Essays, First Series | Page 9

in his wagon and roams through all latitudes as easily as a Calmuc.
At sea, or in the forest, or in the snow, he sleeps as warm, dines with as
good appetite, and associates as happily as beside his own chimneys.

Or perhaps his facility is deeper seated, in the increased range of his
faculties of observation, which yield him points of interest wherever
fresh objects meet his eyes. The pastoral nations were needy and
hungry to desperation; and this intellectual nomadism, in its excess,
bankrupts the mind through the dissipation of power on a miscellany of
objects. The home-keeping wit, on the other hand, is that continence or
content which finds all the elements of life in its own soil; and which
has its own perils of monotony and deterioration, if not stimulated by
foreign infusions.
Every thing the individual sees without him corresponds to his states of
mind, and every thing is in turn intelligible to him, as his onward
thinking leads him into the truth to which that fact or series belongs.
The primeval world,--the Fore-World, as the Germans say, --I can dive
to it in myself as well as grope for it with researching fingers in
catacombs, libraries, and the broken reliefs and torsos of ruined villas.
What is the foundation of that interest all men feel in Greek history,
letters, art, and poetry, in all its periods from the Heroic or Homeric age
down to the domestic life of the Athenians and Spartans, four or five
centuries later? What but this, that every man passes personally through
a Grecian period. The Grecian state is the era of the bodily nature, the
perfection of the senses,--of the spiritual nature unfolded in strict unity
with the body. In it existed those human forms which supplied the
sculptor with his models of Hercules, Phoebus, and Jove; not like the
forms abounding in the streets of modern cities, wherein the face is a
confused blur of features, but composed of incorrupt, sharply defined
and symmetrical features, whose eye-sockets are so formed that it
would be impossible for such eyes to squint and take furtive glances on
this side and on that, but they must turn the whole head. The manners
of that period are plain and fierce. The reverence exhibited is for
personal qualities; courage, address, self-command, justice, strength,
swiftness, a loud voice, a broad chest. Luxury and elegance are not
known. A sparse population and want make every man his own valet,
cook, butcher and soldier, and the habit of supplying his own needs
educates the body to wonderful performances. Such are the

Agamemnon and Diomed of Homer, and not far different is the picture
Xenophon gives of himself and his compatriots in the Retreat of the
Ten Thousand. "After the army had crossed the river Teleboas in
Armenia, there fell much snow, and the troops lay miserably on the
ground covered with it. But Xenophon arose naked, and taking an axe,
began to split wood; whereupon others rose and did the like."
Throughout his army exists a boundless liberty of speech. They quarrel
for plunder, they wrangle with the generals on each new order, and
Xenophon is as sharp-tongued as any and sharper-tongued than most,
and so gives as good as he gets. Who does not see that this is a gang of
great boys, with such a code of honor and such lax discipline as great
boys have?
The costly charm of the ancient tragedy, and indeed of all the old
literature, is that the persons speak simply,--speak as persons who have
great good sense without knowing it, before yet the reflective habit has
become the predominant habit of the mind. Our admiration of the
antique is not admiration of the old, but of the natural. The Greeks are
not reflective, but perfect in their senses and in their health, with the
finest physical organization in the world. Adults acted with the
simplicity and grace of children. They made vases, tragedies, and
statues, such as healthy senses should,--that is, in good taste. Such
things have continued to be made in all ages, and are now, wherever a
healthy physique exists; but, as a class, from their superior organization,
they have surpassed all. They combine the energy of manhood with the
engaging unconsciousness of childhood. The attraction of these
manners is that they belong to man, and are known to every man in
virtue of his being once a child; besides that there are always
individuals who retain these characteristics. A person of childlike
genius and inborn energy is still a Greek, and revives our love of the
Muse of Hellas. I admire the love of nature in the Philoctetes. In
reading those fine apostrophes to sleep, to the stars, rocks, mountains
and waves, I feel time passing away