The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, No. 58, August, 1862

I resolved to give up steel for some metal or substance of finer grain. I almost impoverished myself in purchasing plates of the finer metals, before it occurred to me to try glass, and had to laugh at my own stupidity when I discovered that in the last analysis glass showed much smoother than any of the rest. I immediately obtained a great many specimens of glass, and spent much time in subjecting them to my lenses only to see how much fibrous appearance, or unevenness, could be brought before the eye from a smooth surface. I found one excellent specimen, and gave myself up to grinding it to the utmost extent consistent with its strength.

I felt now that I was about to make a final test. It would be not only a test of my new plate, but of my own sanity, which I had at various times doubted. I felt, that, unless my idea should be proved true, I could no longer trust my reason, which had at every step beckoned me on to the next. I had studied medicine enough in my father's office long ago to know that either sanity or insanity may come as a reality from a mind's determined verdict on itself. When, therefore, I again sat down to analyze my daguerrotype of the planet, it was with the awe and fear which might beset one standing on a ledge between a frightful chasm and a transcendent height, and not knowing which was to receive him.

From the first burst of the sunlight over the world, I sat at my task. Each instrument, each lens I used, I spent an hour or hours over, giving it the finest polish or nicety of adjustment to which it could be brought. Into that day I had distilled my past; into it I was willing to distil the eternity that was before me. With each now application, the field of the planet shrank a thousand leagues, but each time the light deepened. According to my principle, there was no doubt that some object would be revealed before the space became too limited, provided nothing interfered with the distinctness of the picture. At length I calculated that I was selecting about twenty square miles from about seven hundred. Forms were distinct, but they were rigid, and painfully reminded me of the astronomic maps. About five removes from this, I judged that the space I was looking at must be about ten feet square. I was sure that the objects really occupying those ten feet must be in my picture, if I could evoke them.

On this I placed a mild power, and was startled at finding something new. The picture which had been so full of rigid and sharp outlines now became a confusion of ever-changing forms. Now it was light,–now shadow; angles faded into curves; but out of the swarming mass of shapes I could not, after hours of watching, obtain one that seemed like any form of life or art that I had ever seen.

Had I, then, come to the end of my line? My eyes so pained me, and had been so tried, that I strove to persuade myself that the evanescent forms resulting from my unsatisfactory experiment must be optical illusions. I determined to let matters rest as they were until the next day, when my brain would be less heated and my eye calmer and steadier.

They will never let a man alone,–they, the herd, who cry "Madman!" when any worker and his work which they cannot comprehend rise before them. In the great moment when, after years of climbing, I stood victorious on the summit, they claimed that I had fallen to the chasm's depths, and confined me here at Staunton as a hopeless lunatic. This heart of mine, burning with the grandest discovery ever made, must throb itself away in a cell, because it could not contain its high knowledge, but went forth among men once more to mingle ideal rays with their sunshine, and make every wind, as it passed over the earth, waft a higher secret than was ever before attained. A lunatic! I! But next me in array are the prisons of the only sane ones of history, the cells dug by Inquisitorial Ignorance in every age for its wisest men. Now I understand them; walls cannot impede the hands we stretch out to each other across oceans and centuries. One day the purblind world will invoke in its prayers the holy army of the martyrs of Thought.

Yes, I was mad,–mad to think that the world's horny eyes could not receive the severe light of knowledge,–mad as was he who ran through the streets and cried, "Eureka!" The head and front of my madness have this extent,–no more. And for this I must write the rest of my story here amid iron gratings, through which, however, thank God, my familiars, the stars, and the red, blue, and golden planets, glance kindly, saying, "Courage, brother! soon thou shaft rise to us, to whom thou belongest!" Yet I will write it: one day men will read, and say, "Come, let us garnish the sepulchre of one immured because his stupid age could not understand!" and then, doubtless, they will go forth to stone the seer on whose tongue lies the noblest secret of the Universe for that day.

When I left the last experiment mentioned in these pages, in order to recover steadiness of brain and nerve, and to relieve my overtaxed eyes, I had no hope of reaching success in any other way than that pointed out in the principle which I was pressing,–a principle whose importance is proved in the familiar experiments on stereoscopic views, whereby things entirely invisible to the naked eye are disclosed by lenses. But that night I dreamed out the success which had eluded my waking hours. I have nothing to say here about the phenomenon of dreaming: I state only the fact. In my dream there appeared to me my father, bearing in his left hand a plate of glass, and in his right a phial of bright blue liquid which he seemed to be pouring on the polished surface. The phial was of singular shape, having a long slender neck rising from a round globe. When I awoke, I found myself standing in the middle of the floor with hands stretched out appealingly to the vacant air.

Acknowledging, as I did, nothing but purely scientific methods,–convinced that nothing could be reached but through all the intervening steps fixed by Nature between Reason and Truth,–I should, at any other than such a weary time, have forgotten the vision in an hour. But now it took a deeper hold on my imagination. That my father should be associated in my dream with these experiments was natural; the glass plate which he had held was the same I was using; as for the phial, might it not be some old compound that I had known him or the daguerrotypist use, now casually spun out of the past and woven in with my present pursuits? Nevertheless, I was glad to shove aside this rationalistic interpretation: on the verge of drowning, I magnified the straw to a lifeboat, and caught at it. I pardoned myself for going to the shelves which still held my father's medicines, and examining each of the phials there. But when I turned away without finding one which at all answered to my dream, I felt mean and miserable; deeply disappointed at not having found the phial, I was ashamed at my retrogression to ages which dealt with incantations, and luck, and other impostures. I was shamed to the conclusion that the phial with its blue liquid was something I had read of in the curious old books which my father had hidden away from me, and which, strange to say, I had never been able to find since his death.

Whilst I was meditating thus, there was a knock at my door, and a drayman entered with a chest, which he said had belonged to my father, and had been by him deposited several years before with a friend who lived a few miles from our village. I could scarcely close and bolt the door after the man had departed; as he brought in the chest, I had seen through the lid the phial with the blue liquid. So certain was I of this, that before I opened it I went and withdrew my glass plate, repolished it, and made all ready for a final experiment. Opening the chest, I found the old books which had been abstracted, and a small medicine-box, in which was the phial seen in my dream.

But now the question arose, How was the blue fluid to be applied? I had not looked closely at the plate which my father held to see whether it was already prepared for an impression; and so I was at a loss to know whether this new fluid was to prepare the glass with a more perfect polish, or to mingle with the subtile nitrate itself. Unfortunately I tried the last first, and there was no result at all,–except the destruction of a third of the precious fluid. Cleaning the plate perfectly, I burnt into it, drop by drop, the whole of the contents of the phial. As I drained the last drop from it, it reddened on the glass as if it were the last drop of my heart's blood poured out.

At the first glance on the star-picture thus taken, I knew that I was successful. Jupiter shone like the nucleus of a comet, even before a second power was upon it. As picture after picture was formed, belts of the most exquisite hues surrounded the luminous planet, which seemed rolling up to me, hurled from lens to lens, as if wrested from its orbit by a commanding force. Plainer and plainer grew its surface; mountain-ranges, without crags or chasms, smooth and undulating, emerged; it was zoned with a central sunlit sea. On each scene of the panorama I lingered, and each was retained as well as the poor materials would allow. I was cautious enough to take two pictures of each distinct phase,–one to keep, if this happy voyage should be my last, and the other of course as the subject from which a centre should be selected for a new expansion.

At last there stood plainly before my eye a tower!–a tower, slender and high, with curved dome, the work of Art! A cry burst from my lips,–I fainted with joy. Afraid to touch the instrument with my trembling hand, I walked the floor, imploring back my nervous self-possession. Fixing the tower by photograph, I took the centre of its dome as the next point for expansion. Slowly, slowly, as if the fate of a solar system depended on each turn of the screw, I drew on the final view. An instant of gray confusion,–another of tremulous crystallization,–and, scarcely in contact with the tower's dome, as if about to float from it, hovered an aerial ship, with two round balls suspended above it. Again one little point was taken, for I felt that this was not the culmination of my vision; and now two figures appeared, manifestly human, but their features and dress as yet undistinguishable.

Another turn, and I looked upon the face of a glorious man!

Another, and the illusion, Space, shrank away beneath my feet, my eye soared over her abysses, and gazed into the eye of an immortal.

But now,–oh, horror!–turning back to earth, I remembered that I had not analyzed the precious liquid which could so link world with world. Seized with a sudden agony, I tried to strain one least drop more; but, alas! the power had perished from the earth!

For this loss I deserve all that has happened to me. My haste to fulfil my life's object proved me the victim of a mental lust, and I saw why the highest truth is not revealed: simply, it awaits those who can receive and not be intoxicated by it. And now the planet which I had disobeyed for another avenges itself,–seeing, naturally, in strange results, whose methods are untraceable, nothing but monomania. The photographs, in which the pollens of two planet-flowers mingle, lie in my attic, dust-eaten:–"Above all, the patient must not see anything of that kind," has been the order ever since I published a card announcing my discovery to my fellow-citizens.

But they were gentle; they did not take away all. The old books are with me, each a benison from a brother. The best works of ancient times are, I think, best understood when read by prison-light.

Hist! some visitor comes! Many come from curiosity to see one who thinks he descried a man in a planet "Distinguished man of science from Boston to see me,"–ah, indeed! Celebrated paper on tadpoles, I suppose! But now that I look closer, I like my Boston man-of-science's eye, and his voice is good. I have not yet exhausted the fingers of one hand in counting up all the sane people who have visited me since I have been immured.

How do I test them?

As now I test you.

Here my treasure of treasures I open. It is the old suppressed volume of John de Sacro Bosco, inscribed to that Castilian Alphonso who dared to have the tables of Ptolemy corrected. (Had he not been a king, he had been mad: such men as Bosco were mad after Alphonso died.) And thus to my curious scientific visitor I read what I ask may go into his report along with the description of my case.

"John de Sacro Bosco sendeth this book to Alphonso de Castile. A. D. 1237."

"They alone are kings who know." "Ken and Can are twins." "God will not be hurried."

"Sacred are the fools: God understandeth them."

"Impatient, I cried, 'I will clear the stair that leadeth to God!' Now sit I at His feet, lame and weak, and men scoff at knowledge,–'Aha, this cometh of ascending stairways!'"

"The silk-worm span its way up to wings. I am ashamed and dumb, who would soar ere I had toiled.

"When riseth an Ideal in the concave of some vaulting heart or brain, it is a new heaven and signeth a new earth."

"Each clear Idea that ascendeth the vault of Pure Reason is a Bethlehem star; be sure a Messias is born for it on the Earth; the new sign lit up in the heaven of Vision is a new power set in motion among men; and, do what the Herods will, Earth's incense, myrrh, yea, even its gold, must gather to the feet of the Omnipotent Child,–the IDEA."

IN WAR-TIME

INSCRIBED TO W.B

As they who watch by sick-beds find relief
Unwittingly from the great stress of grief
And anxious care in fantasies outwrought
From the hearth's embers flickering low, or caught
From whispering wind, or tread of passing feet,
Or vagrant memory calling up some sweet
Snatch of old song or romance, whence or why
They scarcely know or ask,–so, thou and I,
Nursed in the faith that Truth alone is strong
In the endurance which outwearies Wrong,
With meek persistence baffling brutal force,
And trusting God against the universe,–
We, doomed to watch a strife we may not share
With other weapons than the patriot's prayer,
Yet owning, with full hearts and moistened eyes,
The awful beauty of self-sacrifice,
And wrung by keenest sympathy for all
Who give their loved ones for the living wall
'Twixt law and treason,–in this evil day
May haply find, through automatic play
Of pen and pencil, solace to our pain,
And hearten others with the strength we gain.
I know it has been said our times require
No play of art, nor dalliance with the lyre,
No weak essay with Fancy's chloroform
To calm the hot, mad pulses of the storm,
But the stern war-blast rather, such as sets
The battle's teeth of serried bayonets,
And pictures grim as Vernet's. Yet with these
Some softer tints may blend, and milder keys
Believe the storm-stunned ear. Let us keep sweet,
If so we may, our hearts, even while we eat
The bitter harvest of our own device
And half a century's moral cowardice.
As Nürnberg sang while Wittenberg defied,
And Kranach painted by his Luther's side,
And through the war-march of the Puritan
The silver stream of Marvell's music ran,