124

WAR BETTER THAN DECAY.

and it becomes carnage. Doubtless. And take away public spirit and invisible principles from resistance to a tax, and Hampden becomes a noisy demagogue. Take away the grandeur of his cause, and Washington is a rebel, instead of the purest of patriots. Take away imagination from love, and what remains? Let a people treat with scorn the defenders of its liberties, and invest them with the symbols of degradation, and it will soon have no one to defend it.

is but a truism.

This

The truth is, that here, as elsewhere, poetry has reached the truth, while science and common sense have missed it. It has distinguished as, in spite of all sophistry, men ever will distinguish war from mere bloodshed. It has discerned the higher feelings which lie beneath its revolting features.

Carnage is terrible. The conversion of producers into destroyers is a calamity. Death, and insults to women worse than death, and human features obliterated beneath the hoof of the war-horse, and reeking hospitals, and ruined commerce, and violated homes, and broken hearts, they are all awful. there is something worse than death. Cowardice is worse. And the decay of enthusiasm and manliness is worse. And it is worse than death than a hundred thousand deaths.

But

ay, worse when a people has gravitated down into the creed that the "wealth of nations" consists not in generous hearts "fire in each breast, and freedom on each brow" -in national virtues, and primitive simplicity, and heroic endurance, and preference of duty to life; not in MEN, but in silk and cotton, and something that they call "capital."

DROWNED IN QUICKSAND.

125

Peace is blessed-peace arising out of charity. But peace springing out of the calculations of selfishness is not blessed. If the price to be paid for peace is this, that "wealth accumulates, and men decay," better far that every street in every town of our once noble country run red with blood.

IT

58. DROWNED IN QUICKSAND.

T sometimes happens, on certain coasts of Brittany or Scotland, that a man, traveller or fisherman, walking on the beach at low tide, far from the bank, notices that for several minutes he has been walking with difficulty. The strand beneath his feet is like pitch; his soles stick to it; it is sand no longer; it is glue.

The beach is perfectly dry; but at every step he takes, as soon as he lifts his foot, the print which it leaves fills with water. The eye, however, has noticed no change; the immense strand is smooth and tranquil; all the sand has the same appearance; the joyous little crowd of sand-flies continues to leap tumultuously over the wayfarer's feet.

The man pursues his way, goes forward, inclines towards the land, endeavors to get nearer the upland. He is not anxious. Anxious about what? Only he feels, somehow, as if the weight of his feet increased with every step which he takes. Suddenly he sinks in; he sinks in two or three inches. Decidedly he is not in the right road; he stops to take his bearings. His feet have disappeared; the sand covers them. He turns back; he sinks in deeper. Then he recog

126

DROWNED IN QUICKSAND.

nizes, with unspeakable terror, that he is caught in the quicksand, and that he has beneath him the fearful medium in which man can no more walk than the fish can swim.

He throws off his load, if he has. one; he lightens himself like a ship in distress. It is already too late; the sand is above his knees. He calls; he waves his hat; the sand gains on him more; and if the beach is deserted, if the land is too far off, if the sand-bank is of too ill-repute, if there is no hero in sight, it is all over; he is condemned to enlizement. He is condemned to that appalling interment, long, infallible, implacable, impossible to slacken or to hasten, which endures for hours; which will not end; which seizes you erect, free, and in full health; which at every effort, at every shout, drags you a little deeper; which sinks the man slowly into the earth, while it leaves him all the time to look at the horizon, the trees, the green fields, the smoke of the villages in the plain, the sails of the ships upon the sea, the birds flying and singing, the sunshine, the sky.

Enlizement is the grave become a tide, and rising from the depths of the earth towards a living man. The victim attempts to sit down, to lie down, to creep; every movement he makes inters him ; he straightens up; he sinks in; he feels that he is being swallowed up; he howls, implores, cries to the clouds, wrings his hands, despairs.

Behold him, waist-deep in the sand; the sand reaches his breast; he is now only a bust. He raises his arms, utters furious groans, clutches the beach with his nails, sobs frenziedly; the sand rises. The sand reaches his shoulders; the sand reaches his

GALILEO GALILEI.

127

neck; the face alone is visible now. The mouth cries; the sand fills it; silence. The eyes still gaze; the sand shuts them; night. Then the forehead decreases, a little hair flutters above the sand, a hand protrudes, moves, shakes, and disappears.

Sinister effacement of a man. It is shipwreck elsewhere than in the water. It is the earth drowning man. The earth filled with the ocean becomes a trap.

59. GALILEO GALILEI.

THERE is much in every way in the city of Flor

THERE

ence to excite the curiosity, kindle the imagination, and gratify the taste; but among all its fascinations, addressed to the sense, the memory, and the heart, there was none to which I more frequently gave a meditative hour, during a year's residence, than to the spot where Galileo Galilei sleeps beneath the marble floor of Santa Croce; no building on which I gazed with greater reverence than I did upon that modest mansion at Arcetri; villa once, and prison, in which that venerable sage, by the command of the Inquisition, passed the sad, closing years of his life.

Of all the wonders of ancient and modern art, statues and paintings, jewels and manuscripts, the admiration. and delight of ages, there was nothing I beheld with more affectionate awe than that poor little spy-glass, through which the human eye first pierced the clouds of visual error, which from the creation of the world had involved the system of the Universe.

There are occasions in life in which great minds live years of rapt enjoyment in a moment. I can fancy the

128

GALILEO GALILEI.

emotions of Galileo, when, first raising the newly-constructed telescope to the heavens, he saw fulfilled the grand prophecy of Copernicus, and beheld the planet Venus, crescent like the moon. It was such another moment as that when the immortal printers of Mentz and Strasburg received the first copy of the Bible into their hands; like that when Columbus, through the gray dawn of the 12th of October, 1492, first beheld the shores of San Salvador; like that when Le Verrier received back from Berlin the tidings that the predicted planet was found.

Yes! noble Galileo! thou wast right: "It does move." Bigots may make thee recant it; but it moves still. Yes, the earth moves; and the planets move; and the mighty waters move; and the great sweeping tides of air move; and the empires of men move; and the world of thought moves ever onward and ever upward to higher facts and bolder theories. Hang up that poor little spy-glass; it has done its work.

Franciscans and Dominicans may deride thy discoveries now; but the time will come when from two hundred observatories, in Europe and America, the glorious artillery of science shall nightly assault the skies; but they shall gain no conquests in those glittering fields, before which thine shall be forgotten.

Rest in peace, great Columbus of the heavens ! like him scorned, persecuted, broken-hearted. In other ages, in distant hemispheres, when the votaries of science, with solemn acts of consecration, shall dedicate their stately edifices to the cause of knowledge and of truth, thy name shall be mentioned with honor.