Washington Allston

“ The scattered powers of human kind
In thy capacious soul combin'd;
Be thou the umpire of the strife,
And judge as thou wert still in life.
Thus bid, with grave becoming air,
Th' appointed judge assum'd the chair.
And now with modest-seeming air,
The rivals straight for speech prepare:
And thus, with hand upon his breast,
The Senior Ghost the Judge address'd:
The world, (if ought the world I durst
In this believe) did call me first
Of those, who by the magick play
Of harmonizing colours, sway
The gazer's sense with such surprise,
As make him disbelieve his eyes. ”

“ Would the Parthenon, for instance, with its beautiful forms,--made still more beautiful under its native sky,--seeming almost endued with the breath of life, as if its conscious purple were a living suffusion brought forth in sympathy by the enamoured blushes of a Grecian sunset;--would this beautiful object even then elevate the soul above its own roof? No: we should be filled with a pure delight,--but with no longing to rise still higher. It would satisfy us; which the sublime does not; for the feeling is too vast to be circumscribed by human content. ”

“ If ever the soul may be said to be intoxicated, it is then, when it feels the full power of a beautiful, bad woman. The fabled enchantments of the East are less strange and wonder-working than the marvellous changes which her spell has wrought. For a time every thought seems bound to her will; the eternal eye of the conscience closes before her; the everlasting truths of right and wrong sleep at her bidding; nay, things most gross and abhorred become suddenly invested with a seeming purity: till the whole mind is hers, and the bewildered victim, drunk with her charms, calls evil good. ”

“ The tongue of eloquence, the vital art
Of bold Prometheus, kindling at command
With breathing life the labours of his hand;
Yet shall the World thy daring high pretence
With scorn deride, for thou--hast common sense.
But dost thou, reckless of stern honour's laws,
Intemperate hunger for the World's applause?
Bid Nature hence; her fresh embow'ring woods,
Her lawns and fields, and rocks, and rushing floods,
And limpid lakes, and health-exhaling soil,
Elastick gales, and all the glorious toil
Of Heaven's own hand, with courtly shame discard,
And Fame shall triumph in her city bard. ”

“ But let another actor be added to the drama in the presiding Inquisitor, the cool methodizer of this process of torture; in an instant the scene is changed, and, strange to say, our feelings become less painful,--nay, we feel a momentary interest,--from an instant revulsion of our moral nature: we are lost in wonder at the excess of human wickedness, and the hateful wonder, as if partaking of the infinite, now distends the faculties to their utmost tension; for who can set bounds to passion when it seizes the whole soul? It is as the soul itself, without form or limit. ”

“ Like the moon, without atmosphere, brilliant and clear,
Yet doom'd, like the moon, with no being to cheer
The bright barren waste of her mind.
But rather than sit like a statue so still
When the rain made her mansion a pound,
Up and down would she go, like the sails of a mill,
And pat every stair, like a woodpecker's bill,
From the tiles of the roof to the ground.
One morn, as the maid from her casement inclin'd,
Pass'd a youth, with a frame in his hand.
The casement she clos'd--not the eye of her mind ”

“ So neither can a good act undo an ill one: a fearful truth! For good and evil have a moral life, which nothing in time can extinguish; the instant they exist, they start for Eternity. How, then, can a man who has once sinned, and who has not of himself cleansed his soul, be fit for heaven where no sin can enter? I seek not to enter into the mystery of the atonement, "which even the angels sought to comprehend and could not"; but I feel its truth in an unutterable conviction, and that, without it, all flesh must perish. ”

“ Seven days seven nights, with the shrieks of despair,
Did Ellen in torment convulse the dun air,
All covered with oil to the chin.
On the morn of the eighth on a huge sable stone
Then Ellen, all reeking, he laid;
With a rock for his muller he crush'd every bone,
But, though ground to jelly, still, still did she groan;
For life had forsook not the maid.
Now reaching his palette, with masterly care
Each tint on its surface he spread;
The blue of her eyes, and the brown of her hair,
And the pearl and the white of her forehead so fair,
And her lips' and her cheeks' rosy red. ”

“ This is but one of the thousand forms in which the human spirit is wont to effuse itself on the things without, making to the mind a new and fairer world,--even the shadowing of that which its immortal craving will sometimes dream of in the unknown future. Nay, there is scarcely an object so familiar or humble, that its magical touch cannot invest it with some poetic charm. Let us take an extreme instance,--a pig in his sty. The painter, Morland, was able to convert even this disgusting object into a source of pleasure,--and a pleasure as real as any that is known to the palate. ”

“ It is needless to dwell on the immeasurable mass of materials which a world like this may supply to the Artist.
The very thought of its vastness darkens into wonder. Yet how much deeper the wonder, when the created mind looks into itself, and contemplates the power of impressing its thoughts on all things visible; nay, of giving the likeness of life to things inanimate; and, still more marvellous, by the mere combination of words or colors, of evolving into shape its own Idea, till some unknown form, having no type in the actual, is made to seem to us an organized being. ”

“ For who, not hardened by vice, has ever looked upon a sleeping child in its first bloom of beauty, and seen its pure, fresh hues, its ever varying, yet according lines, moulding and suffusing, in their playful harmony, its delicate features,--who, not callous, has ever looked upon this exquisite creature, (so like what a poet might fancy of visible music, or embodied odors,) and has not felt himself carried, as it were, out of this present world, in quest of its moral counterpart? It seems to us perfect; we desire no change,--not a line or a hue but as it is ”

“ No poetic being, supposed of our species, ever lived to the imagination without some indication of the moral; it is the breath of its life: and this is also true in the converse; if there be but a hint of it, it will instantly clothe itself in a human shape; for the mind cannot separate them. In the whole range of the poetic creations of the great master of truth,--we need hardly say Shakspeare,--not an instance can be found where this condition of life is ever wanting; his men and women all have souls. ”

“ Of the nature and mode of operation of the Power to which we refer, we know, and can know, nothing; it is one of those secrets of our being which He who made us has kept to himself. And we should be content with the assurance, that we have in it a sure and intuitive guide to a reverent knowledge of the beauty and grandeur of his works,--nay, of his own adorable reality. And who shall gainsay it, should we add, that this mysterious Power is essentially immanent in that "breath of life," by which man becomes "a living soul"? ”

“ When we have basked in the beauty of a summer sunset, was there nothing in the sky that spoke to the soul of Truth and Goodness? And when the opening intellect first received the truth of the great law of gravitation, or felt itself mounting through the profound of space, to travel with the planets in their unerring rounds, did never then the kindred Ideas of Goodness and Beauty chime in, as it were, with the fabled music,--not fabled to the soul,--which led you on like one entranced? ”

“ As to some, they are never content if they do not find beauty, whatever the subject, though it may neutralize the character, if not render it ridiculous. Were Raffaelle, who seldom sought the purely beautiful, to be judged by the want of it, he would fall below Guido. But his object was much higher,--in the intellect and the affections; it was the human being in his endless inflections of thought and passion, in which there is little probability he will ever be approached. Yet false criticism has been as prodigal to him in the ascription of beauty, as parsimonious and unjust to many others. ”

“ If we are led to such an Idea, then, by any work of imagination, a poem, a picture, a statue, or a building, it is as truly sublime as any natural object. This, it appears to us, is the sole mystery, without which neither sound, nor color, nor form, nor magnitude, is a true correlative to the unseen cause. And here, as with Beauty, though the test of that be within us, is the modus operandi equally baffling to the scrutiny of the understanding. We feel ourselves, as it were, lifted from the earth, and look upon the outward objects that have so affected us, yet learn not how ”

“ In the Mosaic words so often quoted, "Let there be light, and there was light," we have the sublime of thought, of mere naked thought; but what could more awe the mind with the power of God? Of like nature is the conjecture of Newton, when he imagined stars so distant from the sun that their coeval light has not yet reached us. Let us endeavour for one moment to conceive of this; does not the soul seem to dilate within us, and the body to shrink as to a grain of dust? "Woe is me! unclean, unclean!" said the holy Prophet, when the Infinite Holiness stood before him. ”

“ Nay, is its source more intelligible where the feeling is more definite, when taking the form of a sense of harmony, as from something that diffuses, yet deepens, unbroken in its progress through endless variations, the melody as it were of the pleasurable object? Who has never felt, under certain circumstances, an expansion of the heart, an elevation of mind, nay, a striving of the whole being to pass its limited bounds, for which he could find no adequate solution in the objects around him,--the apparent cause? ”

“ In one sense, indeed, we may admit a human genus,--such as every man must be in his individual entireness.
Man has been called a microcosm, or little world. And such, however mean and contemptible to others, is man to himself; nay, such he must ever be, whether he wills it or not. He may hate, he may despise, yet he cannot but cling to that without which he is not; he is the centre and the circle, be it of pleasure or of pain; nor can he be other. Touch him with misery, and he becomes paramount to the whole world,--to a thousand worlds ”

“ And, though crime and misery may close the heart for years, and seal it up for ever to every redeeming thought, they cannot so shut out from the memory these gleams of innocence; even the brutified spirit, the castaway of his kind, has been made to blush at this enduring light; for it tells him of a truth, which might else have never been remembered,--that he has once been a man. ”

“ This being the case, how is it possible that it should not in some degree affect our feelings towards every one we meet,--that it should not leave some speck of leaven on each impression, which shall impregnate it with something that we admire and love, or else with that which we hate and despise?
And what is the most beautiful or the most ungainly form before a sorcerer like this, who can endow a fair simpleton with the rarest intellect, or transform, by a glance, the intellectual, noble-hearted dwarf to an angel of light? These, of course, are extreme cases. ”

“ As we follow the chain through this last region of disease, misery, and sin, of embodied Discord, and feel, as we must, in the mutilated affinities of its revolting forms, their fearful relation to this fair, harmonious creation,--how does the awful fact, in these its breathing fragments, speak to us of a fallen world!
As the living centre of this stupendous circle stands the Soul of Man; the conscious Reality, to which the vast inclosure is but the symbol. ”

“ But what is the truth of the Spirit but the Spirit itself,--the conscious I? which is never even thought of in connection with it. In what form, then, shall we recognize it? In its own,--the form of Life,--the life of the Human Being; that self-projecting, realizing power, which is ever present, ever acting and giving judgment on the instant on all things corresponding with its inscrutable self. We now assign it a distinctive epithet, and call it Human.
It is a common saying, that there is more in a name than we are apt to imagine. ”

“ It is that light which projects the shadow which is seen of the multitude, to be wondered at and reverenced, even while so little comprehended as to be often confounded with the substance,--the substance being admitted from the shadow, as a matter of faith. It is the economy of Providence to provide such lights: like rising and setting stars, they follow each other through successive ages: and thus the monumental form of Genius stands for ever relieved against its own imperishable shadow.
33. All excellence of every kind is but variety of truth. ”

“ And does it not at least hint of duties and affections towards the most deformed in body, the most depraved in mind,--of interminable consequences? If man were a mere animal, though the highest animal, could these inscrutable influences affect us as they do? Would not the animal appetites be our true and sole end? What even would Beauty be to the sated appetite? If it did not, as in the last instance, of the brutal husband, become an object of scorn,--which it could not be, from the necessary absence of moral obliquity,--would it be better than a picked bone to a gorged dog? ”

“ Shall we appeal to the artist? If he deserve the name, he will disdain the imputation that either wealth or fame has ever aided at the birth of his ideal offspring: it was Truth that smiled upon him, that made light his travail, that blessed their birth, and, by her fond recognition, imparted to his breast her own most pure, unimpassioned emotion. But, whatever mixed feeling, through the infirmity of the agent, may have influenced the artist, whether poet or painter, there can be but one feeling in the reader or spectator. ”