Essays · Sir Walter Raleigh (4/6)

“And if we cannot deny, but that God hath given virtues to springs and fountains, to cold earth, to plants and stones, minerals, and to the excremental parts of the basest living creatures, why should we rob the beautiful stars of their working powers? for seeing they are many in number, and of eminent beauty and magnitude, we may not think, that in the treasury of his wisdom, who is infinite, there can be wanting (even for every star) a peculiar virtue and operation; as every herb, plant, fruit, and flower adorning the face of the earth, hath the like. For as these were not created to beautify the earth alone, and to cover and shadow her dusty face, but otherwise for the use of man and beast, to feed them and cure them; so were not those uncountable glorious bodies set in the firmament, to no other end, than to adorn it; but for instruments and organs of his divine providence, so far as it hath pleased his just will to determine.

“Origen upon this place of Genesis, Let there be light in the firmament, etc., affirmeth, that the stars are not causes (meaning per chance binding causes); but are as open books, wherein are contained and set down all things whatsoever to come; but not to be read by the eyes of human wisdom: which latter part I believe well, and the saying of Syracides withal; That there are hid yet greater things than these be, and we have seen but a few of his works. And though, for the capacity of men, we know somewhat, yet in the true and uttermost virtues of herbs and plants, which our selves sow and set, and which grow under our feet, we are in effect ignorant; much more in the powers and working of celestial bodies.⁠ ⁠… But in this question of fate, the middle course is to be followed, that as with the heathen we do not bind God to his creatures, in this supposed necessity of destiny; and so on the contrary we do not rob those beautiful creatures of their powers and offices⁠ ⁠… And that they wholly direct the reasonless mind, I am resolved: for all those which were created mortal, as birds, beasts, and the like, are left to their natural appetites; over all which, celestial bodies (as instruments and executioners of God’s providence) have absolute dominion⁠ ⁠… And Saint Augustine says, Deus regit inferiora corpora per superiora; ‘God ruleth the bodies below by those above.’⁠ ⁠… It was therefore truly affirmed, Sapiens adiuvabit opus astrorum, quemadmodum agrlcola terrae naturam; ‘A wise man assisteth the work of the stars, as the husbandman helpeth the nature of the soil.’ Lastly, we ought all to know, that God created the stars as he did the rest of the universal; whose influences may be called his reserved and unwritten laws⁠ ⁠… But it was well said of Plotinus, that the stars were significant, but not efficient, giving them yet something less than their due: and therefore as I do not consent with them, who would make those glorious creatures of God virtueless: so I think that we derogate from his eternal and absolute power and providence, to ascribe to them the same dominion over our immortal souls, which they have over all bodily substances, and perishable natures: for the souls of men loving and fearing God, receive influence from that divine light itself, whereof the sun’s clarity, and that of the stars, is by Plato called but a shadow, Lumen est umbra Dei, et Deus est lumen luminis; ‘Light is the shadow of God’s brightness, who is the light of light.’ ”

We are reminded by this of Du Bartas’s poem on the “Probability of the Celestial Orbs being inhabited,” translated by Sylvester:13

I’ll ne’er believe that the arch-Architect

With all these fires the heavenly arches deck’d

Only for show, and with their glistering shields

T’ amaze poor shepherds, watching in the fields;

I’ll ne’er believe that the least flow’r that pranks

Our garden borders, or the common banks,

And the least stone, that in her warming lap

Our kind nurse Earth doth covetously wrap,

Hath some peculiar virtue of its own,

And that the glorious stars of heav’n have none.

Nor is the following brief review and exaltation of the subject of all history unworthy of a place in this History of the World:

“Man, thus compounded and formed by God, was an abstract, or model, or brief story in the universal:⁠ ⁠… for out of the earth and dust was formed the flesh of man, and therefore heavy and lumpish; the bones of his body we may compare to the hard rocks and stones, and therefore strong and durable; of which Ovid:

Inde genus durum sumus experiensque laborum,

Et documenta damus, qua simus origine nati:

From thence our kind hard-hearted is,

Enduring pain and care,

Approving, that our bodies of

A stony nature are.

His blood, which disperseth itself by the branches of veins through all the body, may be resembled to those waters, which are carried by brooks and rivers over all the earth; his breath to the air, his natural heat to the enclosed warmth which the earth hath in itself, which, stirred up by the heat of the sun, assisteth nature in the speedier procreation of those varieties, which the earth bringeth forth; our radical moisture, oil or balsamum (whereon the natural heat feedeth and is maintained) is resembled to the fat and fertility of the earth; the hairs of man’s body, which adorns, or overshadows it, to the grass, which covereth the upper face and skin of the earth; our generative power, to nature, which produceth all things; our determinations, to the light, wandering, and unstable clouds, carried everywhere with uncertain winds; our eyes to the light of the sun and moon; and the beauty of our youth, to the flowers of the spring, which, either in a very short time, or with the sun’s heat, dry up and wither away, or the fierce puffs of wind blow them from the stalks; the thoughts of our mind, to the motion of angels; and our pure understanding (formerly called mens, and that which always looketh upwards) to those intellectual natures, which are always present with God; and lastly, our immortal souls (while they are righteous) are by God himself beautified with the title of his own image and similitude.”

But man is not in all things like nature: “For this tide of man’s life, after it once turneth and declineth, ever runneth with a perpetual ebb and falling stream, but never floweth again, our leaf once fallen, springeth no more; neither doth the sun or the summer adorn us again with the garments of new leaves and flowers.”

There is a flowing rhythm in some of these sentences like the rippling of rivers, hardly to be matched in any prose or verse. The following is his poem on the decay of Oracles and Pantheism:

“The fire which the Chaldeans worshipped for a god, is crept into every man’s chimney, which the lack of fuel starveth, water quencheth, and want of air suffocateth: Jupiter is no more vexed with Juno’s jealousies; death hath persuaded him to chastity, and her to patience; and that time which hath devoured itself, hath also eaten up both the bodies and images of him and his; yea, their stately temples of stone and dureful marble. The houses and sumptuous buildings erected to Baal, can nowhere be found upon the earth; nor any monument of that glorious temple consecrated to Diana. There are none now in Phoenicia, that lament the death of Adonis; nor any in Libya, Creta, Thessalia, or elsewhere, that can ask counsel or help from Jupiter. The great god Pan hath broken his pipes; Apollo’s priests are become speechless; and the trade of riddles in oracles, with the devil’s telling men’s fortunes therein, is taken up by counterfeit Egyptians, and cozening astrologers.”

In his Discourse of War in General, (commencing with almost a heroic verse, “The ordinary theme and argument of history is war,”) are many things well thought, and many more well said. He thus expands the maxim that corporations have no soul: “But no senate nor civil assembly can be under such natural impulses to honor and justice as single persons⁠ ⁠… For a majority is nobody when that majority is separated, and a collective body can have no synteresis, or divine ray, which is in the mind of every man, never assenting to evil, but upbraiding and tormenting him when he does it: but the honor and conscience that lies in the majority is too thin and diffusive to be efficacious; for a number can do a great wrong, and call it right, and not one of that majority blush for it. Hence it is, that though a public assembly may lie under great censures, yet each member looks upon himself as little concerned: this must be the reason why a Roman senate should act with less spirit and less honor than any single Roman would do.”

He then in the same treatise leaps with easy and almost merry elasticity from the level of his discourse to the heights of his philosophy: “And it is more plain there is not in nature a point of stability to be found; everything either ascends or declines: when wars are ended abroad, sedition begins at home, and when men are freed from fighting for necessity, they quarrel through ambition.”

And he thus concludes this discourse: “We must look a long way back to find the Romans giving laws to nations, and their consuls bringing kings and princes bound in chains to Rome in triumph; to see men go to Greece for wisdom, or Ophir for gold; when now nothing remains but a poor paper remembrance of their former condition.

“It would be an unspeakable advantage, both to the public and private, if men would consider that great truth, that no man is wise or safe, but he that is honest. All I have designed is peace to my country; and may England enjoy that blessing when I shall have no more proportion in it than what my ashes make!”

If his philosophy is for the most part poor, yet the conception and expression are rich and generous.

His maxims are not true or impartial, but are conceived with a certain magnanimity which was natural to him, as if a selfish policy could easily afford to give place in him to a more universal and true.

As a fact evincing Raleigh’s poetic culture and taste, it is said that, in a visit to the poet Spenser on the banks of the Mulla, which is described in Colin Clout’s Come Home Again, he anticipated the judgment of posterity with respect to the Faerie Queene, and by his sympathy and advice encouraged the poet to go on with his work, which by the advice of other friends, among whom was Sidney, he had laid aside. His own poems, though insignificant in respect to number and length, and not yet collected into a separate volume, or rarely accredited to Raleigh, deserve the distinct attention of the lover of English poetry, and leave such an impression on the mind that this leaf of his laurels, for the time, well nigh overshadows all the rest.14 In these few rhymes, as in that country he describes, his life naturally culminates and his secret aspirations appear. They are in some respects more trustworthy testimonials to his character than state papers or tradition; for poetry is a piece of very private history, which unostentatiously lets us into the secret of a man’s life, and is to the reader what the eye is to the beholder, the characteristic feature which cannot be distorted or made to deceive. Poetry is always impartial and unbiased evidence. The whole life of a man may safely be referred to a few deep experiences. When he only sings a more musical line than usual, all his actions have to be retried by a newer and higher standard than before.

The pleasing poem entitled “A Description of the Country’s Recreations,”15 also printed among the poems of Sir Henry Wotton, is well known. The following, which bears evident marks of his pen, we will quote, from its secure and continent rhythm:

As you came from the holy land

Of Walsingham,

Met you not with my true love

By the way as you came?

How shall I know your true love,

That have met many one,

As I went to the holy land,

That have come, that have gone.

She is neither white nor brown,

But as the heavens fair;

There is none hath a form so divine,

In the earth or the air.

Such a one did I meet, good Sir,

Such an angelic face;

Who like a queen, like a nymph did appear,

By her gait, by her grace:

She hath left me here all alone,

All alone as unknown,

Who sometimes did me lead with herself,

And me loved as her own:

What’s the cause that she leaves you alone,

And a new way doth take:

Who loved you once as her own

And her joy did you make?

I have loved her all my youth,

But now, old as you see,

Love likes not the falling fruit

From the withered tree:

Know that Love is a careless child

And forgets promise past,

He is blind, he is deaf, when he list,

And in faith never fast:

His desire is a dureless content,

And a trustless joy;

He is won with a world of despair,

And is lost with a toy.

Of women-kind such indeed is the love,

Or the word love abused;

Under which, many childish desires

And conceits are excused:

But true love is a durable fire

In the mind ever burning;

Never sick, never old, never dead,

From itself never turning.

The following will be new to many of our readers:

Prais’d be Diana’s fair and harmless light;

Prais’d be the dews, wherewith she moists the ground;

Prais’d be her beams, the glory of the night;

Prais’d be her power, by which all powers abound!

Prais’d be her nymphs, with whom she decks the woods;

Prais’d be her knights, in whom true honor lives;

Prais’d be that force by which she moves the floods!

Let that Diana shine, which all these gives!

In heaven, queen she is among the spheres;

She mistress-like, makes all things to be pure;

Eternity in her oft-change she bears;

She, Beauty is; by her, the fair endure.

Time wears her not; she doth his chariot guide;

Mortality below her orb is plac’d;

By her the virtues of the stars down slide;

In her is Virtue’s perfect image cast!

A knowledge pure it is her worth to know:

With Circes let them dwell that think not so!

Though we discover in his verses the vices of the courtier, and they are not equally sustained, as if his genius were warped by the frivolous society of the Court, he was capable of rising to unusual heights. His genius seems to have been fitted for short flights of unmatched sweetness and vigor, but by no means for the sustained loftiness of the epic poet. One who read his verses would say that he had not grown to be the man he promised. They have occasionally a strength of character and heroic tone rarely expressed or appreciated; and powers and excellences so peculiar, as to be almost unique specimens of their kind in the language. Those which have reference to his death have been oftenest quoted, and are the best. “The Soul’s Errand”16 deserves to be remembered till her mission is accomplished in the world.

We quote the following, not so well known, with some omissions, from the commencement of⁠—