Who art thou? old Mound Builder!Where dost thou come from?Womb of what country,Womb of what womanGave birth to thee?Who was thy sire?Who thy sire's sire?And who were his forbears?Cam'st thou from Asia?Where the race swarms like fireflies,Where many races mark.As with colored belts, its tropics!What pigment stained thy skin?Was it a red, or wert thouOlive-dyed, or brassy?Handsome thou couldst hardly have been,With those high cheek-bones,That mighty jaw, and its grim chops,That long skull, so broad at the back parts,That low, retreating forehead!Doubtless thine eyes were dark,Like fire-moons set in their sockets;Doubtless thine hair was black,Coarse, matted, long, and electric;Thy skeleton that of a giant!Well fleshed, well lashed with muscles,As with an armor of iron;And doubtless thou wert a brave fellow,On the old earth, in thy time.I think I know thee, old Mole!Earth delver, mound builder, mine worker!I think I have met thee before,In times long since, and forgotten;Many thousands of years, it may be,Or ever old Noah, the bargeman,Or he, the mighty Deucalion,Wroth with the world as he found it,Uprose in a passion of stormAnd smote with his fist the sluices,The water sluices of Cloudland—Locked in the infinite azure—Drowning the plains and mountains,The shaggy beasts and hybrids,The nameless birds—and the reptiles,Monstrous in bulk and feature,Which alone were thy grim contemporaries.Here, in the State of Wisconsin,In newly discovered America,I, curious to know what secretsWere hid in the mounds of thy building,Have gone down into their chambers,Into their innermost grave-crypts,Unurning dry bones and skulls,Fragments of thy mortality!Oftentimes near to the surfaceOf these thy conical earth-runes,—For who shall tell their secret?—Meeting with strange interlopers,Bodies of red Winnebagoes,Each with its bow and its arrows,Each with its knife and its war gear,Its porphyry-carved tobacco pipe,Modern, I know by the fashioning.Often, I asked of them,As they lay there so silently,So stiff and stark in their bones,What right they had in these old places,Sacred to dead men of a race they knew not?And oh! the white laughters,The wicked malice of the white laughtersWhich they laughed at me,With their ghastly teeth, in answer!Was never mockery half so dismal!As if it were none of my business.Nor was it; save that I liked grimly to plague them,To taunt them with their barbarity,That they could not so much as dig their own graves,But must needs go break those of the dead race,Their far superiors, and masters in craft and lore!And bury themselves there, just out of sight,Where the vulture's beak could peck them,Were he so obscenely minded,And the wolf could scrape them up with his foot.Curious for considerationAll this with its dumb recordings!Very suggestive also,The meeting of him, the first-born,Who lived before the rainbowBurst from the womb of the suncloud,In the Bible days of the Deluge—The meeting very suggestiveOf him, with the red Winnebago,Such immemorial ages,Cartooned with mighty empires,Lying outstretched between them.He, the forerunner of cities—His mounds their type and rudiment—And he, the fag-end of creation,Meaningless sculpture of journeymen,Doomed to the curse of extinction.Curious, also, that I,An islander from far-off BritainShould meet them,Or, the rude scrolls of them.Both together in these wilds,Round about the region of the Black River,Cheek by jowl in a grave.Who was the builder of the grave?A primitive man, no doubt,Of the stone era, it may be,For of stone are his implements.And not of metal-work, nor the device of fire.He may have burrowed for leadAnd dug out copper ore,Dark-green as with emerald rust, from the minesLong since forsaken, and but newly foundBy the delvers at Mineral Point.He, or his subsequents, issue of him,I know not; and, soothe to say,Shall never know.Neither wilt thou ever knowAnything of me, old Mound Builder!Of the race of Americans, nothing,Who now, and ever henceforth,Own, and shall own, this continent!Heirs of the vast wealth of timeSince thou from the same land departed;New thinkers, new builders, creatorsOf life, and the scaffolds of life,For far-off grand generations!This skull which I handle!—How long has the soul left it tenantless?And what did the soul do in its house,When this roof covered it?Many things, many wonderful things!It wrote its primeval historyIs earthworks and fortifications,In animal forms and pictures,In symbols of unknown meaning.I know from the uncouth hieroglyphs,And the more finished records,That this soul had a religion,Temples, and priests, and altars:I think the life-giver, the sun,Was the god unto whom he sacrificed.I think that the moon and starsWere the lesser gods of his worship;And that the old serpent of EdenCame in for a share of devotion.I find many forms of this reptile,Scattered along the prairies,Coiled on the banks of the rivers,In Iowa, and far Minnesota,And here and there, in Wisconsin.Now he is circular,Gnawing his tail, like the Greek symbol,Suggesting infinite meaningsUnto the mind of a modernCrammed with the olden mythologies.Now, uncoiled in the sunlight,He stretches himself out at full lengthIn all his undulate longitude.His body is a constellation of mounds,Artfully imitative,From the fatal tail to the more fatal head.Overgrown they are with grass,Short, green grass, thick and velvety,Like well cared-for lawns,With strange, wild flowers glittering,Made up of alien mouldBrought hither from distant regions.Curiously I have considered them,Many a time in the summer,Lying beside them under the flaming sky,Smoking an old tobacco pipe,Made by one of these moundsmen.Who in his time had smoked it,Perchance over the council fire,Or in the dark woods where he had gone a-hunting;In war time—in peaceful evenings,With his squaw by his side,And his brood of dusky papposinsPlaying about in the twilightUnder the awful star-shadows.It seemed that I was very close to him, at such times;And that his thick-ribbed lips,—Gone to dust for unknown centuries—Had met mine inscrutably,By a magic hid in the pipestem,Making me his familiar and hail fellow.Almost I felt his breath,And the muffled sound of his heart-beats;Almost I grasped his hand,And shook the antediluvian,With a shake of grimmest fellowshipTrying to cozen him of his grim secret.But sudden the gusty wind came,Laughing away the illusion,And I was alone in the desert.If he could only wake up now,And confront me—that ancient salvage!Resurgated, with his facultiesAll quick about him, and his memories,What an unheard-of powwowCould I report to you, O friends of mine!Who look for some revelation,Some hint of the strange apocalypse,Which the wit of this man, livingSo near to the prime of the morning,So near to the gates of the azure,The awful gates of the Unseen—Whence all that is seen proceeded—Hath wrought in this new-found country!I wonder if he would rememberAnything about the Land of the Immortals.Something he would surely findIn the deeps of his consciousnessTo wake up a dim reminiscence.Dreamy shadows might haunt him,Shadows of beautiful faces, and of terrible;Large, lustrous eyes, full of celestial meanings,Looking up at him, beseeching him,From unfathomable abysses,With glances which were a language.The finalest secrets and mysteries,Behind every sight, and sound, and color,Behind all motions, and harmonies,Which floated round about him,Archetypes of the phenomenal!Or, it might be, that coming suddenly in his mindUpon some dark veil, as of Isis,He lifts it with a key-thought,Or the sudden memory of an arcane sign,And beholds the gardens of Living Light,The starry platform, palaces, and thrones—The vast colossi, the intelligencesMoving to and fro over the flaming causewaysOf the kingdoms beyond the gates—The infinite archesAnd the stately pillars,Upbuilt with sapphire sunsAnd illuminated with emerald and ruby stars,Making cathedrals of immensityFor the everlasting worship without words.All, or some, of the wondrous, impenetrable picture-land:The crimson seas,Flashing in uncreated light,Crowded with galleonsOn a mission to ports where dwell the old godsAnd the mighty intellects of the Immortals.The ceaseless occupations,The language and the lore;The arts, and thoughts, the music, and the instruments;The beauty and the divine glory of the faces,And how the Immortals love,Whether they wed like Adamites,Or are too happy to wed,Living in single blessedness!Well, I know it is rubbish,The veriest star-dust of fancy,To think of such a thing as thisBeing a memorial heirloom of the fore-world,Such rude effigies of men,Such clodbrains, as these poor mound builders!Their souls never had any priority in the life of them;No background of eternityOver which they had traversedFrom eon to eon,Sun-system to sun-system,Planets and stars under them,Planets and stars over them;Now dwelling on immeasurable plains of azureBigger than space,Dazzling with the super-tropical brightnessOf passionate flowers without a name,In all the romance of color and beauty—Now, in the cities celestial,Where they made their acquaintancesWith other souls, which had never been incarnated,But were getting themselves readyBy an intuitive obedienceTo a well-understood authority,Which had never spoken,To take upon themselves the living formOf some red-browed, fire-eyed Mars-man,Some pale-faced, languishing sonOf the Phalic planet Venus,Or wherever else it might be,In what remote star soeverQuivering on shadowy battlements.Along the lines of the wilderness,Of worlds beyond worlds,These souls were to try their fortunes.Surely, no experience of this sortEver happened unto them,Although one would like to invest themWith the glory of it, for the sake of the soul.But they were, to speak truth of them,A sort of journeyman work,Not a Phidian statuary,But a first cast of man,A rude draft of him;Huge gulfs, as of dismal Tartarus,Separating him from the high-born Caucasian.He, a mere Mongolian,As good, perhaps, in his faculties,As any Jap. or Chinaman—But not of the full-orbed brain,Star-blown, and harmoniousWith all sweet voices as of flutes in him,And viols, bassoons, and organs;Capable of the depths and circumferences of thought,Of sphynxine entertainments,And the dramas of life and death.A plain fellow, and a practical,With picture in him and symbol,And thus not altogether clay-made,But touched with the fire of the rainbow,And the finger of the first light,Waiting for the second and the third light,Expectant through the ages,And disappointed;Never receiving more,But going down, at last, a dark man,And a lonely, through the dark galleriesOf death, and behind the curtainWhere all is light.I like to think of him, and see his works:I like to read him in his mounds,And think I can make out a good deal of his history.He was a half-dumb man,Very sorrowful to see,But brave, nevertheless, and bravelyStruggling to fling out his thoughts,In a kind of dumb speech;Struggling, indeed, after poetryDædalian forms, and eloquence;Ambitious of distinguishing himselfIn the presence of wolves and bisonsAnd all organic creatures;Of making his claim goodAgainst these, his urgent disputants,That he was lord of the planet.If he could not write books,He could scrawl the earth with his record:He could make hieroglyphs,Constellations of mounds and animals,Effigies of unnamable things,Monsters, and hybrids unnatural,Bred of grotesque fancies; and man-forms.These last, none of your pigmiesA span long in the womb,And six feet, at full growth, out of it—But bigger in chest and paunch,In the girth of his muscular shackle-bones,Round his colossal shoulders,Round his Memnonian countenance,Over the dome of his skull-crypts—From crown to foot of his body—Than grimmest of old Welsh giants,Grimmest of Araby ogres!Many a time talking with gray hunters,Who leaned on their rifles against a tree,And made the bright landscapeAnd the golden morning fuller of gold and brightnessBy the contrast of their furrowed faces,Their shaggy eyebrows,And the gay humor laughing in their eyes,Their unkempt locks, their powder horns, and buskins,And the wild attire, in general, of their persons—Many a time have I heard themTell of these man-effigiesLying prone on the floors of the prairie.And, in my whim for correspondence,And perpetual seeking after identities,I have likened them to the stone sculptures, in cathedrals,Cut by pious hands out of black marble,Memorial resemblances of holy abbots,Of Christian knights, founders of religious houses,Of good lords of fair manors,Who left largess to these houses,Beneficed the arched wine-cellarsWith yearly butts of canary,Or, during their lifetime,Beautified the west front with stately windowsOf colored glass, emblazoned with Scripture stories,The sunlight in shadowy reflections painting the figuresWith blue and gold and crimsonUpon the cold slabs of the pavement.These effigies, stiff, formal,Rudely fashioned, and of poor art,All of them lying, black and stark,Like a corpse-pageantry visioned in some monk's dream,Lying thus, in the transepts,On the cold, gray floor of the cathedral.A curious conceit, truly!But the prairie is also consecrated,And quite as sacred I think itAs Rome's most holy of holies.It blossoms and runs over with religion.These meek and beautiful flowers!What sweet thoughts and divine prayers are in them!These song birds! what anthems of praiseGush out of their ecstatic throats!I pray you, also, tell me,What floors, sacred to what dead,Can compare with the elaborate mosaic workOf this wide, vast, outstretching floor of grass?As good a place, I take it,For the mound builder to make his man-effigiesOut of the mould in,As the cathedral is, for its artistsTo make man-effigies out of the black marble!And the thought, too, is the same!The thought of the primeval savage of the stone era,Roaming about in these wilds,Before the beautiful ChristMade the soul more beautiful,Revealed the terror of its divine forces,Announced its immortality,And was nailed on a tree for His goodness!While the monk, therefore, lay yet in the pagan brain,And' Time had not so much as thoughtOf sowing the seed for his coming—While his glorious cathedral, which, as we now know it,Is an epic poem built in immortal stone,Had no archetype except in the dreams of God,Dim hints of it, lying like hopeless runesIn the forest trees and arches,Its ornamentations in the snow drifts, and the summer leaves and flowers—No doubt, the mound-builder's man, put in effigy on the prairie,Had been a benefactor, in his way and time;Or, a great warrior; or learned teacherOf things symbolized in certain mound-groups,And which, from their arrangement,Appertain, it would seem, to mysteries,And ghostly communications.They thought to keep green his memory,The worship of him and his good deeds,Unto the end of time,Throughout all generations.The holy men, born of Christ,All Christendom but the development of him,And all the world his debtor;Even God owing him more largelyThan He has thought fit to pay back,Taking the immense creditOf nigh two thousand years!These holy men, so born and cultured,Could think of no way wiser,Of no securer methodOf preserving the memory of their saints,And of those who did good to them,Than this rude, monumental way of the savage.So singular is man,So old-fashioned his thinkings,So wonderful and similar his sympathies!Everywhere the same, with a difference;Cast in the same moulds,Of the same animal wants, and common mind,Of the same passions and vices,Hating, loving, killing, lying—A vast electrical chainRunning through tradition, and auroral history,Up through the twilights,And blazing noons,Through vanishing and returning twilights,Through azure nights of stars—Epochs of civilization—Unto the calmer glory,Unto the settled days,Unto the noble men—Nunc formosissimus annus!Thus do I, flinging curiously the webs of fancyAthwart the time-gulfs, and the ages,Reconcile, after a kind, the primitive savage of AmericaWith the wonderful genealogies—Upsprung from the vital sapOf the great life-tree, Igdrasil!Thick and populous nationsHeavily bending its branches,Each in its autumn time of one or two thousand years,Like ripe fruits, fully developed and perfected,From the germ whence they proceeded;Nourished by strong saps of vitality,By the red, rich blood of matured centuries,By passionate Semitic sunlights;Beautiful as the golden apples of the Hesperides!Radiating, also, a divine beauty,The flower-blossom and the aroma,The final music, of a ripe humanity,Whereof each particular nationWas in its way and turnThe form and the expression,Grand autumns were some of them!Grand and beautiful, like that of Greece,Whose glorious consummation always reminds meOf moving statues, music, and richest painting and architecture:Her landscapes shimmering in golden fire-mists,Which hang over the wondrously colored woods,In a dreamy haze of splendor;Revealing arched avenues, and tiny glades,Cool, quiet spots, and dim recesses,Green swards, and floral fairy lands,Sweeping to the hilltops;Illuminating the rivers in their gladsome course,And the yellow shadows of the rolling marshes,And the cattle of the farmer as they stand knee-deepSwitching their tails by the shore;Lighting up the singing faces,The sweet, laughing, singing faces,Of the merry, playful brooks,Now running away over shallows,Now into gurgling eddies;Now under fallen trees,Past beaver dams long deserted;Now under shady banks,Lost in the tangled wood-growths;Quivering now with, their laughter,Out in the open meadow,Flowing, singing and laughing,Over the weeds and rushes,Flowing and singing forever!Plastic and beautiful, and running overWith Schiller's 'play impulse,' was the genius of Greece,Of which her institutions and civility were the embodiment.Other autumn times of the nationsWere calm and peaceful,Symbolized above, as fruit on the branchesOf the life-tree, Igdrasil!And when their time came,They dropped down silently,Like apples from their boughs on the autumn grass;Silently dropped down, on moonlight plains,In the presence of the great company of the stars,And the flaming constellations,Which evermore keep solemn watch over their graves.Others were blown off suddenly,And prematurely—all the elements enraged against them;And others, like the Dead Sea fruit,Were rotten at the heart before their prime!The old mound builder stands at the base of the tree,At the base of the wonderful tree Igdrasil,And the mighty branches thereof,Which hang over his head in flame-shadows,Germinated, and blossomed with nations,In other lands, in another hemisphereFar away, over the measureless brine,From the mother earth where he was planted,Where he grew and flourished,And solved the riddle of life,And tried death,And the riddle beyond death.He thought this passionate America,With its vast results of physical life,Its beautiful and sublime portraitures,Its far-sweeping prairies, rolling in grassy wavesLike the green billows of an inland sea—Its blue-robed mountainsPiercing the bluer heavens with their peaks—Its rivers, lakes, and forests—A roomy, and grand-enough earth to inhabit,Without thought of anything beyond it.And yet he is related to allThat was, and is, and shall be!That idea which was clothed in his fleshIs fleshed in I know not how manyInfinite forms and varieties,In every part of the earth,In this day of my generation.But the flesh is a little different,And here and there the organism a nobler one,And the idea bigger, broader, deeper,Of a more divine quality and diapason.He is included in us, as the lesser in the greater;All our enactments are repetitions of his;Enlarged and adorned;And we pass through all his phases,Some time or other, in our beginnings—Through his, and an infinity of larger ones—And we have the same inevitable endings.
Who art thou? old Mound Builder!Where dost thou come from?Womb of what country,Womb of what womanGave birth to thee?Who was thy sire?Who thy sire's sire?And who were his forbears?Cam'st thou from Asia?Where the race swarms like fireflies,Where many races mark.As with colored belts, its tropics!What pigment stained thy skin?Was it a red, or wert thouOlive-dyed, or brassy?Handsome thou couldst hardly have been,With those high cheek-bones,That mighty jaw, and its grim chops,That long skull, so broad at the back parts,That low, retreating forehead!Doubtless thine eyes were dark,Like fire-moons set in their sockets;Doubtless thine hair was black,Coarse, matted, long, and electric;Thy skeleton that of a giant!Well fleshed, well lashed with muscles,As with an armor of iron;And doubtless thou wert a brave fellow,On the old earth, in thy time.
I think I know thee, old Mole!Earth delver, mound builder, mine worker!I think I have met thee before,In times long since, and forgotten;Many thousands of years, it may be,Or ever old Noah, the bargeman,Or he, the mighty Deucalion,Wroth with the world as he found it,Uprose in a passion of stormAnd smote with his fist the sluices,The water sluices of Cloudland—Locked in the infinite azure—Drowning the plains and mountains,The shaggy beasts and hybrids,The nameless birds—and the reptiles,Monstrous in bulk and feature,Which alone were thy grim contemporaries.Here, in the State of Wisconsin,In newly discovered America,I, curious to know what secretsWere hid in the mounds of thy building,Have gone down into their chambers,Into their innermost grave-crypts,Unurning dry bones and skulls,Fragments of thy mortality!Oftentimes near to the surfaceOf these thy conical earth-runes,—For who shall tell their secret?—Meeting with strange interlopers,Bodies of red Winnebagoes,Each with its bow and its arrows,Each with its knife and its war gear,Its porphyry-carved tobacco pipe,Modern, I know by the fashioning.Often, I asked of them,As they lay there so silently,So stiff and stark in their bones,What right they had in these old places,Sacred to dead men of a race they knew not?And oh! the white laughters,The wicked malice of the white laughtersWhich they laughed at me,With their ghastly teeth, in answer!Was never mockery half so dismal!As if it were none of my business.Nor was it; save that I liked grimly to plague them,To taunt them with their barbarity,That they could not so much as dig their own graves,But must needs go break those of the dead race,Their far superiors, and masters in craft and lore!And bury themselves there, just out of sight,Where the vulture's beak could peck them,Were he so obscenely minded,And the wolf could scrape them up with his foot.
Curious for considerationAll this with its dumb recordings!Very suggestive also,The meeting of him, the first-born,Who lived before the rainbowBurst from the womb of the suncloud,In the Bible days of the Deluge—The meeting very suggestiveOf him, with the red Winnebago,Such immemorial ages,Cartooned with mighty empires,Lying outstretched between them.He, the forerunner of cities
—His mounds their type and rudiment—And he, the fag-end of creation,Meaningless sculpture of journeymen,Doomed to the curse of extinction.Curious, also, that I,An islander from far-off BritainShould meet them,Or, the rude scrolls of them.Both together in these wilds,Round about the region of the Black River,Cheek by jowl in a grave.
Who was the builder of the grave?A primitive man, no doubt,Of the stone era, it may be,For of stone are his implements.And not of metal-work, nor the device of fire.He may have burrowed for leadAnd dug out copper ore,Dark-green as with emerald rust, from the minesLong since forsaken, and but newly foundBy the delvers at Mineral Point.He, or his subsequents, issue of him,I know not; and, soothe to say,Shall never know.
Neither wilt thou ever knowAnything of me, old Mound Builder!Of the race of Americans, nothing,Who now, and ever henceforth,Own, and shall own, this continent!Heirs of the vast wealth of timeSince thou from the same land departed;New thinkers, new builders, creatorsOf life, and the scaffolds of life,For far-off grand generations!This skull which I handle!—How long has the soul left it tenantless?And what did the soul do in its house,When this roof covered it?Many things, many wonderful things!It wrote its primeval historyIs earthworks and fortifications,In animal forms and pictures,In symbols of unknown meaning.
I know from the uncouth hieroglyphs,And the more finished records,That this soul had a religion,Temples, and priests, and altars:I think the life-giver, the sun,Was the god unto whom he sacrificed.I think that the moon and starsWere the lesser gods of his worship;And that the old serpent of EdenCame in for a share of devotion.
I find many forms of this reptile,Scattered along the prairies,Coiled on the banks of the rivers,In Iowa, and far Minnesota,And here and there, in Wisconsin.Now he is circular,Gnawing his tail, like the Greek symbol,Suggesting infinite meaningsUnto the mind of a modernCrammed with the olden mythologies.Now, uncoiled in the sunlight,He stretches himself out at full lengthIn all his undulate longitude.His body is a constellation of mounds,Artfully imitative,From the fatal tail to the more fatal head.Overgrown they are with grass,Short, green grass, thick and velvety,Like well cared-for lawns,With strange, wild flowers glittering,Made up of alien mouldBrought hither from distant regions.
Curiously I have considered them,Many a time in the summer,Lying beside them under the flaming sky,Smoking an old tobacco pipe,Made by one of these moundsmen.Who in his time had smoked it,Perchance over the council fire,Or in the dark woods where he had gone a-hunting;In war time—in peaceful evenings,With his squaw by his side,And his brood of dusky papposinsPlaying about in the twilightUnder the awful star-shadows.
It seemed that I was very close to him, at such times;And that his thick-ribbed lips,—Gone to dust for unknown centuries—Had met mine inscrutably,By a magic hid in the pipestem,Making me his familiar and hail fellow.Almost I felt his breath,And the muffled sound of his heart-beats;Almost I grasped his hand,And shook the antediluvian,With a shake of grimmest fellowshipTrying to cozen him of his grim secret.But sudden the gusty wind came,Laughing away the illusion,And I was alone in the desert.
If he could only wake up now,And confront me—that ancient salvage!Resurgated, with his facultiesAll quick about him, and his memories,What an unheard-of powwowCould I report to you, O friends of mine!Who look for some revelation,Some hint of the strange apocalypse,Which the wit of this man, livingSo near to the prime of the morning,So near to the gates of the azure,The awful gates of the Unseen—Whence all that is seen proceeded—Hath wrought in this new-found country!I wonder if he would rememberAnything about the Land of the Immortals.Something he would surely findIn the deeps of his consciousnessTo wake up a dim reminiscence.Dreamy shadows might haunt him,Shadows of beautiful faces, and of terrible;Large, lustrous eyes, full of celestial meanings,Looking up at him, beseeching him,From unfathomable abysses,With glances which were a language.The finalest secrets and mysteries,Behind every sight, and sound, and color,Behind all motions, and harmonies,Which floated round about him,Archetypes of the phenomenal!
Or, it might be, that coming suddenly in his mindUpon some dark veil, as of Isis,He lifts it with a key-thought,Or the sudden memory of an arcane sign,And beholds the gardens of Living Light,The starry platform, palaces, and thrones—The vast colossi, the intelligencesMoving to and fro over the flaming causewaysOf the kingdoms beyond the gates—The infinite archesAnd the stately pillars,Upbuilt with sapphire sunsAnd illuminated with emerald and ruby stars,Making cathedrals of immensityFor the everlasting worship without words.
All, or some, of the wondrous, impenetrable picture-land:The crimson seas,Flashing in uncreated light,Crowded with galleonsOn a mission to ports where dwell the old godsAnd the mighty intellects of the Immortals.The ceaseless occupations,The language and the lore;The arts, and thoughts, the music, and the instruments;The beauty and the divine glory of the faces,And how the Immortals love,Whether they wed like Adamites,Or are too happy to wed,Living in single blessedness!Well, I know it is rubbish,The veriest star-dust of fancy,To think of such a thing as thisBeing a memorial heirloom of the fore-world,Such rude effigies of men,Such clodbrains, as these poor mound builders!
Their souls never had any priority in the life of them;No background of eternityOver which they had traversedFrom eon to eon,Sun-system to sun-system,Planets and stars under them,Planets and stars over them;Now dwelling on immeasurable plains of azureBigger than space,Dazzling with the super-tropical brightnessOf passionate flowers without a name,In all the romance of color and beauty—Now, in the cities celestial,Where they made their acquaintancesWith other souls, which had never been incarnated,But were getting themselves readyBy an intuitive obedienceTo a well-understood authority,Which had never spoken,To take upon themselves the living formOf some red-browed, fire-eyed Mars-man,Some pale-faced, languishing sonOf the Phalic planet Venus,Or wherever else it might be,In what remote star soeverQuivering on shadowy battlements.Along the lines of the wilderness,Of worlds beyond worlds,These souls were to try their fortunes.
Surely, no experience of this sortEver happened unto them,Although one would like to invest themWith the glory of it, for the sake of the soul.But they were, to speak truth of them,A sort of journeyman work,Not a Phidian statuary,But a first cast of man,A rude draft of him;Huge gulfs, as of dismal Tartarus,Separating him from the high-born Caucasian.He, a mere Mongolian,As good, perhaps, in his faculties,As any Jap. or Chinaman—But not of the full-orbed brain,Star-blown, and harmoniousWith all sweet voices as of flutes in him,And viols, bassoons, and organs;Capable of the depths and circumferences of thought,Of sphynxine entertainments,And the dramas of life and death.
A plain fellow, and a practical,With picture in him and symbol,And thus not altogether clay-made,But touched with the fire of the rainbow,And the finger of the first light,Waiting for the second and the third light,Expectant through the ages,And disappointed;Never receiving more,But going down, at last, a dark man,And a lonely, through the dark galleriesOf death, and behind the curtainWhere all is light.
I like to think of him, and see his works:I like to read him in his mounds,And think I can make out a good deal of his history.He was a half-dumb man,Very sorrowful to see,But brave, nevertheless, and bravelyStruggling to fling out his thoughts,In a kind of dumb speech;Struggling, indeed, after poetryDædalian forms, and eloquence;Ambitious of distinguishing himselfIn the presence of wolves and bisonsAnd all organic creatures;Of making his claim goodAgainst these, his urgent disputants,That he was lord of the planet.
If he could not write books,He could scrawl the earth with his record:He could make hieroglyphs,Constellations of mounds and animals,Effigies of unnamable things,Monsters, and hybrids unnatural,Bred of grotesque fancies; and man-forms.These last, none of your pigmiesA span long in the womb,And six feet, at full growth, out of it—But bigger in chest and paunch,In the girth of his muscular shackle-bones,Round his colossal shoulders,Round his Memnonian countenance,Over the dome of his skull-crypts—From crown to foot of his body—Than grimmest of old Welsh giants,Grimmest of Araby ogres!
Many a time talking with gray hunters,Who leaned on their rifles against a tree,And made the bright landscapeAnd the golden morning fuller of gold and brightnessBy the contrast of their furrowed faces,Their shaggy eyebrows,And the gay humor laughing in their eyes,Their unkempt locks, their powder horns, and buskins,And the wild attire, in general, of their persons—Many a time have I heard themTell of these man-effigiesLying prone on the floors of the prairie.And, in my whim for correspondence,And perpetual seeking after identities,I have likened them to the stone sculptures, in cathedrals,Cut by pious hands out of black marble,Memorial resemblances of holy abbots,Of Christian knights, founders of religious houses,Of good lords of fair manors,Who left largess to these houses,Beneficed the arched wine-cellarsWith yearly butts of canary,Or, during their lifetime,Beautified the west front with stately windowsOf colored glass, emblazoned with Scripture stories,The sunlight in shadowy reflections painting the figuresWith blue and gold and crimsonUpon the cold slabs of the pavement.
These effigies, stiff, formal,Rudely fashioned, and of poor art,All of them lying, black and stark,Like a corpse-pageantry visioned in some monk's dream,Lying thus, in the transepts,On the cold, gray floor of the cathedral.
A curious conceit, truly!But the prairie is also consecrated,And quite as sacred I think itAs Rome's most holy of holies.It blossoms and runs over with religion.These meek and beautiful flowers!What sweet thoughts and divine prayers are in them!These song birds! what anthems of praiseGush out of their ecstatic throats!I pray you, also, tell me,What floors, sacred to what dead,Can compare with the elaborate mosaic workOf this wide, vast, outstretching floor of grass?As good a place, I take it,For the mound builder to make his man-effigiesOut of the mould in,As the cathedral is, for its artistsTo make man-effigies out of the black marble!And the thought, too, is the same!The thought of the primeval savage of the stone era,Roaming about in these wilds,Before the beautiful ChristMade the soul more beautiful,Revealed the terror of its divine forces,Announced its immortality,And was nailed on a tree for His goodness!While the monk, therefore, lay yet in the pagan brain,And' Time had not so much as thoughtOf sowing the seed for his coming—While his glorious cathedral, which, as we now know it,Is an epic poem built in immortal stone,Had no archetype except in the dreams of God,Dim hints of it, lying like hopeless runesIn the forest trees and arches,Its ornamentations in the snow drifts, and the summer leaves and flowers—No doubt, the mound-builder's man, put in effigy on the prairie,Had been a benefactor, in his way and time;Or, a great warrior; or learned teacherOf things symbolized in certain mound-groups,And which, from their arrangement,Appertain, it would seem, to mysteries,And ghostly communications.They thought to keep green his memory,The worship of him and his good deeds,Unto the end of time,Throughout all generations.The holy men, born of Christ,All Christendom but the development of him,And all the world his debtor;Even God owing him more largelyThan He has thought fit to pay back,Taking the immense creditOf nigh two thousand years!These holy men, so born and cultured,Could think of no way wiser,Of no securer methodOf preserving the memory of their saints,And of those who did good to them,Than this rude, monumental way of the savage.So singular is man,So old-fashioned his thinkings,So wonderful and similar his sympathies!Everywhere the same, with a difference;Cast in the same moulds,Of the same animal wants, and common mind,Of the same passions and vices,Hating, loving, killing, lying—A vast electrical chainRunning through tradition, and auroral history,Up through the twilights,And blazing noons,Through vanishing and returning twilights,Through azure nights of stars—Epochs of civilization—Unto the calmer glory,Unto the settled days,Unto the noble men—Nunc formosissimus annus!
Thus do I, flinging curiously the webs of fancyAthwart the time-gulfs, and the ages,Reconcile, after a kind, the primitive savage of AmericaWith the wonderful genealogies—Upsprung from the vital sapOf the great life-tree, Igdrasil!Thick and populous nationsHeavily bending its branches,Each in its autumn time of one or two thousand years,Like ripe fruits, fully developed and perfected,From the germ whence they proceeded;Nourished by strong saps of vitality,By the red, rich blood of matured centuries,By passionate Semitic sunlights;Beautiful as the golden apples of the Hesperides!Radiating, also, a divine beauty,The flower-blossom and the aroma,The final music, of a ripe humanity,Whereof each particular nationWas in its way and turnThe form and the expression,
Grand autumns were some of them!Grand and beautiful, like that of Greece,Whose glorious consummation always reminds meOf moving statues, music, and richest painting and architecture:Her landscapes shimmering in golden fire-mists,Which hang over the wondrously colored woods,In a dreamy haze of splendor;Revealing arched avenues, and tiny glades,Cool, quiet spots, and dim recesses,Green swards, and floral fairy lands,Sweeping to the hilltops;Illuminating the rivers in their gladsome course,And the yellow shadows of the rolling marshes,And the cattle of the farmer as they stand knee-deepSwitching their tails by the shore;Lighting up the singing faces,The sweet, laughing, singing faces,Of the merry, playful brooks,Now running away over shallows,Now into gurgling eddies;Now under fallen trees,Past beaver dams long deserted;Now under shady banks,Lost in the tangled wood-growths;Quivering now with, their laughter,Out in the open meadow,Flowing, singing and laughing,Over the weeds and rushes,Flowing and singing forever!
Plastic and beautiful, and running overWith Schiller's 'play impulse,' was the genius of Greece,Of which her institutions and civility were the embodiment.Other autumn times of the nationsWere calm and peaceful,Symbolized above, as fruit on the branchesOf the life-tree, Igdrasil!And when their time came,They dropped down silently,Like apples from their boughs on the autumn grass;Silently dropped down, on moonlight plains,In the presence of the great company of the stars,And the flaming constellations,Which evermore keep solemn watch over their graves.Others were blown off suddenly,And prematurely—all the elements enraged against them;And others, like the Dead Sea fruit,Were rotten at the heart before their prime!
The old mound builder stands at the base of the tree,At the base of the wonderful tree Igdrasil,And the mighty branches thereof,Which hang over his head in flame-shadows,Germinated, and blossomed with nations,In other lands, in another hemisphereFar away, over the measureless brine,From the mother earth where he was planted,Where he grew and flourished,And solved the riddle of life,And tried death,And the riddle beyond death.
He thought this passionate America,With its vast results of physical life,Its beautiful and sublime portraitures,Its far-sweeping prairies, rolling in grassy wavesLike the green billows of an inland sea—Its blue-robed mountainsPiercing the bluer heavens with their peaks—Its rivers, lakes, and forests—A roomy, and grand-enough earth to inhabit,Without thought of anything beyond it.
And yet he is related to allThat was, and is, and shall be!That idea which was clothed in his fleshIs fleshed in I know not how manyInfinite forms and varieties,In every part of the earth,In this day of my generation.But the flesh is a little different,And here and there the organism a nobler one,And the idea bigger, broader, deeper,Of a more divine quality and diapason.He is included in us, as the lesser in the greater;All our enactments are repetitions of his;Enlarged and adorned;And we pass through all his phases,Some time or other, in our beginnings—Through his, and an infinity of larger ones—And we have the same inevitable endings.
The idea of the possibility and desirableness of a universal language, scientifically constituted; a common form of speech for all the nations of mankind; for the remedy of the confusion and the great evil of Babel, is not wholly new. The celebrated Leibnitz entertained it. It was, we believe, glanced at among the schemes of Lord Monboddo. Bishop Wilkins devoted years of labor to the accomplishment of the task, and thought he had accomplished it. He published the results of his labors in heavy volumes, which have remained, as useless lumber, on the shelves of the antiquarian, or of those who are curious in rare books. A young gentleman of this city, of a rare genius, by the name of Fairbank, who died by a tragical fate a few years since, labored assiduously to the same end. A society of learned men has recently been organized in Spain, with their headquarters at Barcelona, devoted to the same work. Numerous other attempts have probably been made. In all these attempts, projects, and labors, the design has never transcended the purpose ofInvention. The effort has been simply tocontrivea new form of speech, and to persuade mankind to accept it;—a task herculean and hopeless in its magnitude and impracticability; but looking still in the direction of the supply of one of the greatest needs of human improvement. The existence of no less than two or three thousand different languages and idioms on the surface of the planet, in this age of railroad and steamship communication, presents, obviously, one of the most serious obstacles to that unification of humanity which so many concurrent indications tend, on the other hand, to prognosticate.
Another and different outlook toward a unity of speech for the race comes up from a growing popular impression that all existing languages must be ultimately and somewhat rapidly smelted into one by the mere heat and attrition of our intense modern international intercourse. Each nationality is beginning to put forth its pretensions as the proper and probable matrix of the new agglomerate, or philological pudding-stone, which is vaguely expected to result. The English urge the commercial supremacy of their tongue; the French the colloquial and courtly character of theirs; the Germans the inherent energy and philosophical adaptation of the German; the Spanish the wide territorial distribution and the pompous euphony of that idiom; and so of the other nationalities.
Both invention, which is the genius of adaptation, and the blending influence of mere intercourse, may have their appropriate place as auxiliaries, in the reconstruction of human speech, in accordance with the exigencies of the new era which is dawning on the world; but there is another and far more basic and important element, which may, and perhaps we may say must, appear upon the stage, and enter into the solution. This is the element of positive ScientificDiscoveryin the lingual domain. It may be found that every elementary sound of the human voice isinherently ladenbynature herselfwith a primitive significance; that the small aggregate of these meanings is precisely that handful of the Primitive Categories of allThoughtand allBeingwhich the Philosophers, from Aristotle up to Kant, have so industriously and painfully sought for. The germ of this idea was incipiently and crudelystruggling in the mind of the late distinguished philologist, Dr. Charles Kreitser, formerly professor of languages in the University of Virginia, and author of numerous valuable articles in Appletons' 'Cyclopædia;' the most learned man, doubtless, that unfortunate Hungary has contributed to our American body of savans. This element of discovery may, in the end, take the lead, and immensely preponderate in importance over the other two factors already mentioned as participating in the solution of a question of a planetary language. The idea certainly has no intrinsic improbability, that the normal language of mankind should be matter of discovery as the normal music of the race has been already. There was an instinctual and spontaneous development of music in advance of the time when science acted reflectively upon the elements and reconstituted it in accordance with the musical laws so discovered. Why may we not, why ought we not even to expect, analogically, that the same thing will occur for speech?
Setting aside, however, for the present occasion, the profounder inquiry into the inherent significance of sounds, and into all that flows logically from that novel and recondite investigation, we propose at present to treat in a more superficial way the subject indicated in the title of this article—A Universal Language; its Possibility, Scientific Necessity, and Appropriate Characteristics.
The expansion of the scope of science is at this day such that the demand for discriminating technicalities exceeds absolutely the capacity of all existing language for condensed and appropriate combinations and derivations. Hence speech must soon fail to serve the new developments of thought, unless the process of word-building can be itself proportionately improved; unless, in other words, a new and scientifically constructed Language can be devised adequate to all the wants of science. It would seem that there should occur, in the range of possibilities, the existence of thePlaninNatureof aNewandUniversal Language, copious, flexible, and expressive beyond measure; competent to meet the highest demands of definition and classification; and containing within itself a natural, compact, infinitely varied, and inexhaustible terminology for each of the Sciences, as ordained by fixed laws preëxistent in the nature of things.
This language should not then be an arbitrary contrivance, but should be elaborated from the fundamental laws of speech, existing in the constitution of the universe and of man, and logically traced to this special application. This knowledge of the underlying laws of speech should determine the mode of the combination ofElementary Soundsinto Syllables and Words, and of Words into Sentences naturally expressive of given conceptions or ideas. Such a language would rest on discovery, in that precise sense in which discovery differs from invention, and would have in itself infinite capacities and powers of expression, and again of suggesting thought; and might perhaps come to be recognized as the most stupendous discovery to which the human intellect is capable of attaining. 'In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.' The Word, or theLogos, is the underlying or hiddenWisdomof whichspeechis the external utterance or expression. Who can say how profoundly and intimately the underlying and hitherto undiscovered Laws of Speech may be consociated with the basic Principlesof all truthembedded in the Wisdom-Nature of God himself? The old Massonites had a faith, derived from certain mystical utterances of the Greek Philosophers, that whosoever should discover the right name for anything, would have absolute power over that thing. The Wisdom of Plato and the deeper Wisdom of Christ meet and are married toeach other in the conception of John when he makes the startling assertion that the Logos, the Logic, the Law, the Word, is synonymous with God himself.
The possibilities of the existence of such a language, divinely and providentially prepared in the constitution of things, and awaiting discovery, begins to be perceived, if the conception of the existence of an absolutely universal analogy be permitted fairly to take possession of the mind. Such an infinite scheme of analogy, rendering the same principles alike applicable in all spheres, must itself, in turn, rest upon a Divine Unity of Plan reigning throughout the Universe, the execution of which Plan is the act or the continuity of the acts of Creation. The Religious Intuition of the Race has persistently insisted upon the existence of this Unity, to the conception of which the scientific world is only now approximatingly and laboriously ascending.
If there be such Analogy in Nature furnishing an echo and an image in every department of Being of all that exists in every other department of Being, certainly that Analogy must bemost distinctandclearly discoverable as between the Elements, or the lowest and simplest Constituents of Being in each Sphere. The lowest and simplest elements of Language are Oral Sounds, which in written Languages are represented by Letters, and constitute the Alphabets of those Languages. The Alphabets of Sound must be clearly distinguished from the mere Letter-Alphabets by which the Sounds are variously represented. The Sound-Alphabets (the Scales of Phonetic Elements) of any two Languages differ only in the fact that one of the Languages may include a few Sounds which are not heard in the other, or may omit a few which are.
The Mouth, the Larynx (a cartilaginous box at the top of the windpipe), and the Nose—the compound organ of speech—constitute an instrument, capable, like the accordeon, for instance, of a certain number of distinct touches and consequent vocal effects, which produce the sounds heard in all existing Languages. The total of the possible sounds so produced or capable of production may be called the Crude or Unwinnowed Alphabet of Nature, or the Natural Alphabet of Human Language generically or universally considered. Thus, for instance, the sound represented in English and the Southern European Languages generally, by the letterm, is made by the contact of the two lips, while at the same time the sounding breath so interrupted is projected upon thesounding boardof the headthrough the nose, whenceresounding, it is discharged outwardly, this process giving to the sound produced that peculiar effect callednasalornose-sound; and precisely this sound can be produced by the voice in no other way. This sound is, nevertheless, heard in nearly all Languages, although there are a few imperfect savage dialects which are destitute of it. The production of this sound, as above described, will be obvious to the reader if he will pronounce the wordmy, and will attend to the position of the lips when he begins to utter the word. Let him attempt to saymy, without closing the lips, and the impossibility of doing so will be apparent. The production of the sound is therefore mechanical and local; and the number of sounds to be produced by the organ fixed and limited, therefore, by Nature herself. The very limited number of possible sounds may be guessed by the fact that of sounds produced bycompletely closing the two lips, there are only three, namely,p,b,m, in all the Languages of the earth (as inp-ie,b-y,m-y).
It is the same with all the other vocal sounds. They arenecessarilyproduced at certain fixed localities or Seats of Sound, in the mouth, and by a certain fixed modulation or mechanical use of the Organs of Speech. At least they are produced in and are confined to certain circumscribed regions of themouth, and so differ in the method of their production as to be appropriately distributed into certain Natural Classes: as Vowels and Consonants; Labials (Lip Sounds); Linguo-dentals (Tongue-Teeth Sounds); Gutturals (Back-Mouth or Throat Sounds), etc., etc.
From the whole number of sounds which it is possible to produce—the whole Crude Natural Alphabet—one Language of our existing Languages selects a certain number less than the whole, and another Language doing the same, it happens that while they mainly coincide, they, so to speak, shingle over each other at random, and it follows: 1. That the Number of Sounds in different Languages is not uniform; 2. That of any two Languages compared, one will chance to have several sounds not heard in the other; and, 3. The erroneous impression is made upon the casual and superficial observer that in the aggregate of all Languages there must be an immense number of sounds; whereas, in fact, the total Alphabet of Vocal Sounds in nature, like the Gamut of Colors or Musical Tones, is quite limited, if we attend only to those which distinctly differ, or stand at appropriate and appreciable distances from each other.
Further to illustrate: Assume that there are, capable of being clearly discriminated by the human ear, say sixty-four or seventy-two distinct Elementary Sounds of the human voice, in all—as many, for example, as there are Chemical Elements; some existing Languages select and make use of twenty, some of twenty-four, some of thirty, and some of forty of these sounds, omitting the rest.
But—and here is a very important point and a real discovery in this investigation—it will be found, if closely attended to, that a certain selection of one half of this number, say thirty-two or thirty-six of these sounds, embraces the whole body of vocal elementsusually occurringin all the forms of speech on the planet; the remaining half consisting of rare, exceptional, and, we may nearly say, useless sounds. This statement will again be better understood by analogy with what regards the Elements of Chemistry. Just about one half of the known elements of matter occur with frequency, and enter into useful and ordinary combinations to produce the great mass of known substances. The remaining half are unfrequent, obscure, and relatively unimportant; some of them never having been seen even by many of our most eminent chemists. Even should a few new elements be discovered, it cannot be anticipated that any one of them should prove to be of leading importance, like oxygen, carbon, or sulphur.
On the other hand, should some future great chemical discovery realize the dream of the alchemists, and enable us to transmute iron into gold, and indeed every chemical Element into every other chemical Element (convertible identity), still the sixty-four (nearly) Chemical Elements now known would remain the real Elements of Organic and Inorganic Compounds, in a sense just as important as that in which they are now so regarded. The now known Elements would still continue to constituteThe Crude Natural Alphabet of Matter, and be correspondential withThe Crude Natural Alphabet of Sounds in Language. The transmutability of one element into another indefinitely, would not, in any but a certain absolute or transcendental sense, cause the Elements to be regarded as one, or as any less number than now. It would be, on the contrary, a fact precisely corresponding with the actual and well-known transmutability of speech-sounds into each other as occurs in the phenomena of Etymology and Comparative Philology. This is so extensive, as now understood by Comparative Philologists, that it would be hardly difficult to prove that every sound is capable of being transmuted into every other sound, either directly or through intermediates; and yet we do not in theleast tend to cease to regard the several sounds as they stand as the real Elements of Speech.
It is this transmutability of Correspondential Elements in another sphere of Being, which bases the presumption, or gives to it at least countenance from a new quarter, that the metals and other chemical Elements may be actually convertible substances by means of processes not yet suspected or sufficiently understood. The more careful study of the Analogy with the Elements of other spheres, and perhaps specifically with the Elements of Language, under the presiding influence of larger scientific generalizations and views than those which now prevail in the scientific world, may be, and, it would even seem, ought to be the means of revealing the law of Elementary Transmutations in the Chemical Domain. The expectation of a future discovery of the resolution of the existing Elements of Matter, and their convertibility even, is reviving in the chemical field, and even so distinguished a chemist and thinker as Professor Draper does not hesitate to sustain its probability by the weight of his authority and belief. The process by which the transmutation of Elements is actually effected in Language, is bySlow and Continued Attrition. These very words suggest a process but little resorted to in chemical experiment, but which probably intervenes in the Laboratory of Nature, when she makes the diamond out of a substance, simple carbon, the most familiarly known to chemistry, but out of which the human chemist is entirely unable by any process known to him to produce that precious gem.
Whether this particular hint is of any value or not, one thing is certain, that it is in the direction of Universal and Comparative Science—the analogical echo of the parts of one Domain of Being with the parts of another Domain and of all other Domains of Being; of the phenomena of one Science with the phenomena of other Sciences; and especially as among the Elements of each—that we must look for the next grand advances in Scientific Discovery. The world urgently requires the existence of a new class of scientific students who shall concern themselves precisely with these questions of the relations and the indications of unity between the different Sciences; not to displace, but to transcend and to coördinate the labors of that noble Army of Scientific Specialists, with which Humanity is now so extensively and so happily provided.
TheSelectLingual Alphabet of Nature, as distinguished from theCrudeNatural Alphabet above described, is then the expurgated scale of sounds, say thirty-two; the sounds of usual occurrence in polished languages; one half of the whole number; the residuum after rejecting an equal number of obscure, unimportant, or barbarous sounds, of possible production and of real occurrence in some of the cruder Languages, and as crude elements even in the more refined Languages now extant. The two sounds ofthin English, as inthigh andthy (thethetaof the Greek), and the two shades of thech-sound in German, as in nachand ich, are instances of crude sounds in refined Languages, for which other Languages, more fastidious for Euphony, as French and Italian for example, naturally substitutet,d, andk(c). The obscure and crude sounds would always retain, however (in respect to the idea of a Universal Alphabet), a subordinate place and value, and should be gathered and represented in a Supplementary Alphabet for special and particular uses.
It has been the mistake of Phoneticians and Philologians, heretofore, to recognize no difference in the relative importance of sounds. They have sought, through every barbarous dialect, as well as every refined tongue, and gathered by the drag-net of observation, every barbarous and obscure as well as every polite sound which by any accident ever enters into the constitution of speech. The clucks of Hottentot Tribes and the whistle heard in some of the North American Languages have been reckoned in, upon easy terms, with the more serviceable and euphonious members of the Phonetic family, and mere trivial shades of sounds were put upon the same footing as the pivotal sounds themselves. This is as if certain obdurate compounds were introduced in the first instance among Chemical Elements—which subsequent analysis may even prove to be the case in respect to some substances that we now recognize as Elements—and then, by assigning to the least important of Elements the same rank, and giving to them the same attention as to the most important, the number were augmented beyond the practical or working body of Elements, and our treatises upon Chemistry encumbered by a mass of useless matter. Or again, it is as if among the Elements of Music were included all conceivable sounds, as the squeal, the shriek, the sob, etc.; and as if, in addition to this, the least intervals, the quarter tones for instance, were ranked as the musical equals of the whole tones.
If it should prove a matter of fact, as capable of exact scientific demonstration as any other, that the Consonant and Vowel Elements of Oral Language are, in a radical and important sense, repetitory of, or correspondential with, Musical Tones or the Elements of Music, as well as with Chemical Elements, and these again with the Elements of Numerical Calculation, of Form, or the Science of Morphology, and, in fine, with the Prime Metaphysical Elements of Being, or the first Categories of Thought, perhaps we may by such speculations catch a glimpse of the possibilities of a great lingual discovery, having the attributes here indicated.Why should not the Elements of Speech have been brought by Nature herself into some sort of parallelism with the Elements of Thought which it is the special province of Speech to represent?Why, again, should not the Prime Elements of every new domain of Being be merely a Repetition in new form of the Prime Elements of the Universe, as a whole, and of those especially of Language, its representative domain?—Language being the literal word, as Universal Law is the Logos or the Wordpar excellence, and Divine. In that event, every speech-element would be of necessity inherently charged with the precise kind and degree of meaning specifically relating it, first to one of the Prime Elements of Being, metaphysically considered, and then, by an echo of resemblance, to one of the Prime Elements of every subordinate domain of Being throughout the Universe. The Combinations of the Letter-Sounds would then constitute words exactly, simply, and naturally expressive of any combination of the Elements of Being, either, first, in the Universal domain, or, secondly, in any subordinate domain, physical or psychical. In this way a grand and wonderful system of technicals would be wrought out for all the sciences—provided by Nature herself, and discovered, only, by man. It is at least certain that if a grand Science of Analogy is ever to be discovered, capable of Unifying all our knowledges, an anticipation vaguely entertained by our most advanced scientific minds, it must be sought for primarily among the simplest elements of every domain of science, or, what is the same thing, every domain of Thought and Being. It is alike certain that heretofore the first step even has never been rightly taken among the men of science to investigate in that direction. The failure of all those who have entertained the idea of a Universal Analogy as a basis of Scientific Unity, has resulted from the fact that, drawn rapidly along by the beauty of their conceptions, they have attempted to rush forward into the details of their subject, and have lost themselves in the infinity of these, without the wisdom and patience to establish a basis for their immense fabric in the exact discovery and knowledge of Elements. They have hastened forward to the limbs and twigs and leaves and flowers and fruitage, without having securely planted the roots of their scientific tree in the solid earth. Such was the case with Oken, the great German Physio-Philosopher and Transcendental Anatomist, the pupil of Hegel, who exerted a profound influence over the scientific mind of Germany for thirty years, but has now sunk into disrepute for want of just that elementary and demonstrative discovery of first Elements, and the rigorous adhesion to such perceptions of that kind as were partially entertained by him and his school of powerful thinkers and scientists.
To repeat the leading idea above, which is so immensely pregnant with importance, and, perhaps we may add, so essentially new: The combinations of Speech-Elements—in a perfect and normal Language for the Human Race, which we are here assuming that Nature should have provided, and which may be only awaiting discovery—when they should be rightly or scientifically arranged into words and sentences, would be exactly concurrent and parallel with the combinations of thePrime Elementsof Thought and Being in the Real Universe; so that each word, so formed, would become exactly charged with the kind and amount of meaning contained in the thing named or the conception intended. An idea will thus be obtained by the reader, somewhat vague, no doubt, at first, but which would become perfectly distinct, as the subject should be gradually unfolded, of the way in which a universal language naturally expressive of Thoughts and Feelings, and capable of unlimited expansion, might perhaps be evolved from a profound understanding of the Analogies of the Universe. It is important, however, in order that this theory, now when it is first presented, should not unnecessarily prejudice cautious and conservative minds, and seem to them wholly Utopian, to guard it by the additional statement that, while such a language might be appropriately denominated Universal, there is a sense in which it would still not be so; or, in other words, that it could only become Universal by causing to coalesce with its own scientifically organized structure, the best material already wrought out, and existing asnatural growthin the dead and living languages now extant; by absorbing them, so to speak, in itself. It would have no pretension, therefore, directly to supersede any of the existing languages, nor even ultimately to dispense with the great mass of the material found in any of them.
It is a common prejudice among the learned that Language is a growth, and cannot in any sense be a structure; in other words, that it is purely the subject of the instinctive or unthoughted development of man, and not capable of being derived from reflection, or the deliberate application of the scheming faculty of the intellect. A little reflection will show that this opinion is only a half truth. It is certain that language has received its primitive form and first development by the instinctive method. It is equally true, however, that even as respects our existing languages, they have been overlaid by a subsequent formation, originating with the development of theSciences, due wholly to reflection on the scheming faculty of man, and already equal in extension to the primitive growth. The Nomenclature of each of the Sciences has been devised by the reflective genius of individuals, and arbitrarily imposed, so to speak, upon the Spoken and Written Languages of the World, as they previously existed. From the cabinets and books of the learned, they gradually pass into the speech of the laity, and become incorporated with the primitive growth. If, instead of the Carbonate of Soda, the Protoxide of Nitrogen, and other Chemical Technicalities arbitrarily formed inmodern times from the ancient Greek Language, terms which the ancient Greeks themselves never heard nor conceived of, we had words derived from similar combinations of Anglo-Saxon or German Roots; if, for instance, for Protoxide of Nitrogen, we had theFirst-sour-stuffness, or theFirst-sharp-thingness of Salt-petreness, and so throughout the immense vocabulary of chemistry, what an essentially different aspect would the whole English Language now wear! Had Lavoisier, therefore, chosen the Anglo-Saxon or the German as the basis of the chemical nomenclature now in use, we can readily perceive how the intellectual device of a single savant, would, ere this time, have sent a broad current of new development through the heart of all the advanced Languages of the earth; of a different kind wholly, but no more extensive, no more novel, and truly foreign to the primitive instinctual growth of those Languages, no more purely the result of intellectual contrivance, than the current of development to which he actually did give origin.
Lavoisier chose the dead Greek as a fountain from which to draw the elements of his new verbal compounds, assigning to those elements arbitrarily new volumes of meaning, and constructing from them, with no other governing principle than his own judgment of what seemed best, a totally new Language, as it were, adequate to the wants of the new Science. Still, despite these imperfections in the method, the demand, with the growth of the new ideas, for a new expansion of the powers of Language, in a given direction, made the contrivance of the great chemist a successful interpolation upon the speech-usages of the world. It is certainly not therefore inconceivable—because of any governing necessity that Language should be a purely natural growth—that other and greater modifications of the speech of mankind may occur; when—not an arbitrary contrivance upon an imperfect basis and of a limited application is in question, but—when a real discovery, the revelation of the true scientific bases of Language, and limitless applications in all directions, should be concerned.
On the other hand, the extent of the practical applications of strictly scientific principles to the Structure of Language is subject to limitation. Even mathematics, theoretically the most unlimited of the existing Sciences, is practically limited very soon by the complexity of the questions involved in the higher degrees of equations. In the same manner, while it may be possible to construct a Scientific Language adequate to all the wants of Language, in which exactness is involved; that is to say, capable of classifying and naming every object and idea in the Universe which is itself capable of exact classification and definition, still there remains an immense sphere, an equal half, it may be said, of the Universe of objects and conceptions, which have not that susceptibility; which are, in other words, so complex, so idiosyncratic, or so vague in their nature, that the best guide for the formation of an appropriate word for their expression is not Intellect or Reflection, but that very Instinct which has presided over the formation of such Languages as we now have. We may accurately define a triangle or a cube, and might readily bring them within the range of a Universal Language scientifically constructed; but who would venture to attempt by any verbal contrivance to denote the exact elements of thought and feeling which enter into the meaning of the verbsto screechorto twinge?
There is, therefore, ample scope and a peremptory demand for both methods of lingual development. The New Scientific Language herein suggested would be universal within the limit within which Science itself is universal. But there is another sphere within which Science, born of the Intellect, has only a subordinate sway, and inwhich instinct, or that faculty which, in the higher aspect of it, we denominate Intuition, is supreme. This faculty has operated as instinct in the first stage of the growth of Language, the Natural or Instinctual; it should now give place to the Intellect, in the second stage, the Scientific; after which it should regain its ascendency as Intuition, in the final finish and perfectionment of the Integral Speech of Mankind, the Artistic.
Such a Language would be, to all other Languages, precisely what a unitary Science would be to all the special Sciences; and we have seen how it might happen that the same discovery should furnish both the Language and the Science. Without rudely displacing any existing Language, it would, besides filling its own central sphere of uses, furnish a rallying point of unity between them all. It would ally them to itself, not by the destruction of their several individualities, but by developing the genius of each to the utmost. It would enrich them all, by serving as the common interpreter between them, until each would attain something of the powers of all, or at least the full capacity for availing itself of the aid of all others, and chiefly of the central tongue, in all those respects in which in consequence of its own special character it should remain individually defective. The new Scientific and Central Language might thus plant itself in the midst of the Languages; gradually assimilate them to itself; drawing at the same time an augmentation of its own materials from them, until they would become mere idioms of it, and finally, perhaps, in a more remote future, disappear altogether as distinct forms of speech, and be blended into harmony in the bosom of the central tongue.
The resources of Language for the formation of new words, by the possible euphonic combination of elementary sounds, is as nearly infinite as any particular series of combinations usually called infinite; all such series having their limitations, as in the case of the different orders of the Infinite in the calculus which are limited by the fact that there are different orders. Yet, notwithstanding that this inexhaustible fountain of Phonetic wealth exists directly at hand, none of these resources have ever been utilized by any scientific arrangement and advice. Only so many verbal forms as happen to have occurred in any given language, developed by the chance method, in the Greek, for instance, are chosen as a basis, and employed as elements for the new verbal formatives now coming into use with such astonishing rapidity in all the sciences. For instance, let us take the consonant combinationkr(orcr), and add the following series of vowels:i(pronouncedee),e(pronounceda),a(pronouncedah),o(pronouncedaw),u(pronounceduh),o(pronouncedo), andu(pronouncedoo); and we construct the following series of euphonic triliteral roots:
Let us now add the terminationo, and we have the following list of formatives:
Of these verbal forms only two occur in any of the well-known Southwestern Languages of Europe, namely,Creo, I CREATE, of the Latin, Italian, etc., andCrio, I REAR, of the Spanish. The other forms are entirely unused. Of any other simple series of Euphoniccombinations, such as Phonetic art can readily construct, there is the same wasteful neglect, and, in consequence of this total failure of the scientific world to extract these treasures of Phonic wealth lying directly beneath their feet, they are driven to such desperate devices as that of naming the two best-known and most familiar order of fishes, those usually found on our breakfast tables,Acanthopterygii Abdominales, andMalacopterygii Subbrachiati; and the common and beautiful bird called bobolink isDolichonyx Orixyvora. For the same reason—the entire absence of any economical and systematized use of our phonetic materials by the scientific world—the writer found himself, recently, in attempting certain generalizations of the domain of science, stranded almost at the commencement, upon such verbal shoals asAnthropomorphus Inorganismoidismus; and the subsequent steps in the mere naming of discriminations simple enough in themselves, became wholly impossible. The urgent necessity existing, therefore, for the radical intervention of Science in the discovery of true principles applicable to the construction of its own tools and instruments, can hardly be denied or questioned.
The immense condensation of meaning, and the consequent compactness and copiousness of which a Language based on a meaning inherently contained by analogy in the simplest elements of sound would be susceptible, would give to such a Language advantages as the instrument of thought and communication, which are but very partially illustrated in the superiority of printing by movable types over manuscript, for the rapid multiplication of books.
In thecompound wordsof existing Languages each root-word of the combination has a distinct meaning, and the joint meaning of the parts so united is the description or definition of the new idea; thus in German,Fingeris FINGER, andHutis HAT, andFinger-hut(FINGER-HAT) is athimble;Handis HAND,Schueis SHOE, andHand-schueisa glove, etc. So in English,Wheel-barrow,Thunder-storm, etc. The admirable expressiveness of such terms, and the great superiority in this respect of Languages like the Sanscrit, Greek, German, etc., in which such self-defining combinations are readily formed, over Spanish, Italian, French, and other derivative languages, the genius of which resists combination, is immediately perceived and acknowledged. But if we analyze any one of these compound words,Finger-hut, for instance, we shall perceive that while each of the so-called elements of combination,FingerandHut, has a distinct meaning, which enters into the more specific meaning of the compound, yet they are not, in any true sense, elements, or, in other words, that they are not the ultimate elements of the compound words.Fingeris itself constituted, in the first instance, of two syllables,Fingander, which, in accordance with the same principle upon which the compound wordFinger-hutis organized, should describe the thing signified, as would be the case ifFingmeant HAND, andermeant CONTINUATION.Fingerwould then meanHand-continuation, andFinger-hut(thimble) would then be aHand-continuation-hat. But, again,Fingconsists of three elementary sounds,f-i-ng,erof two,e-r, andhutof three,h-u-t. Suppose now that the primary soundfhad been scientifically discovered to be correspondential throughout all the realms of Nature and of Thought withSuperiority,High-position, orUpperness;iwithcentrality, ormain body, andngwithmemberorbranch; the syllableFingwould then signifyUpper-body-branch, a very proper description ofthe arm. Suppose thatesignified, in the same way,flat, palm-like ideas and things generallyand thatralone signifiedcontinuation; thenerwould signifyPalm-continuation, andFingerwould signify anUpper-bodybranch-palm-continuation, or, in other words, aPalm-continuation of an upper-body-branch, and would so be completelydescriptive of, at the same time that it woulddenote, a Finger. Suppose, again, thathsignified inherentlyrotundityorroundness;u,closeness; andt,rooforcovering; thenhutwould signifyround-closed-cover, a proper description of ahat; andFinger-hutwould then meanAn-upper-body-branch-palm-continuation-round-closed-cover, orthe round-closed-cover of a palm-continuation of a superior limb or branch of the body. It will be at once perceived how, with such resources of signification at command, compounds likeAcanthopterygiito signifythornfins,Malacopterygii Subbrachiati, to signifyUnder-arm soft fins, orAnthropomorphus Inorganismoidismus, to signifythings in unorganized form, having a resemblance to man, would soon come to be regarded as the lingual monsters which they really are.