George Edward Woodberry

“ It is a meditation on sin, but so made gracious with beauty as to lose the deformity of its theme; and it suffers a metamorphosis into a thing of loveliness. To us it is in boyhood our dream of Italy, and in after years the best companion of memory; it is also a romance of nature and art, and of the mystery of evil, shot through with such sunshine gleams, with the presence of pure color and divine forms, as to seem like the creations of that old mythic Mediterranean world which, though it held shapes of terror, was the most beautiful land that the imagination has ever known. ”

“ And all that is fills but a player's scene,
Where time is not, nor place; there, to the soul
The passing world, unfolding like a flower
From unseen roots, that shuts at eventide,
Is but a phantom-bloom and beauty's shade,
Echoing far off divine reality:
Such song the morning-stars together sang,
And at creation's birth praised light unseen."
Then in the Roamer stirred his dreaming youth:
"So once I sang with lifted hands to heaven
The beauty that the dawn hath never clasped,
The peace that falls not with eve's blessèd dew,
The mystery within the seas and stars ”

“ Again I use the figure: it is like a rock of the sea, set here in the midst of the Mediterranean world, washed by all the tides of history, beat on by every pitiless storm of the passion of man for blood. The torch of Greece, the light of the Cross, the streaming portent of the Crescent, have shone from it, each in its time; all governments, from Greek democracy to Bourbon tyranny, have ruled it in turn; Roman law and feudal custom had it in charge, each a long age: yet civilization in all its historic forms has never here done more, seemingly, than alleviate at moments the hard human lot. ”

“ The soul rests in its sensations as a bird floats in the air. It is a foretaste of Nirvana. Thought has ceased; duty is silent; labor has vanished; and the life that is deeper than these and of which they were but mortal fragments, “unconcerning things,” resurges, vibrates, flowers. What a relief! what a transmigration! and what a new sense of vitality—almost of a new sort of vitality! It is the repose, the silence, the concentration of being within—the peace. In the Western world one may attain this at times; the desert imposes it as the habit of the soul that yields itself to its influences. ”

“ Hilda in her dove-cote, keeping the perpetual lamp burning at the Virgin's shrine and taking into her heart the lovely pictures of old time as a pool reflects heaven in its quiet depths, is a figure of sensitive purity, rendered symbolically, with the same truth and delicacy as Donatello, though so opposed in contrast to his natural innocence blighted and stained; even the quality of mercilessness, which Hawthorne gave her out of his own heart, she turns to favor and to prettiness, till it seems to belong to her as a part of her chastity of nature. ”

“ As if himself were seated in thy breast.
Then shalt thou shake with the first throb of love
That knows what love is; love is sacrifice
Of all that love holds dear unto itself,
Even to the extinction of its hopes, its life,
So that its object live, complete and fair,
Its nature out to its own loveliness
Of act and being." "Thou hast told my tale,
As if myself had emptied all my heart,"
The Roamer said; and over them swift night
Came in the striding shadow of eclipse
Upon the desert sands. "The light? the light?"
The Roamer said; "the light divine?" "The light?" ”

“ It is a message blended of many voices of the poets whom Shelley called, whatever might be their calamity on earth, the most fortunate of men; it rises from all lands, all ages, all religions; it is the battle-cry of that one great idea whose slow and hesitating growth is the unfolding of our long civilization, seeking to realize in democracy the earthly, and in Christianity the heavenly, hope of man,—the idea of the community of the soul, the sameness of it in all men. To lead this life is to be one with man through love, one with the universe through knowledge, one with God through the will ”

“ But living in solitude till the fullness of time was come, I still kept the dew of my youth and the freshness of my heart.... I used to think I could imagine all passions, all feelings, and states of the heart and mind; but how little did I know!... Indeed, we are but shadows; we are not endowed with real life, and all that seems most real about us is but the thinnest substance of a dream,—till the heart be touched. That touch creates us,—then we begin to be,—thereby we are beings of reality and inheritors of eternity. ”

“ The crown of Western culture is apt to be an encyclopædia. There was no library in the desert. And religion—how much of it comes to us moderns in a dead form! Surely religion is a revelation of the soul, not to it. This is a doctrine of immanence. If the divine be not immanent in the soul, man can have no knowledge of it. Religion is an aura of the soul, a materialization of spiritual consciousness, varying in intensity of light and tones of color from race to race, from age to age, and, indeed, from man to man; it is the soul’s consciousness made visible. ”

“ The all I was; and, lo, my chambered soul
Lived in a thousand nobler lives than mine;
For he who standeth in the whole world's hope
Is as a magnet; he shall draw all hearts
To be his shield, all arms to strike his blow.
So round my voice the globe of battle grew,
The war-clash 'gan to murmur, and my lips
Sang to the onset, and death flashing fell.
But evil, that doth cling to all things here,
O'ercame that triumph. Yet, come all again,
I'll say it o'er; the dearest word of men,
The first to seal the poet's virgin vow,
The last to wing the patriot's breath to heaven,
Is Liberty ”

“ Art endeavours to bring that vision, that plot, however fragmentary, upon earth. It is a world of order clothing itself in beauty, with a charm to the soul, such is our nature,—operative upon the will to live. It is preeminently a vision of beauty. It is true that this beauty which thus wins and moves us seems something added by the mind in its great creations rather than anything actual in life; for it is, in fact, heightened and refined from the best that man has seen in himself, and it partakes more of hope than of memory. ”

“ Death is the striking of the tent. It is quickly over. You shall see four men passing rapidly with the bier, a wide frame on which the body lies, wrapped in white; in the barren place of the dead they dig with haste a shallow hollow in the sand; they stand a moment in the last prayer; they have covered the grave swiftly and stuck three palm twigs in the loose sand, and are gone. A change of day and night, of winter and summer, of birth and death, and at the centre the wind-blown desert and the frail nomad tent; and then, three palm twigs in the nameless sand. ”

“ He shall be taught by my life, and by my death, that the world is a sad one for him who shrinks from its sober duties. My experience shall warn him to adopt some great and serious aim, such as manhood will cling to, that he may not feel himself, too late, a cumberer of this overladen earth, but a man among men. I will beseech him not to follow an eccentric path, nor, by stepping aside from the highway of human affairs, to relinquish his claim upon human sympathy. And often, as a text of deep and varied meaning, I will remind him that he is an American. ”

“ The past survives in human institutions, in the temperament of races, and in the creations of ideal art; but only in the last is it immortal. Custom and law are for an age: race after race is pushed to the sea, and dies; only epic and saga and psalm have one date with man, one destiny with the breath of his lips, one silence at the last with them. Least of all does the past survive in the living memories of men. Here and there the earth cherishes a coin or a statue, the desert embalms some solitary city, a few leagues of rainless air preserve on rock and column the lost speech of Nile ”

“ All vision is the woven veil thereof;
There works the secret craft that builds the world;
There shines the ray that puts earth's glory on;
There wakes the chord that tunes the whirling sphere,
Amphion's art, heard in the rising deep,
And should it falter, heaven and earth were dark."
"Whence hast thou music, and the charm of words
Few speak and live?" the old man, thoughtful, said:
"Another dawn is shining in thy face."
Then, gladdening in his heart, the Roamer spoke;
"Love taught me this, whom mortal once I knew,
And felt upon my cheek his burning bloom. ”

“ It was a processional bas-relief, immovable and majestic, sculptured on the sand-hills and the rock; it was monumental, architectural, Egyptian. The sight defined for me one quality of desert landscape which I had vaguely felt; it is the bas-relief of nature. The lowness of the visual plane, the clarity of the human figures, the framing of the scene against which everything is relieved, suggest to me the effects of bas-relief; the repose of the Arab, too, the fall of the folds of his garment, the simple actions, have more of the sculptural as a living-thing than I have elsewhere observed. ”

“ Yet even here, amid this rural peace and in so restricted a society, life at the Old Manse had a still deeper seclusion, as of a place of retreat and inviolable privacy; there was an atmosphere of solitude about it, wrapping it round, a sense of life with nature, and only slight and distant contact with the world, the privacy of a house that is snow-bound, lasting on as if by enchantment through July heats as well as February drifts. Hawthorne enjoyed this freedom in the place that first seemed to him like real home ”

“ Here is that woven robe of illusion which is so hard a matter to those who live in horizons of the eye and hand. Yet as idealism was found on its mental side harmonious with reason in all knowledge, and on its emotional side harmonious with the heart in its outgoings, so this perfecting temperament that belongs to it and most characterizes it, falls in with the natural faith of mankind. Idealism in this sense, too, existed in life before it passed into literature. The youth idealizes the maiden he loves, his hero, and the ends of his life; and in age the old man idealizes his youth. ”

“ And souls like waves move there, each with its cry—
The sea of life; he felt from world-wide woe,
Vague breaking upon vague, the life-song rise,
Blind music, wandering o'er the face of things,
Heard in his heart, and heard creation through.
But when the treason was, that worked so sore,
And in himself he knew the doom begun,
And felt the blood of man, is dark to me;
Only he made him friends with night and storm,
The sad woods roved, and paced the passionate shore,
And ever on the desert's border hung,
Disturbed, distressful, watched by rising stars. ”

“ The life of the tent is one of sunshine and vitality by comparison; humble and rugged, it has no decadence in its look; in the villages the decadence seems almost of the soil itself. One goes out into the desert to escape the oppression of this universal mortal decay; and there is no life there, only a passage of life, of which the skeleton of the camel in the sands is the epitaph.
A dying world and a race submissive to its fate. In that nomad world, where everything is passing away, there is nothing fixed but the will of Allah. ”

“ Common as light is love, sang Shelley; and equally common with beauty and truth and love is all that is most vital to the soul, all that feeds it and gives it power; if aught be lacking, it is the eye to see and the heart to understand. Grain, fruit and vegetable, wool, silk and cotton, gold, silver and iron, steam and electricity,—were not all, like the spark, within arm's reach of savage man? The slow material progress of mankind through ages is paralleled by the slow growth of the individual soul in laying hold of and putting to use the resources of spiritual strength that are nigh unto it. ”

“ Their hymns shall be a nation's memory.
The few ride on, their lips too firm for song;
On many a lonely field they find how hard
The bright rebellion is that showed so fair
'Gainst this world’s wrong; now, taught within, they learn
What might it takes to wield a heavenly sword!"
⁠He could not stay the spirit's wandering cries,
The music of the breaking heart of man,
Made hoarse by passion now, with grief grown stern:
⁠"Is God then weary? has the flaming sphere,
Belted with burning noons and starred with night,
Paused in its revolution in the deep? ”

“ It is not strange to find fatality the last word of Islam. In the desert world the will of nature appears with extreme nakedness; the fortune of man is brief, scant, and unstable; the struggle is against infinite odds, a meagre subsistence is gained, if at all; and the blow of adversity is sudden and decisive. Patience everywhere is the virtue of the poor, resignation the best philosophy of the unfortunate, and defeat, as well as victory, and perhaps more often, brings peace. These are great words of Islam, and nowhere have they sunk deeper into life than in the desert-soul. ”

“ The ideal is our infinite riches, more than any individual or moment can hold. To refuse it is as if a man should neglect his estate because he can take but a handful of it in his grasp. It is the law of our being to grow, and it is a necessity that we should have examples and patterns in advance of us, by which we can find our way. There is no falsehood in such anticipation; there is only a faith in truth instead of a possession of it. Will you limit us to one moment of time and place? will you say to the patriot that his country is a geographical term? ”

“ I am never lonely with a palm to look at. I lie on the ground for hours and gaze up at their massed green tops in the blue and the sun and the warmth—“their feet in the water, their heads in the fire.” I am never tired of looking. I do not notice the absence of thought. I am quiet, content, and doing nothing am very much alive if vaguely aware of my life. It is a new mode of living, this vital dreaming—a volupté without weakness, consciousness without meditation, vision without thought. That is the human aspect of this life of nature ”

“ Up from the sunken vale,—his world that was,
And through its stony heart the black gash drawn.
So far his feet had pierced into the night,
Such labors done had stamped out all return,
Such grim despair had cut him from his kind;
And in the narrow onward what should lie
More than the bare couch of a lonely grave,
Where never one of men should find the place?
Then leaped the arrow in the open wound:
"Go, if thou wilt, O following with the stars
That rose with thy creation—unbeloved,
Inglorious, though love and fame without
None finds the wholesome uses of his life ”

“ There is no luxury of turf or anything garden-like in these precincts of earth and running waters and trees. There is no effeminacy in the palm. Severity is the artistic trait of everything in the desert. The long lines of the landscape here are rigid, solemn, sombre; the naked rock of the mountain ranges is stern, worn to the bone by wind and rain and sand; except for the diaphanous and veiling effects of atmosphere and heat, and the cloud and mist conditions that I have mentioned earlier, an austere sublimity governs the horizons and vistas all around. ”

“ Who does not remember some awakening moment when he first saw virtue and knew her for what she is? Sweet was it then to learn of some Jason of the golden fleece, some Lancelot of the tourney, some dying Sydney of the stricken field. There was a poignancy in this early knowledge that shall never be felt again; but who knows not that such enthusiasm which earliest exercised the young heart in noble feelings is the source of most of good that abides in us as years go on? In such boyish dreaming the soul learns to do and dare, hardens and supples itself, and puts on youthful beauty ”