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Yet thou seest me daily stretch forth my hand, and therewith clutch many a thing, and swing it hither and thither. Art thou a grown Baby, then, to fancy that the Miracle lies in miles of distance, or in pounds avoirdupois of weight; and not to see that the true inexplicable Godrevealing Miracle lies in this, that I can stretch forth my hand at all; that I have free Force to clutch aught therewith? Innumerable other of this sort are the deceptions, and wonder- 10 domed City of God; that through every star, hiding stupefactions, which Space practises

of elastic balls, was it less a stroke than if the last ball only had been struck, and sent flying? Oh, could I (with the Time-annihilating Hat) transport thee direct from the Beginnings to 5 the Endings, how were thy eyesight unsealed, and thy heart set flaming in the Light-sea of celestial wonder! Then sawest thou that this fair Universe, were it in the meanest province thereof, is in very deed, the star

on us.

"Still worse is it with regard to Time. Your grand anti-magician and universal wonderhider, is this same lying Time. Had we but 15 the Time-annihilating Hat, to put on for once only, we should see ourselves in a World of Miracles, wherein all fabled or authentic Thaumaturgy, and feats of Magic, were outdone.

through every grassblade, and most through every Living Soul, the glory of a present God still beams. But Nature, which is the Timevesture of God, and reveals Him to the wise, hides Him from the foolish.

"Again, could anything be more miraculous than an actual authentic Ghost? The English Johnson 16 longed, all his life, to see one; but could not, though he went to Cock Lane, and

But unhappily we have not such a 20 thence to the church-vaults, and tapped on

Hat; and man, poor fool that he is, can seldom and scantily help himself without one.

"Were it not wonderful, for instance, had Orpheus, or Amphion, built the walls of Thebes

coffins. Foolish Doctor! Did he never with the Mind's eye, as well as with the body's, look round him into that full tide of human Life he so loved; did he never so much as look into

actual and authentic as heart could wish; wellnigh a million of Ghosts were travelling the streets by his side. Once more I say, sweep away the illusion of Time: compress the threescore years into three minutes: what else was he, what else are we? Are we not Spirits, shaped into a Body, into an Appearance; and that fade away again into air, and Invisibility? This is no metaphor, it is a simple scientific fact: we start out of Nothingness, take figure, and are Apparitions; round us, as round the veriest spectre, is Eternity; and to Eternity minutes are as years and æons. Come there not tones of Love and Faith, as from celestial

by the mere sound of his Lyre?13 Yet tell me, 25 Himself? The good Doctor was a Ghost, as Who built these walls of Weissnichtwo; summoning out all the sandstone rocks, to dance along from the Steinbruch1 (now a huge Troglodyte Chasm, 15 with frightful green-mantled pools); and shape themselves into Doric and 30 Ionic pillars, squared ashlar houses, and noble streets? Was it not the still higher Orpheus, or Orpheuses, who, in past centuries, by the divine Music of Wisdom, succeeded in civilizing Man? Our highest Orpheus walked in Judea, eighteen-hundred years ago: his sphere-melody, flowing in wild native tones, took captive the ravished souls of men; and being of a truth sphere-melody, still flows and sounds, though now with thousandfold Ac- 40 harp-strings, like the Song of beatified Souls?

35

companiments, and rich symphonies, through
all our hearts; and modulates and divinely leads
them. Is that a wonder, which happens in
two hours; and does it cease to be wonderful,
if happening in two million? Not only was 45
Thebes built, by the Music of an Orpheus; but
without the music of some inspired Orpheus,
was no city ever built, no work that man
glories in ever done.

And again, do not we squeak and gibber (in our discordant screech-owlish debatings and recriminatings); and glide, bodeful, and feeble, and fearful; or uproar (poltern), and revel in our mad Dance of the Dead,7-till the scent of the morning-air summons us to our still Home; and dreamy Night becomes awake and Day? Where now is Alexander of Macedon: does the steel Host, that yelled in fierce

"Sweep away the Illusion of Time; glance, 50 battle-shouts at Issus and Arbela, remain if thou have eyes, from the near movingcause to its far distant Mover: The stroke that came transmitted through a whole galaxy

13 "Were the stories of Orpheus and of Amphion true, would they not be miraculous?" Orpheus gathered the 55 wild creatures of the forest about him to listen to his lyre; and Amphion, by the mere power and beauty of his music, built the walls of Thebes.

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behind him; or have they all vanished utterly, even as perturbed Goblins must? Napoleon too, and his Moscow Retreats and Austerlitz Campaigns! Was it all other than the veriest Spectre-Hunt; which has now, with its

16 For the story of Dr. Johnson and the Cork Lane Ghost, see Boswell's Johnson.

17 The Dance of Death was a medieval allegory of Death; a skeleton musician leads the dance, in which all men join.

howling tumult that made Night hideous,
flitted away?-Ghosts! There are nigh a
thousand-million walking the earth openly
at noontide; some half-hundred have vanished
from it, some half-hundred have arisen in it, 5
ere thy watch ticks once.

"O Heaven, it is mysterious, it is awful to consider that we not only carry each a future Ghost within him; but are in very deed, Ghosts!

"We are such stuff As dreams are made of, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep!'”

7719

BOSWELL THE HERO-WORSHIPPER (From Essay on Johnson, 1832)

We have a word to say of James Boswel

These Limbs, whence had we them; this 10 Boswell has already been much commented

stormy Force; this life-blood with its burning
Passion? They are dust and shadow; a Shadow-
system gathered round our ME; wherein,
through some moments or years, the Divine
Essence is to be revealed in the Flesh. That 15
warrior on his strong war-horse, fire flashes
through his eyes; force dwells in his arm and
heart: but warrior and war-horse are a vision;
a revealed Force, nothing more. Stately
they tread the Earth, as if it were a firm sub-20
stance: fool! the Earth is but a film; it cracks
in twain and warrior and war-horse sink be-
yond plummet's sounding. Plummet's? Fan-
tasy herself will not follow them. A little while
ago, they were not; a little while, and they 25
are not, their very ashes are not.

upon; but rather in the way of censure and vituperation than of true recognition. He was a man that brought himself much before the world; confessed that he eagerly coveted fans. or if that were not possible, notoriety; of which latter as he gained far more than was his due the public were incited, not only by th natural love of scandal, but by a specia ground of envy, to say whatever ill of hir could be said. Out of the fifteen millions that then lived, and had bed and board in the British islands, this man has provided us a greater pleasure than any other individua at whose cost we now enjoy ourselves; perha has done us a greater service than can be es pecially attributed to more than two or three yet, ungrateful that we are, no written e spoken eulogy of James Boswell anywhere exists; his recompense in solid pudding s on 30 far as copyright went) was not excessive. and as for the empty praise, it has altogether been denied him. Men are unwiser than children; they do not know the hand that feeds them.

Boswell was a person whose mean or bad qualities lay open to the general eye; visible palpable to the dullest. His good qualities. again, belonged not to the time he lived in were far from common then; indeed, in such degree, were almost unexampled; not recog nizable therefore by every one; nay, apt ever (so strange had they grown) to be confoundel with the very vices they lay contiguous to an. had sprung out of. That he was a wine

"So has it been from the beginning, and so will it be to the end. Generation after generation takes to itself the Form of a Body; and forth-issuing from Cimmerian Night, 18 heaven's mission APPEARS. What Force and Fire is in each he expends: one grinding in the mill of Industry; one hunter-like climbing the giddy Alpine heights of Science; one madly dashed in pieces on the rocks of Strife, in war 35 with his fellow-and then the Heaven-sent is recalled; his earthly Vesture falls away, and soon even to Sense becomes a vanished Shadow. Thus, like some wild-flaming, wildthundering train of Heaven's Artillery, does 40 this mysterious MANKIND thunder and flame, in long-drawn, quick-succeeding grandeur, through the unknown Deep. Thus like a Godcreated, fire-breathing Spirit-host, we emerge from the Inane; haste stormfully across the 45 bibber and gross liver; gluttonously fond et astonished Earth; then plunge again into the Inane. Earth's mountains are levelled, and her seas filled up, in our passage: can the Earth which is but dead and a vision, resist Spirits which have reality and are alive? On 50 the hardest adamant some foot-print of us is stamped-in; the last Rear of the host will read traces of the earliest Van. But whence?O Heaven, whither? Sense knows not; Faith knows not; only that it is through Mystery to 55 ribbon, imprinted "Corsica Boswell," round Mystery, from God and to God.

18 A proverbial expression for utter darkness. The Cimmerians are mentioned by Homer as living beyond the ocean-stream in a land where no sun ever shines.

whatever would yield him a little solacement were it only of a stomachic character, is deniable enough. That he was vain, heedless, a babbler; had much of the sycophant, alter nating with the braggadocio, curiously spiced too with an all-pervading dash of the coxcomb: that he gloried much when the tailor, by a court-suit, had made a new man of him; that he appeared at the Shakespeare Jubilee with a

his hat; and in short, if you will, lived no day 19 Tempest, IV. 157.

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of his life without doing and saying more than one pretentious ineptitude: all this unhappily is evident as the sun at noon. The very look of Boswell seems to have signified so much. In that cocked nose, cocked partly in triumph over his weaker fellow-creatures, partly to snuff up the smell of coming pleasure, and scent it from afar; in those bag-cheeks, hanging like half-filled wine-skins, still able to contain more; in that coarsely protruded shelf-mouth, 10 his very blood: old Auchinleck had, if not the

of all bipeds yet known. Boswell too was a Tory; of quite peculiarly feudal, genealogical, pragmaticals temper; had been nurtured in an atmosphere of heraldry, at the feet of a very 5 Gamaliel in that kind; within bare walls, adorned only with pedigrees, amid servingmen in threadbare livery; all things teaching him, from birth upwards, that a laird was a laird. Perhaps there was a special vanity in

that fat dew-lapped chin: in all this, who sees not sensuality, pretension, boisterous imbecility enough; much that could not have been ornamental in the temper of a great man's

gay, tail-spreading, peacock vanity of his son, no little of the slow stalking, contentious, hissing vanity of the gander; a still more fatal species. Scottish advocates will tell you how

overfed great man (what the Scotch name 15 the ancient man, having chanced to be the

flunky), though it had been more natural there? The under part of Boswell's face is of a low, almost brutish character.

first sheriff appointed (after the abolition of "hereditary jurisdiction "10) by royal authority, was wont, in dull-snuffling pompous tone, to preface many a deliverance from the bench with these words: "I, the first king's sheriff in Scotland."

Unfortunately, on the other hand, what great and genuine good lay in him was nowise 20 so self-evident. That Boswell was a hunter after spiritual notabilities, that he loved such, and longed, and even crept and crawled to be near them; that he first (in old Touchwood Auchinleck's phraseology) "took on with 25 with what enclosures and encumbrances you

Paoli;" and then being off with "the Corsican
landlouper," took on with a schoolmaster,"
"ane that keeped a schule, and ca'd it an
academy;" that he did all this, and could not
help doing it, had an "open sense," an open 30
loving heart, which so few have: where ex-
cellence existed, he was compelled to acknowl-
edge it; was drawn towards it, and (let the
old sulphur-brand of a laird say what he
liked) could not but walk with it-if not as 35
superior, if not as equal, then as inferior and
lackey, better so than not at all. If we reflect
now that this love of excellence had not only
such as evil nature to triumph over; but also

And now behold the worthy Bozzy, so prepossessed and held back by nature and by art, fly nevertheless like iron to its magnet

please with wood, with rubbish, with brass: it matters not, the two feel each other, they struggle restlessly towards each other, they will be together. The iron may be a Scottish squirelet, full of gulosity and "gigmanity;"'11 The magnet an English plebeian, and moving rag-and-dust mountain, coarse, proud, irascible, imperious: nevertheless, behold how they embrace, and inseparably cleave to one another! It is one of the strangest phenomena of the past century, that at a time when the old reverent feeling of discipleship (such as brought men from far countries with rich gifts, and prostrate soul, to the feet of the

what an education and social position withstood 40 prophets) had passed utterly away from men's

it and weighed it down, its innate strength, victorious over all these things, may astonish us. Consider what an inward impulse there must have been, how many mountains of impediment hurled aside, before the Scottish 45 laird could, as humble servant, embrace the knees (the bosom was not permitted him) of the English dominie! Your Scottish laird, says an English naturalist of these days, may be defined as the hungriest and vainest 50

Boswell's father, Alexander Boswell, who had the title of Lord Auchinleck from the name of his property in Ayrshire. He was one of the Judges of the Court of Session. Carlyle calls him "Touchwood" in allusion to his explosive irascibility.

Pasquale Paoli (1725-1807), a Corsican patriot, to whom Boswell was introduced by a letter from Rousseau, and with whom he contracted a warm and lasting friendship.

An adventurer, a vagabond.

i. c. Johnson himself, who set up an "academy" Dear Litchfield, where "young gentlemen are boarded and taught the Latin and Greek languages," (1736).

practical experience, and was no longer surmised to exist (as it does), perennial, indestructible, in man's inmost heart-James Boswell should have been the individual, of all others, predestined to recall it, in such singular guise, to the wondering and, for a long while, laughing and unrecognizing world. It has been commonly said, "The man's vulgar vanity

7 A member of the Tory party, which was the ultraconservative party of the time.

8 Self-important, busy; engrossed with every-day business, and hence commonplace.

A member of the Sanhedrin, and St. Paul's instructor in the law. V. Acts v. 34-39; xxii. 3. Boswell's Gamaliel presumably was his father.

10 In Scotland the Sheriff was the judge of the county. After 1748, the office, which had been hereditary, was filled by royal appointment.

11 Gulosity is gluttony, voracity; gigmanity is narrowminded respectability. The latter word was invented by Carlyle (gig and man) to indicate the character of "one whose respectability is measured by his keeping a gig." N. E. D.

Johnson. Mr. Croker14 says, Johnson was the last, little regarded by the great work from which, for a vulgar vanity, all ho as from its fountain, descends. Bozzy, ev 5 among Johnson's friends and special admins seems rather to have been laughed at the envied: his officious, whisking, consequen ways, the daily reproofs and rebuffs he unde went, could gain from the world no golden bu only leaden opinions. His devout disciplesh seemed nothing more than a mean spanielst in the general eye. His mighty "conste tion," or sun, round whom he, as satellite, ► servantly gyrated, was, for the mass of e

was all that attached him to Johnson; he delighted to be seen near him, to be thought connected with him. Now let it be at once granted that no consideration springing out of vulgar vanity could well be absent from the mind of James Boswell, in this his intercourse with Johnson, or in any considerable transaction of his life. At the same time, ask yourself; whether such vanity, and nothing else, actuated him therein; whether this was the true 10 essence and moving principle of the phenomenon, or not rather its outward vesture, and the accidental environment (and defacement) in which it came to light? The man was, by nature and habit, vain; a sycophant-coxcomb, 15 but a huge ill-snuffed tallow-light, and be be it granted: but had there been nothing more than vanity in him, was Samuel Johnson the man of men to whom he must attach himself? At the date when Johnson was a poor rustycoated "scholar," dwelling in Temple-lane,12 20 and indeed throughout their whole intercourse afterwards, were there not chancellors and prime ministers enough; graceful gentlemen, the glass of fashion; honor-giving noblemen; dinner-giving rich men; renowned fire-eaters, 25 swordsmen, gownsmen, quacks and realities of all hues-any one of whom bulked much larger in the world's eye than Johnson ever did? To any one of whom, by half that submissiveness and assiduity, our Bozzy might have 30 recommended himself; and sat there, the envy of surrounding lickspittles; pocketing now solid emolument, swallowing now well cooked viands and wines of rich red vintage; in each

weak night-moth, circling foolishly, darg ously about it, not knowing what he wante If he enjoyed Highland dinners and toasts, 2 henchmen to a new sort of chieftain, He Erskine15 could hand him a shilling “for the sight of his bear." Doubtless the man w laughed at, and often heard himself laughed a for his Johnsonism. To be envied is the grant and sole aim of vulgar vanity; to be filled w good things is that of sensuality: for Johns: perhaps no man living envied poor Bozzy; a of good things (except himself paid for ther there was no vestige in that acquaintancesi, Had nothing other or better than vanity and sensuality been there, Johnson and Boswe had never come together, or had soon an finally separated again.

In fact, the so copious terrestrial dross that welters chaotically, as the outer sphere of the

case, also, shone-on by some glittering reflex 35 man's character, does but render for us mar

of renown or notoriety, so as to be the observed
of innumerable observers. To no one of whom,
however, though otherwise a most diligent
solicitor and purveyor, did he so attach him-
self: such vulgar courtierships were his paid 40
drudgery, or leisure amusement; the worship
of Johnson was his grand, ideal, voluntary
business. Does not the frothy-hearted, yet
enthusiastic man, doffing his advocate's wig,
regularly take post, and hurry up to London, 45
for the sake of his sage chiefly; as to a feast of
tabernacles, the Sabbath of his whole year?
The plate-licker and wine-bibber dives into
Bolt Court, to sip muddy coffee with a cynical
old man and a sour-tempered blind old woman13 50
(feeling the cups, whether they are full, with
her finger); and patiently endures contradic-
tions without end; too happy so he may be
but allowed to listen and live. Nay, it does not
appear that vulgar vanity could ever have 55
been much flattered by Boswell's relation to
12 V. selection, p. 425, supra.

13 Mrs. Anna Williams, who at this time had lodgings in Bolt Court, Fleet Street, had formerly found an asylum in Johnson's house.

remarkable, more touching, the celestial spar of goodness, of light, and reverence for wisd which dwelt in the interior, and could strugg through such encumbrances, and in some degre illuminate and beautify them. There is mu lying yet undeveloped in the love of Boswe for Johnson. A cheering proof, in a time whi else utterly wanted and still wants such, th living wisdom is quite infinitely precious t man, is the symbol of the god-like to him which even weak eyes may discern; that k alty, discipleship, all that was ever mess by hero-worship, lives perennially in the human bosom, and waits, even in these dead days, ong for occasions to unfold it, and inspire all with it, and make again the world alive! James Boswell we can regard as a practical witness, or real martyr, to this high everlasting truth A wonderful martyr, if you will; and in a tim 14 John Wilson Croker, editor of Boswell's Joh 1831, which Carlyle is reviewing. Macaulay reviewed the same work. V. p. 687.

15 Henry Erskine, a brother of Lord Buchan and Lør Erskine, was presented to Johnson by Boswell, wh on a visit to the Parliament House at Edinburgh in 1773 The incident mentioned occurred on that occasion.

sight far deeper than the common. But Boswell's grand intellectual talent was, as such ever is, an unconscious one, of far higher reach, and significance than logic; and showed itself 5 in the whole, not in parts. Here again we have that old saying verified, "The heart sees further than the head."

which made such martyrdom doubly wonderful: yet the time and its martyr perhaps suited each other. For a decrepit, death-sick era, when Cant had first decisively opened her poison-breathing lips to proclaim that Godworship and Mammon-worship were one and the same, that life was a lie, and the earth Beelzebub's, which the Supreme Quack should inherit, and so all things were fallen into the yellow leaf, and fast hastening to noisome 10 the lowest. What, indeed, is man's life gener

Thus does poor Bozzy stand out to us an ill-assorted, glaring mixture of the highest and

ally but a kind of beast godhood; the god in us triumphing in us more and more over the beast; striving more and more to subdue it under his feet? Did not the ancients, in their wise, perennially-significant way, figure nature itself, in their sacred ALL, or PAN, as a portentous commingling of these two discords; as musical, humane, oracular in its upper part, yet ending below in the cloven hairy feet of a

will and reason with foul irrationality and lust; in which, nevertheless, dwelt a mysterious unspeakable fear and half mad panic awe; as for mortals there well might! And is not

same universe; or rather, is not that universe even himself, the reflex of his own fearful and wonderful being, "the waste fantasy of his own dream?" No wonder that man, that

corruption: for such an era, perhaps no better prophet than a parti-colored zany 18-prophet, concealing, from himself and others, his prophetic significance in such unexpected vestures, was deserved, or would have been in place. 15 A precious medicine lay hidden in floods of coarsest, most composite treacle; the world swallowed the treacle, for it suited the world's palate; and now, after half a century, may the medicine also begin to show itself! James 20 goat? The union of melodious, celestial freeBoswell belonged, in his corruptible part, to the lowest classes of mankind; a foolish, inflated creature, swimming in an element of self-conceit: but in his corruptible there dwelt an incorruptible, all the more impressive and 25 man a microcosm, or epitomized mirror of that indubitable for the strange lodging it had taken. Consider, too, with what force, diligence, and vivacity he has rendered back all this which, in Johnson's neighborhood, his "open sense" had so eagerly and freely taken in. 30 each man, and James Boswell like the others, That loose-flowing, careless-looking work of his is as a picture by one of nature's own artists; the best possible remembrance of a reality; like the very image thereof in a clear mirror. Which indeed it was: let but the 35 mirror be clear, this is the great point; the picture must and will be genuine. How the babbling Bozzy, inspired only by love, and the recognition which love can lend, epitomizes nightly the words of wisdom, the deeds and aspects of wisdom, and so, by little and little, unconsciously works together for us a whole Johnsoniad a more free, perfect, sunlit and spirit-speaking likeness than for many centuries had been drawn by man of man! Scarcely 45 on a thousand hills. Nay, sometimes a strange since the days of Homer has the feat been equalled; indeed, in many senses, this also is a kind of heroic poem. The fit "Odyssey" of our unheroic age was to be written, not sung; of a thinker, not of a fighter; and (for want of 50 a Homer) by the first open soul that might offer-looked such even through the organs of a Boswell. We do the man's intellectual endowment great wrong, if we measure it by its mere logical outcome; though, here too, there is not wanting a light ingenuity, a figurative ness and fanciful sport, with glimpses of in

16 A jester who mimicked the professional jester. 17 An epic of Johnson. Cf. Iliad, Eneid.

40

should resemble it! The peculiarity in his case was the unusual defect of amalgamation and subordination: the highest lay side by side with the lowest; not morally combined with it and spiritually transfiguring it, but tumbling in half-mechanical juxtaposition with it, and from time to time, as the mad alternation chanced, irradiating it, or eclipsed by it.

The world, as we said, has been but unjust to him; discerning only the outer terrestrial and often sordid mass; without eye, as it generally is, for his inner divine secret; and thus figuring him nowise as a god Pan, but simply of the bestial species, like the cattle

enough hypothesis has been started of him; as if it were in virtue even of these same bad qualities that he did his good work; as if it were the very fact of his being among the worst men in this world that had enabled him to write one of the best books therein! Falser hypothesis, we may venture to say, never rose in human soul. Bad is by its nature negative, and can do nothing; whatsoever enables us to 55 do anything is by its very nature good. Alas, that there should be teachers in Israel, or even learners, to whom this world-ancient fact is still problematical, or even deniable! Boswell wrote a good book because he had a heart and

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