Chapter 15 - Page 2

one at a time, then all with
one voice: an orchestra of many French bugles and horns, rising, and
falling, and swaying, in golden calls and responses.

Sometimes, when these Atlantics and Pacifics thus undulate round me, I
lie stretched out in their midst: a land-locked Mediterranean, knowing
no ebb, nor flow. Then again, I am dashed in the spray of these sounds:
an eagle at the world's end, tossed skyward, on the horns of the tempest.

Yet, again, I descend, and list to the concert.

Like a grand, ground swell, Homer's old organ rolls its vast volumes
under the light frothy wave-crests of Anacreon and Hafiz; and high
over my ocean, sweet Shakespeare soars, like all the larks of the
spring. Throned on my seaside, like Canute, bearded Ossian smites his
hoar harp, wreathed with wild-flowers, in which warble my Wallers;
blind Milton sings bass to my Petrarchs and Priors, and laureate crown
me with bays.

In me, many worthies recline, and converse. I list to St. Paul who
argues the doubts of Montaigne; Julian the Apostate cross-questions
Augustine; and Thomas-a-Kempis unrolls his old black letters for all
to decipher. Zeno murmurs maxims beneath the hoarse shout of
Democritus; and though Democritus laugh loud and long, and the sneer
of Pyrrho be seen; yet, divine Plato, and Proclus, and, Verulam are of
my counsel; and Zoroaster whispered me before I was born. I walk a
world that is mine; and enter many nations, as Mingo Park rested in
African cots; I am served like Bajazet: Bacchus my butler, Virgil my
minstrel, Philip Sidney my page. My memory is a life beyond birth; my
memory, my library of the Vatican, its alcoves all endless
perspectives, eve-tinted by cross-lights from Middle-Age oriels.

And as the great Mississippi musters his watery nations: Ohio, with
all his leagued streams; Missouri, bringing down in torrents the clans
from the highlands; Arkansas, his Tartar rivers from the plain;--so,
with all the past and present pouring in me, I roll down my billow
from afar.

Yet not I, but another: God is my Lord; and though many satellites
revolve around me, I and all mine revolve round the great central
Truth, sun-like, fixed and luminous forever in the foundationless
firmament.

Fire flames on my tongue; and though of old the Bactrian prophets were
stoned, yet the stoners in oblivion sleep. But whoso stones me, shall
be as Erostratus, who put torch to the temple; though Genghis Khan
with Cambyses combine to obliterate him, his name shall be extant in
the mouth of the last man that lives. And if so be, down unto death,
whence I came, will I go, like Xenophon retreating on Greece, all
Persia brandishing her spears in his rear.

My cheek blanches white while I