Age was just beginning to brighten with the dawning tints of modern civilization. Accustomed as we are to our few and prosaic holidays, we can scarcely enter into the delights of ember eve and holy ale and harvest-home, May-day, merry Shrovetide, "Whitsunpastorals," and even sheep-shearings, so fully pictured in "Winter's Tale." The minuteness of detail which we find mingled with the most exquisite poetry in the descriptions of these festivals reveals the strong hold which they took on the heart and imagination of the boy-poet. No hint was lost upon him. The ancient tales and romances which he read, the local traditions and superstitions which he heard, the pageants and festivities which he saw, every thing that came under his quick and penetrating observation, nourished in him the poetic faculty, like seeds that would have perished on a hard and barren soil, but which, in his fertile intellect, and under the warming rays of his genius, germinated and developed into the rarest flowers and the most luscious fruits. We have, in "Midsummer Night's Dream," an illustration of this marvelous power of transforming the most prosaic into the finest poetry. One might naturally suppose that the cold, wet summer of 1594, destructive of the harvest and productive of the plague, would minister very little to poetical inspiration; yet, by associating this unpropitious season with the quarrels of Oberon and Titania, we have one of the grandest efforts of the imagination, combined with such minute and accurate description that it gives a far more exact idea of the event than any meteorological record of the time. I refer to the well-known passage (Act II, sc. 2) in which Titania attributes all these phenomena to the forgeries of jealousy," which have disturbed the elements and made "the seasons alter." Almost every page of Shakespeare would furnish additional instances of this faculty of seizing and unfolding the subtle relations of the world of sense to the world of imagination. If there is any reliance to be placed on internal evidence, we must conclude that much of Shakespeare's early eduIcation was in the fields. True, too positive inferences should not be drawn from testimony of this kind. Who, for example, would suspect, in reading the "Night Thoughts," that Young was a selfish courtier and fawning sycophant? Who would not suppose, in reading the "Seasons," that Thomson was fond of bodily exercise and an early riser? Yet he was notoriously indolent, and duly slept till noon. His fine description of "the powerful king of day rejoicing in the East" is all hearsay. Turning upon his couch at mid-day, he exclaims: "Falsely luxurious! will not man awake?" But compare this conventional poetry of books and boudoirs with the lively emotions of one who, like Chaucer, has seen how "The besy larke, the messager of day, and every one will feel that Thomson's line is but the dreamy soliloquy of a sluggard who has just energy enough left to reproach himself for never having seen the sun rise. Such verses may be written without any sympathy with nature- -as a man who never looked up to the sky may compose, by candle-light, a mathematical treatise on the solar system. But how different are Shakespeare's pictures! Take the description which Antony gives his friend Eros of "black vesper's pageants": "Sometime we see a cloud that's dragonish; A vapour some time, like a bear, or lion; A tower'd citadel, a pendant rock, A forked mountain or blue promontory With trees upon 't, that nod unto the world And mock our eyes with air." Claude Lorraine never did finer painting; but it becomes something higher than that when Antony, in jealous rage toward Cleopatra, compares himself to the cloud which "even with a thought the rack dislimns." Here is psychological portraiture-the moral use to which the concrete images are put. No other dramatist, nor even descriptive poet, shows such familiarity with the shifting aspects of the external world, with mead and grove, valley and sleeping woodland, low meadows and deep forests; no one else has painted so truly and passionately the minutest and commonest phenomena of animate and inanimate existence, and blended them so harmoniously with the pervading train of his thought. The fury of the tempest is employed to intensify the agony of King Lear; the raven croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan under the battlements; the guest of summer, the temple-haunting martlet, typifies the cheerful and unsuspecting mind of the king as he first breathes the delicate air of the castle; the bat in cloistered flight, and "The shard-borne beetle, with its drowsy hums," Brutus, speculating as to the change that the offer of a crown might produce in Cæsar's nature, exclaims: "It is the bright day that brings forth the adder; And that craves wary walking." A distinguished anatomist says that the line, "And crook the pregnant hinges of the knee," is the most striking and correct description ever given of that peculiar artic ulation of the knee call ginglymus. Botanists also will be surprised to see how much Shakespeare's study of fruits and flowers had taught him of "The art which in their piedness shares With great creating Nature." Milton, in his beautiful monody on the death of Lycidas, puts among the ver nal flowers many which belong to summer; but Shakespeare never commits that error. He was too familiar with their faces not to know how to assign them to their several seasons. He had watched "The marigold, that goes to bed with the sun, And with him rises weeping; daffodils, That comes before the swallow dares, and take How it aggravates the madness and despair of Lear that he curses and crowns his head "With rank fumiter aud furrow-weeds, With harlocks, hemlock, nettles, cuckoo-flowers, Darnel, and all the idle weeds that grow In our sustaining corn." But the gentle Ophelia sings, and weaves into her hair rosemary for remembrance, pansies for thoughts, fennel, columbines and daisies; thus turning affliction, passion, and even suicide, "to favor and to prettiness." These few examples indicate suffi ciently in what sense Shakespeare studied nature. It is something higher and truer than the catalogue classifications of which the savants are so proud. The chemist distils the quintessence, but crushes the flower; he destroys the life, and after analyzing the refuse imagines that he knows all about it; he talks of vegetable fibre, ammonia, and carbonic acid, and tells what substances can be found in the dead tissue, but what does he know of the subtle elements which nature weaves into the living tissue? He calls his science organic, but he never gets beyond the ex-organic. The living creature dies the moment he puts his finger on it. Earthen crucibles and furnaces and blow-pipes, no doubt, scientifically resolve all things into their ultimate parts and decompose the finest forms, but the grace of life disappears in the midst of this rude apparatus, and with the aid of all his organogens the physicist can not construct and vitalize the frame of a mushroom. The ornithologist fills his shelves and cases with dead birds, and the ichthyologist adorns his museum, like the "needy shop" of the Mantuan apothecary, with "A tortoise hung, An alligator stuff'd, and other skins Of ill-shap'd fishes," but does he know what the birds are talking of in their autumnal councils? Can he, like Thoreau, make the fish swim into his hand? "The bird," says Emerson, "is not in its ounces and inches, but in its relations to Nature; and the skin or skeleton you show me is no more a heron or a hawk than a heap of ashes or a bottle of gases into which his body has been reduced is Danté or Washington." The poetnaturalist, who sees "the joiner squir rel" making Mab's chariot out of "an empty hazel-nut," has finer views than the taxidermist who stuffs its skin with sawdust, or the zoologist who pickles the creature in alcohol or puts its bones together with wires. Shakespeare had no scientific terminology, but he saw more in the shells on the beach and the flowers in the meadow than is contained in the broadest nomenclature. His eye was open to all beauty and his ear to all harmony, and the inspirations which he received from nature were like the common wind which an Eolian harp transforms into music, or "Like the sweet South That breathes upon a bank of violets, stealing aud giving odour." This faculty is certainly better than to pore into microscopes over spores and stamens; and the remarkable degree to which it was developed in Shakespeare was evidently due to the influences which surrounded his early years, and have left such an indelible impress in all his works. In this respect, at least, "the child is father of the man." SELF-MADE MEN. IN BY G. M. KELLOGG. N the first place, men are born, not made, much less self-made. They have the hereditary taints, or no-taints, of their ancestors, whose responsibility does not cease with the birth of a son, but continues, more or less grave, through childhood, adolescence, and perhaps a somewhat dilatory manhood. If man is made, it is certainly by the God of us all, and of the same indifferent material. Alexander and the king's jester were fashioned from the same clay. After this, it is all a helping process rendered by human hands. It is doubtful if man has a single instinct to stand as his friend from his birth. He certainly has not had any celestial wet nurses since the morning of life on this planet, or else history is all at fault. The human creature is not like a whelp littered upon the hills, but housed, cabined, cribbed, confined, through all his earlier years. He must be coddled upward by parents, more or less affectionate, who impart to their offspring painfully the family stock of knowledge or experience. He is dependent upon others from the cradle to the grave. Men whose lives are worth any thing are continuously learnersalternately taught and teaching others. Self-taught men! Ridiculous pretense. Had our pseudo-philosophers who have talked for so many years and over so much territory upon this topic, been turned out to grass on some pretty island when but five years of age, (we will give them that advantage, although it is said more is learned in those first years of life than in all the after period,) what a pitiful show of philosophy or rhetoric these self-sufficient expositors would make at the close of forty years! They would, notwithstanding their nat ural parts, at forty-five years of age, be now running at large in puribus. We hardly believe that they would have arrived at breech-clouts, or any other mentionable or unmentionable convenience of apparel. Puffed up with their own wind, these inspirationists belch it into the faces of rustics and scholars also. Every tub may stand on its own bottom, according to the proverb; but man can hardly do so, notwithstanding the conceit so many possess of so doing. The key-stone of civilization is the domestic, social and national inter-dependence of man upon man. We must perforce depend upon the experience of the past. We have the help of the million eyes that have looked out so searchingly and thoughtfully into the world about them for these thousand years. Have all those busy optics been of no moment to us? To be sure, the present age has the vantage-ground of all the past. We must labor assiduously to master all that our ancestors have to bequeath to us in every art of life. It is certainly true in such practical matters as shoemaking or blacksmithing, and all the other crafts, that an apprenticeship should be served; the commonest things must be taught: how much more must this be so in the loftier guilds of scholarship, science and literature! It is a curious subject of speculation, how much another Mr. and Mrs. Noah would be able to transmit to their children of the accumulated wisdom or practical knowledge of the present age, were the race swept suddenly from the face of the earth by another flood. We doubt that they would be much more than wise enough to plant a vineyard, even if they should know better than to get drunk after so signal a success in agriculture. It has of late become somewhat fashionable, among a certain class of superficial thinkers, to decry scholastic institutions. They find their support in the wide-spread belief in this country that scholarship does not pay. The names of scientific and literary men are seldom seen on the income returns from year to year. If there are, as it is said, two thousand scholars in New York City who can not earn their bread, it certainly is a great shame. Many good things are just now below par in New York, including the promises-to-pay of the first and best nationality on earth. But truly, if any one seeks scholarship or literary distinction for the money therein, he is unfit to possess either. It carries with it its own exceeding great reward. What a contrast there is between P. T. Barnum, with his great museum of curiosities, and a patient, unwearied student and naturalist who spends a long life, impoverishing himself and family, in his zeal for a science in no degree lucrative-like the late Doctor Gould of Boston. Whose labors are worth the most to the world, those of Louis Agassiz or the great American showman? We think we would rather take stock in the scholars after all. We are always suspicious of those Bounderbys in science and literature, as in wealth, who are perpetually insinuating or boasting of their own responsibility for their quasi elevation above the ordinary level of humanity. They turn their backs on their own mothers, who have slaved for them, and given them far more help than they are ready to admit. They cream over swiftly the pans so deftly set away in the dairies of thought by careful and tender hands. We shrewdly suspect that they mistake other substances, which mantle the sur face of liquids, for the real cream which they are so ready to plunder-the green scum on a stagnant pool, or the mold which gathers over some forgotten bowl of pottage in the dripping, unlighted cellar of ignorance and superstition. It is sometimes complained that learned men are impractical in their views, or are not nimble enough to keep up with the times that they are hard to stir from their positions. We have often thought, however, that they are like the great snow-balls which boys accumulate in their school playground-very difficult to set in motion, but when fairly turned do wonders, and are welcomed by a great shout of joy and pride, and will, indeed, pick up more in a semi-revolution than the smaller and more active fry can in going many times round the yard. We have been tempted to the foregoing remarks by the fact that, for some dozen years or more, certain individuals of much popular reputation as philosophers have been saying to the people in nearly every sizeable town in the country: Parents, if your boy has genius keep him at the plow or the anvil—in the shop or at the counter; the world will finally find him out and buy him at his real worth. Do not send him out to nurse upon the withered bosoms of our scholastic institutions. Selftaught men, like Shakespeare, Burns, Franklin, and Horace Greeley, stood in no need of such help. Two of the above men confessed their need of that which is so often decried by our modern inspirationists, and Shakespeare would have done so had he left behind him any other personal memento than a will. In order that the question of the good results of a thorough training in our universities should be fairly tested, perhaps we might demand that certain marked individuals, like Franklin and Burns, be sent back to earth to try their lives over again under fairer auspices. |