Haunted Lives

I

IT is my increasing belief, to which the careful observation and study of years give strength, that all lives may be said to be haunted in a greater or less degree by certain recurrent thoughts or influences or impressions or realizations, which, visiting and revisiting the chambers of the mind, probably from earliest years, come at last to dwell persistently with us, returning again and again like the French ghostly revenants, making free to haunt those long-closed rooms of the memory where once, it may be, they moved in the full daylight of consciousness and realization, as delights or dreads, joys or terrors of the soul.

‘Two ideas,’ says Pater, in writing of Leonardo, ‘were especially fixed in him, as reflexes of things that touched his brain in childhood beyond the measure of other impressions — the smiling of women, and the motion of great waters.’ And later on, ‘He became above all a painter of portraits; faces of a modeling more skillful than has been seen before or since, embodied with a reality which almost amounts to illusion on dark air. To take a character as it was, and delicately sound its stops, suited one so curious in observation, curious in invention.’

So we seem to see Leonardo possessed always by the interest and beauty and meaning of faces, fascinated by the individuality, the infinite variety, the delicately interpretative meanings of them; reminiscent of the charm of them; visited by a hundred recurrent lovelinesses of them; preoccupied by their mystery; and above all, it seems, haunted and summoned by the lovely and enigmatic smiling of women.

To recognize this is to know much of Leonardo and his work; and even if we read no more of Pater’s memorable essay, he has succeeded in these three sentences in bringing before us some impression of the essential man which is not readily forgotten, and has admitted us as it were to a partial knowledge of that great and diverse mind.

But all this is rare, very rare in biography. We write biography, for the most part, as we write history — with a leaning toward dates and successions of events.

M. Taine in the introduction to his History of English Literature makes a strong protest, it will be remembered, against this method of writing history. He cites Carlyle’s Cromwell and SainteBeuve’s Port Royal as examples of the opposite and more modern method. In these event and happening are given but secondary place; in these it is always rather the subtle underlying causes which are touched on with particular insistence. It is the tragedy of the soul of Cromwell which is so memorably recorded by Carlyle; and by Sainte-Beuve it is the intricate psychology of an entire institution which is laid bare.

It is according to this method, Taine argues, not only that history should be written, but also that we should study the literature of any nation. He then proceeds through his several volumes to his memorable consideration of English literature, dwelling repeatedly on the psychology of the English people as it manifests itself in their literature. He calls attention again and again to certain recurring ideas or ideals which manifest themselves persistently in this particular race, which haunt it almost as an individual is haunted by certain not always definite, yet strongly formative influences.

All this is not very new in substance, yet in application it belongs distinctly to modern times. It falls in with the spirit of research and inquiry so active in the past half century, and announces as with prophetic voice — for it was written as much as fifty years ago — the psychology of nations, of which we only lately begin to speak with real seriousness.

We have long admitted, it is true, a certain psychology of eras — a kind of ‘soul’ of certain times, or ‘spirit’ of certain ages, manifesting itself diversely in diverse periods. And, quite as the name of an individual not alone summons to the mind that individual and no other, but connotes a particular personality, so such wide phrases as ‘The Elizabethan Age,’ ‘The Renaissance,’ ‘The Homeric Age,’ the ‘Age of Chivalry’ do not alone designate certain ages, but in each case connote some essential quality which went to render that particular age memorable and significant. This quality is found to be in every instance dependent upon some idea or ideal which, drawing its power often from unremarked and not always discoverable sources, moulds and fashions the thought and motives of the times.

So the art, the science, the religion, the philosophy of any given age, all these do but flower from causes that have their roots deep under the surface; and he who would acquaint himself with any notable period must study, not so much the outward and obvious facts and happenings of that period, as the hidden and subtle forces lying beneath all these.

But if the true history of a people cannot be given, or the true spirit of an era be revealed by a mere citing of events, however important or carefully chosen, what shall be said of the futility of studying that infinitely more delicate thing, the history of a human soul, by method of index and compilation? Yet that is precisely what much of our accepted and well-credited biography amounts to, and we have little of what might be called the more modern method. One looks in vain in the average Lives of great men for any careful consideration or analysis of the remote causes or springs of personality.

Certain biographical facts are, it seems, expected and provided. These the average biographer sets out in a perfectly conventional order, somewhat as the host of the conventional inn (I hope I may be forgiven the comparison) sets out the usual table d’hôte in certain courses time-honored and anticipated. If the biographer is a wellknown man, — if this be at the sign of Chesterton, or Colvin, or Birrell, or Gosse, — there will be added, without extra cost, the sprightly light wine of easy style.

In a well-known biography of Hawthorne we have for chapter titles the following: ‘Early Years’; ‘Early Manhood’; ‘Early Writings’; ‘Brook Farm and Concord’; ‘The Three American Novels’; ‘England and Italy’ ‘Last Years.’

In an equally well-known life of Keats, — and in lieu of something better it is perhaps the least unsatisfactory of them all, — we have, among other page and chapter headings, ‘Leigh Hunt’; ‘Determination to Publish’; ‘Poems of 1817’; ‘Margate’; ‘Winter at Hampstead’; ‘Doubts of Success’; ‘Northern Tour’; ‘Absorption in Love and Poetry’; ‘Haydon and Money Difficulties’; ‘The Odes’; ‘The Plays’; ‘Recast of Hyperion’; ‘Last Days and Death.’ It is true that there comes a whole chapter at the very last, under the promising title, ‘Character and Genius’; but reading it hopefully, one finds but talk of ‘ self-control,’ ‘sweetness of disposition,’ ‘sympathy,’ ‘good sense,’ ‘honor,’ ‘manliness’— with a somewhat hackneyed reference to the Greek purity and the mediæval richness of imagery which characterize Keats’s poetry, and a few words concerning his influence on a later age.

Now, considering the vivid and marvelous personality of the man, if these be not the bare bones and laboratory skeletons of biography, then I do not know bare bones or skeletons when I have sight of them.

No one questions that these are helpful if one is studying anatomy; that they may even be admitted necessary to an understanding of that timely temple of abode in which the fiery spirit for a while took up its residence; but to call this a ‘life’ of the man, which gives so little knowledge of his spirit’s habits of living!

If I turn to a little volume of Shelley on my table, where only eighteen small pages out of five hundred and ninety-two are devoted, as it happens, to the same subject, and only at that to the closing incident of Keats’s career, — his untimely death, — I find him spoken of in somewhat more adequate fashion.

I shall not quote the words metred out in verse, as they stand in the volume, but shall ask to be allowed to set them down as if they were mere running prose, as follows: —

For he is gone where all things wise and fair descend.

So much for the sense of shining and resplendent peace that comes with the going of so large a spirit! But let us read on. It is Urania now who is addressed concerning the poet: —

Thy youngest dearest one has perished; thy extreme hope, the loveliest and the last. The bloom whose petals, nipt before they blew, died in the promise of the fruit, is waste; the broken lily lies — the storm is overpast. The quick Dreams, the passionwinged ministers of thought, who were his flocks, whom near the living streams of his young spirit he fed, and whom he taught the love which was its music, wander not, wander no more. . . . And one with trembling hand clasps his cold head, and fans him with her moonlight wings, and cries: ‘Our love, our hope, our sorrow is not dead; see on the silken fringe of his faint eyes, like dew upon a sleeping flower, there lies a tear some Dream has loosened from his brain.’ . . . And others came,— Desires and Adorations, Winged Persuasions, and Veiled Destinies, Splendors and Glooms and glimmering Incarnations of hopes and fears and twilight Phantasies ... all he had loved and moulded into thought from shape, and hue and odor and sweet sound, lamented Adonaïs. . . . He is made one with Nature; there is heard his voice in all her music, from the moan of thunder to the song of night’s sweet bird; he is a presence to be felt and known in darkness and in light, from herb and stone, spreading itself where’er that Power may move which has withdrawn his being to its own; ... he is a portion of the loveliness which once he made more lovely; ... he is gathered to the kings of thought who waged contention with their times’ decay, and of the past are all that cannot pass away.

And this further, this little bit about the poet’s grave: —

Here pause, these graves are all too young as yet, to have outgrown the sorrow which consigned its charge to each; and if the seal is set, here, on one fountain of a mourning mind, break it not thou! . . . From the world’s bitter wind seek shelter in the shadow of the tomb. What Adonaïs is, why fear we to become?'

It will be objected that this is not biography at all, but poetry, and very famous poetry at that. I am aware, full aware of it. I have only to remark that, since there is a beating upon the gates and the starved people demand bread and there is none, ‘Why then, let them eat cake! ’ There is perhaps more pure essence of biography in lines like these, which purport not to be biography at all, than in any pompous three-volume ‘Life,’ which comes decked in scarlet, and heralded by the trumpet-blasts of publishers well versed in the psychology of advertising.

Or take all these supreme lines away and leave me but that one by the same hand, ‘The soul of Adonaïs like a star,’ and I am not sure that I am not richer by that, than by many biographical chapters.

II

It has always seemed to me that the best possible biographer, even including the immortal Boswell, would have been Horatio. Ophelia might have been better still had she kept her poor senses. Even having lost them, she seems to do no less than draw back a shimmering veil from the soul and life of Hamlet in the few remarks she makes concerning him: ‘Where is the beauteous majesty of Denmark?’

Horatio, never having dreamed, certainly, of writing an account of Hamlet’s life at all, yet seems to set forth in his few words more of Hamlet than is to be found in all the commentaries. What is there not revealed in his ‘Here, sweet lord, at your service,’ and his ‘O my dear lord!’

There is further evidence of his qualification, of course, in Hamlet’s unforgettable words concerning him: —

and, at the very last, —

But that which fits Horatio more than all, it seems to me, to bring report to others concerning the life, the motives and character of his ‘sweet lord,’ is that he had long been aware of those fearful and familiar hauntings of his lord’s mind — hauntings which, for the purposes of the play, must be dramatized into the very form of a ghost, but which were in reality something far subtler still, and less bodied. It was of these delicate and awful visitings that Horatio was, more than the rest, aware and sensitively expectant.

It is such an eagerness, such an expectancy, and such an ability as well, I take it, that are needed by him who would understand the life of any great man and would hope to interpret it to others. He who would give us an adequate study of any life whatsoever must, it would seem, reckon on and investigate those subtle hauntings of mind and spirit of which the biographers have, as yet, apparently, taken so little account, having left such investigations to be followed, and that only along somewhat morbid lines, by the psychiatrists and psycho-analysts.

For these, it is true, have recognized clearly that there are such hauntings, though they do not call them such. It is recognized by them that there is frequently an unconscious retention by the mind, and a repression within the unconscious self, of former striking and formative experiences. Freud and his followers tell us that an unpleasant or shocking experience, long dead to the conscious memory, may nevertheless return to haunt and newly shock and distress us when consciousness sleeps. In dreams it is, they tell us, that morbid fears or hateful repressions or unlawful desires of all kinds return to move where they will, unhindered and invulnerable. In whatever scientific or psychologic terms we speak of these things, it all sounds very ghostlike, and the more so when one recalls that these haunting manifestations vanish at the awaking to consciousness, as ghosts at the crowing of the cock; then, be it ghost or old repression, ‘the extravagant and erring spirit hies to his confines’ once more.

The avowed task of the Freud school is the anticipation, the expectation, and at last the careful analysis of these morbid hauntings, these repressions and forbidden desires. It is the self-appointed task of the psycho-analyst to watch for these things, to recognize them, speak with them, and examine into their meanings and purposes, as Hamlet with the ghost of his father on the battlements of Elsinore. All this has been looked upon — rightly, no doubt — as epoch-making in the history of psychology, and more especially as it applies to the study and treatment of nervous and mental disorders.

But to deal only with the morbid hauntings of the mind is to look upon the gloom and night of things only. For, by the same token, it would seem there must be other presences not morbid; other haunting influences, not dreadful, but lovely. There must be without doubt many an exquisite or startling experience or impression, long since passed over into the world of our dead memories — perhaps the frail beauty of flower or leaf, some unearthly delicacy of laced moonlight on the floor of the forest, the spaciousness of dawn, the beauty of women, the kindly clinging touch of hands — some impression which found in us, in early youth it may be, a congenial abode, and returning to us again and again (never in the full daylight of consciousness, but in a dim and twilight fashion, in some delicate haunting form ‘as the air invulnerable’), obtains at last a ghostly possession of some chamber of the mind, holds from there a kind of subtle occupancy of our thoughts, in time a sort of dominion over our personalities, and even at last, it must be, exerts a definite influence upon our characters.

For it is precisely the exact and delicate response to such subtle visitings, whether it be a visiting of fear and dread or of beauty and delight, which, expressing itself in the individual’s manner of living and taste for life, we call personality; which, manifesting itself in his art, we call style; which, exhibiting itself in his purpose and action, we call character.

It is in this sense, then, that the lives of all of us, and very especially the lives of the great, may, without fantastical imagery, be said to be haunted. And if this be true, then it is obvious that, without reference to such hauntings, no so-called ‘lives’ or biographies of great men can be complete.

III

It seems likely that the new criticism must more and more take into account these delicate and psychological reckonings; but meanwhile how shall we, the unelect, seeking unacademically among the lives of the great, become aware of these subtle influences which forever haunt the characters and the works of great men? How shall we put ourselves sensitively in touch with that which is so essentially characteristic; with those mysterious influences of personality which, working together, make, for instance, a poem of Arnold’s a poem of Arnold’s unmistakably, and a painting of Raphael’s so much his own that we are wont to speak of it as ‘ a Raphael ’ ?

Again I turn to Horatio. There must first of all be in us, I believe, a deep love of the men whom we would know

— ‘O my sweet lord!’ There must be on our part all that loyal and watchful friendship which would make any hearsay or report concerning them a matter of interest to us; further, there must be that full intimate companionship to be had, not by hearsay at all, but only by living day after day with these men and their works; and lastly, there must be in us a sensitiveness to spiritual and haunting presences in their lives

— a patient and sensitive watching as it were upon the battlements of Elsinore.

If we turn from Leonardo, as Pater presents him to us, to another notable and equally strong type — to Isaiah; if we ignore all those facts usually insisted upon in biography; if we dismiss as less important the kings and rulers of his age and the dramatic yet negligible circumstances of his times; and if we give our attention rather to the subtle predilections and preoccupations of this great mind, we find Isaiah visited again and again, haunted unceasingly it would seem, by certain effects and meanings, and lovelinesses and memories of light.

Again and again we see him sensitive to its manifestations. Here and there throughout his writings we find him noting and delighting in its return, greeting it with relief and rejoicing, as after a long night’s watching; calling to his people passionately to arise and waken from the darkness of their sins, holding up his own streaming torch, as it were, across their night, in shining prophecy of the better luminary already on the way, which was to be the light of the world.

‘Arise! Shine!’ he cries, ‘for thy light is come and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee. . . . The People that walked in darkness have seen a great light; they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined .... Then shall thy light break forth as the morning. . . . And the Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising. . . . The Lord shall be to thee an everlasting light, and thy God thy glory. . . . The sun shall no more go down, neither shall thy moon withdraw herself.’

His mention also of trees and their boughs and roots and branches is even more frequent still. Here, likewise, ‘two ideas’ seem ‘especially fixed in him as reflexes of things that touched his brain in childhood beyond the measure of other impressions.’

When we study Dante carefully and watch with him also, we find him to have been, hardly less than Isaiah, haunted by the same loveliness, the beauty and meaning of light. For him not less, light would seem to have had a most insistent and spiritual appeal. Far too many to quote are his innumerable exact and sensitive descriptions of it, his careful and repeated observations of its gradations and delicate alterations. Memorably, too, he has it in mind in speaking of Saint Francis of Assisi, that sun of righteousness risen out of the mediæval night. ‘Call it not Assisi,’ he cries; ‘if you would truthfully name it, call it the East because of the sun that rose there.’

Likewise, one who watches patiently and devotedly with Homer cannot but become sensible at last how his mind entertains constantly the thought and moving beauty of the various air. Perpetually, it must have been, he was haunted by the freshness and loveliness of it as it moved across the Ægean and the windy isles of Greece. Pure and awful, in the semblance of the blueeyed Athena, it was the air which passed among his Greek hosts at eventide, or went stirringly among the serried ranks, reviving with a touch the old spirit in them; or in the tent of Achilles took him by the yellow hair, and directed him, a spirit and a presence.

Again and again throughout the Iliad and the Odyssey, the sensitive and watchful will note this persistency and preoccupation, this recurrent observation of the air in its manifold behaviors, as of something dear or memorable, from the swirling, snatching Harpies to the clean-breathed morning; from the sullen sultriness of Achilles’ wrath — a stubborn heat that will not stir — to the swift flight of windy arrows cleansing the banquet-hall of Ithaca. So too, that divinity to whom he paid his most constant homage was Athena, goddess of knowledge and of the air, exquisitely typifying, not alone wisdom, but, as almost one with wisdom, the most moving and yielding of the elements.

How well by these things have we come to know Homer — who yet know not by seven chances even so much as the city of his birth! The bare facts of biography seem poor when compared with these preferences, these preoccupations and predilections of the very man himself.

So, too, though we knew little else about him, it were possible to take the full measure of St. Francis of Assisi by his haunting persistent love of brotherhood. Nothing else in all his deeds and words is half so strong. One even comes to believe that his devotion to his beloved Lady Poverty was — doubtless unknown to himself — rendered solely because it made him one of a larger fraternity and brother to a greater number of men. The fire that burned and seared him was his brother, even as was the beneficent luminary that warmed him. From his triumphant salutation to his radiant ‘brother the sun,’ on down to the delicate and gentle admonishings of his ‘little brothers’ the birds and fishes, the thought of an unlimited and unfettered fraternity perpetually dominates his loving spirit.

In like manner I have noted in my many readings of Matthew Arnold that his mind seems to have responded with a peculiar sensitiveness, and been often subject to the sound and meaning of moving waters, and to the high destiny of stars. It would seem that ‘the unplumbed, salt, estranging sea’ came in time to have a definite power over him in the ordering of his images and even in the determining of his philosophies; that rivers flowing silver under the sun, or, unguessed, in subterranean chambers, became to him interpretative of life itself, and their course and channel and ultimate end a promise to his soul. It is not alone in his poetry that one finds the ‘incognizable sea,’ and hears so frequently of its coasts and beaches and sands and watery wastes and isles; of voyages and charts; the ‘swinging waters and the clustered pier’; the ebbing and flowing of tides; and the still stars: one comes upon these in his prose not less, very especially and memorably in his Study of Poetry.

It may be argued that these might be mere favorite figures and symbols; but it is hardly thinkable, after a careful study of them, that they are not rather haunting influences and impressions having long a familiar access to the chambers of his mind, now taking him with his forsaken Merman, —

or with the Neckan beside the green Baltic, pointing out the sounding deeps, and the starry poles, and interpreting life’s meanings by them.

So too, — to pass but lightly from one to another, — we ean hardly read Chaucer devotedly without at length becoming aware how this poet seems to have been haunted by the idea of the freshness and loveliness of the day’s awaking; his very heroes and heroines again and again seeming to partake of it, and to be like dawn themselves upon the hills.

The ’yonge Squire’ too, of ‘twenty yere of age ’: —

In his most delicate descriptions one feels the presence as of a breaking light, and the birds seem forever to sing in his green coverts.

It is the dawn and early morning of the year not less which is dear to him — and which he has chosen, perhaps by an election not wholly his own, as the season in which to order and assemble his famous pilgrimage.

And so, out into the dawn of the year they go, making an immortal morning of it.

IV

Two more lives suggest themselves as especially rich in the testimony they bring of haunting influences which permanently moulded them — those of Keats and Rossetti.

It is well known how completely the early life of Rossetti came under the influence of the Florence of the Middle Ages, and how from the very beginning there fell athwart his life and across his very name the shadow of her greatest son. It is doubtful whether we gain as much knowledge of him by a study of the modern times in which he lived, as by turning our attention to the history and ideals of the Florence of the time of Dante and Lorenzo de’ Medici.

It has been said [writes Pater] that all the great Florentines were preoccupied with death. Outre-tombe! Outre-tombe! is the burden of their thoughts, from Dante to Savonarola. Even the gay and licentious Boccaccio gives a keener edge to his stories by putting them in the mouths of a party of people who had taken refuge from the danger of death by plague, in a country house. It was to this inherited sentiment, this practical decision that to be preoccupied with the thought of death was in itself dignifying and a note of high quality, that the seriousness of the great Florentines of the fifteenth century was partly due; and it was reinforced in them by the actual sorrows of their times.

A careful study of Rossetti reveals him also, like them, early and profoundly preoccupied with death. The richly lighted chambers of his mind are in their dark moments visited repeatedly by its pity and its melancholy. Space does not admit of citing here the many evidences; but if ever a mind was visited, preoccupied, and at last mastered by a strong idea, a dominant persuasion, the mind of Dante Gabriel Rossetti was so haunted — so dominated — by the idea of death.

When we turn to Keats’s life and writings, they offer examples hardly less notable. For as Rossetti was haunted by the idea of death, so Keats would seem from the first to have been preoccupied by the idea of beauty. By his own memorable confession he had worshiped the spirit of it in all things; he has not the slightest feeling of humility, he says, toward anything in existence with three exceptions only: The Eternal Being, the Memory of Great Men, and the Principle of Beauty.

There is further and ample evidence throughout his writings that he was perpetually possessed by certain definite forms of beauty; by the beauty of mead and moon, the wash of waters at their priestly task, the splendor of the night’s starred face; but very especially and more often, it would seem, was he haunted by that most intimate and tangible of all lovelinesses — the loveliness of flowers.

There is constant reference to them, a constant, recurring delight in them. Their influence again and again visited him and pervaded his most delicate observations. The memory of flowers again and again laid a detaining hand upon him, and must have ministered to him unrecorded in how many a night hour, mindful, reminiscential, with what gentle ministerings!

They bloom in his lines everywhere, familiar as the name of the beloved on the lips. It will be recalled that they stand among those things of beauty which he names with so much devotion as ‘joys forever’: ‘daffodils, with the green world they live in’ shedding an ethereal sunlight across the more sombre beauty of ‘the dooms we have imagined for the mighty dead.'

So, too, ‘ hushed cool rooted flowers, fragrant-eyed,’ touch his memory with an ever-freshening sensibility. The greatest pleasure he has experienced in life, he tells us, is in watching the growth of flowers; and to him — Hazlitt recalls — Hebrew poetry was faulty because it made so little mention of them; and for the converse reason, it would seem likely, Chaucer and Spenser were forever his delight.

What he specially longs for now, he writes, — he has been ill, and is within a year of his death, — is ‘the simple flowers of Spring.’

In the same letter we get a glimpse of certain early personal associations not fully followed, which would seem to lend an added loveliness to flowers which he had always found in themselves so lovely.

How astonishingly [he writes] . . . does the chance of leaving the world impress a sense of its natural beauties upon us! Like poor Falstaff, though I do not ‘babble,’ I think of green fields; I muse with the greatest affection on every flower I have known from my infancy — their shapes and colors are as new to me as if I had just created them with a superhuman fancy. It is because they are connected with the most thoughtless and happiest moments of our lives. I have seen foreign flowers in hothouses, of the most beautiful nature, but I do not care a straw for them. The simple flowers of our Spring are what I want to see again.

He did see them once again, and then no more.

In the account of his drive to Rome, he who reads sympathetically must enjoy most, it seems to me, as doubtless Keats did, the autumn flowers which Severn gathered for him by the way and put into his remembering hand.

Lying quiet at the last, as Severn tells us, with his hand clasped on the white carnelian Fanny Brawne had given him, when all other presences seemed to have departed from him, — Love and Ambition having for the last time visited him, — and when life itself, with her hand already on the latch, stood ready to depart, there lingered yet awhile beside him that old sense of loveliness that had so often, even from earliest infancy, visited and haunted his spirit — the loveliness and friendliness of flowers. Already, in some vision of his spirit, he was laid down in their green world he knew so well and loved. ‘I feel,’ he said, ‘the flowers growing over me.’

V

The observations I have suggested are here touched on but lightly, and in passing. I have made no profound study of them, or of the infinitely subtle psychology that without doubt underlies such hauntings of the spirit. I have but known these men from childhood and from early youth have watched with them in many watchings. If there be one boast left me when I also shall go down into the darkness to which they have so long lent splendor, it may well be that these I have loved and have cherished with a whole heart, and would have served them if I could, than Horatio not less eager: ‘Here, sweet lord, at your service.’

But be all that as it may, I am yet persuaded that it is by some such means as I have here touched on that all biography of the better sort must in time be written. Turn where we will among the great, we find facts of date and birth and schooling and death and all outward circumstance to have been the lesser factors. All these Time at last — the only lastingly considerable biographer — rejects and throws away. That which Time retains as precious and imperishable is rather some fine essence of the spirit, some essential personality built up and moulded by preferences, predilections, and prepossessions of a most highly spiritual order. The loves, the desires, the dear delights of men; the returning dreams, the recurrent longings that will not be gainsaid; the dead and long-lost dreamings that revisit the glimpses of our moon — these are indeed the spirits of us, and our immortalities.

Nor is it only as aids to a more just analysis of the great that these infinitely subtle influences may be considered. Plus on connait de langues plus on est de personnes. If the knowledge of another language gives one another life, as it were, — makes of one yet another person, — what may not be said to be added unto us by the knowledge — not the mere speculation, but the intimate knowledge — of another soul, and that soul one of the great ones of the earth?

This can be had only by an intimate companionship, not with the mere flagrant facts, but with the spiritual visitings, the dear desires and predilections, which haunt all rich lives significantly, perpetually, even as they haunt life itself.

For life is but an infinitely ancient abode, haunted by recurring presences surpassingly spiritual; as he knows who has seen death pass in and out of the ancient chambers in the night watches, or who has heard the autumn rains how reminiscent in patient woodlands, or who has been aware of lovely springs long-gone keeping tryst at certain seasons with the evening star in the twilight, or has felt them stealing back, ghostly and exquisite, when the April crescent hangs thoughtful and remote above dark apple-boughs.

In life as in lives, the presences move dark and dread or shining and lovely; and in the lives of the great as in life itself the shining and lovely would seem to be the more constant visitants. It is not to be forgotten that, though Banquo knocks his fearful summons, and the murdered Dane speaks with hollow mouthings, yet drifting forms dance no less gayly and delicately on midsummer nights in woodsy hollows by the moon.

It is noteworthy and remarkable that even those among the great whose lives have been sombre with tragedy have been visited — indeed they often more than others — by recurring influences of a most haunting beauty, like Beethoven who with ears dull yet heard high symphonies, and Milton who with sight closed to all outward loveliness saw yet in the darkened chambers a vision as of squadrons of brightharnessed angels ranged in order serviceable, and knew the pastures and the silent woods to be full of sweet voices and light steps: —

It is of all such haunting and recurrent presences, be they dread or lovely, that he who most knows life is most aware, and that he who would know the lives of great men must be most sensitively observant. These are the things that must be watched for faithfully and with a whole heart and a single devotion: ‘Here, sweet lord, at your service!’ Leaving all prejudice or interest of our own, it is for us, in studying the lives of great men, to make their affair ours as wholly as may be; and to forget ourselves in a knowledge so much more dearly to be desired.

And by no means, I believe, may this be done so surely as by a patient study of those high elections, those persistent hauntings of mind and spirit which have influenced and, it may be, in so large a measure directed the lives of all great men; giving their mind its bent, their personality its leanings; often guiding, it must be, their motives, and suggesting their high behaviors; laying upon them, as the ghost upon Hamlet, purposes and duties thence never to be avoided, inevitably to be discharged; lending to their speech its lovely and broidered figures, or to the work of the hand its so memorable distinctions, and to all their activities that which we call ‘characteristic’ — something particularly and peculiarly their own; some chosen and essential and precious manner of expression which, mortal though they be, lives on, surviving them; and which is not to be found elsewhere in its kind or measure throughout all the rich and inexhaustible ages.