第36章

--I don't think you mean to flatter me,--the Master answered,--and, what is more, for I am not afraid to be honest with you, I don't think you do flatter me.I have taken the inventory of my faculties as calmly as if I were an appraiser.I have some of the qualities, perhaps I may say many of the qualities, that make a man a poet, and yet I am not one.And in the course of a pretty wide experience of men--and women--(the Master sighed, I thought, but perhaps I was mistaken)--I have met a good many poets who were not rhymesters and a good many rhymesters who were not poets.So I am only one of the Voiceless, that I remember one of you singers had some verses about.

I think there is a little music in me, but it has not found a voice, and it never will.If I should confess the truth, there is no mere earthly immortality that I envy so much as the poet's.If your name is to live at all, it is so much more to have it live in people's hearts than only in their brains! I don't know that one's eyes fill with tears when he thinks of the famous inventor of logarithms, but song of Burns's or a hymn of Charles Wesley's goes straight to your heart, and you can't help loving both of them, the sinner as well as the saint.The works of other men live, but their personality dies out of their labors; the poet, who reproduces himself in his creation, as no other artist does or can, goes down to posterity with all his personality blended with whatever is imperishable in his song.We see nothing of the bees that built the honeycomb and stored it with its sweets, but we can trace the veining in the wings of insects that flitted through the forests which are now coal-beds, kept unchanging in the amber that holds them; and so the passion of Sappho, the tenderness of Simonides, the purity of holy George Herbert, the lofty contemplativeness of James Shirley, are before us to-day as if they were living, in a few tears of amber verse.It seems, when one reads, "Sweet day! so cool, so calm, so bright,"or, "The glories of our birth and state,"as if it were not a very difficult matter to gain immortality,--such an immortality at least as a perishable language can give.A single lyric is enough, if one can only find in his soul and finish in his intellect one of those jewels fit to sparkle "on the stretched forefinger of all time." A coin, a ring, a string of verses.These last, and hardly anything else does.Every century is an overloaded ship that must sink at last with most of its cargo.The small portion of its crew that get on board the new vessel which takes them off don't pretend to save a great many of the bulky articles.But they must not and will not leave behind the hereditary jewels of the race; and if you have found and cut a diamond, were it only a spark with a single polished facet, it will stand a better chance of being saved from the wreck than anything, no matter what, that wants much room for stowage.

The pyramids last, it is true, but most of them have forgotten their builders' names.But the ring of Thothmes III., who reigned some fourteen hundred years before our era, before Homer sang, before the Argonauts sailed, before Troy was built, is in the possession of Lord Ashburnham, and proclaims the name of the monarch who wore it more than three thousand years ago.The gold coins with the head of Alexander the Great are some of them so fresh one might think they were newer than much of the silver currency we were lately handling.

As we have been quoting from the poets this morning, I will follow the precedent, and give some lines from an epistle of Pope to Addison after the latter had written, but not yet published, his Dialogue on Medals.Some of these lines have been lingering in my memory for a great many years, but I looked at the original the other day and was so pleased with them that I got them by heart.I think you will say they are singularly pointed and elegant.

"Ambition sighed; she found it vain to trust The faithless column and the crumbling bust;Huge moles, whose shadows stretched from shore to shore, Their ruins perished, and their place no more!

Convinced, she now contracts her vast design, And all her triumphs shrink into a coin.

A narrow orb each crowded conquest keeps, Beneath her palm here sad Judaea weeps;Now scantier limits the proud arch confine, And scarce are seen the prostrate Nile or Rhine;A small Euphrates through the piece is rolled, And little eagles wave their wings in gold."It is the same thing in literature.Write half a dozen folios full of other people's ideas (as all folios are pretty sure to be), and you serve as ballast to the lower shelves of a library, about as like to be disturbed as the kentledge in the hold of a ship.Write a story, or a dozen stories, and your book will be in demand like an oyster while it is freshly opened, and after tha-- The highways of literature are spread over with the shells of dead novels, each of which has been swallowed at a mouthful by the public, and is done with.But write a volume of poems.No matter if they are all bad but one, if that one is very good.It will carry your name down to posterity like the ring of Thothmes, like the coin of Alexander.Idon't suppose one would care a great deal about it a hundred or a thousand years after he is dead, but I don't feel quite sure.It seems as if, even in heaven, King David might remember "The Lord is my Shepherd" with a certain twinge of earthly pleasure.But we don't know, we don't know.