Sir Walter Raleigh : Introd. by Franklin Benjamin Sanborn

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This is an authorized facsimile of the original book, and was
produced in 1970 by microfilm-xerography by University
Microfilms, A Xerox Company, Ann Arbor, Michigan, U.S.A.

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SIR WALTER RALEIGH

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SIR WALTER RALEIGH

BY

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

LATELY DISCOVERED AMONG HIS UNPUBLISHED JOURNALS
AND MANUSCRIPTS

INiVOnuCTfON JiY

FRAN; : . i!N S'VNUORN

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BOSTON : 'MDCDV

PRINTED EXCLUSIVELY FOR MEMBERS OF

THE 'B1BLIOPPJILE SOC1KTY

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SIR WALTER RALEIGH

BY

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

LATELY DISCOVERED AMONG HIS UNPUBLISHED JOURNALS
AND MANUSCRIPTS

INTRODUCTION BY

FRANKLIN BENJAMIN SANBORN

EDITED BY

HENRY AIKEN METCALF

BOSTON : AIDCDV

PRINTED EXCLUSIVELY FOR MEMBERS OF

THE BIBLIOPHILE SOCIETY

Copyright, 1905, by
THE BIBLIOPHILE SOCIETY

All rights reserved

What makes a hero ? An heroic mind
Expressed in action, in endurance proved :
And if there be pre-eminence of right,
Derived through pain well suffer'd, to the height
Of rank heroic, 'tis to bear unmoved,
Not toil, not risk, not rage of sea or wind,
Not the brute fury of barbarians blind,
But worse, — ingratitude and poisonous darts
Launch'd by the country he had served and loved.
SIR HENRY TAYLOR, Heroism in the S

IX

PREFACE

THE discovery of an unpublished essay by
Thoreau on Sir Walter Ralegh is an event of
great interest in the world of letters, as being
the earliest contribution to literature, of de
cided scholarly value, of its distinguished
author. The original manuscript was pur
chased by Mr. William K.Bixby, of St. Louis,
from Mr. Edward H. Russell, of Worcester,
Massachusetts, to whom nearly all of the
MSS. and 'Journals of Thoreau came by in
heritance ; and it is to the generosity of its
present owner (Mr. Bixby) that the members
of The Bibliophile Society are indebted for
the privilege of possessing such an exceed
ingly rare item of Americana.

When mere fragments of hitherto unpub
lished compositions of our foremost Ameri
can writers are so eagerly sought, it seems
strange that a well-rounded work of perhaps

xi

the most original of the noteworthy group
of Concord (Massachusetts) thinkers should
have remained unknown for nearly sixty
years. This is a veritable treasure wherewith
still further to enrich the bibliography of the
publications of our Society.

It may be well here to remark that sim
ultaneously with this volume the Society has
issued Thoreau's journey West, the entirely
unpublished MS. notes of which were dis
covered among the author's Journals, and
purchased by Mr. Bixby at the same time he
acquired the Sir Walter Ralegh. We are
therefore permitted to bring out, as com
panion pieces, first editions of the first inedited
important manuscript written by Thoreau,
and also this narrative of his Western jour
ney, which preceded his death by only a few
months. These two items will doubtless
prove to be one of the most important lit
erary "finds" of the season.

We are fortunate, moreover, in having a
special Introduction to each of them pre
pared by Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, the
greatest living authority on Thoreau, of whom
he was a life-long friend and neighbor.

xii

There are three drafts of the manuscript
of Sir Walter Ralegh, each one differing in
certain respects from the other two, and
all of which have been used in the prepa
ration of this volume. The third, and final,
draft, in its careful elaboration, and the
skilful weaving together of its parts, is a dis
tinct improvement over the first ; and there
are some indications, even in this last draft,
that the author may have had a still further
revision in contemplation.

We are so wont only to associate Thoreau
with his own immediate world of Nature,
that a work like this in which he ventures
so far afield, and in which he deals with so
much 'that is stirring, presents him to us in
an entirely new light. Perhaps, at first, we
may wonder what there was in common
between the retiring, home-loving citizen
of Concord, and this adventurous knight of
" the spacious days of" great Elizabeth/'
which should make Sir Walter Ralegh his
favorite character in English history. But
we have only to study the career of this sturdy
Devonshire worthy to come under the spell
of his enduring charm and real manliness; to

y.iii

admire the unswerving loyalty with which
he ever served his country ; and to feel, with
Robert Louis Stevenson, that " God has made
nobler heroes, but He never made a finer gen
tleman than Walter Ralegh. "

To every patriotic American this heroic
figure should appeal with a special enthu
siasm, since, as Charles Kingsley has said,—
" To this one man, under the Providence
of Almighty God, the whole United States of
America owe their existence/'

HENRY AIKKN I\!ETCALF

XIV

INTRODUCTION

BY

FRANKLIN BENJAMIN SANBORN

THE finding of a sketch of Sir Walter
Ralegh (as he usually spelt his own name)
among the manuscripts of Thoreau will be
a surprise to most readers. But the sub
ject lay along the lines of his earlier read
ings after leaving Harvard College, and the
sketch, though not so early among his writ
ings as The Service, edited by me in 1902,
and those parts of The Week that first came
out in The Dial (1840-44), belongs in that
active and militant period of his life. It
was probably prepared for publication in The
Dial, and would have been published there,
had not fate and the lack of paying sub
scribers abruptly stopped that quarterly in
the summer of 1844.

The readings from Ralegh's History of
the World began about 1842, as we see by

the earlier Jounials, and the handwriting
and some other circumstances about the
three drafts of the sketch fix the date as
not later than 1844. His poetical scrap-
book, into which he copied most of those
verses of Ralegh's and Ben Jonson s time
that appear in The Week, along with many
others, and which Ellery Channing had
before him in writing his Thoreau the Poet-
Naturalist, opens with three pages copied
from the works of Ralegh, and contains
in its pages, 130—142, the poetic pieces
ascribed to Ralegh in this sketch. It was
this commonplace book that Thoreau used
in preparing his Week for the press in
1848—49, and nothing appears there of
later date. The last extracts therein which
can be certainly dated are from the
Massachusetts Quarterly Review of Septem
ber, 1848, on Hindoo Philosophy. The
paging of the book in pencil is later, and so
is a list of pages which shows what therein
Thoreau had used in his papers for print
ing. The long passages about Alexander
and Epaminondas are in the scrap-book at
pages 236-7; and that fine passage about

the starry influences stands in the scrap-
book on page 235, and in the list of used
pages is crossed out. The poem of Du
Bartas quoted afterwards does not seem to
be in the scrap-book.

Of course, since Thoreau wrote on Ralegh,
now more than sixty years, much has been
learned and printed concerning his problem
atical career, which still remains in some
points doubtful, — in none more so, per
haps, than in the true authorship of the
poems ascribed to him by his contempo
raries, and long after by Bishop Percy.

Thoreau seems to have been guided in
his judgment of Ralegh as the real author
of disputed poems, by his inner conscious
ness of what the knightly courtier ought to
have written. Nor did he live long enough
to see the fragments of an undoubted poem by
Ralegh, The Continuation of Cynthia, which
was found after Thoreau's death among the
numerous papers of the Cecils at Hatfield
House. In its form it is the poorest of all
the verses ascribed to Ralegh ; yet it has good
lines, and a general air of magnanimous re
gret. It is a fragment in the unmistakable

[3]

handwriting of Ralegh, with all his pecul
iarities of spelling, such as " soon " for sun,
" yearth " for earth, " sy thes " for sighs, and
" perrellike " for pearl-like. The Cynthia
of which it is a continuation is irrecover
ably lost, but was mentioned by Spenser in
his Colin Cloufs Come Home Again, as early
as 1593, where he calls Ralegh " the Shep-
heard of the Ocean," and says, —

His song was all a lamentable lay

Of great unkindness and of usage hard,

Of Cynthia, the Lady of the Sea,

Which from her presence faultless him debarred.

That, of course, must have been written
some time after 1592; the continuation is be
lieved by Archdeacon Hannah to have been
written soon after the death of Elizabeth
(his Cynthia) and during his own early
imprisonment in the Tower. Thoreau's
favorite among Ralegh's poems was The
Lie, or as he preferred to call it, The Soul's
Errand, which was long disputed as Ralegh's,
but is now certainly known to be his, by
the direct testimony of two contemporary
manuscripts, " and the .still stronger evi
dence," says Hannah, " of at least two

[4]

contemporary answers, written during his
lifetime, and reproaching him with the
poem, by name or implication." Thoreau
had at first taken it for Ralegh's without
doubt ; then found, in a newspaper of 1843,
a version of it ascribed to Joshua Sylvester,
the translator of Du Bartas, which led him
to doubt its being Ralegh's, and to alter his
version of the text. This later version he
read at the Concord funeral of John Brown
(December 2, 1859), prefacing it with these
words : " The well-known verses called The
Soul's Errand> supposed by some to have
been written by Sir Walter Raleigh, when
he was expecting to be executed on the
following day, are at least worthy of such
an origin, and are equally applicable to the
present case. Hear them/1 — and he pro
ceeded to read them in my hearing. But
on a blank page in the scrap-book he wrote
in pencil/* Assigned to Raleigh by Percy, as
written the night before his execution. But
it appeared in Poetical Rhapsody in 1608,
yet, as Davison says, may have been written
the night before he expected to have been
executed in 1603. It is found among Syl-

[5]

vester's Poems, and by Ritson given to Davi-
son. It also occurs in Lord Pembroke's
Poems, and exists in two copies in the
Harleian MSS."

To this comment, written in 1843-44,
Archdeacon Hannah added in 1870, "It
can be found in MSS. more than ten years
earlier than 1608, — in 1596/1595, or 1593.
There are five other claimants, but not one
with a case that will bear the slightest exami
nation. For the claim of Richard Edwards
we are indebted to a mere mistake of Ellis's;
for that of F. Daviso-n to a freak of Ritson's;
that of. Lord Essex is only known from the
correspondence of Percy, who did not be
lieve it; and those of Sylvester and Lord
Pembroke are sufficiently refuted by the mu
tilated character of the copies which were
printed among their posthumous writings/'

Thoreau evidently had his faith in
-Ralegh V authorship shaken by the attribu
tion to Sylvester in 1843, an<^ ^he printing
then of the extended (rather than mutilated)
copy as found in Sylvester, which he pro
ceeded to compare with his earlier copy.
As a result, the verses read by him at the

[6]

Brown funeral were amended from the Syl
vester copy. Hannah has a theory worth
citing: "We find grounds for supposing
that Ralegh marked each crisis of his his
tory by writing some short poem, in which
the vanity of life is proclaimed, under an
aspect suited to his circumstances and age.
His first slight check occurred in 1589,
when he went to visit Spenser in Ireland ;
and more seriously a little later, when his
secret marriage sent him to the Tower.
The L/e, with its proud, indignant brevity,
would then exactly express his angry temper.
The Pilgrimage belongs more naturally to a
time when he was smarting under the rude
ness of the king's attorney at his trial in
1603. The few lines, Even such is Time,
mark the calm reality of the now certain
doom ; they express the thoughts appropri
ate for the night now known to be indeed
the last, when no room remained for bitter
ness or anger, in the contemplation of im
mediate and inevitable death/'

I may observe that Thoreau adds a little
to the tale of the occasion of these lines
in the scrap-book where he copies them.

[7]

He writes, <c Sir Walter Raleigh the night
before his death/' (In some copies thus
entitled : " Verses said to have been found
in his Bible in the Gatehouse at West
minster ; " Archbishop Sancroft, who has
transcribed the lines, calls them his "Epitaph
made by himself, and given to me of him,
the night before his suffering.")

The S He fit Lover is thought to have been
sent to Elizabeth ; the Walsingham verses,
which Thoreau thought characteristic of
Ralegh, do not seem so to me, and Hannah
says, " I think it very improbable that Ralegh
wrote this ballad." It sounds more like
Campion. .

As in that chapter of The Service which
he has called The Soldier, so in this essay
Thoreau shows a decided taste for war as
against an inglorious state of peace, and sees
little harm in the constant ardor of his hero
for a fight against Irish kernes, Spanish war
ships, and the armies of Austria and Spain,
against which he had contended from his
warlike youth, when he absented himself
from the university to learn the art of war.
Although less inclined, as he grew older, to

use the language of campaigns and battle
fields, Thoreau never quite gave up this
belligerent attitude. He was pugnacious,
and rather annoyed by those ostentatious
preachers of international peace who mixed
themselves in with the anti-slavery and
temperance reformers of his period. One
such, Henry C. Wright, an aggressive non-
resistant, was specially satirized by him in
his "Journal for June 17, 185 3, --the anni
versary of Bunker Hill battle, and perhaps
chosen on that account to make a demon
stration against war in Concord, whose
chief reputation had once been that it
opened the war of the Revolution. It may
be mentioned, parenthetically, in passing,
that Thoreau's grandmother, Mary Jones
of Weston, daughter of the Tory Colonel
Jones of the Provincial militia, on the da^
of Bunker Hill in 1775 came over fro.n
Weston to Concord to carry a basket of
cherries and other good things to a Tory
brother immured in Concord Jail for bring
ing in supplies from Halifax to the British
troops besieged in Boston. She was but a
girl, but she soon married Rev. Asa Dunbar,

[9]

who also was inclined to be a Tory, and did
not join the patriots until lie went to reside
in Keene, N. H., as a lawyer, giving up his
clerical profession, since there were few
parishes that would tolerate a minister who
was not a sincere patriot. Of the Jones
family some were Tories and some patriots,
the rest, among them Mrs. Dunbar, were
neutral. On the contrary, Thoreau's grand
father on the other side was in the Revolu
tionary service as a privateer.

For whatever reason, this particular peace
advocate was not attractive to Thoreau, who
thus spoke of him in his ^Journal, as was first
noted by Channing in his Life of Thoreau ;
" They addressed each other constantly by
their Christian names, and rubbed you con
tinually with the greasy cheek of their
kindness. I was awfully pestered with the
benignity of one of them. . . . He wrote
a book called A Kiss for a Blow, and he be
haved as if I had given him a blow, — was
bent on giving me the kiss, — when there
was neither quarrel nor agreement between
us. ... He addressed me as * Henry '
within one minute from the time I first laid

[10]

eyes on him ; and when I spoke he said,
with drawling, sultry sympathy, 'Henry, I
know all you would say, I understand you
perfectly, — you need not explain anything
to me.' He could tell in a dark room, with
his eyes blinded, and in perfect stillness, if
there was one there whom he loved. . . .
What a relief to have heard the ring of one
healthy, reserved tone." This satirical tone
is seldom found in the essay on Ralegh,
which, like most of the essays and verses
before 1845 are m a serious and often para
doxical spirit, suggesting laughter only by
their extravagance, which the young author
did not seem to perceive.

The tone of The Service was probably sug
gested by those numerous discourses on peace
and non-resistance to which he was obliged
to listen from 1840 to 1848, and which he
resented then, as he also did in 1859 when
writing with some heat on the capture and
martyrdom of John Brown, which he com
pared to that of Ralegh. " I speak for the
slave," he said, "when I say th«t I prefer
the philanthropy of Captain Brown to that
philanthropy which neither shoots me nor

liberates me. For once the Sharp rifles
and the revolvers were employed in a right
eous cause. I do not wish to kill nor to
be killed, but I can foresee circumstances in
which both these things would be by me
unavoidable." He listened with much in
terest to Brown's account of his fights in
Kansas, when I had introduced him to Brown
in his father's house at Concord, in Feb
ruary, 1857, anc^ n°ted down many of their
particulars ; and when the Civil War came
on, he was as earnest as any one that it should
be fought to its just conclusion, the destruc
tion of slavery. In this he was unlike his
English friend Thomas Cholmondeley, who
wrote to him from Shrewsbury, April 23,
1 86 1 : "These rumors of wars make me
wish that we had got done with this brutal
stupidity of war altogether ; and I believe,
Thoreau, that the human race will at last
get rid of it, though, perhaps, not in a
creditable way ; but such powers will be
brought to bear that it will become mon
strous even to the French. Dundonald de
clared to the last that he possessed secrets
which, from their tremendous character,

[12]

would make war "impossible. So peace may
be begotten from the machinations of evil."
Lord Dundonald, who had fought by sea
for the South Americans and the Greeks,
was a good sample of a modern Ralegh ;
but he would not have aroused in Thoreau
the interest which he had felt in Ralegh.
It was the literary as well as the knightly
quality in the Elizabethan that attracted the
Concord man of letters ; and the burden
of this long-lost essay will be found to be
chiefly literary. Ralegh, like his friends,
Sidney and Spenser, is one of the romantic
figures in English literature more admired
than read in these later days ; they are in
dispensable to him who would know all the
resources of poesy in our native tongue. I
was therefore surprised and rather grieved
to hear Dr. Holmes say, as we were re
turning together to Boston from the break
fast given to Mrs". Stowe at Newton, many
years since, that he had never read the verses
ascribed to Ralegh. Nobody now reads the
History of the World, — probably Thoreau
was its latest American reader, except those
whom some historical task required them to

go through with it. He was also the last
reader of Davenant's Gondibert, upon which
many an adventurous youth has been stranded.
But Thoreau, like Emerson and Charles
Lamb, whose researches in Elizabethan fields
aided him, and are acknowledged in his com
monplace book, from 1839 until 1845 made
a faithful study of that copious and racy
literature that filled the century from Surrey
and Wyatt to Crashaw and Vaughan, and
in this scrap-book before me more than
forty authors of that period are quoted,
some of them at much length. The edit
ors of Thoreau's dozen volumes should have
had this scrap-book before them when seek
ing the source of the quotations in which he
so abounds.

Let us not seek to overvalue this treasure-
trove of an author to whom each successive
year brings a new army of readers, and
of whom every reader becomes a warm ad
mirer. It is not a finished piece of English
like many of his essays ; he had not in 1 844
reached that perfection in his style, nor
that ripeness of thought which Walden
and the later writings display. It belongs,

rather, with that collection of literary essays
with which the bulk of his narrative of The
Week is so increased, and its qualities so
much enriched. But it shows how early
his profound conceptions got a striking
expression, and how even earlier his far-
reaching judgments on men and things en
titled him to the name of scholar and sage.
Few youths of New England ever ex
hibited sooner in life, or practised more
seriously and effectively, the arts and gifts
that produce works of permanent literary
value. Such is every completed essay of
Thoreau that I have seen ; and I must
now have seen them nearly all. The rev
elations of his imprinted ^journais are now
to be tested, upon their publication ; but
they will not decrease or check his growing
fame.

SIR WALTER RALEIGH

PERHAPS no one in English history better
represents the heroic character than Sir
Walter Raleigh, for Sidney has got to be
almost as shadowy as Arthur himself. Ra
leigh's somewhat antique and Roman vir
tues appear in his numerous military and
naval adventures, in his knightly conduct
toward the Queen, in his poems and his
employments in the Tower, and not least
in his death, but more than all in his con
stant soldier-like bearing and promise. He
was the Bayard of peaceful as well as war
like enterprise, and few lives which are the
subject of recent and trustworthy history
are so agreeable to the imagination. Not
withstanding his temporary unpopularity, he
especially possessed the prevalent and popu
lar qualities which command the admira
tion of men. If an English Plutarch were
to be written, Raleigh would be the best
Greek or Roman among them all. He was

one whose virtues if they were not distinct
ively great yet gave to virtues a current stamp
and value as it were by the very grace and
loftiness with which he carried them; — one
of nature's noblemen who possessed those
requisites to true nobility without which no
heraldry nor blood can avail. Among sav
ages he would still have been chi^f. He
seems to have had, not a profounder or
grander but, so to speak, more nature than
other men, — a great, irregular, luxuriant na
ture, fit to be the darling of a people. The
enthusiastic and often extravagant, but always
hearty and emphatic, tone in which he is
spoken of by his contemporaries is not the
least remarkable fact about him, and it does
not matter much whether the current stories
are true or not, since they at least prove his
reputation. It is not his praise to have
been a saint or a seer in his generation, but
" one of the gallantest worthies that ever
England bred." The stories about him
testify to a character rather than a virtue.
As, for instance, that " he was damnable
proud. Old Sir Robert Harley of Bramp-
ton-Brian Castle (who knew him) would

[18]

say, 't was a great question, who was the
proudest. Sir Walter or Sir Thomas Over-
bury, but the difference that was, was judged
on Sir Thomas's side; " that "in his youth
his companions were boisterous blades, but
generally those that had wit;'3 that on
one occasion he beats one of them for mak
ing a noise in a tavern, and "seals up his
mouth, his upper and nether beard, with
hard wax/1 A young contemporary says,
"I have heard his enemies confess that he
was one of the weightiest and wisest men
that the island ever bred ; " and another gives
this character of him, — " who hath not
known or read of this prodigy of wit and
fortune, Sir Walter Raleigh, a man unfortu
nate in nothing else but in the greatness of
his wit and advancement, whose eminent
worth was such, both in domestic policy,
foreign expeditions, and discoveries, in arts
and literature, both practic and contempla
tive, that it might seem at once to conquer
example and imitation."

And what we are told of his personal ap
pearance is accordant with the rest, — that
" he had in the outward man a good presence,

in a handsome and well-compacted person;"
that "he was a tall, handsome, and bold
man;" and his "was thought a very good
face," though " his countenance was some
what spoiled by the unusual height of his
forehead." " He was such a person (every
way), that (as King Charles I says of the Lord
Strafford) a prince would rather be afraid of,
than ashamed of,'' and had an "awfulness and
ascendency in his aspect over other mortals;"
and we are not disappointed to learn that he
indulged in a splendid dress, and " notwith
standing his so great mastership in style, and
his conversation with the learnedest and polit
est persons, yet he spake broad Devonshire
to his dying day." 1

Such a character as this was well suited to
the time in which he lived. His age was an
unusually stirring one. The discovery of
America and the successful progress of the
Reformation openedTa field for both the intel
lectual and physical energies of his generation.
The fathers of his age were Calvin and Knox,
and Cranmer, and Pizarro, and Garcilaso ;
and its immediate forefathers were Luther

1 Ail the notes are in the back of the volume.
[20]

and Raphael, and Bayard and Angelo, and
Ariosto, and Copernicus, and Machiavel, and
Erasmus, and Cabot, and Ximenes, and Co
lumbus. Its device might have been an an
chor, a sword, and a quill. The Pizarro laid
by his sword at intervals and took to his let
ters. The Columbus set sail for newer worlds
still, by voyages which needed not the pat
ronage of princes. The Bayard alighted from
his steed to seek adventures no less arduous
than heretofore upon the ocean and in the
Western world ; and the Luther who had re
formed religion began now to reform politics
and science.

In Raleigh's youth, however it may have
concerned him, Carnoens was writing a
heroic poem in Portugal, and the arts still
had their representative in Paul Veronese of
Italy. He may have been one to welcome
the works of Tasso and Montaigne to Eng
land, and when he looked about him he
might have found such men as Cervantes
and Sidney, men of like pursuits and not
altogether dissimilar genius from himself,
for his contemporaries, — a Drake to rival
him on the sea, and a Hudson in western

[21]

adventure ; a Halley, a Galileo, and a Kep-
lefj for his astronomers; a Bacon, a Beh-
men, and a Burton, for his philosophers ;
and a Jonson, a Spenser, and a Shakespeare,
his poets for refreshment and inspiration.

But that we may know how worthy he
himself was to make one of this illustrious
company, and may appreciate the great activ
ity and versatility of his genius, we will glance
hastily at the various aspects of his life.

He was a proper knight, a born cavalier,
who in the intervals of war betook himself
still to the most vigorous arts of peace,
though as if diverted from his proper aim.
He makes us doubt if there is not some
worthier apology for war than has been dis.-
covered, for its modes and manners were an
instinct with him ; and though in his writ
ings he takes frequent occasion sincerely to
condemn its folly, and show the better policy
and advantage of peace, yet he speaks with
the uncertain authority of a warrior still, to
whom those juster wars are not simply the
dire necessity he would imply.

In whatever he is engaged we seem to see
a plume waving over his head, and a sword

[22]

dangling at his side. Born in 1552, the last
year of the reign of Edward VI, we find
that not long after, by such instinct as makes
the young crab seek the seashore, he has
already marched into France, as one of " a
troop of a hundred gentlemen volunteers/*
who are described as " a gallant company,
nobly mounted and accoutred, having on
their colors the motto, Finem dct mlhi virtus
— ' Let valor be my aim/ ' And so in fact
he marched on through life with this motto
in his heart always. All the peace of those
days seems to have been but a truce, or
casual interruption of the order of war.
War with Spain, especially, was so much the
rule rather than the exception that the navi
gators and commanders of these two nations,
when abroad, acted on the presumption that
their countries were at war at home, though
they had left them at peace; and their re
spective colonies in America carried on war
at their convenience, with no infraction of
the treaties between the mother countries.

Raleigh seems to have regarded the Span
iards as his natural enemies, and he was
not backward to develop this part of his

[23]

nature. When England was threatened with
foreign invasion, the Queen looked to him
especially for advice and assistance ; and
none was better able to give them than he.
We cannot but admire the tone in which he
speaks of his island, and how it is to be best
defended, and the navy, its chief strength,
maintained and improved. He speaks from
England as his castle, and his (as no other
man's) is the voice of the state ; for he does
not assert the interests of an individual but
of a commonwealth, and we see in him re
vived a Roman patriotism.

His actions, as they were public and for
the public, were fit to be publicly rewarded;
and we accordingly read with equanimity
of gold chains and monopolies and other
emoluments conferred on him from time to
time for his various services, --his military
successes in Ireland, " that commonweal of
common woe/' as he even then described
it ; his enterprise in the harbor of Cadiz ;
his capture of Fayal from the Spaniards ;
and other exploits which perhaps, more
than anything else, got him fame and a
name during his lifetime.

If war was his earnest work, it was his
pastime too; for in the peaceful intervals we
hear of him participating heartily and bear
ing off the palm in the birthday tourna
ments and tilting matches of the Queen,
where the combatants vied with each other
mainly who should come on to the ground
in the most splendid dress and equipments.
In those tilts it is said that his political rival,
Essex, whose wealth enabled him to lead
the costliest train, but who ran very ill and'
was thought the poorest knight of all, was
wont to change his suit from orange to
green, that it might be said that "There
was one in green who ran worse than one
in orange."

None of the worthies of that age can be
duly appreciated if we neglect to consider
them in their relation to the New World.
The stirring spirits stood with but one foot
on the land. There were Drake, Hawkins,
Hudson, Frobisher, and many others, and
their worthy companion was Raleigh. As
a navigator and naval commander he had
few equals, and if the reader who has at
tended to his other actions inquires how he

filled up the odd years, he will find that they
were spent in numerous voyages to America
for the purposes of discovery and coloniza
tion. He would be more famous for these
enterprises if they were not overshadowed by
the number and variety of his pursuits.

His persevering care and oversight as the
patron of Virginia, discovered and planted
under his auspices in 1584, present him in
an interesting light to the American reader.
The work of colonization was well suited to
his genius; and if the necessity of England
herself had not required his attention and
presence at this time, he would possibly
have realized some of his dreams in planta
tions and cities on our coast.

England has since felt the benefit of his
experience in naval affairs ; for he was one
of the first to assert their importance to
her, and he exerted himself especially for the
improvement of naval architecture, on which
he has left a treatise. He also composed a
discourse on the art of war at sea, a sub
ject which at that time had never been
treated.

We can least bear to consider Raleigh as

a courtier ; though the court of England
at that time was a field not altogether un
worthy of such a courtier. His competitors
for fame and favor there were Burleigh,
Leicester, Sussex, Buckingham, and, be it
remembered, Sir Philip Sidney, whose Ar
cadia was just finished when Raleigh came
to court. Sidney was his natural com
panion and other self, as it were, as if
nature, in her anxiety to confer one speci
men of a true knight and courtier on that
age, had cast two in the same mould, lest
one should miscarry. These two kindred
spirits are said to have been mutually at
tracted toward each other. And there, too,
was Queen Elizabeth herself, the centre of
the court and of the kingdom ; to whose
service he consecrates himself, not so much
as a subject to his sovereign, but as a knight
to the service of his mistress. His- inter
course with the Queen may well have begun
with the incident of the cloak, for such
continued to be its character afterward. It
has in the description an air of romance,
and might fitly have made a part of his
friend Sidney's Arcadia. The tale runs that

[27]

the Queen, walking one day in the midst
of her courtiers, came to a miry place, 'when
Raleigh, who was then unknown to her,
taking off his rich plush cloak, spread it
upon the ground for a foot-cloth.

We are inclined to consider him as some
knight, and a knight errant, too, who had
strayed into the precincts of the court, and
practised there the arts which he had learned
in bower and hall and in the lists. Not
but that he knew how to govern states as
well as queens, but he brought to the task
the gallantry and graces of chivalry, as well
as the judgment and experience of a practical
modern Englishman. " The Queen/* says
one, " began to be taken with his elocution,
and loved to hear his reasons to his demands ;
and the truth is she took him for a kind of
oracle, which nettled them all." He rose
rapidly in her favor, and became her indis
pensable counsellor in all matters which
concerned the state, for he was minutely
acquainted with the affairs of England, and
none better understood her commercial in
terests. But notwithstanding the advantage
of his wisdom to England, we had rather

[28]

think of him taking counsel with the winds
and breakers of the American coast and
the roar of the Spanish artillery, than with
the Queen. But though he made a good
use of his influence (for the most part)
when obtained, he could descend to the
grossest flattery to obtain this, and we could
wish him forever banished from the court,
whose favors he so earnestly sought. Yet
that he who was one while " the Queen of
England's poor captive/' could sometimes
assume a manly and independent tone with
her, appears from his answer when she once
exclaimed, on his asking a favor for a friend,
<; When, Sir Walter, will you cease to be a
beggar ?" "When your gracious Majesty
ceases to be a benefactor."

His court life exhibits him in mean and
frivolous relations, which make him lose
that respect in our eyes which he had
acquired elsewhere.

The base use he made of his recovered
influence (after having been banished from
the court, and even suffered imprisonment
in consequence of the Queen's displeasure)
to procure the disgrace and finally the

[29]

execution of his rival Essex (who had been
charged with treason) is the foulest stain
upon his escutcheon, the one which it is
hardest to reconcile with the nobleness and
generosity which we are inclined to attribute
to such a character. Revenge is most un-
heroic. His acceptance of bribes afterwards
for using his influence in behalf of the earl's
adherents is not to be excused by the usage
of the times. The times may change, but
the laws of integrity and magnanimity are
immutable. Nor are the terms on which
he was the friend of Cecil, from motives
of policy merely, more tolerable to con
sider. Yet we cannot but think that he fre
quently travelled a higher, though a parallel,
course with the mob, and though he had
their suffrages, to some extent deserves the
praise which Jonson applies to another, —

That to the vulgar canst thyself apply,
Treading a better path not contrary.

We gladly make haste to consider him in
what the world calls his misfortune, after
the death of Elizabeth and the accession
of James I, when his essentially nobler

[JO]

nature was separated from the base com
pany of the court and the contaminations
which his loyalty could not resist, though
tested by imprisonment and the scaffold.

His enemies had already prejudiced the
King against him before James's accession
to the throne, and when at length the
English nobility were presented to his
Majesty (who, it .will be remembered, was
a Scotchman), and Raleigh's name was told,
" Raleigh ! " exclaimed the King, " O my
soule, men, I have heard rawly of thee."
His efforts to limit the King's power of
introducing Scots into England contributed
to increase his jealousy and dislike, and he
was shortly after accused by Lord Cobham
of participating in a conspiracy to place
the Lady Arabella Stuart2 on the throne.
Owing mainly, it is thought, to the King's
resentment, he was tried and falsely con
victed of high treason ; though his accuser
retracted in writing his whole accusation
before the conclusion of the trial.

In connection with his earlier behavior
to Essex, it should be remembered that by
his conduct on his own trial he in a great

measure removed the ill-will which existed
against him on that account. At his trial,
which is said to have been most unjustly
and insolently conducted by Sir Edward
Coke on the part of the Crown, "he an
swered," says one, "with that temper, wit,
learning, courage, and judgment that, save
that it went with the hazard of his life, it
was the happiest day that ever he spent."
The first two that brought the news of his
condemnation to the King were Roger Ash-
ton and a Scotsman, " whereof one affirmed
that never any man spake so well in times
past, nor would in the world to come; and
the other said, that whereas when he saw
him first, he was so led with the common
hatred that he would have gone a hundred
miles to have seen him hanged, he would,
ere he parted, have gone a thousand to have
saved his life." Another says, " he behaved
himself so worthily, so wisely, and so tem
perately, that in half a day the mind of all
the company was changed from the extrem-
est hate to the extrernest pity." And an
other said, " to the lords he was humble, but
not prostrate; to the jury affable, but not

[3*] '

fawning ; to the King's counsel patient, but
not yielding to the imputations laid upon
him, or neglecting to repel them with the
spirit which became an injured and hon
orable man." And finally he followed the
sheriff out of court in the expressive words
of Sir Thomas Overbury, " with admirable
erection, but yet in such sort as became a
man condemned. "

Raleigh prepared himself for immediate
execution, but after his pretended accom
plices had gone through the ceremony of a
mock execution and been pardoned by the
King, it satisfied the policy of his enemies
to retain him a prisoner in the Tower for
thirteen years, with the sentence of death still
unrevoked. In the meanwhile he solaced
himself in his imprisonment with writ
ing a History of the World and cultivating
poetry and philosophy as the noblest deeds
compatible with his confinement.

It is satisfactory to contrast with his mean
personal relations while at court his con
nection in the Tower with the young Prince
Henry (whose tastes and aspirations were of
a stirring kind), as his friend and instructor.

[33]

He addresses some of his shorter pieces to
the Prince, and in some instances' they seem
to have been written expressly for his use.
He preaches to him as he was well able,
from experience, a wiser philosophy than he
had himself practised, and was particularly
anxious to correct in him a love of popular
ity which he had discovered, and to give
him useful maxims for his conduct when
he should take his father's place.

He lost neither health nor spirits by thir
teen years of captivity, but after having spent
this, the literary era of his life, as in the
retirement of his study, and having written
the history of the Old World, he began to
dream of actions which would supply mate
rials to the future historian of the New. It
is interesting to consider him, a close pris
oner as he was, preparing for voyages and
adventures which would require him to
roam more broadly than was consistent
with the comfort or ambition of his freest
contemporaries.

Already in 1595, eight years before his
imprisonment, it will be remembered he had
undertaken his first voyage to Guiana in

[34]

person ; mainly, it is said, to recover favor
with the Queen, but doubtless it was much
more to recover favor with himself, and ex
ercise his powers in fields more worthy of
him than a corrupt court. He continued
to cherish this his favorite project though a
prisoner ; and at length in the thirteenth
year of his imprisonment, through the in
fluence of his friends and his confident
assertions respecting the utility of the expe
dition to the country, he obtained his release,
and set sail for Guiana with twelve ships.
But unfortunately he neglected to procure a
formal pardon from the King, trusting to
the opinion of Lord Bacon that this was
unnecessary, since the sentence of death
against him was virtually annulled, by the
lives of others being committed to his
hands. Acting on this presumption, and
with the best intentions toward his country,
and only his usual jealousy of Spain, he un
dertook to make good his engagements to
himself and the world.

It is not easy for us at this day to realize
what extravagant expectations Europe had
formed respecting the wealth of the New

[35]

World. We might suppose two whole con
tinents, with their adjacent seas and oceans,
equal to the known globe, stretching from
pole to pole, and possessing every variety
of soil, climate, and productions, lying un
explored to-day, — what would now be the
speculations of Broadway and State Street ?

The few travellers who had penetrated
into the country of Guiana, whither Raleigh
was bound, brought back accounts of noble
streams flowing through majestic forests, and
a depth and luxuriance of soil which made
England seem a barren waste in comparison.
Its mineral wealth was reported to be as in
exhaustible as the cupidity of its discoverers
was unbounded. The very surface of the
ground was said to be resplendent with gold,
and the men went covered with gold-dust,
as Hottentots with grease. Raleigh was in
formed while at Trinidad, by the Spanish
governor, who was his prisoner, that one Juan
Martinez had at length penetrated into this
country ; and the stories told by him of the
wealth and extent of its cities surpass the
narratives of Marco Polo himself. He is
said in particular to have reached the city

[36]

of Manoa, to which he first gave the name
of El Dorado, or " The Gilded/1 the In
dians conducting him blindfolded, not re
moving the veil from his eyes till he was
ready to enter the city. It was at noon that
he passed the gates, and it took him all that
day and the next, walking from sunrise to
sunset, before he arrived at the palace of
Inga, where he resided for seven months,
till he had made himself master of the lan
guage of the country. These and even more
fanciful accounts had Raleigh heard and
pondered, both before and after his first visit
to the country. No one was more familiar
with the stories, both true and fabulous,
respecting the discovery and resources of the
New World, and none had a better right
than he to know what great commanders
and navigators had done there, or anywhere.
Such information would naturally flow to
him of its own accord. That his ardor and
faith were hardly cooled by actual observa
tion may be gathered from the tone of his
own description.

He was the first Englishman who ascended
the Orinoco, and he thus describes the adja-

[37]

cent country : " On the banks were divers

sorts of fruits good to eat, besides flowers and

trees of that variety as were sufficient to

make ten volumes of herbals. We relieved

ourselves many times with the fruits of the

country, and sometimes with fowl and fish :

we saw birds of all colors, some carnation,

some crimson, orange tawny, purple, green,

watched [watchet], and of all other sorts,

both simple and mixt ; as it was unto us a

great good passing of the time to behold

them, besides the relief we found by killing

some store of them with our fowling pieces,

without which, having little or no bread, and

less drink, but only the thick and troubled

water of the river, we had been in a very

hard case."

The following is his description of the
waterfalls and the province of Canuri,
through which last the river runs. "When
we run to the tops of the first hills of the
plains adjoining to the river, we beheld that
wonderful breach of waters which ran down
Caroli : and might from that mountain see
the river how it ran in three parts above
twenty miles off; there appeared some ten

[38]

or twelve overfalls in sight, every one as high
over the other as a church tower, which fell
with that fury, that the rebound of waters
made it seem as if it had been all covered
over with a great shower of rain : and in
some places we took it at the first for a
smoke that had risen over some great town.
For mine own part, I was well persuaded
from thence to have returned, being a very
ill footman ; but the rest were all so desirous
to go near the said strange thunder of waters,
as they drew me on by little and little, into
the next valley, where we might better,
discern the same. I never saw a more beau
tiful country, nor more lively prospects, hills
so raised here and there over the valleys,
the river winding into divers branches, the
plains adjoining without bush or stubble,
all fair green grass, the ground of hard sand,
easy to march on either for horse or foot,
the deer crossing in every path, the birds
towards the evening singing on every tree
with a thousand several tunes, cranes and
herons of white, crimson, and carnation
perching on the river's side, the air fresh,
with a gentle easterly wind ; and every stone

[39]

that we stopped to take up promised either
gold or silver by his complexion."

In another place he says: "To conclude,
Guiana is a country never sacked, turned,
nor wrought; the face of the earth hath not
been torn, nor the virtue and salt of the soil
spent by manurance."

To the fabulous accounts of preceding ad
venturers Raleigh added many others equally
absurd and poetical, as, for instance, of a
tribe " with eyes in their shoulders and
their mouths in the middle of their breasts,"
but, it seems to us, with entire good faith,
and no such flagrant intent to deceive as he
has been accused of. " Weak policy it
would be in me/' says he, " to betray my
self or my country with imaginations;
neither am I so far in love with that lodg
ing, watching, care, peril, diseases, ill savors,
bad fare, and many other mischiefs that ac
company these voyages, as to woo myself
again into any of them, were I not assured
that the sun covereth not so much riches in
any part of the earth." Some portion of
this so prevalent delusion respecting the pre
cious metals is no doubt to be referred to the

[40]

actual presence of an abundance of mica,
slate, and talc and other shining substances
in the soil. "We may judge," says Macaulay,
" of the brilliancy of these deceptious appear
ances, from learning that the natives ascribed
the lustre of the Magellanic clouds or nebula?
of the southern hemisphere to the bright
reflections produced by them." So he was
himself most fatally deceived, and that too
by the strength and candor no less than the
weakness of his nature, for, generally speak
ing, such things are not to be disbelieved as
task our imaginations to conceive of, but
such rather as are too easily embraced by
the understanding.

It is easy to see that he was tempted, not
so much by the lustre of the gold, as by the
splendor of the enterprise itself. It was the
best move that peace allowed. The expe
ditions to Guiana and the ensuing golden
dreams were not wholly unworthy of him,
though he accomplished little more in the first
voyage than to take formal possession of the
country in the name of the Queen, and in the
second, of the Spanish town of San Thome,
as his enemies would say, in the name of

[40

himself. Perceiving that the Spaniards, who
had been secretly informed of his designs
through their ambassador in England, were
prepared to thwart his endeavors, and resist
his progress in the country, he procured the
capture of this their principal town, which
was also burnt, against his orders.

But it seems that no particular exception
is to be taken against these high-handed
measures, though his enemies have made
the greatest handle of them. His behavior
on this occasion was part and parcel of his
constant character. It would not be easy
to say when he ceased to be an honorable
soldier and became a freebooter ; nor indeed
is it of so much importance to inquire of a
man what actions he performed at one and
what at another period, as what manner of
man he was at all periods. It was after all
the same Raleigh who had won so much re
nown by land and sea, at home and abroad.
It was his forte to deal vigorously with
menx whether as a statesman, a courtier, a
navigator, a planter of colonies, an accused
person, a prisoner, an explorer of continents,
or a military or naval commander.

And it was a right hero's maxim of his,
that "good success admits of no examina
tion ; " which, in a liberal sense, is true
conduct. That there was no cant in him
on the subject of war appears from his say
ing (which indeed is very true), that " the
necessity of war, which among human ac
tions is most lawless, hath some kind of
affinity and near resemblance with the ne
cessity of law/' It is to be remembered,
too, that if the Spaniards found him a rest
less and uncompromising enemy, the In
dians experienced in him a humane and
gentle defender, and on his second visit to
Guiana remembered his name and wel
comed him with enthusiasm.

We are told that the Spanish ambassador,
on receiving intelligence of his doings in
that country, rushed into the presence of
King James, exclaiming " Piratas, piratas! "
— • " Pirates, pirates ! " and the King, to
gratify his resentment, without bringing
him to trial for this alleged new offence,
with characteristic meanness and pusillanim
ity caused him to be executed upon the old
sentence soon after his return to England.

[43]

The circumstances of his execution and
how he bore himself on that memorable oc
casion, when the sentence of death passed
fifteen years before was revived against him,
- — after as an historian in his confinement
he had visited the Old World in his free im
agination, and as an unrestrained adventurer
the New, with his fleets and in person, -
are perhaps too well known to be repeated.
The reader will excuse our hasty rehearsal
of the final scene.

We can pardon, though not without limi
tations, his supposed attempt at suicide in
the prospect of defeat and disgrace ; and no
one can read his letter to his wife, written
while he was contemplating this act, with
out being reminded of the Roman Cato,
and admiring while he condemns him.
" I know," says he, " that it is forbidden'
to destroy ourselves ; but I trust it is for
bidden in this sort, that we destroy not our
selves despairing of God's mercy." Though
his greatness seems to have forsaken him
in his feigning himself sick, and the base
methods he took to avoid being brought to
trial, yet he recovered himself at last, and

[44]

happily withstood the trials which awaited
him. The night before his execution, be
sides writing letters of farewell to his wife,
containing the most practical advice for the
conduct of her life, he appears to have
spent the time in writing verses on his con
dition, and among others this couplet, On
the Snujf of a Candle.

Cowards may fear to die ; but courage stout,
Rather than live in snuff, will be put out.

And the following verses, perhaps, for an
epitaph on himself:

Even such is time, that takes on trust
Our youth, our joys, our all we have,
And pays us but with earth and dust ;
Who in the dark and silent grave,
When we have wandered all our ways,
Shuts up the story of our days !
But from this earth, this grave, this dust,
The Lord shall raise me up, I trust !

His execution was appointed on Lord
Mayor's day, that the pageants and shows
might divert the attention of the people;
but those pageants have long since been for
gotten, while this tragedy is still remem-

[45]

bered. He took a pipe of tobacco before
he went to the scaffold, and appeared there
with a serene countenance, so that a stranger
could not have told which was the con
demned person. After exculpating him
self in a speech to the people, and without
ostentation having felt the edge of the axe,
and disposed himself once as he wished to lie,
he made a solemn prayer, and being directed
to place himself so that his face should look
to the east, his characteristic answer was,
(( It mattered little how the head lay, pro
vided the heart was right/' The execu
tioner being overawed was unable at first to
perform his office, when Raleigh, slowly
raising his head, exclaimed, " Strike away,
man, don't be afraid." " He was the most
fearless of death," says the bishop3 who at
tended him, " that ever was known, and
the most resolute and confident,, yet with
reverence and conscience." But we would
not exaggerate the importance of these
things. The death scenes of great men
are agreeable to consider only when they
make another and harmonious chapter of
their lives, and we have accompanied our

[46]

hero thus far because he lived, so to speak,
unto the end.

In his History of the World occurs this
sentence : " O eloquent, just, and mighty
Death ! Whom none could advise, thou
hast persuaded ; what none hath dared, thou
hast done; and whom all the world hath
flattered, thou only hast cast out of the
world and despised : thou hast drawn to
gether all the far-stretched greatness, all the
pride, cruelty, and ambition of man, and
covered it all over with those two narrow
words — Hie iacet ! '

Perhaps Raleigh was the man of the most
general information and universal accom
plishment of any in England. Though he
excelled greatly in but few departments, yet
he reached a more valuable mediocrity in
many. " Fie seemed," said Fuller, " to be
like Cato Uticensis, born to that only which
he was about/* He said he had been " a
soldier, a sea-captain, and a courtier/' but
he had been much more than this. He
embraced in his studies music, ornamental
gardening, painting, history, antiquities,
chemistry, and many arts beside. Espe-

[47]

cially he is said to have been a great chemist,
and studied most in his sea voyages, " when
he carried always a trunk of books along with
him, and had nothing to divert him/' and
when also he carried his favorite pictures.
In the Tower, too, says one, "he doth spend
all the day in distillations;" and that this
was more than a temporary recreation ap
pears from the testimony of one who says
he was operator to him for twelve years.
Here also " he conversed on poetry, phi
losophy, and literature with Hoskins, his
fellow-prisoner/' whom Ben Jonson men
tions as " the person who had polished
him." He was a political economist far in
advance of his age, and a sagacious and in
fluential speaker in the House of Commons.
Science is indebted to him in more ways
than one. In the midst of pressing public
cares he interested himself to establish some
means of universal communication between
men of science for their mutual benefit, and
actually set up what he termed " An office
of address " for this purpose. As a mathe
matician, he was the friend of Harriot, Dee,
and the Earl of Northumberland. As an

[48]

antiquarian, he was a member of the first
antiquarian society established in England,
along with Spelman, Selden, Cotton, Cam-
den, Savile, and Stow. He is said to have
been the founder of the Mermaid Club,
which met in Fleet Street, to which Shake
speare, Ben Jonson, Fletcher, Beaumont,
Carew, Donne, etc., belonged. He has the
fame of having first introduced the potato
from Virginia and the cherry from the Ca
naries into Ireland, where his garden was ;
and his manor of Sherborne4 " he beautified
with gardens, and orchards, and groves of
much variety and delight/' And this fact,
evincing his attention to horticulture, is re
lated, that once, on occasion of the Queen's
visiting him, he artificially retarded the
ripening of some cherries by stretching a
wet canvas over the tree, and removed it on
a sunny day, so as to present the fruit ripe
to the Queen a month later than usual.

Not to omit a more doubtful but not less
celebrated benefit, it is said that on the re
turn of his first colonists from Virginia in
1586 tobacco was first effectually intro
duced into England, and its use encouraged

[49]

by his influence and example. And finally,
not to be outdone by the quacks, he invented
a cordial which became very celebrated,
bore his name, and was even administered
to the Queen, and to the Prince Henry in
his last illness. One Febure writes that " Sir
Walter, being a worthy successor of Mithri-
dates, Matheolus, Basil Valentine, Paracel
sus, and others, has, he affirms, selected all
that is choicest in the animal, vegetable, and
mineral world, and moreover manifested so
much art and experience in the preparation
of this great and admirable cordial as will
of itself render him immortal."

We come at last to consider him as a
literary man and a writer, concerning which
aspect of his life we are least indebted to
the historian for our facts.

As he was heroic with the sword, so was
he with the pen. The History of the World,
the task which he selected for his prison
hours, was heroic in the undertaking and
heroic in the achievement. The easy and
cheerful heart with which he endured his
confinement, turning his prison into a study,
a parlor, and a laboratory, and his prison-

[50]

yard into a garden, so that men did not so
much pity as admire him; the steady pur
pose with which he set about fighting
his battles, prosecuting his discoveries, and
gathering his laurels, with the pen, if he
might no longer with regiments and fleets,
— is itself an exploit. In writing the His
tory of the World he was indeed at liberty ;
for he who contemplates truth and universal
laws is free, whatever walls immure his
body, though to our brave prisoner thus
employed, mankind may have seemed but
his poor fellow-prisoners still.

Though this remarkable work interests
us more, on the whole, as a part of the
history of Raleigh than as the History of
the World, yet it was done like himself, and
with no small success. The historian of
Greece and Rome is usually unmanned by
his subject, as a peasant crouches before
lords ; but Raleigh, though he succumbs to
the imposing fame of tradition and antedi
luvian story, and exhibits unnecessary rever
ence for a prophet or patriarch, from his
habit of innate religious courtesy, has done
better than this whenever a hero was to be

[50

dealt with. He stalks dcnvn through the
aisles of the past, as through the avenues of
a camp, with poets and historians for his
heralds and guides ; and from whatever
side the faintest trump reaches his ear, that
way does he promptly turn, though to the
neglect of many a gaudy pavilion.

From a work so little read in these days
we will venture to quote as specimens the
following criticisms on Alexander and the
character of Epaminondas. They will, at any
rate, teach our lips no bad habits. There
is a natural emphasis in his style, like a
man's tread, and a breathing space between
the sentences, which the best of more modern
writing does not furnish. His chapters are
like English parks, or rather like a Western
forest, where the larger growth keeps down
the underwood, and one may ride on horse
back through the openings.5

" Certainly the things that this King did
were marvellous, and would hardly have been
undertaken by any man else : and though
his father had determined to have invaded
the lesser Asia, it is like enough that he
would have contented himself with some

[5*3

part thereof, and not have discovered the
river of Indus, as this man did. The swift
course of victory, wherewith he ran over
so large a portion of the world, in so
short a space, may justly be imputed unto
this, that he was never encountered by an
equal spirit, concurring with equal power
against him. Hereby it came to pass, that
his actions, being limited by no greater op
position than desert places, and the mere
length of tedious journeys could make, were
like the Colossus of Rhodes, not so much
to be admired for the workmanship, though
therein also praiseworthy, as for the huge
bulk. For certainly the things performed
by Xenophon, discover as brave a spirit as
Alexander's, and working no less exquisitely,
though the effects were less material, as were
also the forces and power of command, by
which it wrought. But he that would find
the exact pattern of a noble commander,
must look upon such as Epaminondas, that
encountering worthy captains, and those bet
ter followed than themselves, have by their
singular virtue over-topped their valiant ene
mies, and still prevailed over those that

[53]

would not have yielded one foot to any
other. Such as these are do seldom live to
obtain great empires; for it is a work of
more labor and longer time to master the
equal forces of one hardy and well-ordered
state, than to tread down and -utterly sub
due a multitude of servile nations, com
pounding the body of a gross unwieldy
empire. Wherefore these parvopo fen fes, men
that with little have done much upon ene
mies of like ability, are to be regarded as
choice examples of worth ; but great con
querors, to be rather admired for the sub
stance of their actions, than the exquisite
managing : exactness and greatness concur
ring so seldom, that I can find no instance
of both in one, save only that brave Roman,
Cesar."

Of Epaminondas he says, " So died
Epaminondas, the worthiest man that ever
was bred in that nation of Greece, and
hardly to be matched in any age or country;
for he equalled all others in the several
virtues, which in each of them were singu
lar. His justice, and sincerity, his temper
ance, wisdom, and high magnanimity, were

[54]

no way inferior to his military virtue ; in
every part whereof he so excelled, that he
could not properly be called a wary, a val
iant, a politic, a bountiful, or an industrious,
and a provident captain ; all these titles, and
many others being due unto him, which with
his notable discipline, and good conduct,
made a perfect composition of an heroic gen
eral. Neither was his private conversation
unanswerable to those high parts, which gave
him praise abroad. For he was grave, and
yet very affable and courteous ; resolute in
public business, but in his own particular
easy, and of much mildness ; a lover of his
people, bearing with men's infirmities, witty
and pleasant in speech, far from insolence,
master of his own affections, and furnished
with all qualities that might win and keep
love. To these graces were added great
ability of body, much eloquence and very
deep knowledge of philosophy and learn
ing, wherewith his mind being enlightened,
rested not in the sweetness of contempla
tion, but broke forth into such effects as
gave unto Thebes which had ever been an
underling, a dreadful reputation among all

[55]

people adjoining, and the highest command
in Greece."

For the most part an author only writes
history, treating it as a dead subject ; but
Raleigh tells it like a fresh story. A man
of action himself, he knew when there was
an action coming worthy to be related, and
does not disappoint the reader, as is too com
monly the case, by recording merely the
traditionary admiration or wonder. In com
menting upon the military actions of the
ancients, he easily and naturally digresses to
some perhaps equal action of his own, or
within his experience ; and he tells how
they should have drawn up their fleets or
men, with the authority of an admiral or
general. The alacrity with which he ad
verts to some action within his experience,
and slides down from the dignified imper
sonality of the historian into the familiarity
and interest of a party and eye-witness, is as
attractive as rare. He is often without re
proach the Caesar of his own story. He
treats Scipio, Pompey, Hannibal, and the
rest quite like equals, and he speaks like an
eye-witness, and gives life and reality to the

[56]

narrative by his very lively understanding
and relating of it; especially in those parts
in which the mere scholar is most likely to
fail. Every reader has observed what a dust
the historian commonly raises about the field
of battle, to serve as an apology for not mak
ing clear the disposition and manoeuvring
of the parties, so that the clearest idea one
gets is of a very vague counteraction or
standing over against one another of two
forces. In this history we, at least, have
faith that these things are right. Our author
describes an ancient battle with the vivacity
and truth of an eye-witness, and perhaps, in
criticising the disposition of the forces, say
ing they should have stood thus or so, some
times enforces his assertions in some such
style as "I remember being in the harbor
of Cadiz," etc., so that, as in Herodotus and
Thucydides, we associate the historian with
the exploits he describes. But this comes
not on account of his fame as a writer, but
from the conspicuous part he acted on the
world's stage, and his name is of equal mark
to us with those of his heroes. So in the
present instance, not only his valor as a

[57]

writer, but the part he acted in his genera
tion, the life of the author, seems fit to
make the last chapter in the history he is
writing. We expect that when his history
is brought to a close it will include his own
exploits. However, it is hardly a work to
be consulted as authority nowadays, except
on the subject of its author's character.

The natural breadth and grasp of the man
is seen in the preface itself, which is a ser
mon with human life for its text. In the
first books he discusses with childlike ear
nestness, and an ingenuity which they little
deserved, the absurd and frivolous questions
which engaged the theology and philosophy
of his day. But even these are recommended
by his sincerity and fine imagination, while
the subsequent parts, or story itself, have the
merit of being far more credible and lifelike
than is common. He shows occasionally a
poet's imagination, and the innocence and
purity of a child (as it were) under a knight's
dress, such as were worthy of the friend of
Spenser. The nobleness of his nature is
everywhere apparent. The gentleness and
steady heart with which he cultivates phi-

[58]

losophy and poetry in his prison, dissolving
in the reader's imagination the very walls
and bars by his childlike confidence in truth
and his own destiny, are affecting. Even
astrology, or, as he has elsewhere called it,
"star-learning," comes recommended from
his pen, and science will not refuse it.

" And certainly it cannot be doubted,"
says he, " but the stars are instruments of
far greater use, than to give an obscure light,
and for men to gaze on after sunset : it being
manifest, that the diversity of seasons, the
winters and summers, more hot and cold,
are not so uncertained by the sun and moon
alone, who alway keep one and the same
course ; but that the stars have also their
working therein.

"And if we cannot deny, but that God hath
given virtues to springs and fountains, to cold
earth, to plants and stones, minerals, and to
the excremental parts of the basest living
creatures, \vhy should we rob the beautiful
stars of their working powers ? for seeing
they are many in number, and of eminent
beauty and magnitude, we may not think,
that in the treasury of his wisdom, who is

[59]

infinite, there can be wanting (even for every
star) a peculiar virtue and operation ; as
every herb, plant, fruit, and flower adorning
the face of the earth, hath the like. For as
these were not created to beautify the earth
alone, and to cover and shadow her dusty
face, but otherwise for the use of man and
beast, to feed them and cure them ; so were
not those uncountable glorious bodies set in
the firmament, to no other end, than to
adorn it ; but for instruments and organs of
his divine providence, so far as it hath pleased
his just will to determine.

"Origen upon this place of Genesis, Let
there he light in the firmament, G?r., affirmeth,
that the stars are not causes (meaning per
chance binding causes ; ) but are as open
books, wherein are contained and set down
all things whatsoever to come ; but not to be
read by the eyes of human wisdom : which
latter part I believe well, and the saying of
Syracides withal; That there are hid yet greater
things than these bey and we have seen but a few
of his works. And though, for the capacity
of men, we know somewhat, yet in the true
and uttermost virtues of herbs and plants,

[60]

which our selves sow and set, and which
grow under our feet, we are in effect igno
rant; much more in the powers and working
of celestial bodies. . . . But in this question
of fate, the middle course is to be followed,
that as with the heathen we do not bind God
to his creatures, in this supposed necessity of
destiny ; and so on the contrary we do not
rob those beautiful creatures of their powers
and offices. . . . And that they wholly di
rect the reasonless mind, I am resolved : for
all those which were created mortal, as birds,
beasts, and the like, are left to their natural
appetites ; over all which, celestial bodies (as
instruments and executioners of God's provi
dence) have absolute dominion. . . . And
Saint Augustine says, Deus rcgit infer tor a
corpora per superiora ; ' God ruleth the bodies
below by those above/ ... It was there
fore truly affirmed, Sapiens adhrcalnt opus
astrorumy quemadmodum agricola terrae na-
turam; ' A wise man assisteth the work of
the stars, as the husbandman helpeth the
nature of the soil.' . . . Lastly, we ought
all to know, that God created the stars as
he did the rest of the universal ; whose in-

[61]

fluences may be called his reserved and un
written laws. . . . But it was well said of
Plotinus, that the stars were significant, but
not efficient, giving them yet something less
than their due: and therefore as I do not
consent with them, who would make those
glorious creatures of God virtueless: so I
think that we derogate from his eternal and
absolute power and providence, to ascribe to
them the same dominion over our immortal
souls, which they have over all bodily sub
stances, and perishable natures : for the souls
of men loving and fearing God, receive in
fluence from that divine light it self, whereof
the sun's clarity, and that of the stars, is by
Plato called but a shadow, Lumen est umbra
Dei, et Deus est lumen luminis; ' Light is the
shadow of God's brightness, who is the light
of light/"

We are reminded by this of Du Bartas's
poem on the Probability of the Celestial Orbs
being inhabited, translated by Sylvester:6

I '11 ne'er believe that the arch-Architect
With all these fires the heavenly arches deck'd
Only for shew, and with their glistering shields
X* amaze poor shepherds, watching in the fields;

I'll ne'er believe that the least flow'r that pranks
Our garden borders, or the common banks,
And the least stone, that in her warming lap
Our kind nurse Earth doth covetously wrap,
Hath some peculiar virtue of its own,
And that the glorious stars of heav'n have none.

Nor is the following brief review and exal
tation of the subject of all history unworthy
of a place in this History of the World:

" Man, thus compounded and formed by
God, was an abstract, or model, or brief
story in the universal : . . . for out of the
earth and dust was formed the flesh of man,
and therefore heavy and lumpish ; the bones
of his body we may compare to the hard
rocks and stones, and therefore strong and
durable ; of which Ovid :

Indt genus durum sumus experienique laborum,
Et document a damu$y qua simus crigine nati:

From thence our kind hard-hearted is,

Enduring pain and care,
Approving, that our bodies of

A stony nature are.

His blood, which disperseth it self by the
branches of veins through all the body, may
be resembled to those waters, which are
carried by brooks and rivers over all the

[63]

earth ; his breath to the air, his natural heat
to the inclosed warmth which the earth
hath in it self, which, stirred up by the heat
of the sun, assisteth nature in the speedier
procreation of those varieties, which the
earth bringeth forth ; our radical moisture,
oil or balsamum (whereon the natural heat
feedeth and is maintained) is resembled to
the fat and fertility of the earth; the hairs
of man's body, which adorns, or overshadows
it, to the grass, which covereth the upper face
and skin of the earth ; our generative power,
to nature, which produceth all things; our
determinations, to the light, wandering, and
unstable clouds, carried everywhere with
uncertain winds ; our eyes to the light of
the sun and moon ; and the beauty of our
youth, to the flowers of the spring, which,
either in a very short time, or with the sun's
heat, dry up and wither away, or the fierce
puffs of wind blow them from the stalks ;
the thoughts of our mind, to the motion of
angels ; and our pure understanding (for
merly called mens, and that which always
looketh upwards) to those intellectual natures,
which are always present with God; and lastly,

our immortal souls (while they are righteous)
are by God himself beautified with the title
of his own image and similitude/'

But man is not in all things like nature :
" For this tide of man's life, after it once
turneth and declineth, ever runneth with a
perpetual ebb and falling stream, but never
floweth again, our leaf once fallen, springeth
no more ; neither doth the sun or the sum
mer adorn us again with the garments of new
leaves and flowers.''

There is a flowing rhythm in some of
these sentences like the rippling of rivers,
hardly to be matched in any prose or verse.
The following is his poem on the decay of
Oracles and Pantheism :

"The fire which the Chaldeans wor
shipped for a god, is crept into every man's
chimney, which the lack of fuel starveth,
water quencheth, and want of air suffocateth:
Jupiter is no more vexed with Juno's jeal
ousies ; death hath persuaded him to chas
tity, and her to patience ; and that time
which hath devoured it self, hath also eaten
up both the bodies and images of him and
his; yea, their stately temples of stone and

[65]

dureful marble. The houses and sumptuous
buildings erected to Baal, can no where be
found upon the earth ; nor any monument
of that glorious temple consecrated to Diana.
There are none now in Phoenicia, that la
ment the death of Adonis; nor any in Libya,
Creta, Thessalia, or elsewhere, that can ask
counsel or help from Jupiter. The great
god Pan hath broken his pipes ; Apollo's
priests are become speechless; and the trade
of riddles in oracles, with the devil's telling
men's fortunes therein, is taken up by coun
terfeit Egyptians, and cozening astrologers.1'
In his Discourse of War in General^ (com
mencing with almost a heroic verse, " The
ordinary theme and argument of history is
war,") are many things well thought, and
many more well said. He thus expands the
maxim that corporations have no soul :
" But no senate nor civil assembly can be
under such natural impulses to honor and
justice as single persons. . . . For a ma
jority is nobody when that majority is sepa
rated, and a collective body can have no
synteresis, or divine ray, which is in the
mind of every man, never assenting to evil,
£66]

but upbraiding and tormenting him when
he does it : but .the honor and conscience
that lies in the majority is too thin and diffu
sive to be efficacious ; for a number can do
a great wrong, and call it right, and not one
of that majority blush for it. Hence it is,
that though a public assembly may lie under
great censures, yet each member looks upon
himself as little concerned: this must be the
reason why a Roman senate should act with
less spirit and less honor than any single
Roman would do."

He then in the same treatise leaps with
easy and almost merry elasticity from the
level of his discourse to the heights of his
philosophy : " And it is more plain there
is not in nature a point of stability to be
found; every thing either ascends or declines:
when wars *\re ended abroad, sedition begins
at home, and when men are freed from fight
ing for necessity, they quarrel through am
bition."

And he thus concludes this discourse:
" We must look a long way back to find
the Romans giving laws to nations, and their
consuls bringing kings and princes bound in

chains to Rome in triumph ; to see men go
to Greece for wisdom, or Ophir for gold ;
when now nothing remains but a poor paper
remembrance of their former condition.

It would be an unspeakable advantage,
both to the public and private, if men would
consider that great truth, that no man is
wise or safe, but he that is honest. All I
have designed is peace to my country ; and
may England enjoy that blessing when I
shall have no more proportion in it than
what my ashes make ! >:

If his philosophy is for the most part poor,
yet the conception and expression are rich
and generous.

His maxims are not true or impartial, but
are conceived with a certain magnanimity
which was natural to him, as if a selfish
policy could easily afford to give place in
him to a more universal and true.

As a fact evincing Raleigh's poetic cul
ture and taste, it is said that, in a visit to
the poet Spenser on the banks of the Mulla,
which is described in Colin Clout's Come
Home Again> he anticipated the judgment
of posterity with respect to the Faerie

[68]

<Z>ueene9 and by his sympathy and advice
encouraged the poet to go on with his
work, which by the advice of other friends,
among whom was Sidney, he had laid aside.
His own poems, though insignificant in re
spect to number and length, and not yet
collected into a separate volume, or rarely
accredited to Raleigh, deserve the distinct
attention of the lover of English poetry, and
leave such an impression on the mind that
this leaf of his laurels, for the time, well
nigh overshadows all the rest.7 In these few
rhymes, as in that country he describes, his
life naturally culminates and his secret as
pirations appear. They are in some respects
more trustworthy testimonials to his char
acter than state papers or tradition ; for
poetry is a piece of very private history,
which unostentatiously lets us into the
secret of a man's life, and is to the reader
what the eye is to the beholder, the charac
teristic feature which cannot be distorted
or made to deceive. Poetry is always im
partial and unbiassed evidence. The whole
life of a man may safely be referred to a few
deep experiences. When he only sings a

more musical line than usual, all his actions
have to be retried by a newer and higher
standard than before.

The pleasing poem entitled A Descrip
tion of the Country's Recreations,* also printed
among the poems of Sir Henry Wo.tton, is
well known. The following, which bears
evident marks of his pen, we will quote,
from its secure and continent rhythm :

FALSE LOVE AND TRUE LOVE

As you came from the holy land

Of Walsingham,
Met you not with my true love

By the way as you came ?

How shall I know your true love,

That have met many one,
As I went to the holy land,

That have come, that have gone.

She is neither white nor brown,

But as the heavens fair;
There is none hath a form so divine,

In the earth or the air.

Such a one did I meet, good Sir,

Such an angelic face ;
Who like a queen, like a nymph did appear,

By her gait, by her grace :

[70]

She hath left me here all alone,

All alone as unknown,
Who sometimes did me lead with herself,

And me loved as her own :

What 's the cause that she leaves you alone,

And a new way doth take :
Who loved you once as her own

And her joy did you make ?

I have loved her all my youth,

But now, old as you see,
Love likes not the falling fruit

From the withered tree :

Know that Love is a careless child

And forgets promise past,
He is blind, he is deaf, when he list,

And in faith never fast :

His desire is a dureless content,

And a trustless joy ;
He is won with a world of despair,

And is lost with a toy.

Of women-kind such indeed is the love,

Or the word love abused \
Under which, many childish desires

And conceits are excused :

But true love is a durable fire

In the mind ever burning ;
Never sick, never old, never dead,

From itself never turning.

The following will be new to many of
our readers :

THE SHEPHERD'S PRAISE OF HIS
SACRED DIANA

Prais'd be Diana's fair and harmless light;

Prais'd be the dews, wherewith she moists the ground ;
Prais'd be her beams, the glory of the night ;

Prais'd be her power, by which all powers abound !

Prais'd be her nymphs, with whom she decks the woods ;

Prais'd be her knights, in whom true honor lives;
Prais'd be that force by which she moves the floods!

Let that Diana shine, which all these gives !

In heaven, queen she is among the spheres;

She mistress-like, makes all things to be pure;
Eternity in her oft-change she bears ;

She, Beauty is ; by her, the fair endure.

Time wears her not; she doth his chariot guide;

Mortality below her orb is plac'd ;
By her the virtues of the stars down slide;

In her is Virtue's perfect image cast !

A knowledge pure it is her worth to know :
With Circes let them dwell that think not so !

Though we discover in his verses the vices
of the courtier, and they are not equally sus
tained, as if his genius were warped by the
frivolous society of the Court, he was capa-

[7*]

ble of rising to unusual heights. His genius
seems to have been fitted for short flights
of unmatched sweetness and vigor, but by
no means for the sustained loftiness of the
epic poet. One who read his verses would
say that he had not grown to be the
man he promised. They have occasionally
a strength of character and heroic tone
rarely expressed or appreciated; and powers
and excellences so peculiar, as to be almost
unique specimens of their kind in the lan
guage. Those which have reference to his
death have been oftenest quoted, and are
the best. The Soul's Errand* deserves to be
remembered till her mission is accomplished
in the world.

We quote the following, not so well
known, with some omissions, from the
commencement of —

HIS PILGRIMAGE

Give me my scallop-shell of quiet,
My staff of faith to walk upon ;

My scrip of joy, immortal diet ;
My bottle of salvation ;

My gown of glory, (hope's true gage)

And thus I '11 take my pilgrimage.

[73]

Blood must be my bod)'s Kilmer,
No other balm will here be given,

Whilst my soul, like quiet palmer,
Travels to the land of heaven,

Over all the silver mountains,

Where do spring those nectar fountains :

And I there will sweetly kiss
The happy bowl of peaceful bliss.
Drinking mine eternal -111
Flowing on each milky hill.
My soul will be adry before,
But after, it will thirst no more.

In that happy, blissful day,

More peaceful pilgrims I shall see,

That have cast off their rags of clay,
And walk apparelPd fresh like me.

But he wrote his poeirs, after all, rather
with ships and fleets, and regiments of men
and horse. At his bidding, navies took
their place in the channel, and even from
prison he fitted out fleet.; with which to
realize his golden dreams, and invited his
companions to fresh adventures.

Raleigh might well be studied if only for
the excellence of his style, for he is remark
able even in the midst of so many masters.
All the distinguished writers of that period

[74]

possess a greater vigor and naturalness than
the more modern, and when we read a quo
tation from one of them in the midst of a
modern authority, we seem to have come
suddenly upon a greener ground and greater
depth and strength of soil. It is as if a
green bough were laid across the page, and
v/e are refreshed as if by the sight of fresh
grass in midwinter or early spring. You
have constantly the warrant of life and ex
perience in all you read. The little that is
said is supplied by implication of the much
that was done. The sentences are verdu
rous and blooming as evergreen and flowers,
because they are rooted in fact and expe
rience ; but our false and florid sentences
have only the tints of flowers without their
sap or roots. Where shall v/e look for^
standard English but to the words of a stand
ard man? The word which is best said
came very near not being spoken at all ; for
it is cousin to a deed which would have
been better done. It must have taken the
place of a deed by some urgent necessity,
even by some misfortune, so that the truest
writer will be some captive knight after all.

[7.0

And perhaps the fates had such a design,
when, having stored Raleigh so richly with
the substance of life and experience, they
made him a fast prisoner, and compelled
him to make his words his deeds, and trans
fer to his expression the emphasis and sin
cerity of his action.

The necessity of labor, and conversation
with many men and things, to the scholar, is
rarely well remembered. Steady labor with
the hands, which engrosses the attention also,
is the best method of removing palaver out
of one's style both of talking and writing. If
he has worked hard from morning till night,
though he may have grieved that he could
not be watching the train of his thoughts
during that time, yet the few hasty lines
which at evening record his day's experi
ence will be more musical and true, than his
freest but idle fancy could have furnished.
He will not lightly dance at his work wJho
has wood to cut and cord before nightfall
in the short days of winter, but every stroke
will be husbanded and ring soberly through
the wood;10 and so will the stroke of that
scholar's pen, when at evening this records

[76]

the story of the day, ring soberly on the ear
of the reader long after the echoes of his axe
have died away. The scholar may be sure
he writes the tougher truths for the calluses
on his palms. They give firmness to the sen
tence. We are often astonished at the force
arid precision of style to which hard-work
ing men unpractised in writing easily attain,
when required to make the effort ; as if
sincerity and plainness, those ornaments of
style, were better taught on the farm or in
the workshop than in the schools. The sen
tences written by such rude hands are ner
vous and tough, like hardened thongs, the
sinews of the deer, or the roots of the pine.
The scholar might frequently emulate the
propriety and emphasis of the farmer's call
to his team, and confess, if that were written,
it would surpass his labored sentences.

From the weak and flimsy periods of the
politician and literary man we are glad to turn
even to the description of work, the simple
record of the month's labor in the farmer's
almanac, to restore our tone and spirits. We
like that a sentence should read as if its author,
had he held a plough instead of a pen, could

[77]

have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the
end. The scholar requires hard labor to give
an impetus to his thought; he will learn to
grasp the pen firmly so, and wield it grace
fully and effectually as an axe or sword. When
we consider the weak and nerveless periods of
some literary men, who perchance in feet and
inches come up to the standard of their race,
and are not deficient in girth also, we are
amazed at the immense sacrifice of thews
and sinews. What ! these proportions, these
bones, and this their work ! Hands which
could have felled an ox have hewed this fragile
matter which would not have tasked a lady's
fingers. Can this be a stalwart man's work,
who has a marrow in his back and a tendon
Achilles in his heel? They who set up
Stonehenge did somewhat, if they only laid
out their strength for once, and stretched
themselves,

Yet after all the truly efficient laborer will
be found not to crowd his day with work,
but will saunter to his task, surrounded by a
wide halo of ease and leisure, and then do
but what he likes best. He is anxious only
about the kernels of time. Though the hen

should set all day she could lay only one egg,
and besides, she would not have picked up the
materials for another.

A perfectly healthy sentence is extremely
rare. But for the most part we miss the hue
and fragrance of the thought. As if we could
be satisfied with the dews of the morning or
evening without their colors, or the heavens
without their azure. The most attractive
sentences are perhaps not the wisest, but the
surest and soundest. They are spoken firmly
and conclusively, as if the author had a right
to know what he says ; and if not wise, they
have at least been well learned. At least he
does not stand on a rolling stone, but is well
assured of his footing ; and if you dispute their
doctrine, you will yet allow that there is truth
in their assurance. Raleigh's are of this sort,
spoken with entire satisfaction and heartiness.
They are not so much philosophy as poetry.
With him it was always well done and nobly
said. His learning was in his hand, and he
carried it by him and used it as adroitly as
his sword. Aubrey says, " He was no slug;
without doubt had a wonderful waking spirit,
and great judgment to guide it." He wields

[79]

his pen as one who sits at ease in his chair,
and has a healthy and able body to back his
wits, and not a torpid and diseased one to fet
ter them. In whichever hand is the pen we
are sure there is a sword in the other. He
sits with his armor on, .and with one ear open
to hear if the trumpet sound, as one who has
stolen a little leisure from the duties of acamp;
and we are confident that the whole man, as
real and palpable as an Englishman can be,
sat down to the writing of his books, and
not some curious brain only. Such a man's
mere daily exercise in literature might well
attract us, and Cecil has said, " He can toil
terribly."

Raleigh seems to have been too genial and
loyal a soul to resist the temptations of a court;
but if to his genius and culture could have
been added the temperament of George Fox
or Oliver Cromwell, perhaps the world would
have had reason longer to remember him.
He was, however, the most generous nature
that could be drawn into the precincts of a
court, and carried the courtier's life almost to
the highest pitch of magnanimity and grace
of which it was capable. He was liberal and

[so]

generous as a prince, that is, within bounds;
brave, chivalrous, heroic, as a knight in armor
— but not as a defenceless man. His was
not the heroism of a Luther, but of a Bayard,
and had more of grace than of honest truth
in it. He had more taste than appetite. There
may be something petty in a refined taste, —
it easily degenerates into effeminacy. It does
not consider the broadest use, and is not con
tent with simple good and bad, but is often
fastidious, and curious, or nice only.

His faults, as we have hinted before, were
those of a courtier and a soldier. In his coun
sels and aphorisms we see not unfrequently
the haste and rashness of the soldier, strangely
mingled with the wisdom of the philosopher.
Though his philosophy was not wide nor pro
found, it was continually giving way to the
generosity of his nature, and he was not hard
to be won to the right.

What he touches he adorns by a greater
humanity and native nobleness, but he touches
not the truest nor deepest. He does not in
any sense unfold the new, but embellishes
the old, and with all his promise of origi
nality he never was quite original, or steered

[81]

his own course. Ke was of so fair and sus
ceptible a nature, rather than broad or deep,
that he delayed to slake his thirst at the near
est and most turbid wells of truth and beauty ;
and his homage to the least fair and noble
left no room for homage to the All-fair.
The misfortune and incongruity of the man
appear in the fact that he was at once the
author of the Maxims of State and The Soul's
Errand.

When we reconsider what we have said in
the foregoing pages, we hesitate to apply any
of their eulogy to the actual and historical
Raleigh, or any of their condemnation to
that ideal Raleigh which he suggests. For
we must know the man of history as we
know our contemporaries, not so much by
his deeds, which often belie his real charac
ter, as by the expectation he begets in us —
and there is a bloom and halo about the char
acter of Raleigh which defies a close and
literal scrutiny, and robs us of our critical
acumen. With all his heroism, he was not
heroic enough ; with all his manliness, he
was servile and dependent; with all his as
pirations, he was ambitious. He was not

[82]

upright nor constant, yet we would have
trusted him ; he could flatter and cringe,
yet we should have respected him ; and he
could accept a bribe, yet we should confi
dently have appealed to his generosity.

Such a life is useful for us to contemplate
as suggesting that a man is not to be meas
ured by the virtue of his described actions,
or the wisdom of his expressed thoughts
merely, but by that free character he is, and
is felt to be, under all circumstances. Even
talent is respectable only when it indicates a
depth of character unfathomed. Surely it
is better that our wisdom appear in the con
stant success of our spirits than in our busi
ness, or the maxims which fall from our lips
merely. We want not only a revelation, but
a nature behind to sustain it. Many silent,
as well as famous, lives have been the result
of no mean thought, though it was never
adequately expressed nor conceived; and per
haps the most illiterate and unphilosophical
mind may yet be accustomed to think to the
extent of the noblest action. We all know
those in our own circle who do injustice to
their entire character in their conversation

[83]

and in writing, but who, if actually set over
against us, would not fail to make a wiser
impression than many a wise thinker and
speaker.

We are not a little profited by any life
which teaches us not to despair of the race;
and such effect has the steady and cheer
ful bravery of Raleigh. To march sturdily
through life, patiently and resolutely looking
grim defiance at one's foes, that is one way;
but we cannot help being more attracted by
that kind of heroism which relaxes its brows
in the presence of danger, and does not need
to. maintain itself strictly, but, by a kind of
sympathy with the universe, generously adorns
the scene and the occasion, and love? valor
so well that itself would be the defeated party
only to behold it; which is as serene and as
well pleased with the issue as the heavens
which look down upon the field of battle.
It is but a lower height of heroism when the
hero wears a 'sour face. We fear that much
of the heroism which we praise nowadays
is dyspeptic. When we consider the vast
Xerxean army of reformers in these days,
we cannot doubt that many a grim soul goes

silent, the hero of some small intestine war ;
and it is somewhat to begin to live on corn-
bread solely, for one who has before lived on
bolted wheat; — but of this sort surely are
not the deeds to be sung. These are not the
Arthurs that inflame the imaginations of men.
All fair action is the product of enthusiasm,
and nature herself does nothing in the prose
mood, though sometimes grimly with poetic
fury, and at others humorously. There is
enthusiasm in the sunrise and the summer,
and we imagine that the shells on the shore
take new layers from year to year with such
rapture as the bard writes his poems.

We would fain witness a heroism which
is literally illustrious, whose daily life is the
stuff of which our dreams are made ; so that
the world shall regard less what it does than
how it does it ; and its actions unsettle the
common standards, and have a right to be
done, however wrong they may be to the
moralist.

Mere gross health and cheerfulness are
no slight attraction, and some biographies
have this charm mainly. For the most part
the best man's spirit makes a fearful sprite to

[85]

haunt his grave, and it adds not a little there
fore to the credit of Little John, the cele
brated follower of Robin Hood, reflecting
favorably on the character of his life, that
his grave was "long celebrous for the yield
ing of excellent whetstones/'

A great cheerfulness indeed have all great
wits and heroes possessed, almost a profane
levity to such as understood them not, but
their religion had the broader basis of health
and permanence. For the hero, too, has his
religion, though it is the very opposite to
that of the ascetic. It demands not a nar
rower cell but a wider world. He is per
haps the very best man of the world ; the
poet active, the saint wilful ; .not the most
godlike, but the most manlike. There have
been souls of a heroic stamp for whom this
world seemed expressly made ; as if this fair
creation had at last succeeded, for it seems
to be thrown away on the saint. Such seem
to be an essential part of their age if we con
sider them in time, and of the scenery if we
consider them in Nature. They lie out be
fore us ill-defined and uncertain, like some
scraggy hillside or pasture, which varies from

[86]

day to day and from hour to hour, with the
revolutions of Nature, so that the eye of the
forester never rests twice upon the same scene;
one knows not what may occur, — he may
hear a fox bark or a partridge drum. They
are planted deep in Nature and have more
root than others. They are earth-born
(y^ye^et?), as was said of the Titans. They
are brothers of the sun and moon, they be
long, so to speak, to the natural family of
man. Their breath is a kind of wind, their
step like that of a quadruped, their moods
the seasons, and they are as serene as Nature.
Their eyes are deep-set like moles or glow
worms, they move free and unconstrained
through Nature as her guests, their motions
easy and natural as if their course were al
ready determined for them ; — as of rivers
flowing through valleys, not as somewhat
finding a place in Nature, but for whom a
place is already found. We love to hear
them speak though we do not hear what
they say. The very air seems forward to
modulate itself into speech for them, and
their words are of its own substance, and fall
naturally on the ear, like the rustling of leaves

and the crackling of the fire. They have
the heavens for their abettors, for they never
stood from under them, and they look at the
stars with an answering ray. The distinc
tions of better and best, sense and nonsense,
seem trivial and petty, when such great
healthy indifferences come along. We lay
aside the trick of thinking well to attend to
their thoughtless and happy natures, and are
inclined to show a divine p-oliteness and
heavenly good-breeding, for they compel it.
They are great natures. It takes a good deal
to support them. Theirs is no thin diet.
The very air they breathe seems rich, and,
as it were, perfumed.

They are so remarkable as to be least re
marked at first, since they are most in har
mony with the time and place, and if we
wonder at all it will be at ourselves and not
at them. Mountains do not rise perpen
dicularly, but the lower eminences hide the
higher, and we at last reach their top by a
gentle acclivity. We must abide a long
time in their midst and at their base, as we
spend many days at the Notch of the White
Mountains in order to be impressed by the

[88]

scenery. Let us not think that Alexander
will conquer Asia the first time we are in
troduced to him, though smaller men may
be in haste to re-enact their exploits then.

" Would you have

Such an Herculean actor in the scene,
And not his hydra ? "

" They must sweat no less
To fit their properties than to express their parts."

The presence of heroic souls enhances the
beauty and ampleness of Nature herself.
Where they walk, as Vergil says of the abodes
of the blessed, -

Largior hie compos aether et lumlne vestit
Purpureo: solemque suum, sua sidera norunt.

Here a more copious air invests the fields, and clothes
with purple light; and they know their own sun and
their own stars.11

But, alas ! What is Truth ? That which
we know not. What is Beauty ? That
which we see not. What is Heroism ? That
which we are not. It is in vain to hang out
flags on a day of rejoicing, — fresh bunting,
bright and whole ; better the soiled and torn
remnant which has been borne in the wars.

We have considered a fair specimen of an
Englishman in the sixteenth century ; but it

[89]

behoves us to be fairer specimens of Ameri
can men in the nineteenth. The gods have
given man no constant gift, but the power
and liberty to act greatly. How many wait
for health and warm weather to be heroic
and noble ! We are apt to think there is a
kind of virtue which need not be heroic and
brave, — but in fact virtue is the deed of the
bravest ; and only the hardy souls venture
upon it, for it deals in what we have no ex
perience, and alone does the rude pioneer
work of the world. In winter is its cam
paign, and it never goes into quarters. " Sit
not down," said Sir Thomas Browne, "in the
popular seats and common level of virtues,
but endeavor to make them heroical. Offer
not only peace-offerings, but holocausts, unto
God."

In our lonely chambers at night we are
thrilled by some far-off serenade within the
mind, and seem to hear the clarion sound
and clang of corselet and buckler from many
a silent hamlet of the soul, though actu^
ally it may be but the rattling of some farm
er's waggon rolling to market against the

morrow.12

[90]

NOTES

From the first tentative draft of the MS. of
Thoreau's Sir Walter Raleigh

I. Another and kindred spirit contemporary
with Raleigh, who survives yet more exclusively
in his reputation, rather than in his works, and
has been the subject perhaps of even more and
more indiscriminate praise, is Sir Philip Sidney ;
a man who was no less a presence to his contem
poraries, though we now look in vain in his works
for satisfactory traces of his greatness. Who,
dying at the age of thirty-two, having left no
great work behind him, or the fame of a single
illustrious exploit, has yet left the rumor of a
character for heroic impulses and gentle behavior
which bids fair to survive the longer lives and
more illustrious deeds of many a worthy else,
the splendor of whose reputation seems to have
blinded his critics to the faults of his writings.
So that we find his Arcadia spoken of with vague
and dubious praise as " a book most famous for
rich conceits and splendor of courtly expressions."
With regard to whom also this reason is assigned
why no monument should be erected to him,

that " he is his own monument whose memory is
eternized in his writings, and who was born into
the world to show unto our age a sample of
ancient virtue/' and of whom another says, "It
was he whom Queen Elizabeth called her Philip ;
the Prince of Orange, his master ; and whose
friendship my Lord Brook was so proud of, that
he would have no other epitaph on his grave than

this:

'Here lieth Sir Philip Sidney's Friend.'1'1

From Raleigh y by Edmund Gosse

2. Arabella Stuart (born about 1575) was James
I's first cousin, the daughter of Charles Stuart,
fifth Earl of Lennox, Lord Darnley's elder brother.
About 1588 she had come up to London to be
presented to Elizabeth, and on that occasion had
amused Raleigh with her gay accomplishments.
The legal quibble on which her claim was founded
was the fact that she was born in England, whereas
James as a Scotchman was supposed to be ex
cluded. Arabella was no pretender ; her descent
from Margaret, the sister of Henry VIII, was com
plete, and if James had died childless, and she had
survived him, it is difficult to see how her claim
could have been avoided in favor of the Suffolk
line.

3. Dr. Robert Tounson, then Dean of
Westminster, who became Bishop of Salisbury.

[GOSSE.]

[9*]

4. There is a pleasant legend that Raleigh and
one of his half-brothers were riding up to town
from Plymouth, when Raleigh's horse stumbled
and threw him within the precincts of a beautiful
Dorsetshire estate, then in possession of the Dean
and Chapter of Salisbury, and that Raleigh, choos
ing to consider that he had thus taken seisin of
the soil, asked the Queen for Sherborne l Castle
when he arrived at Court. It may have been on
this occasion that Elizabeth asked him when he
would cease to be a beggar, and received the
reply, " When your Majesty ceases to be a
benefactor/' [GossE.]

5. This passage about Alexander and Epami-
nondas is preceded in Ralegh, as copied by Thoreau
in the scrap-book, by some general remarks on that
remarkable quality in a few men which Ralegh
seems to have felt in himself, which, as he wrote,
"Guided handfuls of men against multitudes of
equal bodily strength, contrived victories beyond
all hope and discourse of reason, converted the
fearful passions of his own followers into magna
nimity, and the valor of his enemies into coward
ice. Such spirits have been stirred up in sundry
ages of the world, and in divers parts thereof, to
erect and cast down again, to establish and to de
stroy, and to bring all things, persons and states
to the same certain ends which the infinite Spirit

1 Sherborne came into Ralegh's possession in 1592. — ED.

[93]

of the Universal, piercing, moving and governing
all things, hath ordained." It was passages like
this, in his speech and writings, that laid Ralegh
open to the charge of atheism, which seems to have
been first brought against him at the same time
that his friend the poet Marlowe was similarly
accused, in 1592—3, and may have been one of
the reasons why Queen Elizabeth withdrew her
favor from Ralegh about that time. The definite
accusations against Marlowe, which were sent to
Queen Elizabeth in June, 1592, apparently, were
from the mouth of one Richard Baine, who was
hanged for felony two years after, and contained
these words, perhaps pointing towards Ralegh :
"That one Richard Cholmelei hath confessed that
he was persuaded by Marlowe's reason to become
an atheist. These things shall by good and honest
men be proved to be his opinions and common
speeches, and that this Marlowe doth not only
hold them himself, but almost in every company
he cometh, persuadeth men to atheism,— -willing
them not to be afraid of bugbears and hobgoblins,
and utterly scorning both God and his ministers.
. . . He saith, moreover, that he hath quoted a
number of contrarieties out of the Scriptures, which
he hath given to some great men, who in convenient
time shall be named." That Ralegh was one of
these " great men " is highly probable ; at any rate,
the accusation of atheism was then secretly brought
against him, and was likely to have weighed with

[94]

Elizabeth. Ralegh, with Sidney, is believed to
have been one of the English circle who associated
with Giordano Bruno, during his short residence
in England, a few years before Sidney's death ; and
Bruno also made himself liable to a like charge
of atheism. [F. B. SANBORN.]

6. These lines appear in The Fourth Day of
the First Week of Sylvester's version of Guillaume
Salluste du Bartas's Divine Weeks and Works y
pp. 102-3 of the edition of 1613. Sylvester
adds, at the end of those quoted, continuing the
sentence, —

But shine in vain, and have no charge precise
But to be walking in Heaven's galleries,
And through that Palace up and down to clamber
As Golden Gulls about a Prince's Chamber.

This conceit of the influence of the stars was gen
eral in Ralegh's day. His friend Sidney, in his
Sonnet XXVI, has the same thought as Ralegh,
but turns it to a compliment to Stella, —

Though dusty wits dare scorn Astrology,

And (fools) can think those lamps of purest light
Whose numbers, way, greatness, eternity,

Promising wonders, wonder do invite,
To have for no cause birthright in the sky,

But for to spangle the black weeds of Night ;
Or for some brawl, which in that chamber high

They should still dance, to please a gazer's sight.

[95]

For me, I do Nature unidle know,

And know great causes great effects procure,

And know, those bodies high rule o'er the low ;

And if these rules did fail, proof makes me sure, —

Who oft forejudge my after-following race

By only those two stars in Stella's face.

In what follows, concerning the powers and bod
ily nature of man, Ralegh uses what was a com
monplace of his period, but expresses this quaint
conceit with more grace than was customary, and
closes it with that touch of regret so familiar in
him, though in expression he may borrow from
the Sicilian lament of Moschus for Bion. And
so poetical is his prose at times, that Thoreau
very properly calls the passage on the decay of
oracles a " poem/* [F. B. SAN BORN.]

From Thoreau's second draft of the MS.

7. Aubrey says, fc I well remember his study
[at Durham-house] which was on a little turret
that looked into and over the Thames, and had
the prospect, which is as pleasant, perhaps, as
any in the world, and which not only refreshes
the eie-sight, but cheers the spirits, and (to speake
my mind) I believe enlarges an ingeniose man's
thoughts." Perhaps it was here that he composed
some of his poems.

[96]

3. A DESCRIPTION OF THE COUNTRY'S

RECREATIONS

Quivering fears, heart-tearing cares,
Anxious sighs, untimely tears,

Fly, fly to courts ;

Fly to fond worldlings' sports,
Where strain'd sardonic smiles are glosing still,
And grief is forc'd to laugh against her will;

Where mirth's but mummery ;

And sorrows only real be !

Fly from our country pastimes ! fly,
Sad troop of human misery ;

Come, serene looks,

Clear as the crystal brooks,
Or the pure azur'd heaven, that smiles to see
The rich attendance of our poverty.

Peace, and a secure mind,

Which all men seek, we only find.

Abused mortals ! did you know

Where joy, heart's-case, and comforts grow,

You'd scorn proud towers,

And seek them in these bowers,

Where winds sometimes our woods perhaps may shake,
But blustering care could never tempest make;

Nor murmurs e'er come nigh us,

Saving of fountains that glide by us.

Here's no fantastic masque, nor dance,
But of our kids, that frisk and prance :

Nor wars are seen,

Unless upon the green

[97]

Two harmless lambs are butting one the other,
Which done, both bleating run, each to his mother;

And wounds are never found,

Save what the plough-share gives the ground,

Here are no false entrapping baits,
To hasten too too hasty fates ;

Unless it be

The fond credulity

Of silly fish, which, worldling-like, still look
Upon the bait, but never on the hook :

Nor envy, unless among

The birds, for prize of their sweet song.

Go! let the diving negro seek

For gems hid in some forlorn creek ;

We all pearls scorn,

Save what the dewy morn
Congeals upon each little spire of grass,
Which careless shepherds beat down as they pass ;

And gold ne'er here appears,

Save what the yellow Ceres bears.

Blest, silent groves ! O may ye be
For ev-er mirth's best nursery !

May pure contents

For ever pitch their tents

Upon these downs, these meads, these rocks, these moun
tains,
And peace still slumber by these purling fountains !

Which we may every year

Find when we come a fishing here !

[98]

9- THE SOUL'S ERRAND i

Go, soul, the body's guest,

Upon a thankless errand ;
Fear not to touch the best

The truth shall be thy warrant
Go, since I needs must die,
And give them all the lie.

Go, tell the court it glows,

And shines like painted wood ;
Go, tell the church it shews

What's good, but does no good.
If court and church reply,
Give court and church the lie.

Tell potentates, they live

Acting, but O their actions !
Not lov'd, unless they give;

Nor strone, but by their factions.
If potentates reply,
Give potentates the lie.

1 This poem (also called The Lie and The Fare foe It) has
been given as written by Sir Walter Ralegh, tbf night before
bis execution, which was October 29, 1618 ; but it had already
appeared in- Davison's Rhapsody, in 1608; and it is also to be
found in a MS. collection of Poems in the British Museum,
which has the date of I 596. With the title, The Lie, it is
printed by Davison with many variations, e. g., —

Say to the court it glows,

And shines like rotten wood, &c. , &c. — ED.

[ 99 ] •: i ...

Tell men of high condition,
That rule affairs of state,
Their purpose is ambition ;
Their practice only hate.
And if they do reply,
Then give them all the lie.

Tell those that brave it most,

They beg for more by spending ;
Who in their greatest cost

Seek nothing but commending.
And if they make reply,
Spare not to give the lie.

Tell zeal it la-cks devotion ;

Tell love it is but lust ;
Tell time it is but motion ;
Tell flesh it is but dust :

And wish them not reply,
For thou must give the lie.

Tell age it daily wasteth ;

Tell honor how it alters ;
Tell beauty that it blasteth ;
Tell favor that she fakers :
And as they do reply,
Give every one the lie.

Tell wit how much it wrangles

In fickle points of niceness;
Tell wisdom she entangles
Herself in over-wiseness :
And if they do reply,
Then give them both the lie.
[ 100 ]

Tell physic of her boldness j

Tell skill it is pretension; »
Tell chanty of coldness ;
Tell law it is contention :
And if they yield reply,
Then give them still the lie.

Tell fortune of her blindness ;

Tell nature of decay ;
Tell friendship of unkindness ;
Tell justice of delay :

And if they do reply,
Then give them all the lie.

Tell arts they have no soundness,

But vary by esteeming;
Tell schools they lack profoundness,
And stand too much on seeming.
If arts and schools reply,
Give arts and schools the lie.

Tell faith it's fled the city ;

Tell how the country erreth ;
Tell manhood, shakes of} pity ;
Tell virtue, least preferreth.
And if they do reply,
Spare not to give the lie.

So, when thou hast, as I

Commanded thee, done blabbing;
Although to give the lie

Deserves no less than stabbing
Yet stab at thee who will,
No stab the soul can kill.
[10!]

10. The allusion here is doubtless to Thoreau's
irntimate companion of forty years from early in
n$4j, Ellery Charming, who in the winter of
^•843-44 was chopping cordwood on the road
ffrom Concord to Lincoln, near where Thoreau
aasid his friend, Stearns Wheeler of Lincoln, had
a. cabin in the woods for study and amusement.
Gianning's experiences that winter gave occa
sion to the making of a poem, The Woodman ,
wliich gave title to his third book of verses, pub-
Eislied in 1849 (the year when The Week came
©nt) and was reprinted in 1902, with omissions
und additions, from the Channing MSS. in Poems
c&f Sixty-Five Tears. Thoreau himself had some-
tames been a wood-cutter ; indeed, his range of
manual employments, as he wrote his Harvard
Class Secretary in 1847, made. him " a Surveyor,
a. Gardener, a Farmer, a Painter (I mean a House-
painter), a Carpenter, a Mason, a Day-laborer, a
Pencil-maker, a etc."

In a letter to Horace Greeley, of May, 1848,
TThoreau said that he had supported himself by
mianual labor at a dollar a day for the past five
wears, and yet had seen more leisure than most
scholars foun.d. He added, "There is no rea
son why the scholar, who professes to be a
Ettle wiser than the mass of men, should not
do his work in the dirt occasionally, and by
imeans of his superior wisdom make much less
suffice for him. A wise man will not be un-

f 102]

fortunate, — how then would you know but he
was a fool ? "

His friend Emerson, however, did not find
that the laborer's strokes that he used himself
in his "pleached garden" helped him to better
strokes of the pen ; and so employed Alcott, Chan-
ning. and Thoreau now and then to make the
laborer's strokes for him, while he meditated in
his study or walked the woods and fields. [F. B.
SANBORN.]

II. This trait of cheerfulness was Thoreau's
own, and should be named in all mention of him,
especially in the long endurance of his last illness.
It is well known that the son and namesake of
Horace Mann was the companion of Thoreau on
that long journey to the unsettled parts of Min
nesota in 1 86 1, from which he returned only to
linger and die in May, 1862. Mrs. Mann, the
mother of young Horace (who himself did not
long survive), thus wrote in May of that year to
her sister, Mrs. Hawthorne : " I was made very
happy to-day by seeing Miss Thoreau, whose
brother died such a happy, peaceful death, — leav
ing them all so fully possessed of his faith in
the Immortal Life that they seem almost to have
entered it with him. They said [meaning Mrs.
Thoreau, her sister, Louisa Dunbar, and his other
aunts, as well as Sophia, his sister], they never
could be sad in his presence for a moment; he
had been the happiest person they had ever known,

all through his life, and was just as happy in the
presence of death. This is the more remarkable,
as he was still in the prime of life, with a vivid
sense of its enjoyments. But he was nearer to
the heart of Nature than most men. Sophia said
to-day that he once told her when looking at a
pressed flower that he had walked 10,000 miles
to verify the day on which that flower bloomed.
It grew four miles from his home, and he walked
there every day in the season of it for many years.
. . . He seemed to walk straight into Heaven.
It is animating and inspiring to see a great or a
good man take that last step with his thoughts
about him, and intent upon the two worlds whose
connection he sees with the clairvoyance that death
gives. I know it well, and I could fully sympa
thize in her sense of her brother's continued pres
ence. Death is not the word to use for such a
transit, — but more life, — for which we as yet
have no word."

In a letter to Thoreau's good friend at New
Bedford, Daniel Ricketson (printed in Anna and
Walton Ricketson's Memoir of their father,
p. 142), Sophia, under date of May 20, 1862, said :
" During Henry's long illness I never heard
a murmur escape him, or the slightest wish ex
pressed to remain with us ; his perfect content
ment was truly wonderful. None of his friends
seemed to realize how very ill he was, so full
of life and good cheer did he seem. One friend,

as if by way of consolation, said ta him, ' Well,
Mr. Thoreau, we must all go.' Henry re
plied, 'When I was a very little boy I learned
that I must die, and I set that down, — so
of course I am not disappointed now. Death
is as near to you as it is to me/ . . . The de
votion of his friends was most rare and touch
ing. He would sometimes say ( I should be
ashamed to stay in this world after so much
had been done for me ; I could never repay
my friends/ *

In this last sally of his wit, which was as marked
in its expression during his illness as in his vig
orous days of rambling and writing, we see not
alone the humor, but likewise that strict sense
of obligation which he had from boyhood. He
wished to receive nothing gratis except from Na
ture herself; his debts, unlike those of many
poets, must always be punctually paid. [F. B.
SANBORN.]

12. In this description of Virtue, Thoreau made
some use of the MS. afterward printed in Mr.
Sanborn's edition, in which he quoted the same
passage from Sir Thomas Browne, but without
giving the author's name. A portion of the illus
tration of the clarion and corselet is also found
in The Service. That this whole Ralegh sketch
_was given as a winter lecture in the Concord Ly
ceum is rendered probable by his speaking here
of " waiting for warm weather," and of a winter

[105]

campaign. If the records of that Lyceum were
complete we might find the very evening on which
he read it there, — not later, I am sure, than 1845.
[F. B. SANBORN.]

OCT 2 7 191T

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