Tablets

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TABLETS

by

A. BRONSON ALCOTT

"For curious method expect none, essays for the most part not being placed as at a feast, but placing themselves as at an ordinary." Thomas Fuller.

Boston Roberts Brothers 1868.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1868, by A. Bronson Alcott, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.

Electrotyped and Printed by Alfred Mudge & Son, No. 34 School St., Boston.

CONTENTS.

BOOK I.--PRACTICAL.

I. THE GARDEN. PAGE.

1 Antiquity 5

2 Ornaments 11

3 Pleasures 14

4 Orchard 20

5 Sweet Herbs 25

6 Table Plants 28

7 Rations 36

8 Economies 41

9 Rural Culture 48

II. RECREATION.

1 The Fountains 59

2 The Cheap Physician 65

III. FELLOWSHIP.

1 Hospitality 69

2 Conversation 75

IV. FRIENDSHIP.

1 Persons 81

2 Woman 88

3 Family 92

4 Children 95

V. CULTURE.

1 Modern Teaching 103

2 Socratic Dialectic 108

3 Pythagorean Discipline 113

4 Mother Tongue 118

VI. BOOKS. 127

VII. COUNSELS.

1 Religious 139

2 Personal 145

3 Political 148

4 Soul's Errand 151

BOOK II.--SPECULATIVE.

I. INSTRUMENTALITIES.

1 Tendencies 159

2 Method 162

3 Man 166

II. MIND.

1 Ideas 173

2 The Gifts 179

3 Person 181

4 Choice 184

III. GENESIS.

1 Vestiges 189

2 Serpent Symbol 191

3 Embryons 193

4 Temperament 195

IV. METAMORPHOSES.

1 Sleep 201

2 Reminiscence 203

3 Immortality 205

TABLETS

BOOK I

PRACTICAL

"Philosophy, the formatrix of judgment and manners, has the privilege of having a hand in everything."--MONTAIGNE.

I.

THE GARDEN.

"If Eden be on earth at all, 'Tis that which we the country call." HENRY VAUGHAN.

[Illustration: Decorative banner of bird among grapes and leaves]

THE GARDEN

I.--ANTIQUITY.

"I never had any desire so strong and so like to covetousness," says Cowley, "as that one which I have had always that I might be master at last of a small house and ample garden, with very moderate conveniences joined to them, and there to dedicate the remainder of my life to the culture of them and the study of nature. Virgil's first wish was to be a wise man, the second to be a good husbandman. But since nature denies to most men the capacity or appetite, and fortune allows but to very few the opportunities or possibility of applying themselves wholly to wisdom, the best mixture of human affairs we can make, are the employments of a country life. It is, as Columella calls it, the nearest neighbor or next in kindred to philosophy. And Varro says the principles of it are the same which Ennius made to be the principles of all nature; earth, water, air, and the sun. There is no other sort of life that affords so many branches of praise to a panegyrist; the utility of it to a man's self, the usefulness or rather necessity of it to all the rest of mankind, the innocence, the pleasure, the antiquity, the dignity."

This wish of the poet's appears to be nearly universal. Almost every one is drawn to the country, and takes pleasure in rural pursuits. The citizen hopes to become a countryman, and contrives to secure his cottage or villa, unless he fail by some reverse of fortune or of character. 'Tis man's natural position, the Paradise designed for him, and wherein he is placed originally in the Sacred Books of the cultivated peoples; their first man being conceived a gardener and countryman by inspiration as by choice.

Gardens and orchards plant themselves by sympathy about our dwellings, as if their seeds were preserved in us by inheritance. They distinguish Man properly from the forester and hunter. The country, as discriminated from the woods, is of man's creation. The savage has no country. Nor are farms and shops, trade, cities, but civilization in passing and formation. Civilization begins with persons, ideas; the garden and orchard showing the place of their occupants in the scale; these dotting the earth with symbols of civility wherever they ornament its face. Thus by mingling his mind with nature, and so transforming the landscape into his essence, Man generates the homestead, and opens a country to civilization and the arts.