For that, the foolishness of pride, and flatteries of cringing homage,
Strew with chaff the threshing-floors of science; names perplex them all:
The entomologist, who hath pried upon an insect, straightway shall endow

it with his name;

It had many qualities and marks of note,-but in chief, a vain observer: The geographer shall journey to the pole, through biting frost and desolation,

And, for some simple patron's sake, shall name that land, the happy: 'The fossilist hath found a bone, the rib of some huge lizard,

And forthwith standeth to it sponsor, to tack himself on repte immortalities:

The sportsman, hunting at the Cape, found some strange-horned antelope,
The spots are new, the fame is cheap, and so his name is added.
Thus, obscurities encumber knowledge, even by the vanity of men,
Who play into each other's hand the game of giving names.

Various are the names of men, and drawn from different wells;
Aspects of body, or characters of mind, the creature's first idea :
And some have sprung of trades, and some of dignities or office;
Other some added to a father's, and yet more growing from a place :
Animal creation, with sciences and things, their composites, and near

associations,

Contributed their symbolings of old, wherewith to title men:

And heraldry set upon its cresture the figured attributes as ensigns
By which, as by a name concrete, its bearer should be known.

Egypt opened on the theme, dressing up her gods in qualities;
Horns of power, feathers of the swift, mitres of catholic dominion,
The sovereign asps, the circle everiasting, the crook and thong of justice,
By many mystic shapes and sounds displayed the idol's name.
Thereafter, high-plumed warriors, the chieftains of Etruria and Troy,
And Xerxes, urging on his millions to the tomb of pride, Thermopylæ,
And Hiero with his bounding ships all figured at the prow,
And Rome's Prætorian standards, piled with strange devices,
And stout crusaders pressing to the battle, locked in shining steel,-
These all in their speaking symbols, earned, or wore, a name.
Eve, the mother of all living, and Abraham, father of a multitude,

Jacob, the supplanter, and David the beloved, and all the worthies of old

time,

Nah, who came for consolation, and Benoni, son of sorrow,

Kings and prophets, children of the East, owned cach his title of signifi

cance.

There be names of high descent, and thereby storied honours;
Names of fair renown, and thercin characters of merit :

But to lend the lowborn noble names, is to shed upon them ridicule and evil
Yea, many weeds run rank in pride, if men have dubbed them cedars.
And to herald common mediocrity with the noisy notes of fame,
Tendeth to its deeper scorn; as if it were to call the mole a mammoth.
Yet shall ye find the trader's babe dignified with sounding titles,
And little hath the father guessed the harm he did his child:

For either may they breed him discontent, a peevish repining at his station,

Or point the finger of despite at the mule in the trappings of an elephant : And it is a kind of theft to filch appellations from the famous,

A soiling of the shrines of praise with folly's vulgar herd.

Prudence hath often gone ashamed for the name they added to his father's, If minds of mark and great achievements bore it well before;

For he walketh as the jay in the fable, though not by his own folly, Another's fault hath compassed his misfortune, making him a martyr to his name.

Who would call the tench a whale, or style a torch, Orion?
Yet many a silly parent hath dealt likewise with his nursling.

Give thy child a fit distinguishment, making him sole tenant of a name,
For it were a sore hindrance to hold it in common with a hundred ;

In the Babel of confused identities fame is little feasible,

The felon shall detract from the philanthropist, and the sage share honours with the simple :

Still, in thy title of distinguishment, fall not into arrogant assumption, Steering from caprice and affectations; and for all thou doest, have a rea

son.

He that is ambitious for his son, should give him untried names,

For those that have served other men, haply may injure by their evils; Or otherwise may hinder by their glories; therefore set him by himself, To win for his individual name some clear specific praise.

There were nine Homers, all goodly sons of song; but where any record of the eight?

One grew to fame, an Aaron's rod, and swallowed up his brethren: (**) Who knoweth? more distinctly titled, those dead eight had lived;

But the censers were ranged in a circle, to mingle their sweets without a difference.

Art thou named of a common crowd, and sensible of high aspirings?
It is hard for thee to rise,—yet strive: thou mayst be among them a
Musæus.

Art thou named of a family, the same in successive generations?

It is open to thee still to earn for epithets, such an one, the good or great.
Art thou named foolishly? show that thou art wiser than thy fathers,
Live to shame their vanity or sin by dutiful devotion to thy sphere.
Art thou named discreetly? it is well, the course is free;

No competitor shall claim thy colours, neither fix his faults upon thee:
Hasten to the goal of fame between the posts of duty,

And win a blessing from the world, that men may love thy name;
Yea, that the unction of its praise, in fragrance well deserving,
May float adown the stream of time, like ambergris at sea;

So thy sons may tell their sons, and those may teach their children,
He died in goodness, as he lived ;—and left us his good name.
And more than these: there is a roll whereon thy name is written;
See that, on the Book of Doom, that name is fixed in light :

Then, safe within a better home, where time and its titles are not found,
God will give thee his new Name, and write it on thy heart:
A Name, better than of sons, a Name dearer than of daughters,
A Name of union, peace, and praise, as numbered in thy God.

OF THINGS.

ABSTRACTED from all substance, and flying with the feathered flock of thoughts,

The idea of a thing hath the nature of its Soul, a separate seeming es

sence:

Intimately linked to the idea, suggesting many qualities,

The name of a thing hath the nature of its Mind, an intellectual recorder: And the matter of a thing, concrete, is a Body to the perfect creature,

Compacted three in one, as all things ease within the Universe.

Nothing canst thou add to them, and nothing take away, for all have

these proportions,

The thought, the word, the form, combining in the Thing:

All separate, yet harmonizing well, and mingled each with other,
One whole in several parts, yet each part spreading to a whole:
The idea is a whole, and the meaning phrase that spake idea, a whole,
And the matter, as ye sce it, is a whole; the mystery of true tri-unity :
Yea, there is even a deepe. mystery,—which none, I wot, can fathom,
Matter, different from properties whereby the solid substance is described.
For, size and weight, cohesion and the like, live distinct from matter,
Yet who can image matter, unendowed with size and weight?
As in the spiritual, so in the material, man must rest with patience,
And wait for other eyes wherewith to read the books of God.

Men have talked learnedly of atoms, as if matter could be ever indivisible.
They talk, but ill are skilled to teach, and darken truth by fancies:
An atom by our grosser sense was never yet conceived,

And nothing can be thought so small, as not to be divided:

For an atom runneth to infinity, and never shall be caught in space,
And a molecule is no more indivisible than Saturn's belted orb.
Things intangible, multiplied by multitudes, never will amass to substance,
Neither can a thing which may be touched, be made of impalpable pro-

portions;

The sum of indivisibles must needs be indivisible, as adding many nothings,
And the building up of atoms into matter is but a silly sophism;
Lucretius and keen Anaximander, and many that have followed in their
thoughts,

(For error hath a long black shadow, dimming light for ages,)

In the foolishness of men without a God fancied to fashion Matter

Of intangibles, and therefore unconering, indivisibles and therefore Spirit.

Things breed thoughts; therefore at Thebes and Heliopolis,
In hieroglyphic sculptures are the priestly secrets written ;
Things breed thoughts; therefore was the Athens of Idolatry
Set with carved images, frequent as the trees of Academus;
Things breed thoughts; therefore the Brahmin and the Burman
With mythologic shapes adorn their coarse pantheon ;
Things breed thoughts; therefore the statue and the picture,

Relics, rosaries, and miracles in act, quicken the Papist in his worship:
Things breed thoughts; therefore the lovers at their parting,
Interchanged with tearful smiles the dear reminding tokens;

Things breed thoughts; therefore, when the clansman met his foe,
The blood-stained claymore in his hand revived the memories of vengeance.

Things teach with double force; through the anima eye, and througn the mind,

And the eye catchoth in an instant, what the ear shall not learn within an

hour.

Thence is the potency of travel, the precious might of its advantages
To compensate its dissipative harm, its toil and cost and danger.
Ulysses, wandering to many shores, lived in many cities,

And thereby learnt the minds of men, and stored his own more richly :
Herodotus, the accurate and kindly, spake of that he saw,

And reaped his knowledge on the spot, in fertile fields of Egypt:
Lycurgus culled from every clime the golden fruits of justice;
And Plato roamed through foreign lands, to feed on truth in all.
For travel, conversant with Things, bringeth them in contact with the mind;
We breathe the wholesome atmosphere about ungarbled truth :

Pictures of fact are painted on the eye, to decorate the house of intellect,
Rather than visions of fancy, filling all the chambers with a vapour.
For, in ideas, the great mind will exaggerate, and the lesser extenuate truth :
But in Things the one is chastened, and the other quickened, to equality,
And in Names,-though a property be told, rather than an arbitrary

accident,

Still shall the thought be vague or false, if none hath seen the Thing;
for in Things the property with accident standeth in a mass concrete,
These cannot cheat the sense, nor elude the vigilance of spirit.
Travel is a ceaseless fount of surface education,

But its wisdom will be simply superficial, if thou add not thoughts to things:
Yet, aided by the varnish of society, things may serve for thoughts,
Till many dullards that have seen the world shall pass for scholars:
Because one single glance will conquer all descriptions,

Though graphic, these left some unsaid, though true, these tended to some

error,

And the most witless eye that saw, had a juster notion of its object
Than the shrewdest mind that hoard and shaped its gathered thoughts of

Things.