George Calvert

“ BALTIMORE, GEORGE CALVERT, 1st Baron (c. 1580–1632) , English statesman, son of Leonard Calvert, and Alice, daughter of John Crosland of Crosland, was born at Kipling in Yorkshire and educated at Trinity College, Oxford. After travelling on the continent, he entered the public service as secretary to Robert Cecil, afterwards earl of Salisbury. In 1606 he was appointed clerk of the crown in Connaught and Clare, in 1608 a clerk of the council, and was returned to parliament for Bossiney in 1609. ”

“ Through healthy sympathies and knowledge ample and ripe, through firm sense with artistic flexibility, through largeness of view and subtlety of insight, he enters upon it more than ordinarily empowered for its due discharge. He is at once what the French call fin and what the English call ”sound.” In literary work, in biographical work, in work æsthetical and critical, he delights, and he has a wide capacity of appropriation. The spirit of a book, a man, an age, he seizes quickly. With a nice perception of shades he catches the individual color of a mind or a production ”

“ Carlyle wearies with his ever-recurrent fallacy that might is right. In Heaven’s name, what are all the shams whose presence he so persistently bemoans,—worldly bishops, phantasm-aristocracies, presumptuous upstarts, shallow sway-wielding dukes,—what are all these, and much else, but so many exemplications of might that is not right? When might shall cease to bully, to trample on right, we shall be nearing Utopia. Utopia may be at infinite distance, not attainable by finite men ”

“ He taught them all by his life that a true Christian loves his enemies and does good to those who treat him badly. The man who founded the town of Providence and the state of Rhode Island was the friend both of white men and red because he lived the Golden Rule.
LORD BALTIMORE, CALVERT AND CLAIBORNE, THE THREE FATHERS OF MARYLAND GEORGE CALVERT, of Kipling, England, was such a fine man that he was beloved by king and people alike. King James gave him the title of “Sir” George Calvert, and made him Secretary of State. ”

“ Calvert with Beaufort and d'Azay were busily occupied, the French officers devoting themselves to the wants of the beautiful Miss Peggy Gary and Miss Molly Crenshawe, Calvert gravely seeing that the elderly Mrs. Mason, mother of Mr. Jefferson's great friend, Mr. George Mason, Mrs. Wythe, and other dowagers were bountifully supplied. It was like him to pass by the young beauties to attend upon those who had greater needs and less attractions. ”

“ I am aware that many historians consider the religious freedom of Maryland as originating in subsequent legislation, and claim the act of 1649 as the statute of toleration. I do not agree with them. Sir George Calvert had been a Protestant;—he became a Catholic. As a Catholic, he came to Virginia, and in the colony where he sought to settle, he found himself assailed, for the first time in his life, by Protestant virulence and incapacitation. ”

“ He marvelled, as did everyone who saw Pitt at this time, at the youth (he was but thirty-one) and the dignity of the Prime Minister of George III. Indeed, he moved among the company with a kind of cold splendor that sat strangely on so young a man, smacking of affectation somewhat, and which rather repelled than invited Calvert's admiration. This first impression Mr. Calvert had little reason to alter when, some weeks later, in company with Mr. Morris, he was presented to Mr. Pitt by the Duke of Leeds, and had the occasion of seeing and conversing with him at some length. ”

“ Carlyle overrating them,—a prejudicial one-sidedness in both cases. Leader and led are the complements the one of the other.
History is a growth, and a slow growth. Evils in one age painfully sow the seed that is to come up good in another. The historian, and still more the critical commentator on his own times, needs to be patient, calm, judicial, hopeful. Mr. Carlyle is impatient, fervid, willful, nay, despotic, and he is not hopeful, not hopeful enough. One healthily hopeful, and genuinely faithful, would not be ever betaking him to the past as a refuge from the present ”

“ Such writers deal with the known, with the best commonplace, not the common merely; and under the glance of genius the common grows strange and profound.
Some poets, not weak in poetic imagination, yet use it chiefly for secondary purposes, that is, for beautifying the dress, the externals of poetry. Minds with some breadth but with little depth are not thoroughly original. Their sense of the beautiful busies itself necessarily with that for which they have the readiest gifts ”

“ Mostly when people talk of style ‘t is of the surface; they think not of the depths beneath. In popularly good styles there are indeed no deep or fine springs beneath; in Tom Moore’s, for example, or Southey’s.
Nevertheless there are writers who have more skill and art than others in presenting agreeably what they have to say, in gracefully shaping their utterances; they are better endowed with some of the plastic faculties; they have what Sainte-Beuve calls the genius of style. Tact and craft enable them to make themselves more readable than some other writers of more substance ”

“ His mind is biographical, not historical; stronger in details than in generalization; more intuitive than scientific; critical, not constructive; literary, not philosophical. Mr. Carlyle is great at a picture, very great; he can fail in a survey or an induction. Wealth of thought, strokes of tenderness, clean insight into life, satire, irony, humor, make his least successful volumes to teem with passages noteworthy, beautiful, wise, as do his “Cromwell” and his “Frederick.” Such giants carrying nations on their broad fronts, Mr. ”

“ One cardinal feature of Lord Baltimore's colony found no expression either in the government of Durham or in his own charter. On their liberality in the question of religion the fame of both George and Cecilius Calvert most securely rests. While neither realized the sacredness of the principle of religious freedom, there is no doubt that both father and son possessed a liberality of feeling which placed them ahead of their age. Had policy been solely their motive, they would never have identified themselves with a persecuted and powerless sect in England. ”

“ His examination of the region being ended, Calvert went home to England, and in 1632, obtained the grant of Maryland from Charles I, the son of his royal patron and friend. The charter, which is said to have been the composition of Sir George, did not, however, pass the seals until after the death of its author; but was issued to his eldest son and heir, Cecilius, on the 20th of June, 1632. The life of Sir George had been one of uninterrupted personal and political success; his family was large, united and happy; if he did not inherit wealth, he, at least, contrived to secure it ”

“ After Calvert had given a satisfactory consideration, the Indians readily yielded a number of their houses, and retired to the others. Thus, on the 27th of March, 1634, the governor took peaceable possession of the country of Maryland, and gave to the town the name of St. Mary, and to the creek on which it was situate, the name of St. George. The desire of rendering justice to the natives by giving them a reasonable compensation for their lands, is a trait in the character of the first planters, which will always do honor to their memory. ”

“ Calvert averred that the young man who passed next to the window was the very man who stabbed George Colwan in the back, and she said she was willing to take her oath on it at any time when required, and was certain, if the wretch Ridsley saw him, that he would make oath to the same purport, for that his walk was so peculiar no one of common discernment could mistake it. ”

“ Writers weak in poetic imagination are not visited by those beaming thoughts that come unsummoned out of the invisible, like new stars which, out of the unfathomable deeps of the sky, dart suddenly upon the vision of the heaven-watcher. ”

“ It was a privilege,—the memory of which will last a life-time, to have been admitted into that gigantic temple of industry, there to behold in unimaginable profusion and variety the product of man’s labor, intellect, and genius, gathered from the four corners of the earth into one vast, gorgeous pile,—a spectacle peerless from its mere material splendor, and from its moral significance absolutely sublime. ”

“ Notwithstanding the bold utterances of Marion Calvert, the majority of the spectators looked with favor upon him, and there were many outspoken words in admiration of 198him. The crowd generally falls in with him who shows a fearless attitude, even if he slightly oversteps the line drawn for him, rather than the one who is weak and vacillating, though he represents the cause they intended to espouse. ”

“ Words are the counters of thought; speech is the vocalization of the soul; style is the luminous incarnation of reason and emotion. Thence it behooves scholars, the wardens of language, to keep over words a watch as keen and sleepless as a dutiful guardian keeps over his pupils. ”

“ He surrounds us with beauty; He envelops us in beauty. Beauty is spread out on the familiar grass, glows in the daily flower, glistens in the dew, waves in the commonest leafy branch. All about us, in infinite variety, beauty is lavished by God in sights and sounds, and odors. ”

“ There is no province of honorable human endeavor, no clean inlet opened by the senses or the intellect or the feelings, into which from that vast, deep, oceanic spring, the human soul, the beautiful does not send its fructifying tides. ”

“ Feeling, at its best, has an ascending movement, reaching up towards that high sphere where, through their conjunction, the earthly and the spiritual play in freedom in the sunshine of the beautiful. The surest test of the presence of poetry is buoyancy, springiness, which comes from the union, the divine union, of the spiritual and the beautiful. ”

“ The better to meet the question, What is poetry? we begin by putting before it another, and ask, Where is poetry? Poetry is in the mind. Landscapes, rainbows, sunsets, constellations, these exist not to the stag, the hare, the elephant. ”

“ Glittering on green lawns, glowing in sunsets, flashing through storm-clouds, gilding our wakeful hours, irradiating sleep, it is ever around, within us, eager to sweeten our labors, to purify our thoughts. Nature is a vast treasure-house of beauty, whereof the key is in the human heart. ”

“ The mass of objects and relations presented to us in nature the intellect can learn, count, and arrange; but the life that incessantly permeates the whole and every part, the spirit that looks out from every object and every fact,—of the range and pitch of whose power we have a faint token in the tornado and the earthquake,—of this divine essence we should not have even an intimation through the intellect alone. ”

“ It were a piece of vain flattery to pretend that this Work on Clothes entirely contents us; that it is not, like all works of genius, like the very sun, which, though the highest published creation, or work of genius, has nevertheless black spots and troubled nebulosities amid its effulgence,—a mixture of insight, inspiration, with dullness’ double-vision, and even utter blindness. ”

“ Without the spiritual fervor of the beautiful, your religion is narrow and superstitious, your science cramped and mortal, your life unripened. In the mind it kindles a flame that discloses the divinity there is in all things. Lightning bares to the awed vision the night-shrouded earth; more vivid than lightning, the flash of the beautiful reveals to the soul the presence of God. ”

“ Thus beauty only becomes visible—I might say only becomes actual—by the fire kindled through the meeting of a perfection out of us and an inward appetite therefor. And it is the flaming of this fire, thus kindled, that lights up to us the whole world wherein we live, the inward and the outward. This fire unlighted, and on the face of nature there is darkness, in our own minds there is darkness. For though all nature teems with the essence and the outward mold of beauty, to the unkindled mind beauty is no more present then was Banquo’s ghost to the guests of Macbeth. ”

“ On high, bare, or snow-covered mountains the sense of oppression comes in great part from the absence of sound. But stand in spring under a broad, sapful Norway maple, leafless as yet, its every twig and spray clad in tender green flowerets, and listen to the musical murmur of bees above you, full of life and promise, a heavenly harmony from unseen choristers. ”

“ Nature does not work so loosely. Rich is she, unspeakably rich, and as artful as she is profuse in the use of her riches. She delights in variety, thence her ineffable radiance, and much of her immeasurable efficiency. Diverseness in unity is a source of her power as well as of her beauty. Her wealth of material being infinite, her specifications are endless, countless, superfinely minute. Even no two of the commonest men does she make alike; her men of genius she diversifies at once grandly and delicately, broadly and subtly. ”

“ Had there ever before been heard in the world such accents, such a love of poverty, of self-divestment, such a hunger and thirst for justice, such eagerness to suffer for it, to be cursed of men in behalf of it, such an intrepid confidence in celestial recompense, such a forgiveness of injuries, and not simply forgiveness but a livelier feeling of charity for those who have injured you, who persecute and calumniate you, such a form of prayer and of familiar address to the Father who is in heaven? ”