第103章

--I should like to carry some of my friends to see a giant bee-hive Ihave discovered.Its hum can be heard half a mile, and the great white swarm counts its tens of thousands.They pretend to call it a planing-mill, but if it is not a bee-hive it is so like one that if a hundred people have not said so before me, it is very singular that they have not.If I wrote verses I would try to bring it in, and Isuppose people would start up in a dozen places, and say, "Oh, that bee-hive simile is mine,--and besides, did not Mr.Bayard Taylor call the snowflakes 'white bees'?"I think the old Master had chosen these trivialities on purpose to amuse the Young Astronomer and myself, if possible, and so make sure of our keeping awake while he went on reading, as follows:

--How the sweet souls of all time strike the same note, the same because it is in unison with the divine voice that sings to them! Iread in the Zend Avesta, "No earthly man with a hundred-fold strength speaks so much evil as Mithra with heavenly strength speaks good.No earthly man with a hundred-fold strength does so much evil as Mithra with heavenly strength does good."And now leave Persia and Zoroaster, and come down with me to our own New England and one of our old Puritan preachers.It was in the dreadful days of the Salem Witchcraft delusion that one Jonathan Singletary, being then in the prison at Ipswich, gave his testimony as to certain fearful occurrences,--a great noise, as of many cats climbing, skipping, and jumping, of throwing about of furniture, and of men walking in the chambers, with crackling and shaking as if the house would fall upon him.

"I was at present," he says, "something affrighted; yet considering what I had lately heard made out by Mr.Mitchel at Cambridge, that there is more good in God than there is evil in sin, and that although God is the greatest good and sin the greatest evil, yet the first Being of evil cannot weave the scales or overpower the first Being of good: so considering that the authour of good was of greater power than the authour of evil, God was pleased of his goodness to keep me from being out of measure frighted."I shall always bless the memory of this poor, timid creature for saving that dear remembrance of "Matchless Mitchel." How many, like him, have thought they were preaching a new gospel, when they were only reaffirming the principles which underlie the Magna Charta of humanity, and are common to the noblest utterances of all the nobler creeds! But spoken by those solemn lips to those stern, simpleminded hearers, the words I have cited seem to me to have a fragrance like the precious ointment of spikenard with which Mary anointed her Master's feet.I can see the little bare meeting-house, with the godly deacons, and the grave matrons, and the comely maidens, and the sober manhood of the village, with the small group of college students sitting by themselves under the shadow of the awful Presidential Presence, all listening to that preaching, which was, as Cotton Mather says, "as a very lovely song of one that hath a pleasant voice"; and as the holy pastor utters those blessed words, which are not of any one church or age, but of all time, the humble place of worship is filled with their perfume, as the house where Mary knelt was filled with the odor of the precious ointment.

--The Master rose, as he finished reading this sentence, and, walking to the window, adjusted a curtain which he seemed to find a good deal of trouble in getting to hang just as he wanted it.

He came back to his arm-chair, and began reading again --If men would only open their eyes to the fact which stares them in the face from history, and is made clear enough by the slightest glance at the condition of mankind, that humanity is of immeasurably greater importance than their own or any other particular belief, they would no more attempt to make private property of the grace of God than to fence in the sunshine for their own special use and enjoyment.

We are all tattoed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible.You cannot educate a man wholly out of the superstitious fears which were early implanted in his imagination; no matter how utterly his reason may reject them, he will still feel as the famous woman did about ghosts, Je n'y crois pas, mais je les crains,--"I don't believe in them, but I am afraid of them, nevertheless."--As people grow older they come at length to live so much in memory that they often think with a kind of pleasure of losing their dearest blessings.Nothing can be so perfect while we possess it as it will seem when remembered.The friend we love best may sometimes weary us by his presence or vex us by his infirmities.How sweet to think of him as he will be to us after we have outlived him ten or a dozen years! Then we can recall him in his best moments, bid him stay with us as long as we want his company, and send him away when we wish to be alone again.One might alter Shenstone's well-known epitaph to suit such a case:--Hen! quanto minus est cum to vivo versari Quam erit (vel esset) tui mortui reminisse!

"Alas! how much less the delight of thy living presence Than will (or would) be that of remembering thee when thou hast left us!"I want to stop here--I the Poet--and put in a few reflections of my own, suggested by what I have been giving the reader from the Master's Book, and in a similar vein.