him, than does a man. Even our food does not later have its earlier relish. If a man thinks, that what he recalls of a thing, when absent from it, is the whole of his memory of it, he very much underestimates the fact. It is the glow of youth, the freshness of heart, that give us those bright memories by which we save the past from the extinguishing stroke of oblivion,