Chapter IV: Introduction (1)

All over Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, and other Western States--but chiefly over these--are the monumental remains of an ancient race, long anterior to the present race of Indians, concerning whom we have no other record than that which is afforded by their mounds, earthworks, fortifications, temples, and dwelling places. Even these cannot at first be distinguished and identified the one from the other; and it takes a person skilled in such lore to determine the character and uses of the various mounds and groups of mounds, which he meets with at all points, and in all directions, as he traverses the wilderness.

I have lived a long time in the woods and prairies, following the occupation of a hunter, but with ulterior antiquarian and natural-history objects and purposes. From the time when I first heard of the mounds, which was in the year 1836, when I entertained, in my chambers in New York, an old frontiersman from Chicago--a fine, brave fellow, whose whole life was a romance of the highest and noblest kind--I resolved that as soon as fortune should favor me with leisure and opportunity, I would make a first-hand investigation of these curious antiquities, and try if I could render an intelligent exposition of their meaning. Twenty years passed away, and I was no nearer to the accomplishment of my purpose than I was in that notable year 1836, when the apocalypse of the West and its mystic mound seals were first revealed to me. At last, about four years ago, all things being favorable, I struck my tents in the big city--the wonderful Arabian Nights city of New York!-and, taking a sorrowful leave of my friends and literary associates, I set off for the region round about the Black River in Wisconsin. Here, among the bluffs and forests, within hailing distance of a prairie of some hundred thousand acres, I bought a well-cultivated farm of two hundred and eighty acres, bounded on the south by a deep, romantic ravine, at the bottom of which ran a delightful stream of water, full of trout, always cool and delicious to drink, and never known to be dry even in the fiercest summer droughts. A large log cabin, with a chimney opening in the kitchen, capable of conveying the smoke and flames of half a cord of wood burning at once on the hearthstones, and having other commodious conveniences, was my headquarters, and I intended it to be my permanent home. But thereby hangs a tale--which, though interesting enough, and full of romantic and startling episodes, I will not here and now relate, as being somewhat extraneous to the subject matter before us.

I had no sooner made all the dispositions necessary to the good husbanding of the farm, than I hired a half breed, well known in those parts, and subsequently a Winnebago Indian, to whose wigwam the half breed introduced me at my request. And with these two, the one a veritable savage, and the other very nearly related to him, I set off with a wagon, a yoke of oxen, a large tent, and abundance of provisions, on a journey of mound discoveries.

I have only space here to say that we traversed the whole of the north and west of the State of Wisconsin, and through the chief parts of Minnesota and Iowa; and that subsequently, about, eighteen months afterward, we visited the region of the Four Lakes, of which Madison is the centre, where there are hundreds of mounds, arranged in nearly every form and of nearly every animal device, which we had found in our previous travels.

I made drawings of all the remarkable groups which I met with; and, without going into particulars, I may give you some idea of their likelihood in the following summary: Mounds arranged in circles of three circles, with a large earthwork in the inner one; the outer circle containing sixty mounds, the second thirty, the first fifteen. I examined the earthwork, and found in it, about four feet below the surface, remains of charcoal and charred bones, burnt earth, and considerable quantities of mica. It had evidently been an altar or sacrificial mound--and I afterward, upon examination, found many such--but they were always enclosed by other mounds; and these (the outer mounds) contained nothing but earth, although there was this remarkable peculiarity about them, that the earth of which they were composed was altogether of a different nature from the surrounding earth, and must have been brought to that spot, as the old Druids brought the enormous blocks of stone which composed their temples and altars at Stonehenge, from an unknown distance.

Other mounds were arranged in squares, triangles, and parallelograms. Others, in a series of successive squares, about three feet apart, having an opening to the east and west, and terminating in a square of about fourteen feet in the centre, where a truncated mound is sure to be erected.

Others, formed a good deal like a Minie rifle ball, but with a more pointed apex, running on both sides of the earth effigy of a monstrous bear for upward of forty rods.

Others, shaped like an eagle with outstretched wings, having walls of earthwork two feet high, of oblong shape, and enclosed on all sides except at the east and west, where there are entrances of about four feet in width.

Others, composed of hundreds of tons of earth, shaped like a tortoise, with truncated mounds all around it.

Others, fashioned like men, and Titans at that, some lying prone upon the prairie, others in the act of walking. The limbs clearly defined, the body vast and well moulded, like a huge colossus. One near Baraboo, Sauk County, Wisconsin, discovered by Mr. William H. Canfield, and reported to the Philosophical Society by Mr. Lapham, of Milwaukee, was visited also by us. It is two hundred and fourteen feet in length; the head thirty feet long, the body one hundred feet, and the legs eighty-four. The head lies toward the south, and the motion (for he is represented in the act of walking) is westward. All the lines of this most singular effigy are curved gracefully, much care having very clearly been bestowed upon its construction. The head is ornamented with two projections or horns, giving a comical expression to the whole figure.

Near the old military road, about seven miles east of the Blue Mounds, in Dare County, Wisconsin, we found another man effigy. It lies in an east and west direction, the head toward the west, and the arms and legs extended. It is one hundred and twenty-five feet long, one hundred and forty feet from the extremity of one arm to that of the other. The body is thirty feet in breadth, and is most carefully moulded and rounded; the head twenty-five feet; the elevation above the surface of the prairie nearly six feet.

On the north side of the Wisconsin River, about four miles west of the village of Muscoda, we heard of and found another human effigy. Its peculiarity was that it had two heads, and they reclined with a certain grace over the shoulders. The arms were not in proportion, nor fully represented. Length of body fifty feet, legs forty feet, arms one hundred and thirty feet; lying north and south, the head southward.

Others, a kind of hybrids, half man half beast or bird.

Others, representing birds with outstretched wings, like the forked-tail hawk or swallow.

Others, eagles without heads.

Others, coiled snakes, or outstretched snakes.

Others, elk or deer.

Clusters of mounds star shaped, seven in number, with the sun-shaped mound in the centre.

Others, representing mathematical symbols.

On the banks of the Black River, near the Ox Bow, are the remains of an elevated road, about three feet high and seven feet wide, extending for miles, intersected near the river by the great Indian war path. The settlers call it the Railroad, and it has all the appearance of a work of this nature, and is strongly and carefully built--a fine remain of the old mound builders' time.

Long lines of mounds, extending for scores and probably hundreds of miles, nearly all of the same shape, varying in their distance from each other from one to four miles.

Circular mounds of a base of two hundred feet, and a height of twenty feet.

Others, two hundred yards long, from ten to twenty feet wide, and from two to three feet high--these last, also, having an open space through them, as if intended for an entrance gate.

Others, in the form of rabbits, badgers, bears, and birds; others, of unknown monstrous animals.

We examined in all thirty-nine mounds; and in one, at the very base, on the floor of the natural earth upon which the mound was built (the soil of the mound being, as I said, always of a different character to the surrounding soil) we discovered and carried away with us the perfect skeleton of a man, with a few arrow heads made of flint, and a tobacco pipe, made also of stone, with a very small and narrow bowl, having a device on it like some of the hieroglyphic monsters of Egypt or old India.

In twelve we found skeletons, male and female, of the present race of Indians, with their bows and arrows, or, as was the case in four instances, their rifles and knives and tobacco pipes; some of these last elaborately carved in red stone. In Iowa we dug into a large mound, and discovered fragments of an ancient pottery, with the colors burned into the material, and various bones and skulls, arrow heads, and a flint knife, and saw.

We saw the painted rocks, also, on the Mississippi shores, near Prairie du Chien--said to be of an immemorial age--and the questions, Who was this old mound builder--whence did he come--when did he vanish from this continent? have haunted me ever since. That he was the primitive man of this planet, I think there is good reason to believe. Go where we will, to what portion soever of the earth, we shall find these mound evidences of his existence. In Asia, Europe, Africa, and all along the backbone of the American continent, he has established his record. Yet no one knows anything about him: all tradition even of him and of his works is lost. When Watkinson started from the middle of Asia to visit the newly acquired country of Russia--the beautiful, fruitful, invaluable country of the Amoor--he was confronted at the very outset by a cluster of seven of these very mounds, and his book, from that time forth, extending over thousands of miles, is full of descriptions of these unknown earthworks. I have no doubt they mark the progressive geographical movements of a race of men who came from Asia. From Behring's Strait to the Gulf they can easily be traced.

But I have said enough, and will stop here.

THE MOUND BUILDER.

Who art thou? old Mound Builder!
Where dost thou come from?
Womb of what country,
Womb of what woman
Gave birth to thee?
Who was thy sire?
Who thy sire's sire?
And who were his forbears?
Cam'st thou from Asia?
Where the race swarms like fireflies,
Where many races mark.
As with colored belts, its tropics!
What pigment stained thy skin?
Was it a red, or wert thou
Olive-dyed, or brassy?
Handsome thou couldst hardly have been,
With those high cheek-bones,
That mighty jaw, and its grim chops,
That long skull, so broad at the back parts,
That low, retreating forehead!
Doubtless thine eyes were dark,
Like fire-moons set in their sockets;
Doubtless thine hair was black,
Coarse, matted, long, and electric;
Thy skeleton that of a giant!
Well fleshed, well lashed with muscles,
As with an armor of iron;
And doubtless thou wert a brave fellow,
On the old earth, in thy time.

I think I know thee, old Mole!
Earth delver, mound builder, mine worker!
I think I have met thee before,
In times long since, and forgotten;
Many thousands of years, it may be,
Or ever old Noah, the bargeman,
Or he, the mighty Deucalion,
Wroth with the world as he found it,
Uprose in a passion of storm
And smote with his fist the sluices,
The water sluices of Cloudland--
Locked in the infinite azure--
Drowning the plains and mountains,
The shaggy beasts and hybrids,
The nameless birds--and the reptiles,
Monstrous in bulk and feature,
Which alone were thy grim contemporaries.
Here, in the State of Wisconsin,
In newly discovered America,
I, curious to know what secrets
Were hid in the mounds of thy building,
Have gone down into their chambers,
Into their innermost grave-crypts,
Unurning dry bones and skulls,
Fragments of thy mortality!
Oftentimes near to the surface
Of these thy conical earth-runes,
--For who shall tell their secret?--
Meeting with strange interlopers,
Bodies of red Winnebagoes,
Each with its bow and its arrows,
Each with its knife and its war gear,
Its porphyry-carved tobacco pipe,
Modern, I know by the fashioning.
Often, I asked of them,
As they lay there so silently,
So stiff and stark in their bones,
What right they had in these old places,
Sacred to dead men of a race they knew not?
And oh! the white laughters,
The wicked malice of the white laughters
Which they laughed at me,
With their ghastly teeth, in answer!
Was never mockery half so dismal!
As if it were none of my business.
Nor was it; save that I liked grimly to plague them,
To taunt them with their barbarity,
That they could not so much as dig their own graves,
But must needs go break those of the dead race,
Their far superiors, and masters in craft and lore!
And bury themselves there, just out of sight,
Where the vulture's beak could peck them,
Were he so obscenely minded,
And the wolf could scrape them up with his foot.

Curious for consideration
All this with its dumb recordings!
Very suggestive also,
The meeting of him, the first-born,
Who lived before the rainbow
Burst from the womb of the suncloud,
In the Bible days of the Deluge--
The meeting very suggestive
Of him, with the red Winnebago,
Such immemorial ages,
Cartooned with mighty empires,
Lying outstretched between them.
He, the forerunner of cities

--His mounds their type and rudiment--
And he, the fag-end of creation,
Meaningless sculpture of journeymen,
Doomed to the curse of extinction.
Curious, also, that I,
An islander from far-off Britain
Should meet them,
Or, the rude scrolls of them.
Both together in these wilds,
Round about the region of the Black River,
Cheek by jowl in a grave.

Who was the builder of the grave?
A primitive man, no doubt,
Of the stone era, it may be,
For of stone are his implements.
And not of metal-work, nor the device of fire.
He may have burrowed for lead
And dug out copper ore,
Dark-green as with emerald rust, from the mines
Long since forsaken, and but newly found
By the delvers at Mineral Point.
He, or his subsequents, issue of him,
I know not; and, soothe to say,
Shall never know.

Neither wilt thou ever know
Anything of me, old Mound Builder!
Of the race of Americans, nothing,
Who now, and ever henceforth,
Own, and shall own, this continent!
Heirs of the vast wealth of time
Since thou from the same land departed;
New thinkers, new builders, creators
Of life, and the scaffolds of life,
For far-off grand generations!
This skull which I handle!--
How long has the soul left it tenantless?
And what did the soul do in its house,
When this roof covered it?
Many things, many wonderful things!
It wrote its primeval history
Is earthworks and fortifications,
In animal forms and pictures,
In symbols of unknown meaning.

I know from the uncouth hieroglyphs,
And the more finished records,
That this soul had a religion,
Temples, and priests, and altars:
I think the life-giver, the sun,
Was the god unto whom he sacrificed.
I think that the moon and stars
Were the lesser gods of his worship;
And that the old serpent of Eden
Came in for a share of devotion.

I find many forms of this reptile,
Scattered along the prairies,
Coiled on the banks of the rivers,
In Iowa, and far Minnesota,
And here and there, in Wisconsin.
Now he is circular,
Gnawing his tail, like the Greek symbol,
Suggesting infinite meanings
Unto the mind of a modern
Crammed with the olden mythologies.
Now, uncoiled in the sunlight,
He stretches himself out at full length
In all his undulate longitude.
His body is a constellation of mounds,
Artfully imitative,
From the fatal tail to the more fatal head.
Overgrown they are with grass,
Short, green grass, thick and velvety,
Like well cared-for lawns,
With strange, wild flowers glittering,
Made up of alien mould
Brought hither from distant regions.

Curiously I have considered them,
Many a time in the summer,
Lying beside them under the flaming sky,
Smoking an old tobacco pipe,
Made by one of these moundsmen.
Who in his time had smoked it,
Perchance over the council fire,
Or in the dark woods where he had gone a-hunting;
In war time--in peaceful evenings,
With his squaw by his side,
And his brood of dusky papposins
Playing about in the twilight
Under the awful star-shadows.

It seemed that I was very close to him, at such times;
And that his thick-ribbed lips,
--Gone to dust for unknown centuries--
Had met mine inscrutably,
By a magic hid in the pipestem,
Making me his familiar and hail fellow.
Almost I felt his breath,
And the muffled sound of his heart-beats;
Almost I grasped his hand,
And shook the antediluvian,
With a shake of grimmest fellowship
Trying to cozen him of his grim secret.
But sudden the gusty wind came,
Laughing away the illusion,
And I was alone in the desert.

If he could only wake up now,
And confront me--that ancient salvage!
Resurgated, with his faculties
All quick about him, and his memories,
What an unheard-of powwow
Could I report to you, O friends of mine!
Who look for some revelation,
Some hint of the strange apocalypse,
Which the wit of this man, living
So near to the prime of the morning,
So near to the gates of the azure,
The awful gates of the Unseen--
Whence all that is seen proceeded--
Hath wrought in this new-found country!
I wonder if he would remember
Anything about the Land of the Immortals.
Something he would surely find
In the deeps of his consciousness
To wake up a dim reminiscence.
Dreamy shadows might haunt him,
Shadows of beautiful faces, and of terrible;
Large, lustrous eyes, full of celestial meanings,
Looking up at him, beseeching him,
From unfathomable abysses,
With glances which were a language.
The finalest secrets and mysteries,
Behind every sight, and sound, and color,
Behind all motions, and harmonies,
Which floated round about him,
Archetypes of the phenomenal!

Or, it might be, that coming suddenly in his mind
Upon some dark veil, as of Isis,
He lifts it with a key-thought,
Or the sudden memory of an arcane sign,
And beholds the gardens of Living Light,
The starry platform, palaces, and thrones--
The vast colossi, the intelligences
Moving to and fro over the flaming causeways
Of the kingdoms beyond the gates--
The infinite arches
And the stately pillars,
Upbuilt with sapphire suns
And illuminated with emerald and ruby stars,
Making cathedrals of immensity
For the everlasting worship without words.

All, or some, of the wondrous, impenetrable picture-land:
The crimson seas,
Flashing in uncreated light,
Crowded with galleons
On a mission to ports where dwell the old gods
And the mighty intellects of the Immortals.
The ceaseless occupations,
The language and the lore;
The arts, and thoughts, the music, and the instruments;
The beauty and the divine glory of the faces,
And how the Immortals love,
Whether they wed like Adamites,
Or are too happy to wed,
Living in single blessedness!
Well, I know it is rubbish,
The veriest star-dust of fancy,
To think of such a thing as this
Being a memorial heirloom of the fore-world,
Such rude effigies of men,
Such clodbrains, as these poor mound builders!

Their souls never had any priority in the life of them;
No background of eternity
Over which they had traversed
From eon to eon,
Sun-system to sun-system,
Planets and stars under them,
Planets and stars over them;
Now dwelling on immeasurable plains of azure
Bigger than space,
Dazzling with the super-tropical brightness
Of passionate flowers without a name,
In all the romance of color and beauty--
Now, in the cities celestial,
Where they made their acquaintances
With other souls, which had never been incarnated,
But were getting themselves ready
By an intuitive obedience
To a well-understood authority,
Which had never spoken,
To take upon themselves the living form
Of some red-browed, fire-eyed Mars-man,
Some pale-faced, languishing son
Of the Phalic planet Venus,
Or wherever else it might be,
In what remote star soever
Quivering on shadowy battlements.
Along the lines of the wilderness,
Of worlds beyond worlds,
These souls were to try their fortunes.

Surely, no experience of this sort
Ever happened unto them,
Although one would like to invest them
With the glory of it, for the sake of the soul.
But they were, to speak truth of them,
A sort of journeyman work,
Not a Phidian statuary,
But a first cast of man,
A rude draft of him;
Huge gulfs, as of dismal Tartarus,
Separating him from the high-born Caucasian.
He, a mere Mongolian,
As good, perhaps, in his faculties,
As any Jap. or Chinaman--
But not of the full-orbed brain,
Star-blown, and harmonious
With all sweet voices as of flutes in him,
And viols, bassoons, and organs;
Capable of the depths and circumferences of thought,
Of sphynxine entertainments,
And the dramas of life and death.

A plain fellow, and a practical,
With picture in him and symbol,
And thus not altogether clay-made,
But touched with the fire of the rainbow,
And the finger of the first light,
Waiting for the second and the third light,
Expectant through the ages,
And disappointed;
Never receiving more,
But going down, at last, a dark man,
And a lonely, through the dark galleries
Of death, and behind the curtain
Where all is light.

I like to think of him, and see his works:
I like to read him in his mounds,
And think I can make out a good deal of his history.
He was a half-dumb man,
Very sorrowful to see,
But brave, nevertheless, and bravely
Struggling to fling out his thoughts,
In a kind of dumb speech;
Struggling, indeed, after poetry
Daedalian forms, and eloquence;
Ambitious of distinguishing himself
In the presence of wolves and bisons
And all organic creatures;
Of making his claim good
Against these, his urgent disputants,
That he was lord of the planet.

If he could not write books,
He could scrawl the earth with his record:
He could make hieroglyphs,
Constellations of mounds and animals,
Effigies of unnamable things,
Monsters, and hybrids unnatural,
Bred of grotesque fancies; and man-forms.
These last, none of your pigmies
A span long in the womb,
And six feet, at full growth, out of it--
But bigger in chest and paunch,
In the girth of his muscular shackle-bones,
Round his colossal shoulders,
Round his Memnonian countenance,
Over the dome of his skull-crypts--
From crown to foot of his body--
Than grimmest of old Welsh giants,
Grimmest of Araby ogres!

Many a time talking with gray hunters,
Who leaned on their rifles against a tree,
And made the bright landscape
And the golden morning fuller of gold and brightness
By the contrast of their furrowed faces,
Their shaggy eyebrows,
And the gay humor laughing in their eyes,
Their unkempt locks, their powder horns, and buskins,
And the wild attire, in general, of their persons--
Many a time have I heard them
Tell of these man-effigies
Lying prone on the floors of the prairie.
And, in my whim for correspondence,
And perpetual seeking after identities,
I have likened them to the stone sculptures, in cathedrals,
Cut by pious hands out of black marble,
Memorial resemblances of holy abbots,
Of Christian knights, founders of religious houses,
Of good lords of fair manors,
Who left largess to these houses,
Beneficed the arched wine-cellars
With yearly butts of canary,
Or, during their lifetime,
Beautified the west front with stately windows
Of colored glass, emblazoned with Scripture stories,
The sunlight in shadowy reflections painting the figures
With blue and gold and crimson
Upon the cold slabs of the pavement.

These effigies, stiff, formal,
Rudely fashioned, and of poor art,
All of them lying, black and stark,
Like a corpse-pageantry visioned in some monk's dream,
Lying thus, in the transepts,
On the cold, gray floor of the cathedral.

A curious conceit, truly!
But the prairie is also consecrated,
And quite as sacred I think it
As Rome's most holy of holies.
It blossoms and runs over with religion.
These meek and beautiful flowers!
What sweet thoughts and divine prayers are in them!
These song birds! what anthems of praise
Gush out of their ecstatic throats!
I pray you, also, tell me,
What floors, sacred to what dead,
Can compare with the elaborate mosaic work
Of this wide, vast, outstretching floor of grass?
As good a place, I take it,
For the mound builder to make his man-effigies
Out of the mould in,
As the cathedral is, for its artists
To make man-effigies out of the black marble!
And the thought, too, is the same!
The thought of the primeval savage of the stone era,
Roaming about in these wilds,
Before the beautiful Christ
Made the soul more beautiful,
Revealed the terror of its divine forces,
Announced its immortality,
And was nailed on a tree for His goodness!
While the monk, therefore, lay yet in the pagan brain,
And' Time had not so much as thought
Of sowing the seed for his coming--
While his glorious cathedral, which, as we now know it,
Is an epic poem built in immortal stone,
Had no archetype except in the dreams of God,
Dim hints of it, lying like hopeless runes
In the forest trees and arches,
Its ornamentations in the snow drifts, and the summer leaves and flowers--
No doubt, the mound-builder's man, put in effigy on the prairie,
Had been a benefactor, in his way and time;
Or, a great warrior; or learned teacher
Of things symbolized in certain mound-groups,
And which, from their arrangement,
Appertain, it would seem, to mysteries,
And ghostly communications.
They thought to keep green his memory,
The worship of him and his good deeds,
Unto the end of time,
Throughout all generations.
The holy men, born of Christ,
All Christendom but the development of him,
And all the world his debtor;
Even God owing him more largely
Than He has thought fit to pay back,
Taking the immense credit
Of nigh two thousand years!
These holy men, so born and cultured,
Could think of no way wiser,
Of no securer method
Of preserving the memory of their saints,
And of those who did good to them,
Than this rude, monumental way of the savage.
So singular is man,
So old-fashioned his thinkings,
So wonderful and similar his sympathies!
Everywhere the same, with a difference;
Cast in the same moulds,
Of the same animal wants, and common mind,
Of the same passions and vices,
Hating, loving, killing, lying--
A vast electrical chain
Running through tradition, and auroral history,
Up through the twilights,
And blazing noons,
Through vanishing and returning twilights,
Through azure nights of stars--
Epochs of civilization--
Unto the calmer glory,
Unto the settled days,
Unto the noble men--
_Nunc formosissimus annus!_

Thus do I, flinging curiously the webs of fancy
Athwart the time-gulfs, and the ages,
Reconcile, after a kind, the primitive savage of America
With the wonderful genealogies--
Upsprung from the vital sap
Of the great life-tree, Igdrasil!
Thick and populous nations
Heavily bending its branches,
Each in its autumn time of one or two thousand years,
Like ripe fruits, fully developed and perfected,
From the germ whence they proceeded;
Nourished by strong saps of vitality,
By the red, rich blood of matured centuries,
By passionate Semitic sunlights;
Beautiful as the golden apples of the Hesperides!
Radiating, also, a divine beauty,
The flower-blossom and the aroma,
The final music, of a ripe humanity,
Whereof each particular nation
Was in its way and turn
The form and the expression,

Grand autumns were some of them!
Grand and beautiful, like that of Greece,
Whose glorious consummation always reminds me
Of moving statues, music, and richest painting and architecture:
Her landscapes shimmering in golden fire-mists,
Which hang over the wondrously colored woods,
In a dreamy haze of splendor;
Revealing arched avenues, and tiny glades,
Cool, quiet spots, and dim recesses,
Green swards, and floral fairy lands,
Sweeping to the hilltops;
Illuminating the rivers in their gladsome course,
And the yellow shadows of the rolling marshes,
And the cattle of the farmer as they stand knee-deep
Switching their tails by the shore;
Lighting up the singing faces,
The sweet, laughing, singing faces,
Of the merry, playful brooks,
Now running away over shallows,
Now into gurgling eddies;
Now under fallen trees,
Past beaver dams long deserted;
Now under shady banks,
Lost in the tangled wood-growths;
Quivering now with, their laughter,
Out in the open meadow,
Flowing, singing and laughing,
Over the weeds and rushes,
Flowing and singing forever!

Plastic and beautiful, and running over
With Schiller's 'play impulse,' was the genius of Greece,
Of which her institutions and civility were the embodiment.
Other autumn times of the nations
Were calm and peaceful,
Symbolized above, as fruit on the branches
Of the life-tree, Igdrasil!
And when their time came,
They dropped down silently,
Like apples from their boughs on the autumn grass;
Silently dropped down, on moonlight plains,
In the presence of the great company of the stars,
And the flaming constellations,
Which evermore keep solemn watch over their graves.
Others were blown off suddenly,
And prematurely--all the elements enraged against them;
And others, like the Dead Sea fruit,
Were rotten at the heart before their prime!

The old mound builder stands at the base of the tree,
At the base of the wonderful tree Igdrasil,
And the mighty branches thereof,
Which hang over his head in flame-shadows,
Germinated, and blossomed with nations,
In other lands, in another hemisphere
Far away, over the measureless brine,
From the mother earth where he was planted,
Where he grew and flourished,
And solved the riddle of life,
And tried death,
And the riddle beyond death.

He thought this passionate America,
With its vast results of physical life,
Its beautiful and sublime portraitures,
Its far-sweeping prairies, rolling in grassy waves
Like the green billows of an inland sea--
Its blue-robed mountains
Piercing the bluer heavens with their peaks--
Its rivers, lakes, and forests--
A roomy, and grand-enough earth to inhabit,
Without thought of anything beyond it.

And yet he is related to all
That was, and is, and shall be!
That idea which was clothed in his flesh
Is fleshed in I know not how many
Infinite forms and varieties,
In every part of the earth,
In this day of my generation.
But the flesh is a little different,
And here and there the organism a nobler one,
And the idea bigger, broader, deeper,
Of a more divine quality and diapason.
He is included in us, as the lesser in the greater;
All our enactments are repetitions of his;
Enlarged and adorned;
And we pass through all his phases,
Some time or other, in our beginnings--
Through his, and an infinity of larger ones--
And we have the same inevitable endings.

A UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE:

ITS POSSIBILITY, SCIENTIFIC NECESSITY, AND APPROPRIATE CHARACTERISTICS

The idea of the possibility and desirableness of a universal language, scientifically constituted; a common form of speech for all the nations of mankind; for the remedy of the confusion and the great evil of Babel, is not wholly new. The celebrated Leibnitz entertained it. It was, we believe, glanced at among the schemes of Lord Monboddo. Bishop Wilkins devoted years of labor to the accomplishment of the task, and thought he had accomplished it. He published the results of his labors in heavy volumes, which have remained, as useless lumber, on the shelves of the antiquarian, or of those who are curious in rare books. A young gentleman of this city, of a rare genius, by the name of Fairbank, who died by a tragical fate a few years since, labored assiduously to the same end. A society of learned men has recently been organized in Spain, with their headquarters at Barcelona, devoted to the same work. Numerous other attempts have probably been made. In all these attempts, projects, and labors, the design has never transcended the purpose of _Invention_. The effort has been simply to _contrive_ a new form of speech, and to persuade mankind to accept it;--a task herculean and hopeless in its magnitude and impracticability; but looking still in the direction of the supply of one of the greatest needs of human improvement. The existence of no less than two or three thousand different languages and idioms on the surface of the planet, in this age of railroad and steamship communication, presents, obviously, one of the most serious obstacles to that unification of humanity which so many concurrent indications tend, on the other hand, to prognosticate.

Another and different outlook toward a unity of speech for the race comes up from a growing popular impression that all existing languages must be ultimately and somewhat rapidly smelted into one by the mere heat and attrition of our intense modern international intercourse. Each nationality is beginning to put forth its pretensions as the proper and probable matrix of the new agglomerate, or philological pudding-stone, which is vaguely expected to result. The English urge the commercial supremacy of their tongue; the French the colloquial and courtly character of theirs; the Germans the inherent energy and philosophical adaptation of the German; the Spanish the wide territorial distribution and the pompous euphony of that idiom; and so of the other nationalities.

Both invention, which is the genius of adaptation, and the blending influence of mere intercourse, may have their appropriate place as auxiliaries, in the reconstruction of human speech, in accordance with the exigencies of the new era which is dawning on the world; but there is another and far more basic and important element, which may, and perhaps we may say must, appear upon the stage, and enter into the solution. This is the element of positive Scientific _Discovery_ in the lingual domain. It may be found that every elementary sound of the human voice is _inherently laden_ by _nature herself_ with a primitive significance; that the small aggregate of these meanings is precisely that handful of the Primitive Categories of all _Thought_ and all _Being_ which the Philosophers, from Aristotle up to Kant, have so industriously and painfully sought for. The germ of this idea was incipiently and crudely struggling in the mind of the late distinguished philologist, Dr. Charles Kreitser, formerly professor of languages in the University of Virginia, and author of numerous valuable articles in Appletons' 'Cyclopaedia;' the most learned man, doubtless, that unfortunate Hungary has contributed to our American body of savans. This element of discovery may, in the end, take the lead, and immensely preponderate in importance over the other two factors already mentioned as participating in the solution of a question of a planetary language. The idea certainly has no intrinsic improbability, that the normal language of mankind should be matter of discovery as the normal music of the race has been already. There was an instinctual and spontaneous development of music in advance of the time when science acted reflectively upon the elements and reconstituted it in accordance with the musical laws so discovered. Why may we not, why ought we not even to expect, analogically, that the same thing will occur for speech?

Setting aside, however, for the present occasion, the profounder inquiry into the inherent significance of sounds, and into all that flows logically from that novel and recondite investigation, we propose at present to treat in a more superficial way the subject indicated in the title of this article--A Universal Language; its Possibility, Scientific Necessity, and Appropriate Characteristics.

The expansion of the scope of science is at this day such that the demand for discriminating technicalities exceeds absolutely the capacity of all existing language for condensed and appropriate combinations and derivations. Hence speech must soon fail to serve the new developments of thought, unless the process of word-building can be itself proportionately improved; unless, in other words, a new and scientifically constructed Language can be devised adequate to all the wants of science. It would seem that there should occur, in the range of possibilities, the existence of the _Plan_ in _Nature_ of a _New_ and _Universal Language_, copious, flexible, and expressive beyond measure; competent to meet the highest demands of definition and classification; and containing within itself a natural, compact, infinitely varied, and inexhaustible terminology for each of the Sciences, as ordained by fixed laws preexistent in the nature of things.

This language should not then be an arbitrary contrivance, but should be elaborated from the fundamental laws of speech, existing in the constitution of the universe and of man, and logically traced to this special application. This knowledge of the underlying laws of speech should determine the mode of the combination of _Elementary Sounds_ into Syllables and Words, and of Words into Sentences naturally expressive of given conceptions or ideas. Such a language would rest on discovery, in that precise sense in which discovery differs from invention, and would have in itself infinite capacities and powers of expression, and again of suggesting thought; and might perhaps come to be recognized as the most stupendous discovery to which the human intellect is capable of attaining. 'In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.' The Word, or the _Logos_, is the underlying or hidden _Wisdom_ of which _speech_ is the external utterance or expression. Who can say how profoundly and intimately the underlying and hitherto undiscovered Laws of Speech may be consociated with the basic Principles _of all truth_ embedded in the Wisdom-Nature of God himself? The old Massonites had a faith, derived from certain mystical utterances of the Greek Philosophers, that whosoever should discover the right name for anything, would have absolute power over that thing. The Wisdom of Plato and the deeper Wisdom of Christ meet and are married to each other in the conception of John when he makes the startling assertion that the Logos, the Logic, the Law, the Word, is synonymous with God himself.

The possibilities of the existence of such a language, divinely and providentially prepared in the constitution of things, and awaiting discovery, begins to be perceived, if the conception of the existence of an absolutely universal analogy be permitted fairly to take possession of the mind. Such an infinite scheme of analogy, rendering the same principles alike applicable in all spheres, must itself, in turn, rest upon a Divine Unity of Plan reigning throughout the Universe, the execution of which Plan is the act or the continuity of the acts of Creation. The Religious Intuition of the Race has persistently insisted upon the existence of this Unity, to the conception of which the scientific world is only now approximatingly and laboriously ascending.

If there be such Analogy in Nature furnishing an echo and an image in every department of Being of all that exists in every other department of Being, certainly that Analogy must be _most distinct_ and _clearly discoverable as between the Elements, or the lowest and simplest Constituents of Being in each Sphere_. The lowest and simplest elements of Language are Oral Sounds, which in written Languages are represented by Letters, and constitute the Alphabets of those Languages. The Alphabets of Sound must be clearly distinguished from the mere Letter-Alphabets by which the Sounds are variously represented. The Sound-Alphabets (the Scales of Phonetic Elements) of any two Languages differ only in the fact that one of the Languages may include a few Sounds which are not heard in the other, or may omit a few which are.

The Mouth, the Larynx (a cartilaginous box at the top of the windpipe), and the Nose--the compound organ of speech--constitute an instrument, capable, like the accordeon, for instance, of a certain number of distinct touches and consequent vocal effects, which produce the sounds heard in all existing Languages. The total of the possible sounds so produced or capable of production may be called the Crude or Unwinnowed Alphabet of Nature, or the Natural Alphabet of Human Language generically or universally considered. Thus, for instance, the sound represented in English and the Southern European Languages generally, by the letter _m_, is made by the contact of the two lips, while at the same time the sounding breath so interrupted is projected upon the _sounding board_ of the head _through the nose_, whence _resounding_, it is discharged outwardly, this process giving to the sound produced that peculiar effect called _nasal_ or _nose-sound_; and precisely this sound can be produced by the voice in no other way. This sound is, nevertheless, heard in nearly all Languages, although there are a few imperfect savage dialects which are destitute of it. The production of this sound, as above described, will be obvious to the reader if he will pronounce the word _my_, and will attend to the position of the lips when he begins to utter the word. Let him attempt to say _my_, without closing the lips, and the impossibility of doing so will be apparent. The production of the sound is therefore mechanical and local; and the number of sounds to be produced by the organ fixed and limited, therefore, by Nature herself. The very limited number of possible sounds may be guessed by the fact that of sounds produced by _completely closing the two lips_, there are only three, namely, _p_, _b_, _m_, in all the Languages of the earth (as in _p_-ie, _b_-y, _m_-y).

It is the same with all the other vocal sounds. They are _necessarily_ produced at certain fixed localities or Seats of Sound, in the mouth, and by a certain fixed modulation or mechanical use of the Organs of Speech. At least they are produced in and are confined to certain circumscribed regions of the mouth, and so differ in the method of their production as to be appropriately distributed into certain Natural Classes: as Vowels and Consonants; Labials (Lip Sounds); Linguo-dentals (Tongue-Teeth Sounds); Gutturals (Back-Mouth or Throat Sounds), etc., etc.

From the whole number of sounds which it is possible to produce--the whole Crude Natural Alphabet--one Language of our existing Languages selects a certain number less than the whole, and another Language doing the same, it happens that while they mainly coincide, they, so to speak, shingle over each other at random, and it follows: 1. That the Number of Sounds in different Languages is not uniform; 2. That of any two Languages compared, one will chance to have several sounds not heard in the other; and, 3. The erroneous impression is made upon the casual and superficial observer that in the aggregate of all Languages there must be an immense number of sounds; whereas, in fact, the total Alphabet of Vocal Sounds in nature, like the Gamut of Colors or Musical Tones, is quite limited, if we attend only to those which distinctly differ, or stand at appropriate and appreciable distances from each other.

Further to illustrate: Assume that there are, capable of being clearly discriminated by the human ear, say sixty-four or seventy-two distinct Elementary Sounds of the human voice, in all--as many, for example, as there are Chemical Elements; some existing Languages select and make use of twenty, some of twenty-four, some of thirty, and some of forty of these sounds, omitting the rest.

But--and here is a very important point and a real discovery in this investigation--it will be found, if closely attended to, that a certain selection of one half of this number, say thirty-two or thirty-six of these sounds, embraces the whole body of vocal elements _usually occurring_ in all the forms of speech on the planet; the remaining half consisting of rare, exceptional, and, we may nearly say, useless sounds. This statement will again be better understood by analogy with what regards the Elements of Chemistry. Just about one half of the known elements of matter occur with frequency, and enter into useful and ordinary combinations to produce the great mass of known substances. The remaining half are unfrequent, obscure, and relatively unimportant; some of them never having been seen even by many of our most eminent chemists. Even should a few new elements be discovered, it cannot be anticipated that any one of them should prove to be of leading importance, like oxygen, carbon, or sulphur.

On the other hand, should some future great chemical discovery realize the dream of the alchemists, and enable us to transmute iron into gold, and indeed every chemical Element into every other chemical Element (convertible identity), still the sixty-four (nearly) Chemical Elements now known would remain the real Elements of Organic and Inorganic Compounds, in a sense just as important as that in which they are now so regarded. The now known Elements would still continue to constitute _The Crude Natural Alphabet of Matter_, and be correspondential with _The Crude Natural Alphabet of Sounds in Language_. The transmutability of one element into another indefinitely, would not, in any but a certain absolute or transcendental sense, cause the Elements to be regarded as one, or as any less number than now. It would be, on the contrary, a fact precisely corresponding with the actual and well-known transmutability of speech-sounds into each other as occurs in the phenomena of Etymology and Comparative Philology. This is so extensive, as now understood by Comparative Philologists, that it would be hardly difficult to prove that every sound is capable of being transmuted into every other sound, either directly or through intermediates; and yet we do not in the least tend to cease to regard the several sounds as they stand as the real Elements of Speech.

It is this transmutability of Correspondential Elements in another sphere of Being, which bases the presumption, or gives to it at least countenance from a new quarter, that the metals and other chemical Elements may be actually convertible substances by means of processes not yet suspected or sufficiently understood. The more careful study of the Analogy with the Elements of other spheres, and perhaps specifically with the Elements of Language, under the presiding influence of larger scientific generalizations and views than those which now prevail in the scientific world, may be, and, it would even seem, ought to be the means of revealing the law of Elementary Transmutations in the Chemical Domain. The expectation of a future discovery of the resolution of the existing Elements of Matter, and their convertibility even, is reviving in the chemical field, and even so distinguished a chemist and thinker as Professor Draper does not hesitate to sustain its probability by the weight of his authority and belief. The process by which the transmutation of Elements is actually effected in Language, is by _Slow and Continued Attrition_. These very words suggest a process but little resorted to in chemical experiment, but which probably intervenes in the Laboratory of Nature, when she makes the diamond out of a substance, simple carbon, the most familiarly known to chemistry, but out of which the human chemist is entirely unable by any process known to him to produce that precious gem.

Whether this particular hint is of any value or not, one thing is certain, that it is in the direction of Universal and Comparative Science--the analogical echo of the parts of one Domain of Being with the parts of another Domain and of all other Domains of Being; of the phenomena of one Science with the phenomena of other Sciences; and especially as among the Elements of each--that we must look for the next grand advances in Scientific Discovery. The world urgently requires the existence of a new class of scientific students who shall concern themselves precisely with these questions of the relations and the indications of unity between the different Sciences; not to displace, but to transcend and to cooerdinate the labors of that noble Army of Scientific Specialists, with which Humanity is now so extensively and so happily provided.

The _Select_ Lingual Alphabet of Nature, as distinguished from the _Crude_ Natural Alphabet above described, is then the expurgated scale of sounds, say thirty-two; the sounds of usual occurrence in polished languages; one half of the whole number; the residuum after rejecting an equal number of obscure, unimportant, or barbarous sounds, of possible production and of real occurrence in some of the cruder Languages, and as crude elements even in the more refined Languages now extant. The two sounds of _th_ in English, as in _th_igh and _th_y (the _theta_ of the Greek), and the two shades of the _ch_-sound in German, as in na_ch_ and i_ch_, are instances of crude sounds in refined Languages, for which other Languages, more fastidious for Euphony, as French and Italian for example, naturally substitute _t_, _d_, and _k_ (_c_). The obscure and crude sounds would always retain, however (in respect to the idea of a Universal Alphabet), a subordinate place and value, and should be gathered and represented in a Supplementary Alphabet for special and particular uses.

It has been the mistake of Phoneticians and Philologians, heretofore, to recognize no difference in the relative importance of sounds. They have sought, through every barbarous dialect, as well as every refined tongue, and gathered by the drag-net of observation, every barbarous and obscure as well as every polite sound which by any accident ever enters into the constitution of speech. The clucks of Hottentot Tribes and the whistle heard in some of the North American Languages have been reckoned in, upon easy terms, with the more serviceable and euphonious members of the Phonetic family, and mere trivial shades of sounds were put upon the same footing as the pivotal sounds themselves. This is as if certain obdurate compounds were introduced in the first instance among Chemical Elements--which subsequent analysis may even prove to be the case in respect to some substances that we now recognize as Elements--and then, by assigning to the least important of Elements the same rank, and giving to them the same attention as to the most important, the number were augmented beyond the practical or working body of Elements, and our treatises upon Chemistry encumbered by a mass of useless matter. Or again, it is as if among the Elements of Music were included all conceivable sounds, as the squeal, the shriek, the sob, etc.; and as if, in addition to this, the least intervals, the quarter tones for instance, were ranked as the musical equals of the whole tones.