The Pocket | Page 4

standing up, solemn and sharp, out of the green-gold
air of the east at evening. There go many elements, without doubt, to
the making of one such moment of intense perception; and it is on the
happy agreement of these many elements, on the harmonious vibration
of many nerves, that the whole delight of the moment must depend.
*
You should have heard him speak of what he loved; of the tent pitched
beside the talking water; of the stars overhead at night; of the blest
return of morning, the peep of day over the moors, the awaking birds
among the birches; how he abhorred the long winter shut in cities; and
with what delight, at the return of the spring, he once more pitched his
camp in the living out-of-doors.
*
It was one of the best things I got from my education as an engineer: of
which, however, as a way of life, I wish to speak with sympathy. It
takes a man into the open air; it keeps him hanging about harbour-sides,
which is the richest form of idling; it carries him to wild islands; it

gives him a taste of the genial dangers of the sea; it supplies him with
dexterities to exercise; it makes demands upon his ingenuity; it will go
far to cure him of any taste (if ever he had one) for the miserable life of
cities. And when it has done so, it carries him back and shuts him in an
office! From the roaring skerry and the wet thwart of the tossing boat,
he passes to the stool and desk; and with a memory full of ships, and
seas, and perilous headlands, and the shining Pharos, he must apply his
long-sighted eyes to the pretty niceties of drawing, or measure his
inaccurate mind with several pages of consecutive figures. He is a wise
youth, to be sure, who can balance one part of genuine life against two
parts of drudgery between four walls, and for the sake of the one,
manfully accept the other.
*
No one knows the stars who has not slept, as the French happily put it,
A LA BELLE ETOILE. He may know all their names and distances
and magnitudes, and yet be ignorant of what alone concerns
mankind,--their serene and gladsome influence on the mind. The
greater part of poetry is about the stars; and very justly, for they are
themselves the most classical of poets.
*
He surprised himself by a sudden impulse to write poetry-- he did so
sometimes, loose, galloping octosyllabics in the vein of Scott--and
when he had taken his place on a boulder, near some fairy falls, and
shaded by a whip of a tree that was already radiant with new leaves, it
still more surprised him that he should find nothing to write. His heart
perhaps beat in time to some vast indwelling rhythm of the universe.
*
No man can find out the world, says Solomon, from beginning to end,
because the world is in his heart; and so it is impossible for any of us to
understand, from beginning to end, that agreement of harmonious
circumstances that creates in us the highest pleasure of admiration,
precisely because some of these circumstances are hidden from us for
ever in the constitution of our own bodies. After we have reckoned up
all that we can see or hear or feel, there still remains to be taken into
account some sensibility more delicate than usual in the nerves affected,
or some exquisite refinement in the architecture of the brain, which is
indeed to the sense of the beautiful as the eye or the ear to the sense of

hearing or sight. We admire splendid views and great pictures; and yet
what is truly admirable is rather the mind within us, that gathers
together these scattered details for its delight, and snakes out of certain
colours, certain distributions of graduated light and darkness, that
intelligible whole which alone we call a picture or a view. Hazlitt,
relating in one of his essays how he went on foot from one great man's
house to another's in search of works of art, begins suddenly to triumph
over these noble and wealthy owners, because he was more capable of
enjoying their costly possessions than they were; because they had paid
the money and he had received the pleasure. And the occasion is a fair
one for self-complacency. While the one man was working to be able to
buy the picture, the other was working to be able to enjoy the picture.
An inherited aptitude will have been diligently improved in either case;
only the one man has made for himself a fortune, and the other has
made for himself a living spirit. It is a fair occasion