FullReads

[6] There are passages in Blood that sound like a well-known essay by Emerson. For instance:–“Experience burns into us the fact and the necessity of universal compensation. The philosopher takes it from Heraclitus, in the insight that everything exists through its opposite; and the bummer comforts himself for his morning headache as only the rough side of a square deal. We accept readily the doctrine that pain and pleasure, evil and good, death and life, chance and reason, are necessary equations–that there must be just as much of each as of its other.

“It grieves us little that this great compensation cannot at every instant balance its beam on every individual centre, and dispense with an under dog in every fight; we know that the parts must subserve the whole; we have faith that our time will come; and if it comes not at all in this world, our lack is a bid for immortality, and the most promising argument for a world hereafter. ‘Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him.’

“This is the faith that baffles all calamity, and ensures genius and patience in the world. Let not the creditor hasten the settlement: let not the injured man hurry toward revenge; there is nothing that draws bigger interest than a wrong, and to ‘get the best of it’ is ever in some sense to get the worst.”

[7] Or what thinks the reader of the verbiage of these verses?–addressed in a mood of human defiance to the cosmic Gods–

“Whose lightnings tawny leap from furtive lairs,
To helpless murder, while the ships go down
Swirled in the crazy stound, and mariners’ prayers
Go up in noisome bubbles–such to them;–
Or when they tramp about the central fires,
Bending the strata with aeonian tread
Till steeples totter, and all ways are lost,–
Deem they of wife or child, or home or friend,
Doing these things as the long years lead on
Only to other years that mean no more,
That cure no ill, nor make for use or proof–
Destroying ever, though to rear again.”

[8] I subjoin a poetic apostrophe of Mr. Blood’s to freedom:

“Let it ne’er be known.
If in some book of the Inevitable,
Dog-eared and stale, the future stands engrossed
E’en as the past. There shall be news in heaven,
And question in the courts thereof; and chance
Shall have its fling, e’en at the [ermined] bench.

* * * * * *

Ah, long ago, above the Indian ocean,
Where wan stars brood over the dreaming East,
I saw, white, liquid, palpitant, the Cross;
And faint and far came bells of Calvary
As planets passed, singing that they were saved,
Saved from themselves: but ever low Orion–
For hunter too was I, born of the wild,
And the game flavor of the infinite
Tainted me to the bone–he waved me on,
On to the tangent field beyond all orbs,
Where form nor order nor continuance
Hath thought nor name; there unity exhales
In want of confine, and the protoplasm
May beat and beat, in aimless vehemence,
Through vagrant spaces, homeless and unknown.

* * * * * *

There ends One’s empire!–but so ends not all;
One knows not all; my griefs at least are mine–
By me their measure, and to me their lesson;
E’en I am one–(poor deuce to call the Ace!)
And to the open bears my gonfalon,
Mine aegis, Freedom!–Let me ne’er look back
Accusing, for the withered leaves and lives
The sated past hath strewn, the shears of fate,
But forth to braver days.
O, Liberty,
Burthen of every sigh!–thou gold of gold,
Beauty of the beautiful, strength of the strong!
My soul for ever turns agaze for thee.
There is no purpose of eternity
For faith or patience; but thy buoyant torch
Still lighted from the Islands of the Blest,
O’erbears all present for potential heavens
Which are not–ah, so more than all that are!
Whose chance postpones the ennui of the skies!
Be thou my genius–be my hope in thee!
For this were heaven: to be, and to be free.”

[9] In another letter Mr. Blood writes:–“I think we are through with ‘the Whole,’ and with ‘causa sui,’ and with the ‘negative unity’ which assumes to identify each thing as being what it lacks of everything else. You can, of course, build out a chip by modelling the sphere it was chipped from;–but if it was n’t a sphere? What a weariness it is to look back over the twenty odd volumes of the ‘Journal of Speculative Philosophy’ and see Harris’s mind wholly filled by that one conception of self-determination–everything to be thought as ‘part of a system’–a ‘whole’ and ‘causa sui.’–I should like to see such an idea get into the head of Edison or George Westinghouse.”