The Certainty Of Being Alone

Hippolyte Taine, A Tour Through the Pyrenees, tr. J. Safford Fiske (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1875), 149-51:

This valley is solitary and out of the world; it is without culture; no tourists, not even herdsmen are to be found; three or four cows, perhaps, are there, busily cropping the herbage. Other gorges at the sides of the road and in the mountain of Gourzy are still wilder. There the faint trace of an ancient pathway may with difficulty be made out. Can anything be sweeter than the certainty of being alone? In any widely known spot, you are in constant dread of an incursion of tourists; the hallooing of guides, the loud-voiced admiration, the bustle, whether of fastening horses, or of unpacking provisions, or of airing opinions, all disturb the budding sensation; civilization recovers its hold upon you. But here, what security and what silence! nothing that recalls man; the landscape is just what it has been these six thousand years: the grass grows useless and free as on the first day; no birds among the branches; only now and then may be heard the far-off cry of a soaring hawk. Here and there the face of a huge, projecting rock patches with a dark shade the uniform plane of the trees: it is a virgin wilderness in its severe beauty. The soul fancies that it recognizes unknown friends of long ago; the forms and colors are in secret harmony with it; when it finds these pure, and that it enjoys them unmixed with outside thought, it feels that it is entering into its inmost and calmest depth—a sensation so simple, after the tumult of our ordinary thoughts, is like the gentle murmur of an Æolian harp after the hubbub of a ball.

Life's Endless Toil

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Day is Done (composed in 1844, and pub. in 1845 as an intro. to a compiled volume of lyrics Longfellow himself did; it was prefixed to a collection he titled The Waif):

                The day is done, and the darkness
                      Falls from the wings of Night,
                As a feather is wafted downward
                      From an eagle in his flight.

                I see the lights of the village
                      Gleam through the rain and the mist,
                And a feeling of sadness comes o'er me
                      That my soul cannot resist:

                A feeling of sadness and longing,
                      That is not akin to pain,
                And resembles sorrow only
                      As the mist resembles the rain.

                Come, read to me some poem,
                      Some simple and heartfelt lay,
                That shall soothe this restless feeling,
                      And banish the thoughts of day.

                Not from the grand old masters,
                      Not from the bards sublime,
                Whose distant footsteps echo
                      Through the corridors of Time.

                For, like strains of martial music,
                      Their mighty thoughts suggest
                Life's endless toil and endeavour;
                      And to-night I long for rest.

                Read from some humbler poet,
                      Whose songs gushed from his heart,
                As showers from the clouds of summer,
                      Or tears from the eyelids start;

                Who, through long days of labour,
                      And nights devoid of ease,
                Still heard in his soul the music
                      Of wonderful melodies.

                Such songs have power to quiet
                      The restless pulse of care,
                And come like the benediction
                      That follows after prayer.

                Then read from the treasured volume
                      The poem of thy choice,
                And lend to the rhyme of the poet
                      The beauty of thy voice.

                And the night shall be filled with music,
                      And the cares, that infest the day,
                Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs,
                      And as silently steal away.

No Letter

Aphra Behn (1640-1689), The Love-Letters between a Nobleman and his Sister, pt. I., 1st letter to Sylvia:

                    I have lived a whole Day
                    and yet no Letter from Sylvia.

Weariness

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Weariness:

 

Mine eyes are weary of surveying

The fairest things, too soon decaying;

Mine ears are weary of receiving

The kindest words—ah, past believing!

Weary my hope, of ebb and flow;

Weary my pulse, of tunes of woe:

My trusting heart is weariest!

I would—I would, I were at rest!

For me, can earth refuse to fade?

For me, can words be faithful made?

Will my embitter’d hope be sweet?

My pulse forego the human beat?

No! Darkness must consume mine eye—

Silence, mine ear—hope cease—pulse die—

And o’er mine heart a stone be press’d—

Or vain this,—‘Would I were at rest!’

There is a land of rest deferr’d:

Nor eye hath seen, nor ear hath heard,

Nor Hope hath trod the precinct o’er;

For hope beheld is hope no more!

There, human pulse forgets its tone—

There, hearts may know as they are known!

Oh, for dove’s wings, thou dwelling blest.

To fly to thee, and be at rest!

The Dark Of Night

Anna Wertz, “The Genesis of Hans Blumenberg’s Legitimacy of the Modern Age” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, Spring 2003), 12:

. . . while Blumenberg’s work continued to earn him growing public attention, the man himself became increasingly harder to find. He spent a good deal of his life in partial hiding, preferring to work in the dark of night and sometimes spending long stretches of time without seeing anyone, let alone giving interviews—the last photograph taken of him is from 1960.

That The Modern World Is Both Christian And Un-Christian

Karl Löwith, Meaning In History: Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1949), 200-2:

The communities of modern times are neither religiously pagan nor Christian; they are decidedly secular, i.e., secularized, and only so far, by derivation, are they still Christian. The old churches of modern cities are no longer the outstanding centers of the communal life but strange islands immersed in the business centers. In our modern world everything is more or less Christian and, at the same time, un-Christian: the first if measured by the standard of classical antiquity, the second if measured by the standard of genuine Christianity. The modern world is as Christian as it is un-Christian because it is the outcome of an age-long process of secularization. Compared with the pagan world before Christ, which was in all its aspects religious and superstitious and therefore a suitable object of Christian apologetics, our modern world is worldly and irreligious and yet dependent on the Christian creed from which it is emancipated. The ambition to be ‘‘creative’’ and the striving for a future fulfilment reflect the faith in creation and consummation, even when these are held to be irrelevant myths.

Radical atheism, too, which is, however, as rare as radical faith, is possible only within a Christian tradition; for the feeling that the world is thoroughly godless and godforsaken presupposes the belief in a transcendent Creator-God who cares for his creatures. To the Christian apologists, the pagans were atheists not because they did not believe in any divinity at all but because they were ‘‘polytheistic atheists.’’ To the pagans the Christians were atheists because they believed in only one single God transcending the universe and the city-state, that is, everything that the ancients had consecrated. The fact that the Christian God has ruled out all the popular gods and protecting spirits of the pagans created the possibility of a radical atheism; for, if the Christian belief in a God who is as distinct from the world as a creator is from his creatures and yet is the source of every being is once discarded, the world becomes emancipated and profane as it never was for the pagans. If the universe is neither eternal and divine, as it was for the ancients, nor transient but created, as it is for the Christians, there remains only one aspect: the sheer contingency of its mere ‘‘existence.’’ The post-Christian world is a creation without creator, and a saeculum (in the ecclesiastical sense of this term) turned secular for lack of religious perspective.

Tocqueville On The Indians, The Americans, & The Virtues & Vices Of The Latter

Alexis de Tocqueville, “A Fortnight in the Wilderness, 1831,” in Memoir, Letters, and Remains of Alexis de Tocqueville, the translator unnamed (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1862), 139-140, 141-3, 145-6, 149, 152-154:

One of the things we were most curious about on arriving in America, was to visit the extreme limits of European civilization; and, if we had time, even some of the Indian tribes which have preferred flying to the wildest deserts to accommodating themselves to what the white man calls the enjoyments of social life. . . .  «And what has become of the Indians?» I asked. «The Indians,» replied our host, «are gone I know not whither, beyond the great lakes; the race is becoming extinct; they are not made for civilization—it kills them.»

Man becomes accustomed to everything,—to death on the battle-field, to death in the hospital, to kill and to suffer. Use familiarizes all scenes. An ancient people, the first and legitimate masters of the American continent, melts away every day from the earth, as snow before the sun, and disappears. Another race rises up in its place with still more astonishing rapidity; before this race the forests fall, the marshes dry up; vast rivers, and lakes extensive as seas, in vain oppose its triumph and progress. Deserts become villages—villages towns. The American who daily witnesses these marvels sees nothing surprising in them. This wonderful destruction, and still more astonishing progress, seem to him to be the ordinary course of events. He considers them as laws of nature. [...]

These Indians were short; their limbs, so far as could be seen under their clothes, were meagre; their skins, instead of being, as is generally supposed, a red copper color, were dark, almost like those of mulattoes. Their black and shining hair fell straight down their necks and shoulders. Their mouths were in general immoderately large. The mean and malicious expression of their countenances showed the depth of depravity which a long abuse of the benefits of civilization alone can give. One would have taken them for men from the dregs of our great European towns; and yet they were savages. With the vices which they had caught from us was mixed a rude barbarism, which made them a hundred times more revolting. These Indians were unarmed; they wore European clothes, but put on in a different way from ours. It was evident that they were unaccustomed to them, and that they felt imprisoned in their folds. To the ornaments of Europe they joined barbarous finery, feathers, enormous ear-rings, and necklaces of shells. Their movements were quick and irregular; their voices sharp and discordant, their looks wild and restless. At first sight they might have been taken for wild animals, tamed to resemble men, but still brutal. These feeble and degraded creatures belonged, however, to one of the most celebrated tribes of ancient America. We had before us, and it is a sad fact, the last remains of the famous confederation of the Iroquois, whose manly sense was as renowned as their courage, and who long held the balance between the two greatest European nations.

Still it would be wrong to judge of the Indian race from this imperfect specimen; the cuttings of a wild tree which has grown up in the mud of our towns. We ourselves made this mistake, and afterwards had to correct it. [...]

When we returned to the town we talked to several people of the young Indian. We spoke of his [i.e., of an Indian's] imminent danger; we offered to pay his expenses in an inn. It was useless. We could persuade no one to care about him. Some said: «These men are accustomed to drink to excess, and to sleep on the ground; and they do not die of such accidents.» Others owned that the Indian probably would die; but evidently there rose to their lips the half-expressed thought: What is the life of an Indian? Such was the general feeling. In this society, so proud of its morality and philanthropy, one meets with complete insensibility, with a cold, uncompassionating egotism, when the aborigines are in question. The inhabitants of the United States do not hunt the Indians with cries and horns as the Spaniards used to do in Mexico. But an unpitying instinct inspires here as elsewhere the European race.

How often in the course of our travels we met with honest citizens, who said to us, as they sat quietly in the evening at their firesides, «every day the number of the Indians is diminishing; it is not that we often make war upon them, but the brandy which we sell to them at a low price, carries off every year more than our arms could destroy. This western world belongs to us,» they added; «God, by refusing to these first inhabitants the power of civilization, has predestined them to destruction. The true owners of this continent are those who know how to turn its resources to account.»

Satisfied by this reasoning, the American goes to church to hear a minister of the gospel repeat to him that all men are brothers, and that the Almighty, who made them all on the same model, has imposed on all the duty of helping each other. [...]

In America, more even than in Europe, there is but one society, whether rich or poor, high or low, commercial or agricultural; it is everywhere composed of the same elements. It has all been raised or reduced to the same level of civilization. The man whom you left in the streets of New York you find again in the solitude of the Far West; the same dress, the same tone of mind, the same language, the same habits, the same amusements. No rustic simplicity, nothing characteristic of the wilderness, nothing even like our villages. This peculiarity may be easily explained. The portions of territory first and most fully peopled have reached a high degree of civilization. Education has been prodigally bestowed; the spirit of equality has tinged with singular uniformity the domestic habits. Now, it is remarkable that the men thus educated are those who every year migrate to the desert. In Europe a man lives and dies where he was born. In America you do not see the representatives of a race grown and multiplied in retirement, having long lived unknown to the world, and left to its own efforts. The inhabitants of an isolated region arrived yesterday, bringing with them the habits, ideas, and wants of civilization. They adopt only so much of savage life as is absolutely forced upon them; hence you see the strangest contrasts. You step from the wilderness into the streets of a city, from the wildest scenes to the most smiling pictures of civilized life. If night does not surprise you and force you to sleep under a tree, you may reach a village where you will find everything; even French fashions, and caricatures from Paris. The shops of Buffalo or Detroit are as well supplied with all these things as those of New York. The looms of Lyons work for both alike. You leave the high road, you plunge into paths scarcely marked out; you come at length upon a ploughed field, a hut built of rough logs, lighted by a single narrow window; you think that you have at last reached the abode of an American peasant: you are wrong. You enter this hut which looks the abode of misery; the master is dressed as you are; his language is that of the towns. On his rude table are books and newspapers; he takes you hurriedly aside to be informed of what is going on in Europe, and asks you what has most struck you in his country. He will trace on paper for you the plan of a campaign in Belgium, and will teach you gravely what remains to be done for the prosperity of France. You might take him for a rich proprietor, come to spend a few nights in a shootingbox. And, in fact, the log-hut is only a halting-place for the American, a temporary submission to necessity. As soon as the surrounding fields are thoroughly cultivated, and their owner has time to occupy himself with superfluities, a more spacious and suitable dwelling will succeed the log-hut, and become the home of a large family of children, who, in their turn, will some day build themselves a dwelling in the wilderness.

To cross almost impenetrable forests; to swim deep rivers; to encounter pestilential marshes; to sleep exposed to the damp air of the woods;—these are efforts which an American easily conceives, if a dollar is to be gained by them—that is the point. But that a man should take such journeys from curiosity, he cannot understand. Besides, dwelling in a wilderness, he prizes only man's work. He sends you to visit a road, a bridge, a pretty village; but that you should admire large trees, or wild scenery, is to him incomprehensible. We could make no one understand us.

[...] We were beside ourselves with joy at the prospect of at length finding a place which the torrent of European civilization had not yet invaded.

The appearance of the master of this dwelling is as remarkable as his abode. His sharp muscles and slender limbs, show him at the first glance to be a native of New England; his make indicates that he was not born in the desert. His first years were passed in the heart of an intellectual and cultivated society. Choice impelled him to the toilsome and savage life for which he did not seem intended. But if his physical strength seems unequal to his undertaking; on his features, furrowed by care, is seated an expression of practical intelligence, and of cold and persevering energy. His first years were passed in the heart of an intellectual and cultivated society. Choice impelled him to the toilsome and savage life for which he did not seem intended. But if his physical strength seems unequal to his undertaking, on his features, furrowed by care, is seated an expression of practical intelligence, and of cold and persevering energy. His step is slow and measured, his speech deliberate, and his appearance austere. Habit, and still more pride, have given to his countenance a stoical rigidity, which was belied by his conduct. The pioneer despises (it is true) all that most violently agitates the hearts of men; his fortune or his life will never hang on the turn of a die, or the smiles of a woman; but to obtain competence he has braved exile, solitude, and the numberless ills of savage life; he has slept on the bare earth, he has exposed himself to the fever of the woods, and the Indian’s tomahawk. Many years ago he took the first step. He has never gone back; perhaps twenty years hence he will still be going on without desponding or complaining. Can a man capable of such sacrifices be cold and insensible? Is he not influenced by a passion, not of the heart but of the brain, ardent, persevering, and indomitable? His whole energies concentrated in the desire to make his fortune, the emigrant at length succeeds in making for himself an entirely independent existence, into which even his domestic affections are absorbed. He may be said to look on his wife and children only as detached parts of himself. Deprived of habitual intercourse with his equals, he has learnt to take pleasure in solitude. When you appear at the door of his lonely dwelling, the pioneer steps forward to meet you; he holds out his hand in compliance with custom, but his countenance expresses neither kindness nor joy. He speaks only to question you, to gratify his intelligence, not his heart; and as soon as he has obtained from you the news that he wanted to hear he relapses into silence. One would take him for a man who, having been all day wearied by applicants and by the noise of the world, has retired home at night to rest. If you question him in turn, he will give you in a clear manner all the information you require; he will even provide for your wants, and will watch over your safety as long as you are under his roof; but, in all that he does there is so much constraint and dryness; you perceive in him such utter indifference as to the result of your undertakings, that your gratitude cools. Still the settler is hospitable in his own way, but there is nothing genial in his hospitality, because, while he exercises it, he seems to submit to one of the painful necessities of the wilderness; it is to him a duty of his position, not a pleasure. This unknown person is the representative of the race to which belongs the future of the New World; a restless, speculating, adventurous race, that performs coldly feats which are usually the result of passionate enthusiasm; a nation of conquerors, who endure savage life without feeling its peculiar charms, value in civilized life only its material comforts and advantages, and bury themselves in the wilds of America, provided only with an axe and a file of newspapers! A mighty race which, as is the case with all great nations, is governed by one idea, and directs its sole efforts to the acquisition of wealth with a perseverance and contempt for life which might be called heroic, if such a term could be applied to any but virtuous efforts. A migratory race, which neither rivers nor lakes can stop, before which the forest falls and the prairie becomes covered with foliage, and which, having reached the Pacific Ocean, will retrace its steps to disturb and to destroy the social communities which it will have formed and left behind.

Haeckel, Darwin, And The Idiot-Physiognomy

Wilhelm Bölsche, Haeckel: His Life and Work, tr. Joseph McCabe (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1906), 146-7:

Darwin was never a handsome man from the æsthetic point of view. When he wanted to sail with Fitz-Roy, it was a very near question whether the splenetic captain would not reject him because he did not like his nose. His forehead had so striking a curve that Lombroso, the expert, could put him down as having «the idiot-physiognomy» in his Genius and Insanity. At the time when he wrote the Origin of Species he had not the patriarchal beard that is inseparable from his image in our minds; he was bald, and his chin clean shaved. The prematurely bent form of the invalid could never have had much effect in such a place, no matter what respect was felt for him. Haeckel, young and handsome, was an embodiment of the mens sana in corpore sano. He rose above the grey heads of science, as the type of the young, fresh, brilliant generation. It was an opponent at this Congress, who sharply attacked the new ideas, that spoke of the «colleague in the freshness of youth» who had brought forward the subject. He brought with him the highest thing that a new idea can associate with: the breath of a new generation, of a youth that greets all new ideas with a smiling courage. Behind this was the thought of Darwin himself, a wave that swept away all dams.

‘‘Progress,’’ Hopelessness, France, And Flaubert

Karl Löwith, Meaning In History: Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1949), 96-97:

It took, however, only a few generations among the most enlightened nations to realize the hopelessness of all scientific progress toward a civilized barbarism. In the midst of frantic progress by means of scientific inventions in the middle of the nineteenth century, a mood of aimlessness and despair cast its first shadow upon Europe’s most advanced minds; for the very progress seemed to proceed toward nothingness. In France this nihilism found its most sophisticated expression in the writings of Flaubert and Baudelaire. Having exposed, in the Temptation of St. Anthony, all sorts of current beliefs and superstitions, Flaubert set about to disentangle and analyze the chaos of our modern, scientific culture. He made a list of human follies, intended as an ironical glorification of all that had passed for truth. The result of these absurd studies was the novel Bouvard et Pécuchet—the story of two Philistines, sincerely striving for their higher education; good-natured men of sense, who had been office clerks. In their happily acquired country seat they ramble through the entire maze of piled-up knowledge, from horticulture, chemistry, and medicine to history, archeology, politics, pedagogy, and philosophy—only to return to their copying, now making extracts from the books which they had perused in vain. The whole work leads to the conclusion that our entire scientific education is inane. Doctrines of age-long standing are expounded and developed in a few lines, then they are disposed of by other doctrines which are arraigned against them and then destroyed in turn with equal precision and passion. Page after page, line after line, some new kind of knowledge turns up; but at once another appears to knock the first one down, and then it, too, topples over, hit by a third. At the end of the unfinished sketch, Pécuchet draws a gloomy picture, Bouvard a rosy one, of the future of European mankind. According to the one, the end of the debased human race, sunk into general depravity, approaches. There are three alternative possibilities: (1) radicalism severs every tie with the past, entailing inhuman despotism; (2) if theistic absolutism is victorious, liberalism, with which mankind has been imbued since the French Revolution, will perish, and a revolutionary change will take place; (3) if the convulsions of 1789 continue, their waves will carry us away, and there will no longer be ideals or religion or morality: “America will conquer the world.” According to the second picture, Europe will be rejuvenated with the aid of Asia, and there will develop undreamed-of techniques of communication, U-boats, and balloons; new sciences will be born, enabling man to place the powers of the universe at the service of civilization and, when the earth is exhausted, to emigrate to other stars. Together with human wants, evil will cease, and philosophy will become religion.

The Dark Ages?

Auguste Comte, The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, tr. Harriet Martineau (London: George Bell and Sons, 1896), vol. III., 123:

We shall see that the entire spiritual movement of modern times is referrible to that memorable season in human history, which Protestantism is pleased to call the dark ages. . . . It is an exaggeration also to attribute to the Germanic invasions the retardation of intellectual development during the Middle Ages; for the decline was taking place for centuries before the invasions were of any engrossing importance. . . .

Full Of Divinity

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, The System of Economic Contradictions; or, The Philosophy of Poverty, tr. Benjamin R. Tucker (1888), vol. I., Intro., pt. III.:

I need the hypothesis of God to justify my style.

In my ignorance of everything regarding God, the world, the soul, and destiny; forced to proceed like the materialist, — that is, by observation and experience, — and to conclude in the language of the believer, because there is no other; not knowing whether my formulas, theological in spite of me, would be taken literally or figuratively; in this perpetual contemplation of God, man, and things, obliged to submit to the synonymy of all the terms included in the three categories of thought, speech, and action, but wishing to affirm nothing on either one side or the other, — rigorous logic demanded that I should suppose, no more, no less, this unknown that is called God. We are full of Divinity, Jovis omnia plena; our monuments, our traditions, our laws, our ideas, our languages, and our sciences, all are infected by this indelible superstition outside of which we can neither speak nor act, and without which we do not even think.

God's Closet: Solitude

William Rounseville Alger, The Solitudes of Nature and of Man; or, The Loneliness of Human Life (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1867), 146-148:

To be ignorant of yourself, uneasy and exacting, is to be repulsive no less than miserable. Who would enjoy the world, must move through it detached from it, coming into it from a superior position. He must not be weakly dependent on his fellows, but say to himself, Cannot God, the Universe and I, make my life a rich, self-sufficing thing here in time? To command love we must not be dependent on it; a tragical truth for those who have most need of love. The way to self-sufficingness is the way to public conquest. Happy in the closet is winsome in the crowd. The king of solitude is also the king of society. The reverse, however, is not so true. Many an applauded domineerer of the forum, many a brilliant enchantress of the assembly, when alone, is gnawed by insatiable passions, groans restlessly under the recoil of disappointment. William von Humboldt wrote to his friend Charlotte, «There are few who understand the value of solitude, and how many advantages it offers, especially to women, who are more apt than men to wreck themselves on petty disquietudes.» Self-inspection, self-purification, self-subdual to the conditions of noble being and experience, these form the fitting occupation of our solitary hours. Yet, self must not be the conspicuous object of our contemplation, but great truths and sentiments, moral and religious principles, nature, humanity, and God, the perennial fountains of fresh and pure life. He who follows this course is best qualified to read and interpret the secrets of other souls. He is likewise best fitted to master the world, in the only sense in which a good man will wish to master it. There is no more efficacious mode of observing mankind, than as they are seen from the loop-holes of retreat, and mirrored in our own consciousness. In relation to what is deep and holy, as compared with each other, society is a concealer, solitude a revealer: much, hidden from us in that, is shown to us in this. Amidst a festival the moonlight streams on the wall; but it is unnoticed while the lamps blaze, and the guests crowd and chatter. But when the gossipers go, and the lights are put out then, unveiled of the glare and noise, that silvery illumination from heaven grows visible, and the lonely master of the mansion becomes conscious of the visionary companionship of another world. Solitude is God's closet. It is the sacred auditorium of the secrets of the spiritual world. In this whispering-gallery without walls, tender and reverential spirits are fond of hearkening for those occult tones, divine soliloquies, too deep within or too faintly far ever anywhere else to suffer their shy meanings to be caught. Given a suffciently sensitive intelligence to apprehend the revelations, and every moment of time is surcharged with expressiveness, every spot of space babbles ineffable truths. Silence itself is the conversation of God. We know that in the deepest apparent stillness sounds will betray themselves to those who have finer sense and pay keener attention than ordinary. On the Alps, when everything seems so deathly quiet in the darkness, place your ear at the surface of the ice, and you may catch the tinkle of rivulets running all through the night in the veins and hollows of the frozen hills. Has not the soul too its buried streams of feeling whose movements only the most absorbed listening, in the most hushed moments, can distinguish?

What is it to subject a thing, save to extricate yourself from it, rise apart, and command it from a higher position? To overcome the world it is indispensable first to overlook the world from some private vantage-ground quietly aloof. Would you lift the soul above the petty passions that pester and ravage it, and survey the prizes, the ills, and the frets of ordinary life in their proper perspective of littleness? Accustom yourself to go forth at night, alone, and study the landscape of immensity; gaze up where eternity unveils her starry face and looks down forever without a word. These exercises, their lessons truly learned, so far from making us hate the society of our fellow-creatures, or foolishly suffer from its annoyances, will fit us wisely to enjoy its blessings; be masters of its honors, not victims of its penalties. If to be alone breeds in us a sullen taciturnity, it is proof that we are already bad characters. The more a misanthrope is dissociated from men, the more he loathes them; the longer a pure and loving soul is kept from them, the intenser is his longing to be united with them. None are so bitter and merciless, so abounding in sneers and sarcasms about society and its occupants, as those most thoroughly familiarized and hardened in its routine.

Realms Of Peace And Love

From Georg Friedrich Händel's Jephtha, verses (libretto) by Rev. Thomas Morell:

        In gentle murmurs will I mourn,
        as mourns the mate‐forsaken dove:
        And sighing wish thy dear return
        to liberty and lasting love. [...]

        the sight of thee, my love,
        drives darkness and despair.
        Again I live; in thy sweet smiles I live,
        as in thy father’s ever‐watchful care
        our wretched nation feels new life, new joy.
        O haste, and make my happiness complete! [...]

        Dull delay, in piercing anguish,
        bids thy faithful lover languish.
        While he pants for bliss in vain.
        Oh! With gentle smiles relieve me;
        let no more false hope deceive me,
        nor vain fears inflict a pain. [...]

        How dark, O Lord, are thy decrees!
        All hid from mortal sight!
        All our joys to sorrow turning,
        and our triumphs into mourning,
        as the night succeeds the day;
        no certain bliss, no solid peace,
        we mortals know on earth below.
        Yet on this maxim still obey:
        whatever is, is right.

        Farewell, ye limpid springs and floods,
        ye flow'ry meads and leafy woods;
        farewell, thou busy world, where reign
        short hours or joy, and years of pain.
        Brighter scenes I seek above,
        in the realms of peace and love.

Conversation With The Dead

Letter from Alexander Pope to Mr. Gay, October 1, 1730:

 

I AM something like the sun at this season, withdrawing from the world, but meaning it mighty well, and resolving to shine whenever I can again. But I fear the clouds of a long winter will overcome me to such a degree, that any body will take a farthing candle for a better guide, and more serviceable company. My friends may remember my brighter days, but will think (like the Irish-man) that the moon is a better thing when once I am gone. I do not say this with any allusion to my poetical capacity as a son of Apollo, but in my companionable one, (if you will suffer me to use a phrase of the Earl of Clarendon's,) for I shall see or be seen of few of you this winter. I am grown too faint to do any good, or to give any pleasure. I not only, as Dryden finely says, feel my notes decay as a poet, but feel my spirits flag as a companion, and shall return again to where I first began, my books. I have been putting my library in order, and enlarging the chimney in it, with equal intention to warm my mind and body, if I can, to some life. A friend (a woman friend, God help me!) with whom I have spent three or four hours a day these fifteen years, advised me to pass more time in my studies: I reflected, she must have found some reason for this admonition, and concluded she would complete all her kindnesses to me by returning me to the employment I am fittest for; conversation with the dead, the old, and the worm-eaten.

 

Desolating Loss

Herman Hooker, Uses of Adversity, and the Provisions of Consolation (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1850), 105-7, 109-10:

We had a friend loved and lovely. He had genius and learning. He had all qualities, great and small, blending in a most attractive whole—a character as much to be loved as admired, as truly gentle as it was great, and so combining opposite excellences, that each was beautified by the other. Between him and her who survives him there was a reciprocity of taste and sympathy—a living in each other, so that her thoughts seemed but the pictures of his—her mind but a glass that showed the very beauty that looked into it, or rather became itself that beauty—dying in his dying she did not all die. Her love, the heart's animation, lifted her up; her sense of loss was merged for a while in her love and confidence of his good estate. In strong and trusting thoughts of him as a happy spirit, and of God as his and her portion, she rested as in a cloud. A falling from this elevation was truly a coming to one's self from God—a leaving of heaven for earth. Let her tell the rest in words as beautiful as they are true to nature: «My desolating loss I realise more and more. For many weeks his peaceful and triumphant departure left such an elevating influence on my mind, that I could only think of him as a pure and happy spirit. But now my feelings have become more selfish, and I long for the period to arrive, when I may lie down by his side, and be reunited in a nobler and more enduring union than even that which was ours here.» [...]

If there is anything about us which good hearts will reverence, it is our grief on the loss of those we love. It is a condition in which we seem to be smitten by a Divine hand, and thus made sacred. It is a grief, too, which greatly enriches the heart, when rightly borne. There may be no rebellion of the will, the sweetest sentiments towards God and our fellow-beings may be deepened, and still the desolation caused in the treasured sympathies and hopes of the heart gives a new colour to the entire scene of life. The dear affections which grew out of the consanguinities and connexions of life, next to those we owe to God, are the most sacred of our being; and if the hopes and revelations of a future state did not come to our aid, our grief would be immoderate and inconsolable, when these relations are broken by death.

Without You

A sonnet, Nature, by Luís de Camões (1524-1580), translated by William Baer (Selected Sonnets, University of Chicago Press, 2005, 40-41):

            The beauty of the sweet, fresh mountains here,
            the shade of the green chestnut trees, the pace
            of all the gently crawling streams, this place
            where all one's sadness seems to disappear.

            The hoarse sounds of the sea, the lands that lie
            below, the sun hiding near the hills, the last
            of the lingering cattle slowly moving past,
            the clouds still gently warring in the sky.

            But, finally, all these beauties of nature, pouring
            forth their various splendors, only create
            harsh fresh wounds since you're not here with me.

            Without you, everything is disgusting, and boring;
            without you, I feel, even within this great
            natural happiness, the greatest possible misery.

            A fermosura desta fresca serra
            e a sombra dos verdes castanheiros,
            o manso caminhar destes ribeiros,
            donde toda a tristeza se desterra;

            o rouco som do mar, a estranha terra,
            o esconder do sol pelos outeiros,
            o recolher dos gados derradeiros,
            das nuvens pelo ar a branda guerra;

            enfim, tudo o que a rara natureza
            com tanta variedade nos of'rece,
            me está, se não te vejo, magoando.

            Sem ti, tudo me enoja e me avorrece;
            sem ti, perpetuamente estou passando,
            nas mores alegrias, mór tristeza.

The Dilettante VS. The Artist Of Real Genius

Friedrich Schiller, Æsthetical and Philosophical Essays, ed. Nathan Haskell Dole (Boston: F. A. Niccolls & Company, 1902), 251-253:

I believe this to be the test to distinguish the mere dilettante from the artist of real genius. The seductive charm exercised by the sublime and the beautiful, the fire which they kindle in the young imagination, the apparent ease with which they place the senses under an illusion, have often persuaded inexperienced minds to take in hand the palette or the harp, and to transform into figures or to pour out in melody what they felt living in their heart. Misty ideas circulate in their heads, like a world in formation, and make them believe that they are inspired. They take obscurity for depth, savage vehemence for strength, the undetermined for the infinite, what has not senses for the super-sensuous. And how they revel in these creations of their brain! But the judgment of the connoisseur does not confirm this testimony of an excited self-love. With his pitiless criticism he dissipates all the prestige of the imagination and of its dreams, and carrying the torch before these novices he leads them into the mysterious depths of science and life, where, far from profane eyes, the source of all true beauty flows ever towards him who is initiated. If now a true genius slumbers in the young aspirant, no doubt his modesty will at first receive a shock; but soon the consciousness of real talent will embolden him for the trial. If nature has endowed him with gifts for plastic art, he will study the structure of man with the scalpel of the anatomist; he will descend into the lowest depths to be true in representing surfaces, and he will question the whole race in order to be just to the individual. If he is born to be a poet, he examines humanity in his own heart to understand the infinite variety of scenes in which it acts on the vast theatre of the world. He subjects imagination and its exuberant fruitfulness to the discipline of taste, and charges the understanding to mark out in its cool wisdom the banks that should confine the raging waters of inspiration. He knows full well that the great is only formed of the little—from the imperceptible. He piles up, grain by grain, the materials of the wonderful structure, which, suddenly disclosed to our eyes, produces a startling effect and turns our head. But if nature has only intended him for a dilettante, difficulties damp his impotent zeal, and one of two things happens: either he abandons, if he is modest, that to which he was diverted by a mistaken notion of his vocation; or, if he has no modesty, he brings back the ideal to the narrow limits of his faculties, for want of being able to enlarge his faculties to the vast proportions of the ideal. Thus the true genius of the artist will be always recognized by this sign—that when most enthusiastic for the whole, he preserves a coolness, a patience defying all obstacles, as regards details. Moreover, in order not to do any injury to perfection, he would rather renounce the enjoyment given by the completion. For the simple amateur, it is the difficulty of means that disgusts him and turns him from his aim; his dreams would be to have no more trouble in producing than he had in conception and intuition.

First Affections

William Wordsworth, Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood:

         [...] High instincts before which our mortal Nature
                Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised:
                      But for those first affections,
                      Those shadowy recollections,
                Which, be they what they may
                Are yet the fountain-light of all our day,
                Are yet a master-light of all our seeing;
                    Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
                Our noisy years seem moments in the being
                Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake,
                    To perish never;
                Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour,
                      Nor Man nor Boy,
                Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
                Can utterly abolish or destroy! [...]
                    Though nothing can bring back the hour
                Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
                      We will grieve not, rather find
                      Strength in what remains behind;
                      In the primal sympathy
                      Which having been must ever be;
                      In the soothing thoughts that spring
                      Out of human suffering;
                      In the faith that looks through death, [...]
                Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
                Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
                To me the meanest flower that blows can give
                Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

So Stainless And So Calm

George W. Bethune (1805-1862), Hymn to Night:

                    YES! bear them to their rest;
                The rosy babe, tired with the glare of day,
                The prattler, fallen asleep e’en in his play;
                    Clasp them to thy soft breast,
                                        O night!
                Bless them in dreams with a deep, hushed delight.

                    Yet must they wake again,
                Wake soon to all the bitterness of life,
                The pang of sorrow, the temptation strife,
                    Aye to the conscience pain:
                                        O night!
                Canst thou not take with them a longer flight?

                    Canst thou not bear them far
                E’en now, all innocent, before they know
                The taint of sin, its consequence of woe,
                    The world’s distracting jar,
                                        O night!
                To some ethereal, holier, happier height?

                    Canst thou not bear them up
                Through starlit skies, far from this planet dim
                And sorrowful, e’en while they sleep, to Him
                    Who drank for us the cup,
                                        O night!
                The cup of wrath, for hearts in faith contrite?

                    To Him, for them who slept
                A babe all holy on his mother’s knee,
                And from that hour to cross-crowned Calvary,
                    In all our sorrow wept,
                                        O night!
                That on our souls might dawn Heaven’s cheering light.

                    Go, lay their little heads
                Close to that human heart, with love divine
                Deep-breathing, while his arms immortal twine
                    Around them, as he sheds,
                                        O night!
                On them a brother’s grace of God’s own boundless might.

                    Let them immortal wake
                Among the deathless flowers of Paradise,
                Where angel songs of welcome with surprise
                    This their last sleep may break,
                                        O night!
                And to celestial joy their kindred souls invite.

                    There can come no sorrow;
                The brow shall know no shade, the eye no tears,
                Forever young, through heaven’s eternal years
                    In one unfading morrow,
                                        O night!
                Nor sin nor age nor pain their cherub beauty blight.

                    Would we could sleep as they,
                So stainless and so calm,—at rest with Thee,—
                And only wake in immortality!
                    Bear us with them away,
                                        O night!
                To that ethereal, holier, happier height.

Melancholy Bird

Charlotte Smith, Sonnet III., To A Nightingale:

            Poor melancholy bird—that all night long
            Tell’st to the Moon thy tale of tender woe;
            From what sad cause can such sweet sorrow flow,
            And whence this mournful melody of song?
            Thy poet’s musing fancy would translate
            What mean the sounds that swell thy little breast,
            When still at dewy eve thou leav’st thy nest,
            Thus to the listening night to sing thy fate!
            Pale Sorrow’s victims wert thou once among,
            Tho’ now releas’d in woodlands wild to rove?
            Say—hast thou felt from friends some cruel wrong,
            Or died’st thou—martyr of disastrous love?
            Ah! songstress sad! that such my lot might be,
            To sigh and sing at liberty—like thee!