To Thomas Archer Hirst   Augst 19th 1850

Aug^st 19^th 1850

Dear Tom,

Thrice you have mentioned that paraphrase: I made that promise rashly unwarily¹ for the paraphrase of such a thing demands time and thought and a mood of mind favourable to abstraction. That I have understood sufficient of it to make it delightful to myself is quite a different thing from an endeavour to excite the same delight in another by an analysis of the poem!² Besides, I read many things which I don’t understand and which nevertheless benefit me, give me a certain airiness and courage which is profitable even in common affairs. But I will take a ramble over the poem as you seem to like that I should, but dont measure it by me, study it for yourself if you want to get any thing out of it.

The Sphynx I take to be nature, nature external and internal, the universe that envelops us. Space and time, the stars, the earth, animals trees and flowers, the sciences even, and Man placed in the centre of all, all dumbly questioning him. Whence are we? What mean we? What is your business there? This latter appears to be the main question.

‘The fate of the man-child

The meaning of man’³

The poet discovers here a discordance in the harmonies of nature. Page 2 and the 1^st verse of page 3 are one side of an antithesis; the second verse of page 3 is the opposite side. There is a contentedness in the sprouting palm, in the browsing elephant, in the singing thrush, in the leaves that cover him in the waves, in the breezes, in the sea the earth, sound, silence.⁴ All these are so to speak so many natural acts and own the charm which belongs to such. they are because they are. Their appearance is the announcement of their right to appear. They all have their roots in nature, are the mere spontaneous expression as it were of her will. Now I find it exceedingly difficult to make myself clearly understood here, for I can sometimes fancy a certain close alliance between as it were the soul of nature and such objects as those mentioned but I cannot hope to make myself understood if the same apprehension be not shared by him whom I address. I believe this powerlessness on my part to be partly a defect, or rather a want of clearer and more certain insight, and partly a deficiency of material to illustrate what little insight I have.

The leading idea of Emersons mind and indeed of almost all [philosophic of minds] an idea which is embodied in the religion of the Brahmans thrusts itself forward here – the unity of the universe.

By one music enchanted

one Deity stirred⁵

each of the parts that he recounts fitting in with architectural symmetry and beauty, living stones in this great edifice of God.

But man is a block out of square, he does not fit into the edifice – he is an alien from his fathers house.

He crouches and blushes

Absconds and conceals

He creepeth and peepeth

he palters and steals⁶

The right apprehension of this verse will enable us to understand the foregoing. For Emerson cannot thus condemn without reference to a standard from which man has swerved; this standard he endeavours to illustrate in the foregoing verses – ‘The babe by its mother’⁷ is perhaps the most intelligible of these illustrations – look at the content of a child’s eyes, its fearlessness, its spontaniety – I take pleasure in noticing this every morning. Two little boys sleep in the same room with me; I watch them when they are stripped washing themselves and when they rub their little cheeks and look out from behinds the folds of their towels they look as independent and happy as if the whole universe was their mother’s lap – There is something of the ‘blowing clover and the falling rain’⁸ about their movements – There is a phase in every mans progress which contrasts painfully with this spontaneity – Emerson has felt it as deep as any, otherwise he could not have hit the nail so directly on the head.

Infirm melancholy

Jealous glancing around

An oaf, an accomplice

He poisons the ground.⁹

Do you not notice Tom how often Emerson alludes to the sinking of the eye. I think his frequent use of this allusion has caused a thousand eyes to sink which would otherwise never have done so. He has set people thinking of it and to think of it is to be tormented by it for long or short. I cannot help attributing it to mere consciousness operating upon a wakeful and unimpassioned state of the mind. When a man is in love there is none of it, when a man is enraged there is none of it, in both these states consciousness though present is not able to make the eye tremble on its axis. But where a man unimpassioned speaks to his fellow and thinks that they are looking at each other he straightaway forgets his subject he stares willfully and gets into confusion. I have noticed this between the best of friends Tom and I notice it with concern – you know whom I mean I dare say – it is a very delicate point¹⁰ – how long will two fellows play cat and paw on this subject before either dares to mention it – I may be rash in mentioning it now but the acknowledgement of the fact may assist in the eradication. I don’t notice this uneasiness among fools, they look with most good natured stupidity into each others countenance, and never think of the qualms which agitate the prying intellectual man. I find the honestest men subject to it – It is in fact a form of bashfulness and by no means an indication of guilt. It is however a bashfulness which a man will think beneath him and hence the uneasiness it causes. But Im forgetting the Sphynx – there is nothing however like falling back habitually on experience.

Nature is concerned for the man, for he also as well as palm and elephant is her child –

Who has drugged my boy’s cup?

Who has mixed my boy’s bread?¹¹

The poet solves the question

The fiend that man harries

Is love of the best

Yawns the pit of the dragon

Lit by rays from the blest¹²

You complained to me once of your sins and iniquities and were almost in despair about them. This is a case in point. What was this but the ‘pit of the Dragon’ illuminated as expressed above, and you even solved the question and cast out the fiend before you read Emersons receipt. Remember ever that your life must be a flux – not stationary – you would have it so at the time alluded to and hence your misery, but there is no standing still;

‘Profounder profounder

Man’s spirit must dive

To his aye rolling orbit

No goal will arrive’¹³

A profound philosophy underlies these verses. Emerson is saturated with it – You remember he calls a man a mystic who adheres to one symbol and refuses to translate it into other symbols. I open his first lecture on the uses of great men¹⁴ and find the same. ‘Rotation is the remedy of nature’,¹⁵ ‘the soul is impatient of masters and eager for change’ again – ‘On and for ever onward’ – again ‘In the moment the genius ceases to help us as a cause he begins to help us an effect’, again ‘Our strength is transitional’¹⁶ – ‘There is no thought in any man but it quickly tends to convert itself into a power’.¹⁷ again that great utterance I must call it in Montaigne ‘The philosophy we want is one of fluxions and mobility’.¹⁸ Here we have the same expressed in verse.

The heavens that draw him

With sweetness untold

Once found for new heavens

He Spurneth the old¹⁹

Eterne alternation

Now follows, now flies²⁰

– – – – – –

It is very necessary to a thinking mans happiness to see this and to lay it practically to heart. If he dont do so he will ever have some cause for repining. Some dear idol will depart from him daily and he will be left to mourn over the loss of his household gods. Let him offer them freely, and compensation instantly occurs. Shall I complain because one wave passes me when a thousand others are ready to bear me on. The parable of the 10 talents²¹ is another way of expressing the same thought. the ‘wood notes’²² are full of it. When we would make a thing plain to the understanding of others, or even to our own we are driven to clothe the thing in words or images. Now for certain subjects though felt by an indubitable instinct it is exceedingly difficult to find imagery – I call to your mind that thing noticed by Emerson in his second series of essays²³ – in Experience I think, which every fine spirit has endeavoured to name or to define by a symbol – For the same reason it is difficult give a clear idea of our notion of god or the universe – People may talk about God very glibly, but the longer I live the more eager I am to break through his varnish of words and grapple with the thing itself. Locke talks very majestically of the improper notions which illiterate people have of god, he has not however taken the trouble to give us his own. I have mentioned this to you before. His reasoning on the being of a god certainly leads to the idea that he is merely a man of behemoth proportions, and so of Paleys god.²⁴ He compares the universe to a watch – see you not design he exclaims – If I assent what is to follow? Why simply that the difference between God and man is all a matter of bulk. but I’m running away from my subject – you see what I mean dont you? Paley looks at a watch and says certainly it had an intelligent maker. He looks at the universe and says the same. The maker of the watch being however a being detached from the watch, by analogy the maker of the universe is what Carlyle would call an out-side God²⁵ – I cannot look at god in this light. I cannot extricate him from the universe* (This very idea is implied in the term omnipresence if people would only take time to think of it.)²⁶ no more than I can extricate myself from my material habiliments my eyes arms legs & brain. You see Fichte’s idea of the ego and nonego²⁷ comes in here. The ego can only manifest itself thru the nonego, yet to call the nonego the ego would be a transcendental absurdity. I think the universe is best illustrated by a human body.

All are but parts of one stupendous whole

Whose body nature is and god the soul.²⁸

The universe is a body with a life within it, and among it, and thro’ it, permeating its every fibre. Man is one form of that life, vegetables are another – herein consists that occult relationship between the former & the latter mentioned by Emerson in one of his essays.²⁹ The human skin illustrates the ‘eterne alternation’, deep down in fat layers below the surface a microscopic nucleus is formed – a point – it gathers other points around it and we thus have an aggregation of nuclei, these aggregations collect together and form cells; while all this is doing other nuclei are forming underneath, the cells are pushed upwards, are squeezed together and appear in the form of minute scales on the human skin – in the hair these scales are dandruff. In this way the black mark on your bruised nail is pushed forward. last week it was at the root, next week it will be at the outward edge, thus your hair grows and your whiskers (when you get them!) will sprout. Look at the process here going on! the Universe is typified by this microcosm; not an instants rest – every thing in nature is in the act of becoming another thing –

Eterne alteration

Now follows, now flies.³⁰

Man is an illustration of the universe. A tree is also an illustration – a blade of grass. the currents of the universe so to speak flow thro’ each. The dew drop solves the Sphere, – both are built on the same principles Who solves the one solves the other

‘Who solveth one of my meanings

Is master of all I am’³¹

The universe is life, rendered so to speak concrete; as the cathedral is the concrete thought of the architect – Indeed Emerson uses this very figure in another place,

‘These temples grew as grows the grass’³²

Man is an offshoot from this eternal stock. his spirit is the spirit of the universe. Who solves it solves him and vice versa.

Thou art the unanswered question

Couldst see thy proper eye.³³

This unity of the questioner with the questioned Emerson notices elsewhere. In the Woodnotes for instance

‘Thou askest in fountains and in fires

He is the essence that enquires³⁴

The gladdening effect of this recognition of life in the universe, that all these outward wrappages are a web by which we see the invisible [as noticed] by Emerson in the last verse but one. From a dead dull mechanism, a cold block of stone the Sphynx rises merrily –

Uprose the merry Sphynx

And crouched no more in stone

She melted into purple cloud

She silvered in the moon³⁵

Who dare say saith Tom Hirst that that clock did not speak to me! How long stumbling on the boundary line between the highest wisdom and the very lowest absurdity! –

I have thus [ran] over the Sphynx imperfectly I am aware. probably when you come to think of the matter you will make out a better solution yourself. A great deal more could be written upon it, in fact whole systems of philosophy are wrapped up in it – See you not a direct connexion between the verse

Profounder profounder &c

and Fichte’s doctrine³⁶ of the end and vocation of the scholar, perfection is his end, eternal perfecting is his vocation – ‘Let us rejoice’ says he in another place ‘that our work is infinite’³⁷ –

Your last letter³⁸ has set me thinking, thinking, what I have thought I will tell you by and by. aye come and see us. we have no beds however. they are all used up and even if they were not would be too short for you. We can get you a shop however. possibly we may make a little excursion somewhere, but really you must work hard at German.

Your Tyndall

M^r Hirst | Harrison Road | Halifax | Yorkshire³⁹

RI MS JT/1/T/532