For on such occasions Nature has always something rare to
show us, and the danger to life and limb is hardly greater than
one would experience crouching deprecatingly beneath a roof.
show us, and the danger to life and limb is hardly greater than
one would experience crouching deprecatingly beneath a roof.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v18 - Mom to Old
On the other
hand, all the best ships of the Spaniards were riddled through
and through; and with masts and yards shattered, sails and rig-
ging torn to shreds, and a northwest wind still drifting them
towards the fatal sandbanks of Holland, they labored heavily
in a chopping sea, firing wildly, and receiving tremendous pun-
ishment at the hands of Howard, Drake, Seymour, Winter, and
their followers. Not even master-gunner Thomas could complain
that day of "blind exercise " on the part of the English, with
"little harm done" to the enemy. There was scarcely a ship
in the Armada that did not suffer severely; for nearly all were
engaged in that memorable action off the sands of Gravelines.
The captain-general himself, Admiral Recalde, Alonzo de Leyva,
Oquendo, Diego Flores de Valdez, Bertendona, Don Francisco
de Toledo, Don Diego de Pimentel, Telles Enriquez, Alonzo de
Luzon, Garibay, with most of the great galleons and galeasses,
were in the thickest of the fight; and one after the other each of
these huge ships were disabled. Three sank before the fight was
over; many others were soon drifting helpless wrecks towards a
hostile shore; and before five o'clock in the afternoon, at least
sixteen of their best ships had been sacrificed, and from four to
five thousand soldiers killed.
Nearly all the largest vessels of the Armada, therefore, having
been disabled or damaged,- according to a Spanish eye-witness,-
## p. 10398 (#226) ##########################################
10398
JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY
and all their small shot exhausted, Medina Sidonia reluctantly
gave orders to retreat. The captain-general was a bad sailor;
but he was a chivalrous Spaniard of ancient Gothic blood, and
he felt deep mortification at the plight of his invincible fleet,
together with undisguised resentment against Alexander Farnese,
through whose treachery and incapacity he considered the great
Catholic cause to have been so foully sacrificed. Crippled, mal-
treated, and diminished in number as were his ships, he would
have still faced the enemy, but the winds and currents were fast
driving him on a lee-shore; and the pilots, one and all, assured
him that it would be inevitable destruction to remain. After
a slight and very ineffectual attempt to rescue Don Diego de
Pimentel in the St. Matthew-who refused to leave his disabled
ship- and Don Francisco de Toledo, whose great galleon the St.
Philip was fast driving, a helpless wreck, towards Zeeland, the
Armada bore away N. N. E. into the open sea, leaving those who
could not follow, to their fate.
But Howard decided to wrestle no further pull. Having
followed the Spaniards till Friday, 12th of August, as far as
the latitude of 56° 17', the Lord Admiral called a council. It was
then decided, in order to save English lives and ships, to put
into the Frith of Forth for water and provisions, leaving two
"pinnaces to dog the fleet until it should be past the Isles of
Scotland. " But the next day, as the wind shifted to the north-
west, another council decided to take advantage of the change,
and bear away for the North Foreland, in order to obtain a sup-
ply of powder, shot, and provisions.
Up to this period the weather, though occasionally threaten-
ing, had been moderate. During the week which succeeded the
eventful night off Calais, neither the Armada nor the English
ships had been much impeded in their manœuvres by storms or
heavy seas. But on the following Sunday, 14th of August, there
was a change. The wind shifted again to the southwest; and
during the whole of that day and the Monday, blew a tremen-
dous gale.
"Twas a more violent storm," said Howard, «< than
was ever seen before at this time of the year. " The retreat-
ing English fleet was scattered, many ships were in peril " among
the ill-favored sands off Norfolk," but within four or five days
all arrived safely in Margate roads.
Far different was the fate of the Spaniards. Over their In-
vincible Armada, last seen by the departing English midway
## p. 10399 (#227) ##########################################
JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY
10399
between the coasts of Scotland and Denmark, the blackness of
night seemed suddenly to descend. A mystery hung for a long
time over their fate. Damaged, leaking, without pilots, without a
competent commander, the great fleet entered that furious storm,
and was whirled along the iron crags of Norway, and between
the savage rocks of Faröe and the Hebrides. In those regions
of tempest the insulted North wreaked its full vengeance on the
insolent Spaniards. Disaster after disaster marked their perilous
track, gale after gale swept them hither and thither, tossing them
on sandbanks or shattering them against granite cliffs. The
coasts of Norway, Scotland, Ireland, were strewn with the wrecks
of that pompous fleet which claimed the dominion of the seas;
with the bones of those invincible legions which were to have
sacked London and made England a Spanish viceroyalty.
Through the remainder of the month of August there was
a succession of storms. On the 2d of September a fierce south-
wester drove Admiral Oquendo in his galleon, together with one
of the great galeasses, two large Venetian ships (the Ratta and
the Balauzara), and thirty-six other vessels, upon the Irish coast,
where nearly every soul on board perished; while the few who
escaped to the shore-notwithstanding their religious affinity
with the inhabitants—were either butchered in cold blood, or sent
coupled in halters from village to village, in order to be shipped
to England. A few ships were driven on the English coast;
others went ashore near Rochelle.
Of the four galeasses and four galleys, one of each returned
to Spain. Of the ninety-one great galleons and hulks, fifty-eight
were lost and thirty-three returned. Of the tenders and zabras,
seventeen were lost and eighteen returned. Of one hundred and
thirty-four vessels which sailed from Coruña in July, but fifty-
three, great and small, made their escape to Spain; and these
were so damaged as to be utterly worthless. The Invincible
Armada had not only been vanquished but annihilated.
Of the thirty thousand men who sailed in the fleet, it is prob-
able that not more than ten thousand ever saw their native land
again. Most of the leaders of the expedition lost their lives.
Medina Sidonia reached Santander in October, and as Philip for a
moment believed, "with the greater part of the Armada," although
the King soon discovered his mistake. Recalde, Diego Flores de
Valdez, Oquendo, Maldonado, Bobadilla, Manriquez, either per-
ished at sea, or died of exhaustion immediately after their return.
## p. 10400 (#228) ##########################################
10400
JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY
Pedro de Valdez, Vasco de Silva, Alonzo de Sayas, Pimentel,
Toledo, with many other nobles, were prisoners in England and
Holland. There was hardly a distinguished family in Spain not
placed in mourning; so that, to relieve the universal gloom, an
edict was published forbidding the wearing of mourning at all.
On the other hand, a merchant of Lisbon, not yet reconciled
to the Spanish conquest of his country, permitted himself some
tokens of hilarity at the defeat of the Armada, and was immedi-
ately hanged by express command of Philip. Thus-as men said
-one could neither cry nor laugh within the Spanish dominions.
This was the result of the invasion, so many years prepa
and at an expense almost incalculable. In the year 1588 alone,
the cost of Philip's armaments for the subjugation of England
could not have been less than six millions of ducats; and there
was at least as large a sum on board the Armada itself, although
the Pope refused to pay his promised million. And with all this
outlay, and with the sacrifice of so many thousand lives, nothing
had been accomplished; and Spain, in a moment, instead of seem-
ing terrible to all the world, had become ridiculous.
THE FATE OF JOHN OF BARNEVELD
From the Life and Death of John of Barneveld. Copyright 1874, by John
Lothrop Motley. Reprinted by permission of Harper & Brothers
B
ARNEVELD was about to enter the judges' chamber as usual,
but was informed that the sentence would be read in the
great hall of judicature. They descended accordingly to
the basement story, and passed down the narrow flight of steps
which then as now connected the more modern structure, where
the Advocate had been imprisoned and tried, with what remained
of the ancient palace of the Counts of Holland. In the centre of
the vast hall once the banqueting chamber of those petty sov
ereigns, with its high vaulted roof of cedar which had so often in
ancient days rung with the sounds of mirth and revelry — was a
great table at which the twenty-four judges and the three prose-
cuting officers were seated, in their black caps and gowns of
office. The room was lined with soldiers, and crowded with a dark
surging mass of spectators, who had been waiting there all night.
A chair was placed for the prisoner. He sat down, and the
clerk of the commission, Pots by name, proceeded at once to read
## p. 10401 (#229) ##########################################
JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY
10401
the sentence. A summary of this long, rambling, and tiresome
paper has been already laid before the reader. If ever a man
could have found it tedious to listen to his own death sentence,
the great statesman might have been in that condition as he
listened to Secretary Pots.
During the reading of the sentence the Advocate moved
uneasily on his seat, and seemed about to interrupt the clerk
at several passages which seemed to him especially preposterous.
But he controlled himself by a strong effort, and the clerk went
steadily on to the conclusion.
Then Barneveld said:
"The judges have put down many things which they have no
right to draw from my confession. Let this protest be added. "
"I thought too," he continued, "that my lords the States-
General would have had enough in my life and blood, and that
my wife and children might keep what belongs to them. Is this
my recompense for forty-three years' service to these provinces ? »
President de Voogd rose:
"Your sentence has been pronounced," he said. "Away!
away! " So saying, he pointed to the door into which one of
the great windows at the southeastern front of the hall had been
converted.
Without another word the old man rose from his chair. and
strode, leaning on his staff, across the hall, accompanied by his
faithful valet and the provost, and escorted by a file of soldiers.
The mob of spectators flowed out after him at every door into
the inner court-yard in front of the ancient palace.
IN THE beautiful village-capital of the "Count's Park," com-
monly called The Hague, the most striking and picturesque spot
then as now was that where the transformed remains of the old
moated castle of those feudal sovereigns were still to be seen. A
three-storied range of simple, substantial buildings, in brown
brickwork picked out with white stone, in a style since made
familiar both in England and America, and associated with a
somewhat later epoch in the history of the House of Orange,
surrounded three sides of a spacious inner paved quadrangle
called the Inner Court, the fourth or eastern side being over-
shadowed by a beechen grove. A square tower flanked each
angle; and on both sides of the southwestern turret extended the
commodious apartments of the Stadtholder. The great gateway
XVIII-651
## p. 10402 (#230) ##########################################
10402
JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY
on the southwest opened into a wide open space called the Outer
Court-yard. Along the northwest side a broad and beautiful sheet
of water, in which the walls, turrets, and chapel-spires of the
inclosed castle mirrored themselves, was spread between the mass
of buildings and an umbrageous promenade called the Vyverberg,
consisting of a sextuple alley of lime-trees, and embowering here
and there a stately villa. A small island, fringed with weeping
willows, and tufted all over with lilacs, laburnums, and other
shrubs then in full flower, lay in the centre of the miniature lake;
and the tall solid tower of the Great Church, surmounted by a
light openwork spire, looked down from a little distance over the
scene.
It was a bright morning in May. The white swans were
sailing tranquilly to and fro over the silver basin; and the mavis,
blackbird, and nightingale, which haunted the groves surround-
ing the castle and the town, were singing as if the daybreak
were ushering in a summer festival.
But it was not to a merry-making that the soldiers were
marching, and the citizens thronging so eagerly from every
street and alley towards the castle. By four o'clock the Outer
and Inner Courts had been lined with detachments of the
Prince's Guard, and companies of other regiments to the num-
ber of twelve hundred men. Occupying the northeastern side of
the court rose the grim, time-worn front of the ancient hall,
consisting of one tall pyramidal gable of ancient gray brickwork
flanked with two tall slender towers; the whole with the lancet-
shaped windows and severe style of the twelfth century, except-
ing a rose-window in the centre, with the decorated mullions of
a somewhat later period.
In front of the lower window, with its Gothic archway hastily
converted into a door, a shapeless platform of rough, unhewn
planks had that night been rudely patched together. This was
the scaffold. A slight railing around it served to protect it from
the crowd, and a heap of coarse sand had been thrown upon it.
A squalid, unclean box of unplaned boards, originally prepared as
a coffin for a Frenchman,- who some time before had been con-
demned to death for murdering the son of Goswyn Meurskens,
a Hague tavern-keeper, but pardoned by the Stadtholder, - lay
on the scaffold. It was recognized from having been left for
a long time, half forgotten, at the public execution place of The
Hague.
## p. 10403 (#231) ##########################################
JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY
10403
Upon this coffin now sat two common soldiers of ruffianly
aspect playing at dice, betting whether the Lord or the Devil
would get the soul of Barneveld. Many a foul and ribald jest
at the expense of the prisoner was exchanged between these
gamblers, some of their comrades, and a few townsmen who
were grouped about at that early hour. The horrible libels,
caricatures, and calumnies which had been circulated, exhibited,
and sung in all the streets for so many months, had at last
thoroughly poisoned the minds of the vulgar against the fallen
statesman.
The great mass of the spectators had forced their way by
daybreak into the hall itself to hear the sentence, so that the
Inner Court-yard had remained comparatively empty.
At last, at half-past nine o'clock, a shout arose, "There he
comes! there he comes! " and the populace flowed out from the
hall of judgment into the court-yard like a tidal wave.
In an instant the Binnenhof was filled with more than three
thousand spectators.
The old statesman, leaning on his staff, walked out upon the
scaffold and calmly surveyed the scene. Lifting his eyes to
heaven, he was heard to murmur, "O God! what does man
come to! " Then he said bitterly once more, «This, then, is the
reward of forty years' service to the State! "
La Motte, who attended him, said fervently: "It is no longer
time to think of this. Let us prepare your coming before God. "
"Is there no cushion or stool to kneel upon? " said Barneveld,
looking around him.
The provost said he would send for one; but the old man
knelt at once on the bare planks. His servant, who waited upon
him as calmly and composedly as if he had been serving him.
at dinner, held him by the arm. It was remarked that neither
master nor man, true stoics and Hollanders both, shed a single
tear upon the scaffold.
La Motte prayed for a quarter of an hour, the Advocate re-
maining on his knees.
He then rose and said to John Franken, "See that he does
not come near me," pointing to the executioner, who stood in
the background grasping his long double-handed sword. Barne-
veld then rapidly unbuttoned his doublet with his own hands,
and the valet helped him off with it. "Make haste! make
haste! " said his master.
## p. 10404 (#232) ##########################################
10404
JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY
The statesman then came forward, and said in a loud, firm
voice to the people:-
"Men, do not believe that I am a traitor to the country. I
have ever acted uprightly and loyally as a good patriot, and as
such I shall die. "
The crowd was perfectly silent.
He then took his cap from John Franken, drew it over his
eyes, and went forward towards the sand, saying:-
"Christ shall be my guide. O Lord, my Heavenly Father,
receive my spirit. "
As he was about to kneel with his face to the south, the
provost said:-
"My lord will be pleased to move to the other side, not
where the sun is in his face. "
He knelt accordingly with his face towards his own house.
The servant took farewell of him, and Barneveld said to the
executioner:
"Be quick about it. Be quick. "
The executioner then struck his head off at a single blow.
Many persons from the crowd now sprang, in spite of all
opposition, upon the scaffold, and dipped their handkerchiefs in
his blood, cut wet splinters from the boards, or grubbed up the
sand that was steeped in it; driving many bargains afterwards for
these relics to be treasured, with various feelings of sorrow, joy,
glutted or expiated vengeance.
It has been recorded, and has been constantly repeated to
this day, that the Stadtholder, whose windows exactly faced the
scaffold, looked out upon the execution with a spy-glass; saying
as he did so:-
"See the old scoundrel, how he trembles! He is afraid of the
stroke. "
But this is calumny. Colonel Hauterive declared that he was
with Maurice in his cabinet during the whole period of the exe-
cution; that by order of the prince all the windows and shutters
were kept closed; that no person wearing his livery was allowed
to be abroad; that he anxiously received messages as to the pro-
ceedings, and heard of the final catastrophe with sorrowful emo-
tion.
## p. 10405 (#233) ##########################################
10405
JOHN MUIR
(1836-)
OHN MUIR, an explorer and naturalist, whose field of work has
been particularly the western and northwestern mountain
regions of America, - where at least one great glacier now
bears his name,- - was born at Dunbar, Scotland, in 1836. With his
parents and a large flock of brothers and sisters, he came to the
United States in 1850, after some good common-schooling in Dunbar.
He began his study of nature in the region near Fort Winnebago,
Wisconsin, with an ever increasing interest and delight in whatever
belongs to the world of creatures, plants,
and stones, particularly in the waving soli-
tudes of forests and rock-and-snow tracts of
the northwestern Sierras.
Muir's freedom to devote himself to a
life of observation and record was delayed:
and in the story of his years of manual
work as a farmer, mechanic, lumberman,
sheep-herder, and what not besides, there
comes surprise at his power to find time
and energy for other pursuits in the nature
of an avocation; and with the surprise we
have a sense of pleasure that a man of
untiring muscles and mind could win free
of all that checked his natural preferences.
He studied grammar and mathematics while a farm hand, and read
through a library of books when in the fields. He earned enough as
a young man to give himself four years of special scientific study
in the University of Wisconsin. Then began an independent life,
in which he alternated seasons of hard work, wholly or much alone;
partly through the circumstances of his wanderings, partly by his
own choice. It is said that during ten years of mountaineering in the
remoter Sierras, he met no men except one band of Mono tribesmen.
JOHN MUIR
For some ten summers and winters prior to 1876, Mr. Muir was
settled near the Yosemite district. In the year named he became a
member of the Geodetic Survey of the Great Basin, and attempted
much botanical work. During 1879 and subsequently, after he reached
Alaska, he explored and charted its vast mountain ranges, discovered
## p. 10406 (#234) ##########################################
10406
JOHN MUIR
Glacier Bay and the Muir Glacier system; and with that expedition and
the two succeeding tours he became the foremost authority on Alas-
ka's geologic and other natural aspects. He also visited the Yukon
and Mackenzie Rivers, and traversed the cañon country of California.
He was of the party on board the Corwin in 1881, sent out to trace
the lost Jeannette, which enterprise added largely to his sketches.
and notes for scientific use. Since 1879, the year of his marriage,
Mr. Muir has had his home in California; but to find him in it at
other than a given time, is somewhat an accident, so indefatigable
is his industry as a naturalist. He is as ready to-day for an alpine
excursion of weeks or months as in the early period of a naturalistic
career exceptionally arduous and fruitful.
Mr. Muir has written much less than his explorations would
suggest: but as a contributor to the highest class of American and
foreign periodicals, and the author of volumes dealing with his expe-
riences, impressions, and discoveries, he is a writer of distinct and
unusual individuality. He is less a man of letters in his manner than
he is the direct, graphic, and sincere observer, whose aim is to write
down simply what he sees or feels, to ut the reader in the quickest
and closest touch with a topic or a scene. But the simplicity and
personal effect of his style give it a peculiar vigor and eloquence.
He has been spoken of as a naturalist whose observations "have the
force of mathematical demonstration. " In the study of glacial con-
ditions, botanic life, the fauna of the Northwest, and kindred subjects,
he is reckoned a specialist by the first scientists of the day; and his
personal traits have won him the esteem of the army of scientists
who have visited the Western country where he lives and works.
His most popular volume, 'The Mountains of California,' promises
to become a classic; his editorial contributions in Picturesque Cali-
fornia are thoroughly effective; and he has won wide favor through
descriptive pages, splendid for spontaneous and vivid prose pictures
of great scenery,— studies of the wind's movement of a pine forest,
or a delicate flower of California, or a wild-bird's lonely nest.
A WIND-STORM IN THE FORESTS
From The Mountains of California. Copyright 1894, by The Century
Company
THE
HE mountain winds, like the dew and rain, sunshine and snow,
are measured and bestowed with love on the forests, to
develop their strength and beauty. However restricted the
scope of other forest influences, that of the winds is universal.
The snow bends and trims the upper forests every winter, the
## p. 10407 (#235) ##########################################
JOHN MUIR
10407
lightning strikes a single tree here and there, while avalanches
mow down thousands at a swoop as a gardener trims out a bed
of flowers. But the winds go to every tree, fingering every leaf
and branch and furrowed bole; not one is forgotten: the Mount-
ain Pine towering with outstretched arms on the rugged but-
tresses of the icy peaks, the lowliest and most retiring tenant of
the dells, they seek and find them all, caressing them tenderly,
bending them in lusty exercise, stimulating their growth, pluck-
ing off a leaf or limb as required, or removing an entire tree or
grove, now whispering and cooing through the branches like a
sleepy child, now roaring like the ocean; the winds blessing the
forests, the forests the winds, with ineffable beauty and harmony
as the sure result.
-
After one has seen pines six feet in diameter bending like
grasses before a mountain gale, and ever and anon some giant
falling with a crash that shakes the hills, it seems astonishing
that any, save the lowest thick-set trees, could ever have found
a period sufficiently stormless to establish themselves; or once
established, that they should not sooner or later have been blown
down. But when the storm is over, and we behold the same
forests tranquil again, towering fresh and unscathed in erect
majesty, and consider what centuries of storms have fallen upon
them since they were first planted: hail, to break the tender
seedlings; lightning, to scorch and shatter; snow, winds, and
avalanches, to crush and overwhelm,- while the manifest result
of all this wild storm-culture is the glorious perfection we behold:
then faith in Nature's forestry is established, and we cease to
deplore the violence of her most destructive gales, or of any
other storm implement whatsoever.
There are two trees in the Sierra forests that are never blown
down, so long as they continue in sound health. These are the
Juniper and the Dwarf Pine of the summit peaks. Their stiff,
crooked roots grip the storm-beaten ledges like eagles' claws;
while their lithe, cord-like branches bend round compliantly,
offering but slight holds for winds, however violent. The other
alpine conifers- the Needle Pine, Mountain Pine, Two-leaved
Pine, and Hemlock Spruce-are never thinned out by this
agent to any destructive extent, on account of their admirable
toughness and the closeness of their growth. In general the
same is true of the giants of the lower zones. The kingly Sugar
Pine, towering aloft to a height of more than two hundred feet,
## p. 10408 (#236) ##########################################
10408
JOHN MUIR
offers a fine mark to storm-winds; but it is not densely foliaged,
and its long horizontal arms swing round compliantly in the
blast, like tresses of green, fluent algæ in a brook: while the Sil-
ver Firs in most places keep their ranks well together in united
strength.
The Yellow or Silver Pine is more frequently overturned
than any other tree on the Sierra, because its leaves and branches
form a larger mass in proportion to its height; while in many
places it is planted sparsely, leaving open lanes through which
storms may enter with full force. Furthermore, because it is
distributed along the lower portion of the range, which was the
first to be left bare on the breaking up of the ice-sheet at the
close of the glacial winter, the soil it is growing upon has been
longer exposed to post-glacial weathering, and consequently is in
a more crumbling, decayed condition than the fresher soils far-
ther up the range,
and therefore offers a less secure anchorage
for the roots. While exploring the forest zones of Mount Shasta,
I discovered the path of a hurricane strewn with thousands of
pines of this species. Great and small had been uprooted or
wrenched off by sheer force, making a clean gap, like that made
by a snow avalanche. But hurricanes capable of doing this class
of work are rare in the Sierra; and when we have explored the
forests from one extremity of the range to the other, we are
compelled to believe that they are the most beautiful on the
face of the earth, however we may regard the agents that have
made them so.
There is always something deeply exciting, not only in the
sounds of winds in the woods, which exert more or less influence
over every mind, but in their varied water-like flow as manifested
by the movements of the trees, especially those of the conifers.
By no other trees are they rendered so extensively and impress-
ively visible; not even by the lordly tropic palms or tree-ferns
responsive to the gentlest breeze. The waving of a forest of
the giant Sequoias is indescribably impressive and sublime; but
the pines seem to me the best interpreters of winds. They are
mighty waving golden-rods, ever in tune, singing and writing
wind-music all their long century lives. Little, however, of this
noble tree-waving and tree-music will you see or hear in the
strictly alpine portion of the forests. The burly Juniper, whose
girth sometimes more than equals its height, is about as rigid as
the rocks on which it grows. The slender lash-like sprays of the
## p. 10409 (#237) ##########################################
JOHN MUIR
10409
Dwarf Pine stream out in wavering ripples, but the tallest and
slenderest are far too unyielding to wave even in the heaviest
gales. They only shake in quick, short vibrations. The Hemlock
Spruce, however, and the Mountain Pine, and some of the tallest
thickets of the Two-leaved species, bow in storms with consid-
erable scope and gracefulness. But it is only in the lower and
middle zones that the meeting of winds and woods is to be seen
in all its grandeur.
One of the most beautiful and exhilarating storms I ever
enjoyed in the Sierra occurred in December 1874, when I hap-
pened to be exploring one of the tributary valleys of the Yuba
River. The sky and the ground and the trees had been thor-
oughly rain-washed and were dry again. The day was intensely
pure: one of those incomparable bits of California winter, warm
and balmy and full of white sparkling sunshine, redolent of all
the purest influences of the spring, and at the same time enliv-
ened with one of the most bracing wind-storms conceivable.
Instead of camping out, as I usually do, I then chanced to be
stopping at the house of a friend. But when the storm began
to sound, I lost no time in pushing out into the woods to enjoy
it.
For on such occasions Nature has always something rare to
show us, and the danger to life and limb is hardly greater than
one would experience crouching deprecatingly beneath a roof.
It was still early morning when I found myself fairly adrift.
Delicious sunshine came pouring over the hills, lighting the tops
of the pines, and setting free a steam of summery fragrance
that contrasted strangely with the wild tones of the storm. The
air was mottled with pine-tassels and bright green plumes, that
went flashing past in the sunlight like birds pursued. But there
was not the slightest dustiness; nothing less pure than leaves, and
ripe pollen, and flecks of withered bracken and moss. I heard
trees falling for hours at the rate of one every two or three
minutes: some uprooted, partly on account of the loose, water-
soaked condition of the ground; others broken straight across,
where some weakness caused by fire had determined the spot.
The gestures of the various trees made a delightful study.
Young Sugar Pines, light and feathery as squirrel-tails, were
bowing almost to the ground; while the grand old patriarchs,
whose massive boles had been tried in a hundred storms, waved
solemnly above them, their long, arching branches streaming
fluently on the gale, and every needle thrilling and ringing and
## p. 10410 (#238) ##########################################
10410
JOHN MUIR
shedding off keen lances of light like a diamond. The Douglas
Spruces, with long sprays drawn out in level tresses, and needles
massed in a gray, shimmering glow, presented a most striking
appearance as they stood in bold relief along the hilltops. The
madroños in the dells, with their red bark and large glossy leaves
tilted every way, reflected the sunshine in throbbing spangles
like those one so often sees on the rippled surface of a glacier
lake. But the Silver Pines were now the most impressively
beautiful of all. Colossal spires two hundred feet in height waved
like supple golden-rods chanting and bowing low as if in worship;
while the whole mass of their long, tremulous foliage was kindled
into one continuous blaze of white sun-fire. The force of the
gale was such that the most steadfast monarch of them all rocked
down to its roots, with a motion plainly perceptible when one
leaned against it. Nature was holding high festival, and every
fibre of the most rigid giants thrilled with glad excitement.
I drifted on through the midst of this passionate music and
motion, across many a glen, from ridge to ridge; often halting in
the lee of a rock for shelter, or to gaze and listen. Even when
the grand anthem had swelled to its highest pitch, I could dis-
tinctly hear the varying tones of individual trees,-Spruce, and
Fir, and Pine, and leafless Oak,- and even the infinitely gentle
rustle of the withered grasses at my feet.
Each was express-
ing itself in its own way,-singing its own song, and making its
own peculiar gestures,-manifesting a richness of variety to be
found in no other forest I have yet seen. The coniferous woods
of Canada and the Carolinas and Florida are made up of trees
that resemble one another about as nearly as blades of grass,
and grow close together in much the same way. Coniferous
trees, in general, seldom possess individual character, such as is
manifest among Oaks and Elms. But the California forests are
made up of a greater number of distinct species than any other
in the world. And in them we find, not only a marked differ-
entiation into special groups, but also a marked individuality in
almost every tree, giving rise to storm effects indescribably glo-
rious.
Toward midday, after a long, tingling scramble through copses
of hazel and ceanothus, I gained the summit of the highest ridge
in the neighborhood; and then it occurred to me that it would
be a fine thing to climb one of the trees, to obtain a wider out-
look and get my ear close to the Eolian music of its topmost
## p. 10411 (#239) ##########################################
JOHN MUIR
10411
needles. But under the circumstances the choice of a tree was
a serious matter. One whose instep was not very strong seemed
in danger of being blown down, or of being struck by others in
case they should fall; another was branchless to a considerable
height above the ground, and at the same time too large to be
grasped with arms and legs in climbing; while others were not
favorably situated for clear views. After cautiously casting about,
I made choice of the tallest of a group of Douglas Spruces that
were growing close together like a tuft of grass, no one of which
seemed likely to fall unless all the rest fell with it. Though
comparatively young, they were about a hundred feet high, and
their lithe, brushy tops were rocking and swirling in wild ecstasy.
Being accustomed to climb trees in making botanical studies,
I experienced no difficulty in reaching the top of this one; and
never before did I enjoy so noble an exhilaration of motion.
The slender tops fairly flapped and swished in the passionate
torrent, bending and swirling backward and forward, round and
round, tracing indescribable combinations of vertical and hori-
zontal curves, while I clung with muscles firm braced, like a
bobolink on a reed.
In its widest sweeps my tree-top described an arc of from
twenty to thirty degrees; but I felt sure of its elastic temper,
having seen others of the same species still more severely tried
bent almost to the ground indeed, in heavy snows-without
breaking a fibre. I was therefore safe, and free to take the wind
into my pulses and enjoy the excited forest from my superb out-
look. The view from here must be extremely beautiful in any
weather. Now my eye roved over the piny hills and dales as
over fields of waving grain, and felt the light running in ripples
and broad swelling undulations across the valleys from ridge to
ridge, as the shining foliage was stirred by corresponding waves.
of air. Oftentimes these waves of reflected light would break
up suddenly into a kind of beaten foam, and again, after chasing
one another in regular order, they would seem to bend forward
in concentric curves, and disappear on some hillside, like sea
waves on a shelving shore. The quantity of light reflected from
the bent needles was so great as to make whole groves appear
as if covered with snow, while the black shadows beneath the
trees greatly enhanced the effect of the silvery splendor.
Excepting only the shadows, there was nothing sombre in
all this wild sea of pines. On the contrary, notwithstanding this
## p. 10412 (#240) ##########################################
10412
JOHN MUIR
was the winter season, the colors were remarkably beautiful.
The shafts of the pine and libocedrus were brown and purple,
and most of the foliage was well tinged with yellow; the laurel
groves, with the pale under sides of their leaves turned upward,
made masses of gray; and then there was many a dash of choc-
olate color from clumps of manzanita, and jet of vivid crimson
from the bark of the madroños; while the ground on the hillsides,
appearing here and there through openings between the groves,
displayed masses of pale purple and brown.
The sounds of the storm corresponded gloriously with this
wild exuberance of light and motion. The profound bass of the
naked branches and boles booming like waterfalls; the quick,
tense vibrations of the pine-needles, now rising to a shrill, whis-
tling hiss, now falling to a silky murmur; the rustling of laurel
groves in the dells, and the keen metallic click of leaf on leaf,—
all this was heard in easy analysis when the attention was calmly
bent.
The varied gestures of the multitude were seen to fine ad-
vantage, so that one could recognize the different species at a
distance of several miles by this means alone, as well as by their
forms and colors and the way they reflected the light. All
seemed strong and comfortable, as if really enjoying the storm,
while responding to its most enthusiastic greetings. We hear
much nowadays concerning the universal struggle for existence,
but no struggle in the common meaning of the word was mani-
fest here; no recognition of danger by any tree; no deprecation:
but rather an invincible gladness, as remote from exultation as
from fear.
I kept my lofty perch for hours, frequently closing my eyes
to enjoy the music by itself, or to feast quietly on the delicious
fragrance that was streaming past. The fragrance of the woods
was less marked than that produced during warm rain, when so
many balsamic buds and leaves are steeped like tea; but from
the chafing of resiny branches against each other, and the inces-
sant attrition of myriads of needles, the gale was spiced to a very
tonic degree. And besides the fragrance from these local sources,
there were traces of scents brought from afar. For this wind
came first from the sea, rubbing against its fresh, briny waves,
then distilled through the redwoods, threading rich ferny gulches,
and spreading itself in broad undulating currents over many a
flower-enameled ridge of the coast mountains, then across the
## p. 10413 (#241) ##########################################
JOHN MUIR
10413
golden plains, up the purple foot-hills, and into these piny woods
with the varied incense gathered by the way.
Winds are advertisements of all they touch, however much or
little we may be able to read them; telling their wanderings
even by their scents alone. Mariners detect the flowery perfume
of land-winds far at sea, and sea-winds carry the fragrance of
dulse and tangle far inland, where it is quickly recognized, though
mingled with the scents of a thousand land-flowers. As an illus-
tration of this, I may tell here that I breathed sea-air on the
Firth of Forth, in Scotland, while a boy; then was taken to Wis-
consin, where I remained nineteen years: then, without in all this
time having breathed one breath of the sea, I walked quietly,
alone, from the middle of the Mississippi Valley to the Gulf of
Mexico, on a botanical excursion; and while in Florida, far from
the coast, my attention wholly bent on the splendid tropical vege-
tation about me, I suddenly recognized a sea-breeze, as it came
sifting through the palmettos and blooming vine-tangles, which
at once awakened and set free a thousand dormant associations,
and made me a boy again in Scotland, as if all the intervening
years had been annihilated.
Most people like to look at mountain rivers, and bear them
in mind; but few care to look at the winds, though far more
beautiful and sublime, and though they become at times about as
visible as flowing water. When the north winds in winter are
making upward sweeps over the curving summits of the High
Sierra, the fact is sometimes published with flying snow-banners
a mile long. Those portions of the winds thus embodied can
scarce be wholly invisible, even to the darkest imagination. And
when we look around over an agitated forest, we may see some-
thing of the wind that stirs it, by its effects upon the trees.
Yonder it descends in a rush of water-like ripples, and sweeps
over the bending pines from hill to hill. Nearer, we see detached
plumes and leaves, now speeding by on level currents, now whirl-
ing in eddies, or escaping over the edges of the whirls, soaring
aloft on grand, upswelling domes of air, or tossing on flame-like
crests. Smooth, deep currents, cascades, falls, and swirling eddies,
sing around every tree and leaf, and over all the varied topog-
raphy of the region with telling changes of form, like mountain
rivers conforming to the features of their channels.
After tracing the Sierra streams from their fountains to the
plains, marking where they bloom white in falls, glide in crystal
## p. 10414 (#242) ##########################################
10414
JOHN MUIR
plumes, surge gray and foam-filled in bowlder-choked gorges,
and slip through the woods in long, tranquil reaches -after thus
learning their language and forms in detail, we may at length
hear them chanting all together in one grand anthem, and com-
prehend them all in clear inner vision, covering the range like
lace. But even this spectacle is far less sublime and not a whit
more substantial than what we may behold of these storm-streams
of air in the mountain woods.
We all travel the Milky Way together, trees and men; but
it never occurred to me until this storm day, while swinging in
the wind, that trees are travelers, in the ordinary sense. They
make many journeys; not extensive ones, it is true; but our own
little journeys, away and back again, are only little more than
tree-wavings- many of them not so much.
When the storm began to abate, I dismounted and sauntered
down through the calming woods. The storm-tones died away,
and turning toward the east, I beheld the countless hosts of the
forests hushed and tranquil, towering above one another on the
slopes of the hills like a devout audience. The setting sun filled
them with amber light, and seemed to say, while they listened,
"My peace I give unto you. ”
As I gazed on the impressive scene, all the so-called ruin of
the storm was forgotten; and never before did these noble woods
appear so fresh, so joyous, so immortal.
## p. 10415 (#243) ##########################################
10415
ELISHA MULFORD
(1833-1885)
W
HEN the Civil War drew to its close, there was a general idea
that the stress of emotional feeling through which we had
passed, the quickening of the national consciousness by the
season of national peril, and the remembrance of countless instances
of heroism and adventure, would result in the production of a dis-
tinct type of national literature, from which the note of either pro-
vincialism or cosmopolitanism should be absent.
This anticipation has been realized, but within different limits and
in different forms from those expected by the generation which took
part in the struggle. There is a body of war literature, in which
General Grant's 'Memoirs' perhaps ranks highest; but it is seen that
this literature is still but material from which, as from "old chron-
icles of wasted time," future generations must draw the inspiration
for higher forms, perhaps of song or sustained poem, perhaps of
drama or historical novel. The war, however, did inspire contem-
porary writings. In no case is this more evident than in Mulford's
'Nation,' which glows with a lofty and impassioned idea of patriot-
ism. In the preface the writer says that he has "sought, however
imperfectly, to give expression to the thought of the people in the
late war, and that conception of the nation which they who were so
worthy, held worth living and dying for. "
Elisha Mulford was born in Montrose, Pennsylvania, in 1833, from
the stock of those Puritans who settled the eastern end of Long
Island. He was graduated at Yale in 1855; and after a year in
Germany was admitted, in 1862, to the priesthood of the Episcopal
Church. A slight infirmity of deafness interfered with his usefulness
as a parish priest; and after a settlement in South Orange, New
Jersey, he spent his life in literary and philosophical study, first at
Friendsville, Pennsylvania, and afterwards at Cambridge, Massa-
chusetts. In 1862 he married Rachel Carmalt, daughter of Caleb
Carmalt, a prominent member of the Society of Friends of Northern
Pennsylvania. His book The Nation' secured him a recognized
place among the profound and original minds of his generation, and
was published in 1871; and his other book, The Republic of God,
an Institute in Theology,' in 1881. This last holds something of the
position in the Episcopal Church that Dr. Bushnell's writings do in
## p. 10416 (#244) ##########################################
10416
ELISHA MULFORD
the Congregational Church, and is characterized by the lofty spiritu-
ality which belonged to the great ages of the Church.
In both of his books, Mulford's philosophical standpoint is that
of Hegel, especially in regarding every human institution as the
embodiment of an idea which virtually constitutes its soul or proper
life. The nation and the church he talks about are our ideal, and
the outward form is the government; the church organizations are
of little consequence except as the visible body of the metaphysical
entity behind them. This tone of thought is not in favor at present:
his writings are highly valued but by a chosen few; and his philoso-
phy seems mystical or impractical to many. Mulford's literary style
is marred by the saturation of his mind with the mannerisms of the
German metaphysicians. Nevertheless, there is a weight and dignity
in it which is found only in the pages of the writers of the greatest
periods, and there are many passages which in rhythm and power
are hardly to be matched in American prose.
Mr. Mulford was of singularly attractive and unselfish character.
His gifts as a conversationalist and occasional speaker were of a high
order, for he never failed to idealize the subject in hand in a pecul-
iarly felicitous manner. Many of his sermons were of singular beauty
and elevation, but only the memory of them remains. At the time
of his death in 1885 he had projected several important works. His
grave is in the cemetery at Concord, not far from the graves of
Emerson and Hawthorne.
As a political thinker, Mr. Mulford won recognition from those
to whom the thought-element, the moral in the highest sense, is re-
garded as the basis of the nature of the State. President Garfield,
Charles Sumner, Wayne MacVeagh, President Angell, Professor Di-
man, F. D. Maurice, and Dean Stanley, among others, testified warmly
to their appreciation of the force and elevation of The Nation. '
The austere dignity which characterizes the 'Republic of God' has
strengthened the faith and comforted the hearts of many who
have come to feel that theology was a "baseless fabric," or at best
a metaphysical system resting on traditionary assumptions. It can
hardly be doubted that when the present tendency to exalt the con-
crete both in philosophy and worship shall have spent its force, the
'Republic of God' will be turned to by sincere Christians as one of
the great modern "Institutes in Theology. "
## p. 10417 (#245) ##########################################
ELISHA MULFORD
10417
[The following selections are taken from The Nation, copyright 1870
by E. Mulford, and from The Republic of God,' copyright 1881 by Elisha
Mulford; and are reprinted by permission of Mrs. Mulford, and of Houghton,
Mifflin & Co. , the publishers. ]
THE NATION IS A CONTINUITY
From The Nation'
IT
T NO more exists complete in a single period of time than does
the race; it is not a momentary existence, as if defined in
some circumstance. It is not composed of its present occu-
pants alone, but it embraces those who are, and have been,
and shall be. There is in it the continuity of the generations; it
reaches backward to the fathers and onward to the children, and
its relation is manifest in its reverence for the one and its hope
for the other.
The evidence of this continuity is in the consciousness of a
people. It appears in the apprehension of the nation as an in-
heritance received from the fathers, to be transmitted unimpaired
to the children. This conviction, that has held the nation as a
heritage worth living and worth dying for, has inspired the devo-
tion and sacrifice of a people.
The evidence of this continuity is also in the fact that the
spirit of a people always contemplates it. The nation has never
existed which placed a definite termination to its existence—a
period when its order was to expire and the obligation to its law
to cease. It cannot anticipate a time when it shall be resolved
into its elements, but contends with the intensity of life against
every force which threatens dissolution. Those who have repre-
sented the State as a compact, have yet held it to be a perpetual
one, in which the children are bound by the acts of their fathers.
This continuity is the condition of the existence of the nation
in history. The nation persists through a form of outward cir-
cumstance. Judea was the same under the judges and under the
kings; Rome was the same under the kings and under the con-
suls. The elements of the being of the nation subsist in this
continuity. In it, also, the products of human effort are con-
served, and the law of human production conforms to it. The
best attainments pass slowly from their germ to their perfectness,
as in the growth of the language and the law, the arts and the
literature of a people. Chaucer and Spenser, through intervals of
XVIII-652
## p. 10418 (#246) ##########################################
10418
ELISHA MULFORD
slow advance, precede Shakespeare, as Giotto and Perugino lead
the way to Michael Angelo and Raphael.
The nation is a continuity, as also in itself the product of
succeeding generations. It transcends the achievement of a sin-
gle individual or a separate age. The life of the individual is
not its measure. In its fruition there is the work of the gen-
erations; and even in the moments of its existence, the expres-
sion of their spirit, the blending of the strength of youth, the
resolve of manhood, and the experience of age-the hope and
the inspiration of the one, the wisdom and repose of the other.
There is the spirit which is always young, and yet always full of
years; and even in its physical course the correspondence to an
always renewed life.
-
This continuity has found expression in the highest political
thought. Shakespeare has it in his historical plays: the continu-
ity of the nation is represented as existing through the years
with the vicissitudes of the people, in the changes of scene,
with the coming and going of men; and there is, as in the
nation, the unity of the drama in which so many actors move,
and whose events revolve from age to age; and thus these plays
hold an attraction apart from the separate scenes and figures
which present some isolated ideal for the poet to shape. Burke
has represented this continuity in the nation as moving through
generations, in a life which no speculative schemes and no legal
formulas may compass: "The nation is indeed a partnership, but
a partnership not only between those who are living, but between
those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to
be born. "
THE NATION THE REALIZATION OF FREEDOM
From The Nation'
HERE is always a tendency in those withdrawn from the bat-
tle, and its "confused noise and garments rolled in blood,"
to bear its issues into some ideal and abstract sphere.
Thus the war is represented as the immediate conflict of the
antagonistic ideas, freedom and slavery. The reality is other
than this: the hosts are mustered in no intellectual arena, and
the forces called into its field are other than spectral ideas.
This tendency to resolve history into the conflict and progress of
## p. 10419 (#247) ##########################################
ELISHA MULFORD
10419
abstract ideas, or the development of what is called an intellect-
ual conception, can apprehend nothing of the real passion of
history. It knows not what, with so deep significance, is called
the burden of history. It enters not into the travail of time, it
discerns not the presence of a living Person in the judgments
which are the crises of the world. It comprehends only some
intellectual conflict in the issue of necessary laws, but not the
strife of a living humanity. The process of a legal formula, the
evolution of a logical sequence, the supremacy of abstract ideas,-
this has nothing to compensate for the agony and the suffering
and the sacrifice of the actual battle, and it discerns not the real
glory of the deliverance of humanity, the real triumph borne
through but over death. There was in the war, in the issue
which came upon us, "even upon us," and in the sacrifice of
those who were called, the battle of the nation for its very
being; and it was the nation which met slavery in mortal strife.
The inevitable conflict was of slavery with the life of the nation.
There is no vague rhetoric, but a deep truth, in the words
"Liberty and union, now and forever, one and inseparable. " They
are worthy to live upon the lips of the people, for there can be
no union without freedom, since slavery has its necessary result
in the dissolution of the being of the nation; and there can be
no freedom without union, for it is only in the being of the
nation that freedom becomes real.
THE PEOPLE AND THE LAND
From The Nation'
BU
UT in the existence of the nation, which is the substance of
civilization, there is a power higher than the necessary
process of the physical world. It exists in the order of the
moral world. This cannot be determined by physical elements.
The history of the world cannot be deduced from its geography.
In the political course of the nation the land is a necessary ele-
ment, but it is not the creative nor the controlling element. The
future of the nation will not be concluded by its relative near-
ness to the equator. The nation exists historically in the reali-
zation of the freedom of man, and his consequent dominion over
Mr. Buckle, when he stood in Judea, avowed that his
nature.
## p. 10420 (#248) ##########################################
10420
ELISHA MULFORD
only interest was in the agriculture of the country: but the soil
is the same upon which a people lived who stood in the continu-
ity of a nation, which long captivity in strange lands and under
strange skies did not destroy, whose unity was lost in the grand-
eur of no imperialism, and whose lines of kings and prophets
looked to the coming of One in whom was the hope of humanity;
but the physical process of nature does not renew that life. The
mountains of Attica are the same upon which the Parthenon was
built, and their quarries the same which furnished marble for
the sculpture of Athene, and the windy plains are the same upon
which an army was mustered at Marathon, and the sea is the
same whose waves were parted by their ships at Salamis; but
the conflict which in its moral interest made these names immor-
tal, has closed.
THE PERSONALITY OF MAN
From The Republic of God'
THE
HE personality of man is not to be represented as a reflection
of the personality of God. It is no remote imitation and no
faint impression of the personality of God. It is real. It
has the strength of the free spirit. It moves among the fleeting
forms and fading images of the finite, where shadow pursues
shadow, but it is not of them. In the accident of time it is con-
scious of a life "builded far from accident. "
The personality of God is the ground of his relation with the
personality of man. Without personality in God, he would, so
far as the knowledge of man goes, be lower than man; and with-
out personality in man, there would be no ground of relation to
God.
THE PERSONALITY OF GOD
From The Republic of God'
THE
HE personality of God is the postulate of the knowledge of
God. In this human life and these human relations, in the
knowledge of a person by a person, there are elements of
strength and love, elements of freedom which are deeper than
those which exist in the knowledge of the physical world. The
knowledge of the physical process is the result of observation
## p. 10421 (#249) ##########################################
ELISHA MULFORD
10421
and comparison; it is the fruit of research: but in human rela-
tions there are other elements. There is a knowledge which is
not the result of experiment, and yet may come through experi-
ence. Thus, for instance, one will not experiment on a friend,
and sympathy and love are not among the results of research.
There may be in the words, I know Him in whom I have believed,
a deeper knowledge than that which man obtains through the
external observation of phenomena.
THE TELEOLOGICAL ARGUMENT
From The Republic of God'
THE
HE conditions of this process are those of conflict, a struggle
for existence; it is "the rack of this tough world," and one
form passes beyond another form by survival. There are in
nature elements of subsistence for production and for destruction.
One race to subsist must prey with ravin upon another race.
There is the adaptation of the wing of the crow and of the tooth.
of the shark. There is a strange intermingling in the poison
that fills the chalice of the most beautiful flower, the malaria
that is borne upon the softest airs, the colors that gleam re-
splendently in the sinuous folds of the serpent. There is the
fair light that illumines the dawn and empurples the evening, but
throws its radiance over mists and exhalations. There are smooth
waters that bear the reflection of the clouds which hold the
tempest, and are changed with the clouds which burst over them
into the rage of cruel seas. The tides rise and fall with almost
changeless precision; but they are swept by the storm that marks
their lines with wreck. By the cleft and broken strata of the
rocks, one may still seem to hear "the sea rehearse its ancient
song of chaos. " There is in nature that which is beautiful, and
that which is fantastic and monstrous. These aspects of nature
become more apparent in tropical countries, where there is a
stronger movement of the impulse, the passion of nature, with
more impetuous energies. Thus in India there are more images
and shrines of supplication to Siva the destroyer, than to Brahma
the creator and Vishnu the preserver.
## p. 10422 (#250) ##########################################
10422
ELISHA MULFORD
THE SCRIPTURES
From The Republic of God'
HE Bible is a book written in literal forms, subject to the
ordinary rules of construction, as defined in the science of
grammar.
The Bible is a book written in languages, as the Hebraic, the
Chaldaic, the Greek, or Græco-Hebraic; subject to the ordinary
rules of derivation and distinction, as defined in the science of
comparative philology.
The Bible is a book written in manuscripts; which require
in their transcription and authentication the critical study which
belongs to the science which-in comparing, for instance, the
uncial with other styles-is the science which deals with scriptory
forms.
The Bible is a book which has been subject to the mutations
of literature. It is written in manuscripts of unequal value, no
one of which is entirely perfect in itself, so as to displace all
others, and none are free from obscure or various readings. It
has suffered simply the mutations of literature, and has had no
exemptions from them.
It embraces the most varied forms of literature; as genealo-
gies, laws, histories, records of legislative and judicial procedure,
methods of sanitary, civil, and military administration. There is
legend and myth. There are various forms of poetry: the ode,
as in the antiphone of Moses and Miriam; the drama, as in the
Book of Job; the idyl, as in the Song of Solomon; the lyric, as
in the Book of the Psalms, and the opening pages of the Gospel
of St. Luke; and in the writings of St. Paul, citations from the
Greek comedy, as from Menander.
These Scriptures embraced, in substance, all the literature that
the ancient Hebrew people possessed. Their productions in art
and music always remained rude and simple, and in architecture
they were the common adaptations of a primitive mode of life, or
often the reproduction of forms copied from Egypt, or imported
from Phoenicia.
There are traces in these writings of the races, countries,
and ages in which they appeared, and of climatic conditions with.
hand, all the best ships of the Spaniards were riddled through
and through; and with masts and yards shattered, sails and rig-
ging torn to shreds, and a northwest wind still drifting them
towards the fatal sandbanks of Holland, they labored heavily
in a chopping sea, firing wildly, and receiving tremendous pun-
ishment at the hands of Howard, Drake, Seymour, Winter, and
their followers. Not even master-gunner Thomas could complain
that day of "blind exercise " on the part of the English, with
"little harm done" to the enemy. There was scarcely a ship
in the Armada that did not suffer severely; for nearly all were
engaged in that memorable action off the sands of Gravelines.
The captain-general himself, Admiral Recalde, Alonzo de Leyva,
Oquendo, Diego Flores de Valdez, Bertendona, Don Francisco
de Toledo, Don Diego de Pimentel, Telles Enriquez, Alonzo de
Luzon, Garibay, with most of the great galleons and galeasses,
were in the thickest of the fight; and one after the other each of
these huge ships were disabled. Three sank before the fight was
over; many others were soon drifting helpless wrecks towards a
hostile shore; and before five o'clock in the afternoon, at least
sixteen of their best ships had been sacrificed, and from four to
five thousand soldiers killed.
Nearly all the largest vessels of the Armada, therefore, having
been disabled or damaged,- according to a Spanish eye-witness,-
## p. 10398 (#226) ##########################################
10398
JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY
and all their small shot exhausted, Medina Sidonia reluctantly
gave orders to retreat. The captain-general was a bad sailor;
but he was a chivalrous Spaniard of ancient Gothic blood, and
he felt deep mortification at the plight of his invincible fleet,
together with undisguised resentment against Alexander Farnese,
through whose treachery and incapacity he considered the great
Catholic cause to have been so foully sacrificed. Crippled, mal-
treated, and diminished in number as were his ships, he would
have still faced the enemy, but the winds and currents were fast
driving him on a lee-shore; and the pilots, one and all, assured
him that it would be inevitable destruction to remain. After
a slight and very ineffectual attempt to rescue Don Diego de
Pimentel in the St. Matthew-who refused to leave his disabled
ship- and Don Francisco de Toledo, whose great galleon the St.
Philip was fast driving, a helpless wreck, towards Zeeland, the
Armada bore away N. N. E. into the open sea, leaving those who
could not follow, to their fate.
But Howard decided to wrestle no further pull. Having
followed the Spaniards till Friday, 12th of August, as far as
the latitude of 56° 17', the Lord Admiral called a council. It was
then decided, in order to save English lives and ships, to put
into the Frith of Forth for water and provisions, leaving two
"pinnaces to dog the fleet until it should be past the Isles of
Scotland. " But the next day, as the wind shifted to the north-
west, another council decided to take advantage of the change,
and bear away for the North Foreland, in order to obtain a sup-
ply of powder, shot, and provisions.
Up to this period the weather, though occasionally threaten-
ing, had been moderate. During the week which succeeded the
eventful night off Calais, neither the Armada nor the English
ships had been much impeded in their manœuvres by storms or
heavy seas. But on the following Sunday, 14th of August, there
was a change. The wind shifted again to the southwest; and
during the whole of that day and the Monday, blew a tremen-
dous gale.
"Twas a more violent storm," said Howard, «< than
was ever seen before at this time of the year. " The retreat-
ing English fleet was scattered, many ships were in peril " among
the ill-favored sands off Norfolk," but within four or five days
all arrived safely in Margate roads.
Far different was the fate of the Spaniards. Over their In-
vincible Armada, last seen by the departing English midway
## p. 10399 (#227) ##########################################
JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY
10399
between the coasts of Scotland and Denmark, the blackness of
night seemed suddenly to descend. A mystery hung for a long
time over their fate. Damaged, leaking, without pilots, without a
competent commander, the great fleet entered that furious storm,
and was whirled along the iron crags of Norway, and between
the savage rocks of Faröe and the Hebrides. In those regions
of tempest the insulted North wreaked its full vengeance on the
insolent Spaniards. Disaster after disaster marked their perilous
track, gale after gale swept them hither and thither, tossing them
on sandbanks or shattering them against granite cliffs. The
coasts of Norway, Scotland, Ireland, were strewn with the wrecks
of that pompous fleet which claimed the dominion of the seas;
with the bones of those invincible legions which were to have
sacked London and made England a Spanish viceroyalty.
Through the remainder of the month of August there was
a succession of storms. On the 2d of September a fierce south-
wester drove Admiral Oquendo in his galleon, together with one
of the great galeasses, two large Venetian ships (the Ratta and
the Balauzara), and thirty-six other vessels, upon the Irish coast,
where nearly every soul on board perished; while the few who
escaped to the shore-notwithstanding their religious affinity
with the inhabitants—were either butchered in cold blood, or sent
coupled in halters from village to village, in order to be shipped
to England. A few ships were driven on the English coast;
others went ashore near Rochelle.
Of the four galeasses and four galleys, one of each returned
to Spain. Of the ninety-one great galleons and hulks, fifty-eight
were lost and thirty-three returned. Of the tenders and zabras,
seventeen were lost and eighteen returned. Of one hundred and
thirty-four vessels which sailed from Coruña in July, but fifty-
three, great and small, made their escape to Spain; and these
were so damaged as to be utterly worthless. The Invincible
Armada had not only been vanquished but annihilated.
Of the thirty thousand men who sailed in the fleet, it is prob-
able that not more than ten thousand ever saw their native land
again. Most of the leaders of the expedition lost their lives.
Medina Sidonia reached Santander in October, and as Philip for a
moment believed, "with the greater part of the Armada," although
the King soon discovered his mistake. Recalde, Diego Flores de
Valdez, Oquendo, Maldonado, Bobadilla, Manriquez, either per-
ished at sea, or died of exhaustion immediately after their return.
## p. 10400 (#228) ##########################################
10400
JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY
Pedro de Valdez, Vasco de Silva, Alonzo de Sayas, Pimentel,
Toledo, with many other nobles, were prisoners in England and
Holland. There was hardly a distinguished family in Spain not
placed in mourning; so that, to relieve the universal gloom, an
edict was published forbidding the wearing of mourning at all.
On the other hand, a merchant of Lisbon, not yet reconciled
to the Spanish conquest of his country, permitted himself some
tokens of hilarity at the defeat of the Armada, and was immedi-
ately hanged by express command of Philip. Thus-as men said
-one could neither cry nor laugh within the Spanish dominions.
This was the result of the invasion, so many years prepa
and at an expense almost incalculable. In the year 1588 alone,
the cost of Philip's armaments for the subjugation of England
could not have been less than six millions of ducats; and there
was at least as large a sum on board the Armada itself, although
the Pope refused to pay his promised million. And with all this
outlay, and with the sacrifice of so many thousand lives, nothing
had been accomplished; and Spain, in a moment, instead of seem-
ing terrible to all the world, had become ridiculous.
THE FATE OF JOHN OF BARNEVELD
From the Life and Death of John of Barneveld. Copyright 1874, by John
Lothrop Motley. Reprinted by permission of Harper & Brothers
B
ARNEVELD was about to enter the judges' chamber as usual,
but was informed that the sentence would be read in the
great hall of judicature. They descended accordingly to
the basement story, and passed down the narrow flight of steps
which then as now connected the more modern structure, where
the Advocate had been imprisoned and tried, with what remained
of the ancient palace of the Counts of Holland. In the centre of
the vast hall once the banqueting chamber of those petty sov
ereigns, with its high vaulted roof of cedar which had so often in
ancient days rung with the sounds of mirth and revelry — was a
great table at which the twenty-four judges and the three prose-
cuting officers were seated, in their black caps and gowns of
office. The room was lined with soldiers, and crowded with a dark
surging mass of spectators, who had been waiting there all night.
A chair was placed for the prisoner. He sat down, and the
clerk of the commission, Pots by name, proceeded at once to read
## p. 10401 (#229) ##########################################
JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY
10401
the sentence. A summary of this long, rambling, and tiresome
paper has been already laid before the reader. If ever a man
could have found it tedious to listen to his own death sentence,
the great statesman might have been in that condition as he
listened to Secretary Pots.
During the reading of the sentence the Advocate moved
uneasily on his seat, and seemed about to interrupt the clerk
at several passages which seemed to him especially preposterous.
But he controlled himself by a strong effort, and the clerk went
steadily on to the conclusion.
Then Barneveld said:
"The judges have put down many things which they have no
right to draw from my confession. Let this protest be added. "
"I thought too," he continued, "that my lords the States-
General would have had enough in my life and blood, and that
my wife and children might keep what belongs to them. Is this
my recompense for forty-three years' service to these provinces ? »
President de Voogd rose:
"Your sentence has been pronounced," he said. "Away!
away! " So saying, he pointed to the door into which one of
the great windows at the southeastern front of the hall had been
converted.
Without another word the old man rose from his chair. and
strode, leaning on his staff, across the hall, accompanied by his
faithful valet and the provost, and escorted by a file of soldiers.
The mob of spectators flowed out after him at every door into
the inner court-yard in front of the ancient palace.
IN THE beautiful village-capital of the "Count's Park," com-
monly called The Hague, the most striking and picturesque spot
then as now was that where the transformed remains of the old
moated castle of those feudal sovereigns were still to be seen. A
three-storied range of simple, substantial buildings, in brown
brickwork picked out with white stone, in a style since made
familiar both in England and America, and associated with a
somewhat later epoch in the history of the House of Orange,
surrounded three sides of a spacious inner paved quadrangle
called the Inner Court, the fourth or eastern side being over-
shadowed by a beechen grove. A square tower flanked each
angle; and on both sides of the southwestern turret extended the
commodious apartments of the Stadtholder. The great gateway
XVIII-651
## p. 10402 (#230) ##########################################
10402
JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY
on the southwest opened into a wide open space called the Outer
Court-yard. Along the northwest side a broad and beautiful sheet
of water, in which the walls, turrets, and chapel-spires of the
inclosed castle mirrored themselves, was spread between the mass
of buildings and an umbrageous promenade called the Vyverberg,
consisting of a sextuple alley of lime-trees, and embowering here
and there a stately villa. A small island, fringed with weeping
willows, and tufted all over with lilacs, laburnums, and other
shrubs then in full flower, lay in the centre of the miniature lake;
and the tall solid tower of the Great Church, surmounted by a
light openwork spire, looked down from a little distance over the
scene.
It was a bright morning in May. The white swans were
sailing tranquilly to and fro over the silver basin; and the mavis,
blackbird, and nightingale, which haunted the groves surround-
ing the castle and the town, were singing as if the daybreak
were ushering in a summer festival.
But it was not to a merry-making that the soldiers were
marching, and the citizens thronging so eagerly from every
street and alley towards the castle. By four o'clock the Outer
and Inner Courts had been lined with detachments of the
Prince's Guard, and companies of other regiments to the num-
ber of twelve hundred men. Occupying the northeastern side of
the court rose the grim, time-worn front of the ancient hall,
consisting of one tall pyramidal gable of ancient gray brickwork
flanked with two tall slender towers; the whole with the lancet-
shaped windows and severe style of the twelfth century, except-
ing a rose-window in the centre, with the decorated mullions of
a somewhat later period.
In front of the lower window, with its Gothic archway hastily
converted into a door, a shapeless platform of rough, unhewn
planks had that night been rudely patched together. This was
the scaffold. A slight railing around it served to protect it from
the crowd, and a heap of coarse sand had been thrown upon it.
A squalid, unclean box of unplaned boards, originally prepared as
a coffin for a Frenchman,- who some time before had been con-
demned to death for murdering the son of Goswyn Meurskens,
a Hague tavern-keeper, but pardoned by the Stadtholder, - lay
on the scaffold. It was recognized from having been left for
a long time, half forgotten, at the public execution place of The
Hague.
## p. 10403 (#231) ##########################################
JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY
10403
Upon this coffin now sat two common soldiers of ruffianly
aspect playing at dice, betting whether the Lord or the Devil
would get the soul of Barneveld. Many a foul and ribald jest
at the expense of the prisoner was exchanged between these
gamblers, some of their comrades, and a few townsmen who
were grouped about at that early hour. The horrible libels,
caricatures, and calumnies which had been circulated, exhibited,
and sung in all the streets for so many months, had at last
thoroughly poisoned the minds of the vulgar against the fallen
statesman.
The great mass of the spectators had forced their way by
daybreak into the hall itself to hear the sentence, so that the
Inner Court-yard had remained comparatively empty.
At last, at half-past nine o'clock, a shout arose, "There he
comes! there he comes! " and the populace flowed out from the
hall of judgment into the court-yard like a tidal wave.
In an instant the Binnenhof was filled with more than three
thousand spectators.
The old statesman, leaning on his staff, walked out upon the
scaffold and calmly surveyed the scene. Lifting his eyes to
heaven, he was heard to murmur, "O God! what does man
come to! " Then he said bitterly once more, «This, then, is the
reward of forty years' service to the State! "
La Motte, who attended him, said fervently: "It is no longer
time to think of this. Let us prepare your coming before God. "
"Is there no cushion or stool to kneel upon? " said Barneveld,
looking around him.
The provost said he would send for one; but the old man
knelt at once on the bare planks. His servant, who waited upon
him as calmly and composedly as if he had been serving him.
at dinner, held him by the arm. It was remarked that neither
master nor man, true stoics and Hollanders both, shed a single
tear upon the scaffold.
La Motte prayed for a quarter of an hour, the Advocate re-
maining on his knees.
He then rose and said to John Franken, "See that he does
not come near me," pointing to the executioner, who stood in
the background grasping his long double-handed sword. Barne-
veld then rapidly unbuttoned his doublet with his own hands,
and the valet helped him off with it. "Make haste! make
haste! " said his master.
## p. 10404 (#232) ##########################################
10404
JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY
The statesman then came forward, and said in a loud, firm
voice to the people:-
"Men, do not believe that I am a traitor to the country. I
have ever acted uprightly and loyally as a good patriot, and as
such I shall die. "
The crowd was perfectly silent.
He then took his cap from John Franken, drew it over his
eyes, and went forward towards the sand, saying:-
"Christ shall be my guide. O Lord, my Heavenly Father,
receive my spirit. "
As he was about to kneel with his face to the south, the
provost said:-
"My lord will be pleased to move to the other side, not
where the sun is in his face. "
He knelt accordingly with his face towards his own house.
The servant took farewell of him, and Barneveld said to the
executioner:
"Be quick about it. Be quick. "
The executioner then struck his head off at a single blow.
Many persons from the crowd now sprang, in spite of all
opposition, upon the scaffold, and dipped their handkerchiefs in
his blood, cut wet splinters from the boards, or grubbed up the
sand that was steeped in it; driving many bargains afterwards for
these relics to be treasured, with various feelings of sorrow, joy,
glutted or expiated vengeance.
It has been recorded, and has been constantly repeated to
this day, that the Stadtholder, whose windows exactly faced the
scaffold, looked out upon the execution with a spy-glass; saying
as he did so:-
"See the old scoundrel, how he trembles! He is afraid of the
stroke. "
But this is calumny. Colonel Hauterive declared that he was
with Maurice in his cabinet during the whole period of the exe-
cution; that by order of the prince all the windows and shutters
were kept closed; that no person wearing his livery was allowed
to be abroad; that he anxiously received messages as to the pro-
ceedings, and heard of the final catastrophe with sorrowful emo-
tion.
## p. 10405 (#233) ##########################################
10405
JOHN MUIR
(1836-)
OHN MUIR, an explorer and naturalist, whose field of work has
been particularly the western and northwestern mountain
regions of America, - where at least one great glacier now
bears his name,- - was born at Dunbar, Scotland, in 1836. With his
parents and a large flock of brothers and sisters, he came to the
United States in 1850, after some good common-schooling in Dunbar.
He began his study of nature in the region near Fort Winnebago,
Wisconsin, with an ever increasing interest and delight in whatever
belongs to the world of creatures, plants,
and stones, particularly in the waving soli-
tudes of forests and rock-and-snow tracts of
the northwestern Sierras.
Muir's freedom to devote himself to a
life of observation and record was delayed:
and in the story of his years of manual
work as a farmer, mechanic, lumberman,
sheep-herder, and what not besides, there
comes surprise at his power to find time
and energy for other pursuits in the nature
of an avocation; and with the surprise we
have a sense of pleasure that a man of
untiring muscles and mind could win free
of all that checked his natural preferences.
He studied grammar and mathematics while a farm hand, and read
through a library of books when in the fields. He earned enough as
a young man to give himself four years of special scientific study
in the University of Wisconsin. Then began an independent life,
in which he alternated seasons of hard work, wholly or much alone;
partly through the circumstances of his wanderings, partly by his
own choice. It is said that during ten years of mountaineering in the
remoter Sierras, he met no men except one band of Mono tribesmen.
JOHN MUIR
For some ten summers and winters prior to 1876, Mr. Muir was
settled near the Yosemite district. In the year named he became a
member of the Geodetic Survey of the Great Basin, and attempted
much botanical work. During 1879 and subsequently, after he reached
Alaska, he explored and charted its vast mountain ranges, discovered
## p. 10406 (#234) ##########################################
10406
JOHN MUIR
Glacier Bay and the Muir Glacier system; and with that expedition and
the two succeeding tours he became the foremost authority on Alas-
ka's geologic and other natural aspects. He also visited the Yukon
and Mackenzie Rivers, and traversed the cañon country of California.
He was of the party on board the Corwin in 1881, sent out to trace
the lost Jeannette, which enterprise added largely to his sketches.
and notes for scientific use. Since 1879, the year of his marriage,
Mr. Muir has had his home in California; but to find him in it at
other than a given time, is somewhat an accident, so indefatigable
is his industry as a naturalist. He is as ready to-day for an alpine
excursion of weeks or months as in the early period of a naturalistic
career exceptionally arduous and fruitful.
Mr. Muir has written much less than his explorations would
suggest: but as a contributor to the highest class of American and
foreign periodicals, and the author of volumes dealing with his expe-
riences, impressions, and discoveries, he is a writer of distinct and
unusual individuality. He is less a man of letters in his manner than
he is the direct, graphic, and sincere observer, whose aim is to write
down simply what he sees or feels, to ut the reader in the quickest
and closest touch with a topic or a scene. But the simplicity and
personal effect of his style give it a peculiar vigor and eloquence.
He has been spoken of as a naturalist whose observations "have the
force of mathematical demonstration. " In the study of glacial con-
ditions, botanic life, the fauna of the Northwest, and kindred subjects,
he is reckoned a specialist by the first scientists of the day; and his
personal traits have won him the esteem of the army of scientists
who have visited the Western country where he lives and works.
His most popular volume, 'The Mountains of California,' promises
to become a classic; his editorial contributions in Picturesque Cali-
fornia are thoroughly effective; and he has won wide favor through
descriptive pages, splendid for spontaneous and vivid prose pictures
of great scenery,— studies of the wind's movement of a pine forest,
or a delicate flower of California, or a wild-bird's lonely nest.
A WIND-STORM IN THE FORESTS
From The Mountains of California. Copyright 1894, by The Century
Company
THE
HE mountain winds, like the dew and rain, sunshine and snow,
are measured and bestowed with love on the forests, to
develop their strength and beauty. However restricted the
scope of other forest influences, that of the winds is universal.
The snow bends and trims the upper forests every winter, the
## p. 10407 (#235) ##########################################
JOHN MUIR
10407
lightning strikes a single tree here and there, while avalanches
mow down thousands at a swoop as a gardener trims out a bed
of flowers. But the winds go to every tree, fingering every leaf
and branch and furrowed bole; not one is forgotten: the Mount-
ain Pine towering with outstretched arms on the rugged but-
tresses of the icy peaks, the lowliest and most retiring tenant of
the dells, they seek and find them all, caressing them tenderly,
bending them in lusty exercise, stimulating their growth, pluck-
ing off a leaf or limb as required, or removing an entire tree or
grove, now whispering and cooing through the branches like a
sleepy child, now roaring like the ocean; the winds blessing the
forests, the forests the winds, with ineffable beauty and harmony
as the sure result.
-
After one has seen pines six feet in diameter bending like
grasses before a mountain gale, and ever and anon some giant
falling with a crash that shakes the hills, it seems astonishing
that any, save the lowest thick-set trees, could ever have found
a period sufficiently stormless to establish themselves; or once
established, that they should not sooner or later have been blown
down. But when the storm is over, and we behold the same
forests tranquil again, towering fresh and unscathed in erect
majesty, and consider what centuries of storms have fallen upon
them since they were first planted: hail, to break the tender
seedlings; lightning, to scorch and shatter; snow, winds, and
avalanches, to crush and overwhelm,- while the manifest result
of all this wild storm-culture is the glorious perfection we behold:
then faith in Nature's forestry is established, and we cease to
deplore the violence of her most destructive gales, or of any
other storm implement whatsoever.
There are two trees in the Sierra forests that are never blown
down, so long as they continue in sound health. These are the
Juniper and the Dwarf Pine of the summit peaks. Their stiff,
crooked roots grip the storm-beaten ledges like eagles' claws;
while their lithe, cord-like branches bend round compliantly,
offering but slight holds for winds, however violent. The other
alpine conifers- the Needle Pine, Mountain Pine, Two-leaved
Pine, and Hemlock Spruce-are never thinned out by this
agent to any destructive extent, on account of their admirable
toughness and the closeness of their growth. In general the
same is true of the giants of the lower zones. The kingly Sugar
Pine, towering aloft to a height of more than two hundred feet,
## p. 10408 (#236) ##########################################
10408
JOHN MUIR
offers a fine mark to storm-winds; but it is not densely foliaged,
and its long horizontal arms swing round compliantly in the
blast, like tresses of green, fluent algæ in a brook: while the Sil-
ver Firs in most places keep their ranks well together in united
strength.
The Yellow or Silver Pine is more frequently overturned
than any other tree on the Sierra, because its leaves and branches
form a larger mass in proportion to its height; while in many
places it is planted sparsely, leaving open lanes through which
storms may enter with full force. Furthermore, because it is
distributed along the lower portion of the range, which was the
first to be left bare on the breaking up of the ice-sheet at the
close of the glacial winter, the soil it is growing upon has been
longer exposed to post-glacial weathering, and consequently is in
a more crumbling, decayed condition than the fresher soils far-
ther up the range,
and therefore offers a less secure anchorage
for the roots. While exploring the forest zones of Mount Shasta,
I discovered the path of a hurricane strewn with thousands of
pines of this species. Great and small had been uprooted or
wrenched off by sheer force, making a clean gap, like that made
by a snow avalanche. But hurricanes capable of doing this class
of work are rare in the Sierra; and when we have explored the
forests from one extremity of the range to the other, we are
compelled to believe that they are the most beautiful on the
face of the earth, however we may regard the agents that have
made them so.
There is always something deeply exciting, not only in the
sounds of winds in the woods, which exert more or less influence
over every mind, but in their varied water-like flow as manifested
by the movements of the trees, especially those of the conifers.
By no other trees are they rendered so extensively and impress-
ively visible; not even by the lordly tropic palms or tree-ferns
responsive to the gentlest breeze. The waving of a forest of
the giant Sequoias is indescribably impressive and sublime; but
the pines seem to me the best interpreters of winds. They are
mighty waving golden-rods, ever in tune, singing and writing
wind-music all their long century lives. Little, however, of this
noble tree-waving and tree-music will you see or hear in the
strictly alpine portion of the forests. The burly Juniper, whose
girth sometimes more than equals its height, is about as rigid as
the rocks on which it grows. The slender lash-like sprays of the
## p. 10409 (#237) ##########################################
JOHN MUIR
10409
Dwarf Pine stream out in wavering ripples, but the tallest and
slenderest are far too unyielding to wave even in the heaviest
gales. They only shake in quick, short vibrations. The Hemlock
Spruce, however, and the Mountain Pine, and some of the tallest
thickets of the Two-leaved species, bow in storms with consid-
erable scope and gracefulness. But it is only in the lower and
middle zones that the meeting of winds and woods is to be seen
in all its grandeur.
One of the most beautiful and exhilarating storms I ever
enjoyed in the Sierra occurred in December 1874, when I hap-
pened to be exploring one of the tributary valleys of the Yuba
River. The sky and the ground and the trees had been thor-
oughly rain-washed and were dry again. The day was intensely
pure: one of those incomparable bits of California winter, warm
and balmy and full of white sparkling sunshine, redolent of all
the purest influences of the spring, and at the same time enliv-
ened with one of the most bracing wind-storms conceivable.
Instead of camping out, as I usually do, I then chanced to be
stopping at the house of a friend. But when the storm began
to sound, I lost no time in pushing out into the woods to enjoy
it.
For on such occasions Nature has always something rare to
show us, and the danger to life and limb is hardly greater than
one would experience crouching deprecatingly beneath a roof.
It was still early morning when I found myself fairly adrift.
Delicious sunshine came pouring over the hills, lighting the tops
of the pines, and setting free a steam of summery fragrance
that contrasted strangely with the wild tones of the storm. The
air was mottled with pine-tassels and bright green plumes, that
went flashing past in the sunlight like birds pursued. But there
was not the slightest dustiness; nothing less pure than leaves, and
ripe pollen, and flecks of withered bracken and moss. I heard
trees falling for hours at the rate of one every two or three
minutes: some uprooted, partly on account of the loose, water-
soaked condition of the ground; others broken straight across,
where some weakness caused by fire had determined the spot.
The gestures of the various trees made a delightful study.
Young Sugar Pines, light and feathery as squirrel-tails, were
bowing almost to the ground; while the grand old patriarchs,
whose massive boles had been tried in a hundred storms, waved
solemnly above them, their long, arching branches streaming
fluently on the gale, and every needle thrilling and ringing and
## p. 10410 (#238) ##########################################
10410
JOHN MUIR
shedding off keen lances of light like a diamond. The Douglas
Spruces, with long sprays drawn out in level tresses, and needles
massed in a gray, shimmering glow, presented a most striking
appearance as they stood in bold relief along the hilltops. The
madroños in the dells, with their red bark and large glossy leaves
tilted every way, reflected the sunshine in throbbing spangles
like those one so often sees on the rippled surface of a glacier
lake. But the Silver Pines were now the most impressively
beautiful of all. Colossal spires two hundred feet in height waved
like supple golden-rods chanting and bowing low as if in worship;
while the whole mass of their long, tremulous foliage was kindled
into one continuous blaze of white sun-fire. The force of the
gale was such that the most steadfast monarch of them all rocked
down to its roots, with a motion plainly perceptible when one
leaned against it. Nature was holding high festival, and every
fibre of the most rigid giants thrilled with glad excitement.
I drifted on through the midst of this passionate music and
motion, across many a glen, from ridge to ridge; often halting in
the lee of a rock for shelter, or to gaze and listen. Even when
the grand anthem had swelled to its highest pitch, I could dis-
tinctly hear the varying tones of individual trees,-Spruce, and
Fir, and Pine, and leafless Oak,- and even the infinitely gentle
rustle of the withered grasses at my feet.
Each was express-
ing itself in its own way,-singing its own song, and making its
own peculiar gestures,-manifesting a richness of variety to be
found in no other forest I have yet seen. The coniferous woods
of Canada and the Carolinas and Florida are made up of trees
that resemble one another about as nearly as blades of grass,
and grow close together in much the same way. Coniferous
trees, in general, seldom possess individual character, such as is
manifest among Oaks and Elms. But the California forests are
made up of a greater number of distinct species than any other
in the world. And in them we find, not only a marked differ-
entiation into special groups, but also a marked individuality in
almost every tree, giving rise to storm effects indescribably glo-
rious.
Toward midday, after a long, tingling scramble through copses
of hazel and ceanothus, I gained the summit of the highest ridge
in the neighborhood; and then it occurred to me that it would
be a fine thing to climb one of the trees, to obtain a wider out-
look and get my ear close to the Eolian music of its topmost
## p. 10411 (#239) ##########################################
JOHN MUIR
10411
needles. But under the circumstances the choice of a tree was
a serious matter. One whose instep was not very strong seemed
in danger of being blown down, or of being struck by others in
case they should fall; another was branchless to a considerable
height above the ground, and at the same time too large to be
grasped with arms and legs in climbing; while others were not
favorably situated for clear views. After cautiously casting about,
I made choice of the tallest of a group of Douglas Spruces that
were growing close together like a tuft of grass, no one of which
seemed likely to fall unless all the rest fell with it. Though
comparatively young, they were about a hundred feet high, and
their lithe, brushy tops were rocking and swirling in wild ecstasy.
Being accustomed to climb trees in making botanical studies,
I experienced no difficulty in reaching the top of this one; and
never before did I enjoy so noble an exhilaration of motion.
The slender tops fairly flapped and swished in the passionate
torrent, bending and swirling backward and forward, round and
round, tracing indescribable combinations of vertical and hori-
zontal curves, while I clung with muscles firm braced, like a
bobolink on a reed.
In its widest sweeps my tree-top described an arc of from
twenty to thirty degrees; but I felt sure of its elastic temper,
having seen others of the same species still more severely tried
bent almost to the ground indeed, in heavy snows-without
breaking a fibre. I was therefore safe, and free to take the wind
into my pulses and enjoy the excited forest from my superb out-
look. The view from here must be extremely beautiful in any
weather. Now my eye roved over the piny hills and dales as
over fields of waving grain, and felt the light running in ripples
and broad swelling undulations across the valleys from ridge to
ridge, as the shining foliage was stirred by corresponding waves.
of air. Oftentimes these waves of reflected light would break
up suddenly into a kind of beaten foam, and again, after chasing
one another in regular order, they would seem to bend forward
in concentric curves, and disappear on some hillside, like sea
waves on a shelving shore. The quantity of light reflected from
the bent needles was so great as to make whole groves appear
as if covered with snow, while the black shadows beneath the
trees greatly enhanced the effect of the silvery splendor.
Excepting only the shadows, there was nothing sombre in
all this wild sea of pines. On the contrary, notwithstanding this
## p. 10412 (#240) ##########################################
10412
JOHN MUIR
was the winter season, the colors were remarkably beautiful.
The shafts of the pine and libocedrus were brown and purple,
and most of the foliage was well tinged with yellow; the laurel
groves, with the pale under sides of their leaves turned upward,
made masses of gray; and then there was many a dash of choc-
olate color from clumps of manzanita, and jet of vivid crimson
from the bark of the madroños; while the ground on the hillsides,
appearing here and there through openings between the groves,
displayed masses of pale purple and brown.
The sounds of the storm corresponded gloriously with this
wild exuberance of light and motion. The profound bass of the
naked branches and boles booming like waterfalls; the quick,
tense vibrations of the pine-needles, now rising to a shrill, whis-
tling hiss, now falling to a silky murmur; the rustling of laurel
groves in the dells, and the keen metallic click of leaf on leaf,—
all this was heard in easy analysis when the attention was calmly
bent.
The varied gestures of the multitude were seen to fine ad-
vantage, so that one could recognize the different species at a
distance of several miles by this means alone, as well as by their
forms and colors and the way they reflected the light. All
seemed strong and comfortable, as if really enjoying the storm,
while responding to its most enthusiastic greetings. We hear
much nowadays concerning the universal struggle for existence,
but no struggle in the common meaning of the word was mani-
fest here; no recognition of danger by any tree; no deprecation:
but rather an invincible gladness, as remote from exultation as
from fear.
I kept my lofty perch for hours, frequently closing my eyes
to enjoy the music by itself, or to feast quietly on the delicious
fragrance that was streaming past. The fragrance of the woods
was less marked than that produced during warm rain, when so
many balsamic buds and leaves are steeped like tea; but from
the chafing of resiny branches against each other, and the inces-
sant attrition of myriads of needles, the gale was spiced to a very
tonic degree. And besides the fragrance from these local sources,
there were traces of scents brought from afar. For this wind
came first from the sea, rubbing against its fresh, briny waves,
then distilled through the redwoods, threading rich ferny gulches,
and spreading itself in broad undulating currents over many a
flower-enameled ridge of the coast mountains, then across the
## p. 10413 (#241) ##########################################
JOHN MUIR
10413
golden plains, up the purple foot-hills, and into these piny woods
with the varied incense gathered by the way.
Winds are advertisements of all they touch, however much or
little we may be able to read them; telling their wanderings
even by their scents alone. Mariners detect the flowery perfume
of land-winds far at sea, and sea-winds carry the fragrance of
dulse and tangle far inland, where it is quickly recognized, though
mingled with the scents of a thousand land-flowers. As an illus-
tration of this, I may tell here that I breathed sea-air on the
Firth of Forth, in Scotland, while a boy; then was taken to Wis-
consin, where I remained nineteen years: then, without in all this
time having breathed one breath of the sea, I walked quietly,
alone, from the middle of the Mississippi Valley to the Gulf of
Mexico, on a botanical excursion; and while in Florida, far from
the coast, my attention wholly bent on the splendid tropical vege-
tation about me, I suddenly recognized a sea-breeze, as it came
sifting through the palmettos and blooming vine-tangles, which
at once awakened and set free a thousand dormant associations,
and made me a boy again in Scotland, as if all the intervening
years had been annihilated.
Most people like to look at mountain rivers, and bear them
in mind; but few care to look at the winds, though far more
beautiful and sublime, and though they become at times about as
visible as flowing water. When the north winds in winter are
making upward sweeps over the curving summits of the High
Sierra, the fact is sometimes published with flying snow-banners
a mile long. Those portions of the winds thus embodied can
scarce be wholly invisible, even to the darkest imagination. And
when we look around over an agitated forest, we may see some-
thing of the wind that stirs it, by its effects upon the trees.
Yonder it descends in a rush of water-like ripples, and sweeps
over the bending pines from hill to hill. Nearer, we see detached
plumes and leaves, now speeding by on level currents, now whirl-
ing in eddies, or escaping over the edges of the whirls, soaring
aloft on grand, upswelling domes of air, or tossing on flame-like
crests. Smooth, deep currents, cascades, falls, and swirling eddies,
sing around every tree and leaf, and over all the varied topog-
raphy of the region with telling changes of form, like mountain
rivers conforming to the features of their channels.
After tracing the Sierra streams from their fountains to the
plains, marking where they bloom white in falls, glide in crystal
## p. 10414 (#242) ##########################################
10414
JOHN MUIR
plumes, surge gray and foam-filled in bowlder-choked gorges,
and slip through the woods in long, tranquil reaches -after thus
learning their language and forms in detail, we may at length
hear them chanting all together in one grand anthem, and com-
prehend them all in clear inner vision, covering the range like
lace. But even this spectacle is far less sublime and not a whit
more substantial than what we may behold of these storm-streams
of air in the mountain woods.
We all travel the Milky Way together, trees and men; but
it never occurred to me until this storm day, while swinging in
the wind, that trees are travelers, in the ordinary sense. They
make many journeys; not extensive ones, it is true; but our own
little journeys, away and back again, are only little more than
tree-wavings- many of them not so much.
When the storm began to abate, I dismounted and sauntered
down through the calming woods. The storm-tones died away,
and turning toward the east, I beheld the countless hosts of the
forests hushed and tranquil, towering above one another on the
slopes of the hills like a devout audience. The setting sun filled
them with amber light, and seemed to say, while they listened,
"My peace I give unto you. ”
As I gazed on the impressive scene, all the so-called ruin of
the storm was forgotten; and never before did these noble woods
appear so fresh, so joyous, so immortal.
## p. 10415 (#243) ##########################################
10415
ELISHA MULFORD
(1833-1885)
W
HEN the Civil War drew to its close, there was a general idea
that the stress of emotional feeling through which we had
passed, the quickening of the national consciousness by the
season of national peril, and the remembrance of countless instances
of heroism and adventure, would result in the production of a dis-
tinct type of national literature, from which the note of either pro-
vincialism or cosmopolitanism should be absent.
This anticipation has been realized, but within different limits and
in different forms from those expected by the generation which took
part in the struggle. There is a body of war literature, in which
General Grant's 'Memoirs' perhaps ranks highest; but it is seen that
this literature is still but material from which, as from "old chron-
icles of wasted time," future generations must draw the inspiration
for higher forms, perhaps of song or sustained poem, perhaps of
drama or historical novel. The war, however, did inspire contem-
porary writings. In no case is this more evident than in Mulford's
'Nation,' which glows with a lofty and impassioned idea of patriot-
ism. In the preface the writer says that he has "sought, however
imperfectly, to give expression to the thought of the people in the
late war, and that conception of the nation which they who were so
worthy, held worth living and dying for. "
Elisha Mulford was born in Montrose, Pennsylvania, in 1833, from
the stock of those Puritans who settled the eastern end of Long
Island. He was graduated at Yale in 1855; and after a year in
Germany was admitted, in 1862, to the priesthood of the Episcopal
Church. A slight infirmity of deafness interfered with his usefulness
as a parish priest; and after a settlement in South Orange, New
Jersey, he spent his life in literary and philosophical study, first at
Friendsville, Pennsylvania, and afterwards at Cambridge, Massa-
chusetts. In 1862 he married Rachel Carmalt, daughter of Caleb
Carmalt, a prominent member of the Society of Friends of Northern
Pennsylvania. His book The Nation' secured him a recognized
place among the profound and original minds of his generation, and
was published in 1871; and his other book, The Republic of God,
an Institute in Theology,' in 1881. This last holds something of the
position in the Episcopal Church that Dr. Bushnell's writings do in
## p. 10416 (#244) ##########################################
10416
ELISHA MULFORD
the Congregational Church, and is characterized by the lofty spiritu-
ality which belonged to the great ages of the Church.
In both of his books, Mulford's philosophical standpoint is that
of Hegel, especially in regarding every human institution as the
embodiment of an idea which virtually constitutes its soul or proper
life. The nation and the church he talks about are our ideal, and
the outward form is the government; the church organizations are
of little consequence except as the visible body of the metaphysical
entity behind them. This tone of thought is not in favor at present:
his writings are highly valued but by a chosen few; and his philoso-
phy seems mystical or impractical to many. Mulford's literary style
is marred by the saturation of his mind with the mannerisms of the
German metaphysicians. Nevertheless, there is a weight and dignity
in it which is found only in the pages of the writers of the greatest
periods, and there are many passages which in rhythm and power
are hardly to be matched in American prose.
Mr. Mulford was of singularly attractive and unselfish character.
His gifts as a conversationalist and occasional speaker were of a high
order, for he never failed to idealize the subject in hand in a pecul-
iarly felicitous manner. Many of his sermons were of singular beauty
and elevation, but only the memory of them remains. At the time
of his death in 1885 he had projected several important works. His
grave is in the cemetery at Concord, not far from the graves of
Emerson and Hawthorne.
As a political thinker, Mr. Mulford won recognition from those
to whom the thought-element, the moral in the highest sense, is re-
garded as the basis of the nature of the State. President Garfield,
Charles Sumner, Wayne MacVeagh, President Angell, Professor Di-
man, F. D. Maurice, and Dean Stanley, among others, testified warmly
to their appreciation of the force and elevation of The Nation. '
The austere dignity which characterizes the 'Republic of God' has
strengthened the faith and comforted the hearts of many who
have come to feel that theology was a "baseless fabric," or at best
a metaphysical system resting on traditionary assumptions. It can
hardly be doubted that when the present tendency to exalt the con-
crete both in philosophy and worship shall have spent its force, the
'Republic of God' will be turned to by sincere Christians as one of
the great modern "Institutes in Theology. "
## p. 10417 (#245) ##########################################
ELISHA MULFORD
10417
[The following selections are taken from The Nation, copyright 1870
by E. Mulford, and from The Republic of God,' copyright 1881 by Elisha
Mulford; and are reprinted by permission of Mrs. Mulford, and of Houghton,
Mifflin & Co. , the publishers. ]
THE NATION IS A CONTINUITY
From The Nation'
IT
T NO more exists complete in a single period of time than does
the race; it is not a momentary existence, as if defined in
some circumstance. It is not composed of its present occu-
pants alone, but it embraces those who are, and have been,
and shall be. There is in it the continuity of the generations; it
reaches backward to the fathers and onward to the children, and
its relation is manifest in its reverence for the one and its hope
for the other.
The evidence of this continuity is in the consciousness of a
people. It appears in the apprehension of the nation as an in-
heritance received from the fathers, to be transmitted unimpaired
to the children. This conviction, that has held the nation as a
heritage worth living and worth dying for, has inspired the devo-
tion and sacrifice of a people.
The evidence of this continuity is also in the fact that the
spirit of a people always contemplates it. The nation has never
existed which placed a definite termination to its existence—a
period when its order was to expire and the obligation to its law
to cease. It cannot anticipate a time when it shall be resolved
into its elements, but contends with the intensity of life against
every force which threatens dissolution. Those who have repre-
sented the State as a compact, have yet held it to be a perpetual
one, in which the children are bound by the acts of their fathers.
This continuity is the condition of the existence of the nation
in history. The nation persists through a form of outward cir-
cumstance. Judea was the same under the judges and under the
kings; Rome was the same under the kings and under the con-
suls. The elements of the being of the nation subsist in this
continuity. In it, also, the products of human effort are con-
served, and the law of human production conforms to it. The
best attainments pass slowly from their germ to their perfectness,
as in the growth of the language and the law, the arts and the
literature of a people. Chaucer and Spenser, through intervals of
XVIII-652
## p. 10418 (#246) ##########################################
10418
ELISHA MULFORD
slow advance, precede Shakespeare, as Giotto and Perugino lead
the way to Michael Angelo and Raphael.
The nation is a continuity, as also in itself the product of
succeeding generations. It transcends the achievement of a sin-
gle individual or a separate age. The life of the individual is
not its measure. In its fruition there is the work of the gen-
erations; and even in the moments of its existence, the expres-
sion of their spirit, the blending of the strength of youth, the
resolve of manhood, and the experience of age-the hope and
the inspiration of the one, the wisdom and repose of the other.
There is the spirit which is always young, and yet always full of
years; and even in its physical course the correspondence to an
always renewed life.
-
This continuity has found expression in the highest political
thought. Shakespeare has it in his historical plays: the continu-
ity of the nation is represented as existing through the years
with the vicissitudes of the people, in the changes of scene,
with the coming and going of men; and there is, as in the
nation, the unity of the drama in which so many actors move,
and whose events revolve from age to age; and thus these plays
hold an attraction apart from the separate scenes and figures
which present some isolated ideal for the poet to shape. Burke
has represented this continuity in the nation as moving through
generations, in a life which no speculative schemes and no legal
formulas may compass: "The nation is indeed a partnership, but
a partnership not only between those who are living, but between
those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to
be born. "
THE NATION THE REALIZATION OF FREEDOM
From The Nation'
HERE is always a tendency in those withdrawn from the bat-
tle, and its "confused noise and garments rolled in blood,"
to bear its issues into some ideal and abstract sphere.
Thus the war is represented as the immediate conflict of the
antagonistic ideas, freedom and slavery. The reality is other
than this: the hosts are mustered in no intellectual arena, and
the forces called into its field are other than spectral ideas.
This tendency to resolve history into the conflict and progress of
## p. 10419 (#247) ##########################################
ELISHA MULFORD
10419
abstract ideas, or the development of what is called an intellect-
ual conception, can apprehend nothing of the real passion of
history. It knows not what, with so deep significance, is called
the burden of history. It enters not into the travail of time, it
discerns not the presence of a living Person in the judgments
which are the crises of the world. It comprehends only some
intellectual conflict in the issue of necessary laws, but not the
strife of a living humanity. The process of a legal formula, the
evolution of a logical sequence, the supremacy of abstract ideas,-
this has nothing to compensate for the agony and the suffering
and the sacrifice of the actual battle, and it discerns not the real
glory of the deliverance of humanity, the real triumph borne
through but over death. There was in the war, in the issue
which came upon us, "even upon us," and in the sacrifice of
those who were called, the battle of the nation for its very
being; and it was the nation which met slavery in mortal strife.
The inevitable conflict was of slavery with the life of the nation.
There is no vague rhetoric, but a deep truth, in the words
"Liberty and union, now and forever, one and inseparable. " They
are worthy to live upon the lips of the people, for there can be
no union without freedom, since slavery has its necessary result
in the dissolution of the being of the nation; and there can be
no freedom without union, for it is only in the being of the
nation that freedom becomes real.
THE PEOPLE AND THE LAND
From The Nation'
BU
UT in the existence of the nation, which is the substance of
civilization, there is a power higher than the necessary
process of the physical world. It exists in the order of the
moral world. This cannot be determined by physical elements.
The history of the world cannot be deduced from its geography.
In the political course of the nation the land is a necessary ele-
ment, but it is not the creative nor the controlling element. The
future of the nation will not be concluded by its relative near-
ness to the equator. The nation exists historically in the reali-
zation of the freedom of man, and his consequent dominion over
Mr. Buckle, when he stood in Judea, avowed that his
nature.
## p. 10420 (#248) ##########################################
10420
ELISHA MULFORD
only interest was in the agriculture of the country: but the soil
is the same upon which a people lived who stood in the continu-
ity of a nation, which long captivity in strange lands and under
strange skies did not destroy, whose unity was lost in the grand-
eur of no imperialism, and whose lines of kings and prophets
looked to the coming of One in whom was the hope of humanity;
but the physical process of nature does not renew that life. The
mountains of Attica are the same upon which the Parthenon was
built, and their quarries the same which furnished marble for
the sculpture of Athene, and the windy plains are the same upon
which an army was mustered at Marathon, and the sea is the
same whose waves were parted by their ships at Salamis; but
the conflict which in its moral interest made these names immor-
tal, has closed.
THE PERSONALITY OF MAN
From The Republic of God'
THE
HE personality of man is not to be represented as a reflection
of the personality of God. It is no remote imitation and no
faint impression of the personality of God. It is real. It
has the strength of the free spirit. It moves among the fleeting
forms and fading images of the finite, where shadow pursues
shadow, but it is not of them. In the accident of time it is con-
scious of a life "builded far from accident. "
The personality of God is the ground of his relation with the
personality of man. Without personality in God, he would, so
far as the knowledge of man goes, be lower than man; and with-
out personality in man, there would be no ground of relation to
God.
THE PERSONALITY OF GOD
From The Republic of God'
THE
HE personality of God is the postulate of the knowledge of
God. In this human life and these human relations, in the
knowledge of a person by a person, there are elements of
strength and love, elements of freedom which are deeper than
those which exist in the knowledge of the physical world. The
knowledge of the physical process is the result of observation
## p. 10421 (#249) ##########################################
ELISHA MULFORD
10421
and comparison; it is the fruit of research: but in human rela-
tions there are other elements. There is a knowledge which is
not the result of experiment, and yet may come through experi-
ence. Thus, for instance, one will not experiment on a friend,
and sympathy and love are not among the results of research.
There may be in the words, I know Him in whom I have believed,
a deeper knowledge than that which man obtains through the
external observation of phenomena.
THE TELEOLOGICAL ARGUMENT
From The Republic of God'
THE
HE conditions of this process are those of conflict, a struggle
for existence; it is "the rack of this tough world," and one
form passes beyond another form by survival. There are in
nature elements of subsistence for production and for destruction.
One race to subsist must prey with ravin upon another race.
There is the adaptation of the wing of the crow and of the tooth.
of the shark. There is a strange intermingling in the poison
that fills the chalice of the most beautiful flower, the malaria
that is borne upon the softest airs, the colors that gleam re-
splendently in the sinuous folds of the serpent. There is the
fair light that illumines the dawn and empurples the evening, but
throws its radiance over mists and exhalations. There are smooth
waters that bear the reflection of the clouds which hold the
tempest, and are changed with the clouds which burst over them
into the rage of cruel seas. The tides rise and fall with almost
changeless precision; but they are swept by the storm that marks
their lines with wreck. By the cleft and broken strata of the
rocks, one may still seem to hear "the sea rehearse its ancient
song of chaos. " There is in nature that which is beautiful, and
that which is fantastic and monstrous. These aspects of nature
become more apparent in tropical countries, where there is a
stronger movement of the impulse, the passion of nature, with
more impetuous energies. Thus in India there are more images
and shrines of supplication to Siva the destroyer, than to Brahma
the creator and Vishnu the preserver.
## p. 10422 (#250) ##########################################
10422
ELISHA MULFORD
THE SCRIPTURES
From The Republic of God'
HE Bible is a book written in literal forms, subject to the
ordinary rules of construction, as defined in the science of
grammar.
The Bible is a book written in languages, as the Hebraic, the
Chaldaic, the Greek, or Græco-Hebraic; subject to the ordinary
rules of derivation and distinction, as defined in the science of
comparative philology.
The Bible is a book written in manuscripts; which require
in their transcription and authentication the critical study which
belongs to the science which-in comparing, for instance, the
uncial with other styles-is the science which deals with scriptory
forms.
The Bible is a book which has been subject to the mutations
of literature. It is written in manuscripts of unequal value, no
one of which is entirely perfect in itself, so as to displace all
others, and none are free from obscure or various readings. It
has suffered simply the mutations of literature, and has had no
exemptions from them.
It embraces the most varied forms of literature; as genealo-
gies, laws, histories, records of legislative and judicial procedure,
methods of sanitary, civil, and military administration. There is
legend and myth. There are various forms of poetry: the ode,
as in the antiphone of Moses and Miriam; the drama, as in the
Book of Job; the idyl, as in the Song of Solomon; the lyric, as
in the Book of the Psalms, and the opening pages of the Gospel
of St. Luke; and in the writings of St. Paul, citations from the
Greek comedy, as from Menander.
These Scriptures embraced, in substance, all the literature that
the ancient Hebrew people possessed. Their productions in art
and music always remained rude and simple, and in architecture
they were the common adaptations of a primitive mode of life, or
often the reproduction of forms copied from Egypt, or imported
from Phoenicia.
There are traces in these writings of the races, countries,
and ages in which they appeared, and of climatic conditions with.
